‘Did you hear the music Mrs Haverty was on about?’ she enquired with a briskness she considered suitable.

Patty shook her head again. No music had penetrated to the depths of the kitchen quarters and, unlike Brigid, she had not been out in the yard. She hadn’t understood the information imparted by Mrs Haverty about the entertainment, but she brushed the clay from another carrot before she asked about it. Brigid said:

‘He has a woman standing up against a board and then he pitches knives at her. He has twenty knives stuck into the board before he’s finished.’

‘Glory be to God, are you serious, Brigid?’ Scrubbing-brush and carrot dropped into the sink. Open-mouthed, her jaw slackened to its extent, Patty stared at her kitchen superior.

‘If you could see yourself,’ Brigid sharply admonished her. ‘Don’t look like a fool, girl.’

‘But isn’t it shocking all the same? Wouldn’t you think she’d get cut?’

‘Get on with your work, girl.’

On the way upstairs Mrs Rolleston’s train of thought continued. The memory of Kathleen Quigley became the memory of Haverty saying, ‘I haven’t told Brigid.’ Just for a moment she had closed her eyes and then had gone to the kitchen to tell Brigid herself, while Haverty and another man gathered up the remains of the body on the avenue. Mrs Haverty had stayed in the kitchen because she’d asked her to and she’d gone herself to the pier. She’d waited there through a night that never became dark and saw them as the birds began to sing—Hugh and her grandsons rowing the boat they had earlier rowed across to the party, four uniforms in a second boat, a third one trailing behind. She heard their laughter and their voices becoming louder. There were other girls besides Villana: people had been invited to breakfast at Carriglas. If you persist in fraternising with the barracks, a message received a week ago had threatened, measures will be taken. Villana had laughed.

She entered her bedroom and pulled open the drawer of her dressing-table. She took the letter to the chair by the window. When she’d told them they had remained as they were, arrested in their movements, a girl about to step out of a boat, John James and Lionel already on the pier. One of the other men swore. ‘We can guess who our visitor was,’ she’d said before she walked away.

Fifteen shillings would see me right, she read.

She spoke from her afternoon bed, paying him a compliment, saying he was her king. He, naked by the window though obscured from the promenade by double net curtains, lit a cigarette. She preferred him not to smoke when he lay beside her, and so obligingly he rose when the moment for a cigarette arrived.

‘Darling, you’re cross about that bridge.’

He shook his head, then changed his mind and said the bridge was inconveniently placed. No proper thought had been given to the matter.