‘There was always music after a wedding at Carriglas. The band playing in the alcove on the stairs. Dancing all over the place.’

‘Oh, I don’t think that would be possible. To start with, we couldn’t afford a band.’

The old woman did not acknowledge that. She sipped her tea. Then she said:

‘I wish you wouldn’t go on with this foolishness.’ i’ve chosen this foolishness. I’ve actually made a choice.’

Villana picked up her book, from where she’d left it on the grass before going for her walk. ‘But, my dear girl, we can all do perfectly well without happiness,’ a line of dialogue maintained. Some wise old gentleman was speaking, a traveller who had climbed the mountains of four continents and seen nature in the raw. ‘The other side of the coin, my dear, is that no one can do without love. It is the greatest of all deprivations not to know love in some wise, either to give or to receive. It hardly matters which.’

She nodded over the words, agreeing with the sentiment. But what the novel didn’t say was that love left an emptiness behind that was as cold as frozen snow. The lonely cigarette in the middle of the night, the pages of another story turned, the balm of Traynor’s picture house, the dream of Hugh returning to Carriglas: none of them lasted long. Only love itself, offered from whatever source, could warm, just a little, those fathomless depths: Hugh, too, knew that.

‘I’ll be all right, you know,’ she said, as gently as she could.

But Mrs Rolleston seemed not to hear.

Finnamore, while tea was taken at Carriglas, held up his arms to facilitate the tailor who fitted him with his wedding suit. It seemed proper that new clothes should have been cut and made for him, even though he possessed other clothes that might have done. Villana had agreed.

‘I have a bad debt, Mr Balt,’ the tailor said from among the pins that lined his mouth. ‘I was going to ask you to write a letter. If you would, sir.’

‘Indeed I will. You mustn’t put up with that.’

The tailor nodded, marking the dark cloth with his chalk. He revealed more about the nature of the debt while Finnamore courteously listened, as he always did when a misdemeanour was outlined.

‘Goff,’ the tailor said, naming his debtor as a member of the landowning class. ‘Sir Cedric Goff owes me for four suits of plus-fours.’

‘I will write Sir Cedric Goff a letter. Most certainly.’