‘Darling, I’m only codding you.’ She giggled from the pillows. ‘Come on back in.’

She swore it wasn’t true. She made him take the statue of the Virgin from the shelf on the wall and he held it while she swore. ‘Janey Mack!’ she exclaimed, laughing. ‘If anyone could see us!’

She attempted more cajoling, but he said it was time to go. He fiddled with his studs and cufflinks, hurrying to get them into place, knowing her good mood wouldn’t last. He could sense her searching her mind for some new shaft of attack.

‘One of the boarders’ll take me,’ she finally threatened. ‘We’ll make an evening of it.’ She mentioned Myley Flynn’s public house, saying an hour or so would probably be spent there. ‘You’d never know what would happen on a night like that,’ she casually remarked, ‘with everyone excited by the show.’

Villana stood in the ice-house, where Hugh Pollexfen had first kissed her. No longer used for any purpose, grimy and cobwebbed, the ice-house had been their secret place. A brick ledge ran round the walls, almost a bench. You could sit on it, crouching beneath the first of the grey marble shelves that ran from wall to wall also. The first time she and Hugh had found privacy in the ice-house they had not sat down, but on subsequent occasions they had huddled together in a corner, their arms around one another. ‘Oh, Hugh,’ she murmured now, wondering what he was doing at this moment. She did not know the name of the girl he had married because she had never wanted to, nor the names of his children, of which there were three. England was not a place she would care to find herself in, formal and polite, its landscape said to be like that also. She had never been there but could easily guess. At this moment his wife was perhaps calling him into whatever house they lived in, where the children would be primly waiting around a tea table. ‘Hugh,’ she murmured again. ‘Oh, Hugh, how ridiculous!’

Ploughing, Lionel walked patiently, the horse’s weariness at the end of the day dictating their shared pace. Almost as tall and thin as his father had been, a little stooped even though he was only a few years into his thirties, Lionel at a distance presented the impression of wiry strength: seen closer, the cast of his face suggested vulnerability, as it had in childhood. He was aware of his brother’s liaison with the boarding-house keeper but did not ever think about it. He was bewildered by his sister’s forthcoming marriage and by the fact, an hour ago revealed to him, that her husband was to live at Carriglas. He regretted the building of the bridge, but what concerned him more were the crops he sowed, and his animals, and the trees on the skyline. That was his life.