‘There’s tea,’ Villana called out from the door that led to the house. She was dressed in green, a tweed skirt and blouse, a cameo brooch at her throat. When she spoke she did not raise her voice but projected it through the warm foliage, over pots and ornamental urns. Her looks were certainly striking now, Mrs Rolleston reflected, her skin like porcelain, her pale hair silky, her eyes as they had ever been.

‘It has suddenly occurred to me, Villana, that they will say you are marrying for money. No doubt they are saying it already.’

They walked together to the drawing-room. Tea and madeira cake were on a table close to where Villana sat. She poured two cups and cut two slices.

‘In fact, it isn’t true.’ Villana shook her head, lending emphasis to her denial and then dismissing the suspicions by advancing the conversation in a different direction. ‘There is something more to the point,’ she said, and went on to reveal that she had at last been permitted to reject the house near the promenade which her fiancé had inherited on his parents’ death.

‘So Finnamore will live among us?’

‘I am suggesting it.’

Mrs Rolleston’s query had been vague; she was thinking of something else. If the regiment had not rejected Lionel as unfit for the war he would not have come back, or else would have come back more knocked about than his brother. She knew that in her bones: it was the bright side. She had lost a son and a husband in foolish wars but at least her grandsons had been spared, with only a shattered leg between them. Hugh, of course, had come back also. Hugh had apparently married a girl in Colchester, wherever that was.

‘Finny will pay something,’ Villana said. ‘That’s only fair.’ She knocked a cigarette from a packet with a black cat on it. ‘The wedding date we thought of is towards the end of August, Grandmamma.’ She lit the cigarette. ‘The twenty-sixth. A Wednesday.’

‘I see.’

She had known Finnamore Balt for a lifetime and had never in all those years guessed that his uncomfortable hatchet of a face would one day come to be there at every mealtime. Villana didn’t love him any more than John James loved his promenade woman or Lionel loved anyone at all. You never tell me how your grandchildren are getting on these days: the post that morning had brought the letter she had wondered about when she first awoke. I often think about your grandchildren. I wish you’d tell me, the looped handwriting had chided.

‘And then we are to honeymoon at the Killarney lakes.’

More tea was poured. Once she had been to the Killarney lakes herself. Famous poets had apparently been inspired there. The surrounding mountains echoed strangely.

‘Finny is kind, you know.’

‘I did not think otherwise. Am I confused, or is there dance music playing somewhere?’