As the months passed she grew thin, and pale as a slug: only the useless eyes seemed to grow larger and, indeed, lovelier, burning coldly in the centre of a pinched grey face.

They fed her three times a day, and they tied a rope from the door of the shack to the privy, to guide her on her one essential journey. Life reduced itself to this deadly cycle: the food in the mouth, the bucket underneath her, and all in silent darkness.

So, for two years, lived Esther Costello.

Chapter Three

The large black Cadillac, with chromium bumpers and white sidewall tyres, which entered by the dusty Wexford road, and pulled up outside the Cloncraig Arms, created an enormous stir in the village. Not only was it the first car from ‘outside’ which had visited them since the war’s end, it was the first car of such opulence ever to arrive in Cloncraig. It was a sight to see – and the same might well be said of its single occupant, the woman who presently stepped from the driving seat and began to look about her.

She was a woman of forty-one or two, tall, impressively built, fashionably dressed: a handsome woman, a woman of assurance, a woman (clearly) of the world. She was in black, with furs: her stockings were of fine mesh, her heels (by Irish village standards) wonderfully high. She looked “for all the world like a French whore”, said Paddy Finane, who had never seen a whore of any nationality. But it was a fact that the stranger had a certain distinction, a certain urban elegance new to Cloncraig, and therefore dubious; and when she disappeared into the Cloncraig Arms, a large number of people waited about at the door in the hope that she might reappear, and were disappointed when she did not, and when her luggage followed her inside.

“Gone to bed,” explained the landlord, Joe Lane, later, when the bar was at its most crowded. “A plate of cold mutton and pickles, a cut off the cheese, and two whisky and sodas. And just now a hot water bottle.”

“That’s what I’d like to be,” said Paddy Finane, snickering. “A hot water bottle to a big, handsome woman like that.”

Encouraged by the laughter, he went on to suggest other offices he might perform, given goodwill on both sides.

“You!” interrupted James Costello, who was drunk already. “What’s a little fellow like you going to do, in that line? You’d be hopping about like a flea on a bitch, asking the right way home.”

The laughter, turning against Paddy, discomforted him. “There’s good small ones as well as good big ones,” he said belligerently. “I’ve never had a complaint yet.”

“You’ve never had a — yet, more likely,” said Costello. “I’ll bet that woman upstairs could teach you a thing or two.”

“What’s she doing in Cloncraig, anyway?” asked a voice at the back.

“Looking for a husband,” said another.

The rough laughter brought Joe Lane to the front of the bar again.