“Oh, that’s right,” Jack’s father said to Sadie, as though noticing her for the first time. He regarded her with an intensity she couldn’t interpret. Kindly? Aggressive? Flirtatious? “Americans don’t appreciate the scatological, do they?”

“We do,” said Sadie, thinking, I don’t. The kitchen table was at an angle to the walls, and it gave her a headache. She could feel the sugar from the strawberry sandwich in her molars. How far was town? Could they get out of there? She looked up at Jack. “Coffee?”

“That’s right, I was going to make some.”

“This is my father,” said Fiona. She squinted at the smoke from her cigarette. “Daddy, this is Sadie. I’m sorry you won’t meet my mother.”

“No?” said Sadie to Jack.

“She’s unwell,” said Michael Valert. “Rotten timing.” It was his eyes that confused things, so joltingly blue they seemed to hold every emotion and its opposite. “You must be absolutely shattered,” he told her.

“Not too bad.”

“All that driving. I’d be shattered. I am shattered.”

“S’shame,” said Jack. “About Ma.”

“Can’t be helped,” said Fiona. “We’re videotaping it.”

Jack set a cup of coffee on the table. The little plastic jug in front of her was marked MILK. “Cream?” she said to Jack.

He shook his head. “I’m going to help Piet set up the tables for the reception. You all right?”

She nodded. She understood that she would be, in some way, abandoned to these English people. “What can I do to help?” she asked the room at large.

“Nothing to do,” said Fiona. She dropped her cigarette down the neck of a beer bottle on the counter, which was already filled with cigarettes. “The Dutch have it in hand.”

“We’re going for a walk, if you’d like to come,” said Eloise.

“That sounds nice.”

“You can borrow a pair of boots and a coat.”

As Sadie passed Michael Valert, he said, “It’s a large turd. Impressive. You must be feeding him well.”

The boots wouldn’t go over Sadie’s thick calves, so she put on her wet shoes, a pair of rubber-soled Mary Janes. The coat wouldn’t button over her hips, so she wore it open. By we, Eloise had meant herself and a small, wild-eyed, disheveled terrier who looked like the dog in the Arnolfini portrait and whose name was, apparently, Shithead. Sadie followed the two of them out the door, across a field, and then, dismayingly, up a hill.

“It’s an amazing house,” said Sadie, to prove to Eloise that she wasn’t too out of breath to talk. “Why Ireland?”

“Why indeed. Apparently they like the Irish. I think they’re mad to have bought it.”

“Why?”