At Coole Park, with an insistent gaiety that she now cringes to remember, she goaded Ted to climb the forbidding iron fence and carve his initials next to Yeats’s on the famous copper beech. Made her vague, panicked wish over the river rushing past Thoor Ballylee—screwing her eyes shut, flinging her coins, knowing the others were watching and counting on their audience. And from the top-floor window of the tower zeroed in, like a kamikaze, on the overburdened apple tree below, surely planted by Yeats himself. Shook red apples down out of the branches, gathering a hundred pounds or more in the nettled grass. They couldn’t have possibly fit all those apples into Richard’s van—

—The Court Green apples are nearly gone, a few rattling in the corner of the bin at the bottom of the electric fridge. She unloads the surplus of yesterday’s produce she holds at her chest: carrots, onions, celery, all of it by rote, nothing she has an appetite for. Spaghetti tonight, beef stew on Christmas Eve. Moroccan tangerines handpicked at Yeoman’s on Regent’s Park Road, the greengrocer wrapping them in crackling tissue and hiding them conspiratorially at the bottom of her basket when she whispered they would fill the toes of the children’s stockings—

—Their ankles scraped and rashy, they pinched foxtails from their socks all the way back to Connemara. And Ted on automatic all the while, a replacement for himself, letting her lead, as usual, in public—indulgent, patient, but disengaged, his participation mechanized. He seemed to come to life only when the interrogatory spotlight she kept shining on their marital patch-up swung in an altogether different direction, the subject of pine martens or reel fishing or the founding of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre dropping a coin into his mental operations. His tolerant unreachableness only made her more desperate to reach him—

—How’s this? she recalls, How’s this? A knot comes apart and the paper splays, streaked with blood. Involuntary flesh gleaming at the marrow, bone cut clean like a pipe. The agreeable butcher of Princess Road with his cleaver, the guillotine drop—

—Ted was up and dressed, wearing his raggy old sweater patched at the elbows. The new one of Irish wool she’d bought for him the day before, knitted by the widow next door who owned the cow, lay on top of the cupboard, untouched in its wrapping. The curtains were tied back, revealing crippled Cleggan’s straggling army of chimney fires against the glass-bottle light of the sky, cotton smokes blowing up toward them, blotting the craggy hills sliding off on their damp mosses toward the mirrory inkling of bay. Ted was gathering his things, packing them in a knapsack torn open on the twin bed where he’d slept.