‘I shall sympathise with him.’

‘I shan’t. I think he has let us down in a way that is beyond forgiveness.’

‘I find that concept difficult, Hector.’

He pulled in at one of the bends in the foothills as the town appeared all at once below us.

‘You could have left him, couldn’t you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You were in love with someone else, that doctor who came from England after Ronnie’s accident.’

‘You mean Hedley Raven? Where on earth did you get that idea?’

‘Rosa Santry told me.’

‘Rosa Santry?’

Hector covered my hand with his.

‘When I was in Monument last year, Rosa came in to see me. Dick Coad asked her to, I think. They thought I was going to top myself or something. Beautiful woman. She told me that years ago she saw you and this English doctor together on the riverbanks in Main. She said you were in love.’

I could not stem my tears, nor even protest innocence. ‘I didn’t know she saw us.’

‘As long as it wasn’t my fault.’

‘How could it possibly have been your fault?’

‘You probably thought you had to stay with Ronnie on account of me.’

Shame rose within me like a monster. ‘Hector, he meant nothing. Believe me, he was nothing at all.’

Hector had reserved two rooms in the Commercial. It seemed eerie being in lodgings once again in a town I had come to know so well. Before supper, I went for a walk down Long Quay. Attended by swarms of seagulls, trawlers were discharging their boxes of catch. Farther down the wharf, a ship was taking on lumber as members of her crew, their eyes white in their dark faces, leant over the deck rails and smoked cigarettes. I thought, for all its size, how much more tame Dublin was than Monument, how in Dublin one lived in settled, leafy suburbs untouched by commerce or the smell of fish or foreign tobacco. Hector, because of everything that had happened, because of how he now saw Ronnie, would never come to live here, might never, in fact, come back here again. For both our sakes, I had hoped he might return: for his own, because I valued Monument so dearly on his behalf; and for mine because I had imagined myself coming down to visit him. He was in the bar reading the evening paper when I came back in. The front page showed that Ulster was on fire: buses and cars alight, riots in the cities.

‘There’s talk of us being sent, you know,’ he said as we sat down either side of an upright plastic menu wedged in a block of wood. ‘To keep both sides apart.’

I felt myself go dizzy. ‘I’d prefer if you didn’t.’

Hector smiled at me kindly. ‘It’s part of my job, Mother.’

I had not ever thought of this, but now it seemed grotesque.

Hector was saying, ‘It may all fizzle out. We may not be sent at all. God, I’m hungry. D’you think their steak is any good?’

There and then, I wanted to tell him what I had sworn I never would, but I needed time to think and to prepare myself.

Hector was saying, ‘You like it down here, don’t you? Do you have to live in Dublin… I mean, just because that’s where you own a house?’

‘I think by living in Dublin I can love Monument best.’

‘I’ll never live here,’ he said. ‘Not because I’m afraid of bumping into Ronnie — I couldn’t care less, to be frank — but, and this sounds odd, I’ve never felt I belong here.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s an inner thing. I feel more at home in England than in Ireland, and that’s being honest.’

‘You do belong here, Hector, believe me,’ I said. ‘Monument is where you belong.’

Langley had been brought to Sibrille’s church and next morning we got there early to put our flowers on his coffin. Local people stood outside the church door and removed their hats when they saw me. My nostrils were met by the smell of candle wax as we walked in and the heels of our shoes echoed in the empty church.

‘Mrs Shaw?’

A small, hunched man holding a bowler hat at his chest stepped from the shadows. I recognised him as the undertaker from Peppy’s funeral.

‘You’re welcome home, Ma’m. Would you like to see the captain?’

For a moment, the meaning of his words confused me. Then I grasped what he was asking.

‘Oh, you mean, Langley. Hector, he’s asking do we want the coffin opened.’

Hector drew in his breath. ‘Why not?’

The man removed wreaths from the lid and placed them around the bier, then with quick, knowing fingers went to screws along the side and gently lifted off the top. I stared.

‘Isn’t he the real old captain? The real McCoy’, the undertaker said.

Langley was dressed in hunting pink, complete with neck stock, britches and gleaming black boots with the brown top cuffs of a master of foxhounds. In one yellowing hand was clasped his riding crop; in the other, his hunting horn. Above all this splendour presided his head, midway to the skeletal, but touched up with foundation and rouge so that no resemblance whatsoever to Langley Shaw remained.

‘Good Lord,’ Hector said.

‘Whose idea was it?’ I asked.

‘Captain Shaw’s idea, Ma’m, I mean, your… his son’s idea. To send him off in style the way he liked.’

‘Could you not have put a horse in too?’ Hector asked.

We settled on the left of the central aisle, one pew from the front. Very quickly, the little church filled as people came to the coffin and genuflected and placed down their flowers. Langley might not have lived here in over ten years, nor hunted this country in thirty, but the respect he was due for his exploits shone from the faces of the countrymen and women who had come to bury him. Nor was his ancient magnanimity to the Catholic Church forgotten, judging by the numbers of priests making their way, satchels in hand, through the alter rails to the sacristy. Father O’Dea, now a parish priest in Monument, paused and shook our hands.

‘The end of an era, or maybe not,’ he said and winked at Hector. ‘I don’t think I’d bother hunting if there wasn’t a Shaw to show me the way.’

We sat there at the front, unable to turn in our seats and inspect the whispering congregation. Then, as if a blade had fallen, the murmuring ceased. I could hear nothing. Hector was seated forward, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. It was a sliding noise at first, imperceptible unless you listened for it. I strained my eyes into the very corners of their sockets. My husband, alone, had arrived level with our pew. It was Ronnie, beyond a doubt, yet it was Ronnie with twenty years added. He stood, looking down at us. Then, he genuflected, a most laborious business, and took his place in the foremost pew on the aisle’s other side.

I remember little of the service or of the eulogies, hunting stories and prayers. Three teams each of six men from the locality shared the shouldering of Langley out into a day of blissful sunshine, of high swallows, of warm air tinged with the ozone from the nearby sea. When he was lowered down, the huntsman sounded the ‘gone away!’, shrill pips that stirred the blood, and then the long, mournful notes that draw in the close of the hunting day.

‘Ronnie.’

He turned to me.

‘I just wanted you to know that I am very sorry for your grief. I feel for you.’

‘Thank you, Iz.’

He was looking over my shoulder to where Hector had been a moment before.

‘Will you and Hector come back to the pub for a drink? I’ve arranged food.’

‘I think not, Ronnie.’

‘Iz, can we not… things are not good.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it.’

‘I’ve been a fool.’

I couldn’t hurt him beside his father’s open grave.

‘Ronnie, we are what we are. It’s not our fault. Don’t torture yourself, not today.’

‘Hector…’

‘He’s upset, Ronnie.’

‘He’s my son.’

‘He’s upset and angry.’

‘Oh God. Come back for ten minutes.’

I thought of Hector. ‘Sorry, I have to go now.’

‘You don’t have to go, Iz.’

‘Yes, I do.’

I felt a wonderful freedom all at once, for I was no longer tied there. I had escaped and could leave without constraint or conscience. Even the sea could not keep me, much as I had once thought it could, for now I ached for the trees in my Dublin garden, the silence at night, the faces of strangers and the balm of solitude. I found Hector by the car.

‘Do you want to go to the pub?’ he asked. ‘I can drive you there, but I won’t go in.’

‘I want to go home. Now.’

It was not until we were coming in along Captain Penny’s Road that either of us spoke.

‘He looks like death,’ I said.

‘She’s left him.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘A couple of months ago. Dick Coad told me.’

‘Was Dick there?’

‘He was looking for you. He told me she’s run off to England with some old farm hand.’

I looked at Hector. ‘Not Beasley?’

‘Dick didn’t say.’

To laugh seemed the only response. ‘Oh, God, wait till Bibs hears. Poor Ronnie. What a fool.’

‘He’s up to his neck, according to Dick. Some old case in which he diddled someone. They’re taking him to court.’

‘That happened years ago!’

‘Dick said he could do jail,’ Hector said and slammed through the gears of the rented car. ‘And you ask me whether I’d like to come back here again? And be the son of a man who left his wife to live with a tart and who’s now all but in the clink because he’s a crook? Christ, I never want to set foot in this bloody place again.’

As we met the foothills, I thought of how, had it not been for Hector, I might well have gone back for ten minutes, and then learned that Lucy was gone, and of the old trouble that now seemed set to put paid to Ronnie once and for all; and if I had, and had come within reach again of the sea, perhaps I might have thought my freedom to be an illusion and, once again, persuaded myself that my place was with a man who needed me.