No word had come from Hugh. She’d thought it might, a line or two of good wishes, some sort of sign. Might he be angry? she had wondered. ‘I don’t want to live without you, Villana’: she heard his voice, as girls heard the echo of their lovers’ voices in the novels she borrowed from the convent library. In the novels she loved it when whatever was wrong became right—when the amnesia of a soldier’s shell-shock lifted, when a tyrannical father relented, or a mother gave up her son to his bride with a contented heart. Happening as tenderly as any of that, Hugh might yet confess that his marriage to some girl in Essex was all made up; and looking into one another’s faces, they might say they had been fools. What on earth did it matter? they might say: why shouldn’t they snatch at happiness? She closed her eyes and saw him on the avenue with his leather suitcase, returning to Carriglas.

Villana finished her cigarette before she continued her walk, steeply downhill to the pier, which the ferryboat had just reached. Having turned off its engines, the ferryman was sitting on a fish crate, smoking a cigarette himself.

‘I wanted to invite you,’ Villana said as she approached him, ‘to come up to the house on the twenty-sixth. You know what day that is?’

‘I do of course, miss. It’s good you’d invite an old fellow.’

‘We’re sorry the ferry is coming to an end.’

‘You’ll be better off with the bridge in the long way.’

‘We’re used to the ferry.’

She walked along the shore and took the path by the old boathouse to the garden, where her grandmother was sitting in the shade of the strawberry trees, a white-brimmed hat protecting her further from the afternoon sun. Villana rid her shoes of the dust they had gathered by drawing them, first one and then the other, sideways over the grass. Then she kicked them off.

‘I told the ferryman to come up for a drink.’

‘That’s nice of you.’

‘It’s a natural thing to do.’

Patty arrived with a tray and a tablecloth. The cloth was spread on the table that stood among the chairs, cups and saucers arranged. Before the maid went away Villana handed her the sea-pinks and asked her to put them in water.

‘I will surely, miss.’

Another wedding present had arrived: a set of Waterford decanters. Villana described them to her grandmother and, listening to the description, Mrs Rolleston nodded several times. Villana mentioned the wedding luncheon.

‘Sea trout and turbot,’ she said. ‘Salads to go with them. Everything cold if we’re to be outside.’

Again her grandmother nodded.

‘And ham, I suppose, better be ordered from Meath’s,’ Villana stipulated. ‘Not everyone cares for fish.’

‘You’ll have music, of course?’

‘Music?’