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says.
    I find myself nodding to Billy Kerr. It is difficult to leave a room without even a bare nod, but I would rather I had omitted it.
    ‘All right,’ he says, whatever he means by it. It is just an echo of Sarah maybe. ‘Good day to you, my little bucko,’ he says to the boy as the child passes, being towed by myself, my defeat no doubt plain and clear by the redness I feel flaring on my cheeks.
    And I go out into the yard, trailing doubt like a comet trails a fiery tail.

Chapter Three
    I stand in the yard as still as a cow with her calf when the air presses down heavy in the summer. The bucket creaks ever so slightly in my hand.
    What is this growing old, when even the engine that holds our despair and hope in balance begins to fail us?
    She is old, yes, Sarah Cullen, as I am myself. She was born in the last flutter of the old century, in the winter of 1898. I was born two years later, it is the same gap oddly enough that is between the children.
    She was a beautiful little girl, with a tousle of wheaten hair. Nothing afflicted her, joy jumped in her marrow.
    There is only a whisper of time between then and now, it seems to me. The clock of the heart does not follow the one on the mantelpiece.
    Oh, I thank God for Sarah Cullen. I have spent these years with her now, after Matthew turned me from the house in Dublin. It was a crime I will ever hold against him. To take up with another woman when my sister Maud was only two years in her grave. I did briefly have a hope that he might be glad of a female to serve his household, now poor Maud was gone. But that was not to be. He wished, it seems, to marry again, and he was not interested in his sister-in-law with her bowed back. While Maud lived, he used to jest, ‘Annie, you carry the moon on your back,’ which was a nice thing to say. But I do not think it looked to him like the moon when his mind turned to marrying a second time. But there. It is an ill story, maybe even a filthy story. That was a terrible time, and Sarah Cullen took me in.
    All the anxiety of these recent years has been the fear of losing my last niche in the world, the left side of Sarah’s bed, and this little farm. All I have brought to her is a few of the hens, those Rhode Island Reds kicking about the yard, an almost laughable thing, and the strength of my own body. My fortune currently is the mere strength left to me, and the knowledge I have of the tasks of each day, of the byre, of the dairy, of the dunghill, of the well, of the fire. If that went, all my value would be at naught.
    The county home is a fearful place. That is where the homeless and the country destitute go, the withered girls and the old bachelors finally maddened by the rain. This I know, because I have seen it with my own eyes. It is a terrible fact to me that my poor father died there, alone and astray in his head.
    The Wicklow rain has madness in it like an illness, an ague.
    I am thinking these thoughts as I stand, stymied, in the yard with the boy. The bucket is in my hand but I cannot go forward.
    I can see, beyond the boundary of the green road, the stooped figure of Mary Callan, returning from the well.
    She is a devil for disturbing the mud and the twigs at the bottom of any well. It is a penance to have to share a well with her, as we do. In the old days it was said that the first draw of water in the morning pulled the luck of the well into your bucket. She is certainly old enough to believe that, for she must be in her nineties. She has a field and a milking cow and a house with one room, and now the luck of this day in her brimming bucket. It will be an hour at least before the muck settles.
    Sometimes too she brings that old blackened kettle of hers straight to the well and fills it. It leaves such a scum on the surface. You cannot truly clean a vessel that touches upon the fire, and I am sure she makes no attempt to clean it. She is a bad, old-fashioned woman.
    But that is not the only thing that keeps me