Up from the bar below came the tinkle of breaking glass, followed by a bellow of laughter. Mrs Bannister smiled indulgently. Those hillbillies down there were certainly enjoying themselves. And so was she, come to that.

The trip to Britain and the continent had been a spur of the moment project – because she was free, and glad the war was over, and felt the need to travel after being cooped up for five years, and felt also that it was better to travel at forty than at fifty. But the journey to Cloncraig had been no accidental affair; it was a sentimental pilgrimage, planted in her heart by her father some years before he died. “If you get the chance, Belle, go back to the old country,” he had said. “Go to Cloncraig, and see where you came from. You’ll not be sorry.” Now he was dead, and in spite of setbacks she could still afford to travel, and the old man had been right – she was not sorry she had come.

Of course, she could not remember the village at all: the Cloncraig of thirty-five years ago, when she was six, might be the same now or it might have changed, but she could recall nothing of it, either way. The Maclean family had emigrated shortly before the First World War: time had carried away all details of the event, save that the journey was long and uncomfortable, and that for many years after it they had been desperately poor. But her father, progressing from stonemason to speculative builder, had made his pile, and now, after his death, she had her share of it: she herself had married, and that was over too; and so, being free, she had come back to Cloncraig, as her father had told her to, to have a look at the place where she was born.

She hadn’t meant to startle them in the village – she was aware now of the effect of the Cadillac and of her own get-up – but she simply hadn’t realized what Cloncraig would be like, and just how simple, how grounded in the narrow past, an Irish village could be. It had made her feel, for a moment, very much the American tourist of modern legend.

“What a dump,” she phrased it to herself aloud; and then: “No – what a poor, left-behind place.”

She would do better for them tomorrow, anyway: she had some old tweeds in one of the trunks …

A fresh burst of laughter came from below. Seemingly they could enjoy themselves here, whether they had been left behind or not. But that did not alter what she had seen as she drove slowly through on her arrival, and what the ‘hotel’ itself told her – the shabbiness and the bitter poverty that possessed the whole village, the village where she was born.

It would be nice to do something for Cloncraig.

Despite the ‘old tweeds’ (a Glen Urquhart check which had first seen the occidental light of day on Fifth Avenue), Mrs Bannister continued to cause a major stir in Cloncraig. The children hung in swarms round her car, leaving small and filthy finger marks on the paintwork; good-naturedly, she would sometimes select a dozen of them and, packing them in like freshly netted sardines, take them on a tour of their village. The shrieks, the waving, the open-mouthed spectators, gave to such excursions a touch of royalty which would have affected a woman of far lesser vanity … She explored the village, and bought from the general store a number of articles, such as nail varnish and egg shampoo, which, laid in stock many years before when the proprietor had succumbed to the blandishments of a golden-tongued commercial traveller from Dublin, had defied all later efforts to dispose of them. She also paid a formal call on the place of her birth, a mean cottage at the lower end of the village now occupied by Cloncraig’s blacksmith.