He picked up the lamp and shone it about him before he left the outhouse. Seed-boxes were stacked in a corner. A new cross-shaft for a gate was still clamped in the vice, where he’d been planing it. The potato sacks which Mrs Haverty had recently patched hung from a hook, tied together in a bundle.

He closed the outhouse door and crossed the yard with the lamp still alight, his sheepdogs close behind him. He said goodnight to them and watched them disappear in the gloom before he passed into the scullery corridor. ‘You’ll have heard about the bridge?’ Haverty had said as they walked back from the fields that evening. ‘They’re going to remember Dowley with it.’

At dinner that news had been present at the table, though mentioned by no one. Villana had spoken of something the dressmaker had passed on when she’d visited the house that morning, to do with a nephew’s promotion in the Guards. John James, as always on a Monday evening, had not said much. ‘Have you the hay in cocks?’ his grandmother had asked him, and Lionel had replied that the hay was safe.

In the silent, empty kitchen he made tea, pouring boiling water from the kettle that had been left for him on the range, and rooting in a tin box for the biscuits he liked. He had been in the town on the day of Dowley’s funeral. He had watched the cheap cortège going slowly to the church, the blinds of shops and houses drawn, men pulling off their caps and blessing themselves. That morning Cornelius Dowley’s mother had drowned herself, as if she’d been unable to bear the ordeal of this occasion. He’d thought of that as he stood there, and then had been overcome by a strange confusion. He had wanted to walk at the end of the procession.

He broke another biscuit in half and ate it slowly.

Carriglas, July 14th, 1931. I dreamed last night of an afternoon one summer when Hugh was here. They were not children any more, and I had become their companion rather than being in charge of them. We walked, all of us, to the tennis-court among the trees, and later the maids brought lemonade and stood to watch. ‘How greatly Sarah has improved!’ Lionel said. I was first aware then that Villana and my brother were in love.

Nothing was different in my dream from the afternoon itself. John James was carefree and had the manner of his father, and in my dream I was reminded how I had imagined him one day the master of Carriglas, and had imagined the household as it would be, another family growing up.