Penetrating deeper into the house, we ascended a back stairway that had nothing of the grandeur of the front one about it, being steeply pitched and narrow, uncarpeted and with a green-painted handrail. ‘The servants sleep there,’ Villana announced, pointing to doors that led off a small landing, uncarpeted also. Having climbed another flight of stairs, we crossed back into the main part of the house, through an archway and down some steps. In what Villana called the nursery-schoolroom two rocking horses stood side by side in the window space, and a shelf of dolls, like a women’s regiment, stretched along one wall. A speckled grey hen regarded us beadily from a cardboard box in a corner. It made a clucking sound when Villana stroked its head. She did not comment on its presence.

‘And this is your own little place,’ she said instead, showing me into a pink-distempered room next door. A single window looked down into a cobbled yard, across which a boy now passed with a bunch of carrots. There were stables in the yard, but no sign of horses. Chickens pecked in a corner, and in another a spaniel lay where the last patch of evening sunshine lingered.

‘Thank you, Villana.’ I turned away from the window as I spoke, but Villana was no longer in the room. Through the open door I could still hear the clucking of the hen. I closed the door and sat down on the edge of the bed, allowing myself to feel weary now that I was alone. Soon after that a gong sounded.

The boy who had been in the yard was Lionel. When I arrived in the hall he was closing the entrance doors, for a moment unaware of my presence as I hesitated on the last step of the stairs. ‘Ah,’ he said when he turned round. Fair-haired like his father, and seeming frail, he softly introduced himself. He appeared to be as shy as I was myself.

‘How are things in Dunadry?’ another voice said: smiling on the stairs behind me, an older, more confident boy stood. He bowed and held his hand out. ‘You’re Hugh’s sister,’ he said. ‘I’m John James.’ It was he who led the way to the dining-room, saying as we went: ‘Hugh’s told us about Dunadry. Do you know if Bandon means the place of the pointed hills?’

I walked beside Lionel along one of the arched corridors and through the inner hall. I was confused because I did not know the answer to John James’s question. He asked it again in the dining-room. ‘It’s Banagher, I think,’ his grandmother said, ‘that has to do with pointed hills.’