‘You’re not forgetting to keep the well tidy?’ she said, returning the black-lead and the brushes to the cupboard she’d taken them from. She had a smudge of the black-lead on her forehead, and he drew her attention to it because she’d be cross if she went to the house like that, the way she was when she’d gone up with a mark of egg yolk on her overall.

‘I’ll go over to the well tomorrow.’

‘It’s great you look after it, Tom.’

She left the kitchen soon afterwards to go up and cook the Rollestons’ dinner for them, and as soon as she’d gone he remembered he should have asked her to bring him back a piece of butter-paper to trace a map on. The bays and harbours had to be marked in and named. Next week it would be the mountains, the week after it would be the rivers. ‘Ask your mother for a bit of butter-paper,’ Sister Sullivan always advised when a map had to be traced, and if anyone raised a hand to say there wouldn’t be butter-paper in the house she would reply that in that case it would have to be obtained elsewhere. ‘No good attending school if you don’t assist yourselves,’ Sister Sullivan often said. ‘You might as well stop back in the fields.’

So Tom ran after his mother and asked her on the avenue if she’d bring him back a piece of butter-paper. She said she would. She said she’d leave it on the kitchen table and he could draw the map in the morning, before he went to school.

‘It was here it happened,’ she said, pointing at a spot a few yards away, it was here your father was killed.’

There was nothing different about that part of the avenue. The moss on the surface was the same shade of green as it was elsewhere. The rhododendrons on either side looked as though they had never been disturbed by an explosion.

‘I didn’t know it was here.’

His mother was still staring at the place, and he realised now that she was upset because the bridge was to be called after Corny Dowley. You could tell it by the way she touched her cheeks with the tops of her fingers, and walked away without saying anything else.

In the outhouse that was his workshop a paraffin lamp burned steadily on the old mahogany dressing-table Lionel remembered in his father’s room when he was a child. He and Haverty had carried it out of the back scullery a year ago so that he might repair one of its legs, but he had not yet done so. He wasn’t sure that he could; in the end he would probably abandon it.