As she eats, an irony occurs to Patty: it seems odd that a hearse should take the body back to the mainland when the whole island was a burial place once. It was Sarah Pollexfen herself who’d told her that, who’d explained in the kitchen one afternoon about the standing stones. She’d spoken of the graveyard beneath them, and the boats that carried the dead to this chosen place, the processing of the funerals.

‘I never saw the standing stones,’ she says. ‘I never was up there.’

‘They’ll be there a while yet.’

‘I’ll go up one of these days.’

Somehow it will be easier now. Sarah Pollexfen was the gentlest of creatures, but she was there to give an order and to restrain. It seems a pity to destroy her diaries, Patty reflects as she clears away the dishes, even though she said they might be destroyed when they were read. Fancy a maid from this kitchen sending in demands for money!

‘it’s dry in the cupboard by the range,’ she suggests. ‘As good a place as any.’

Tom nods in agreement. For an hour he reads the newspaper, spread out on the table where the plates and cups have been. There was an emptiness, too, when the others went, one by one. He sensed it again this morning when he passed through the yard, and when he took the short cut through the garden and walked on the road to the pier. It will last a month or two, and then it won’t be noticeable any more.

‘Goodnight so, Tom,’ Patty bids him, taking the alarm clock from the dresser.

They will live here, changing nothing: they both know that now, though neither says it. He will not sell the lead from the roof, any more than he’ll ask Burke’s to come over and arrange an auction. In time people will become used to the two of them having a home in the same house. In time Esmeralda Coyne’s interest will wither. ‘You are happy, Tom?’ Villana said, the time she asked him to leave the gate-lodge for the house. He wanted nothing more than what he had, he confessed. ‘Oh, that is happiness,’ Villana said.

‘Goodnight, Patty.’