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clammy cedar. The red clay mortar, which tried to fill the wall cracks in this hard climate, rouged his forehead.
    â€˜My bride, my bride, my bride. Moriarty, being a real lad, is up and about for you.’
    This was the fanciful name he had for the flesh; and he chuckled now, as if Moriarty and all his kin were well-worn friends of his and not the dark strangers they were. Ann was usually diverted by Halloran’s fables about thisbuffoon within his own walls; but she said nothing today. He heard the little rasps of cloth as she rubbed her hands dry, and scrapings of her skirt against furniture. She poured out some water from a kettle. Some spilt, and the querulous old hearth she served snorted savagely back at her.
    â€˜Do you think I’m coarse?’ asked Halloran, to bring her out.
    â€˜Not very much,’ she said negligently.
    She continued to give three-quarters of her attention to placing utensils and pouring water.
    â€˜Forget what I said last week about God and the woman in the ditch!’ he persisted. ‘It means nothing. It’s a minor confusion, that’s all, and it’s no news to anyone. The damned scholars have been talking about it for thousands of years. They call it the battle between sacred and fleshly love – and the beggars are on to a truth for once. But it doesn’t matter. It’s commonplace. You’re rare, and I’m not so big a fool as not to know it.’
    â€˜I have to go and see Mrs Blythe,’ Ann told him, coldly ducking the flight of his metaphysics or theology or whatever else it was.
    â€˜Hey,’ he called at top whisper, ‘you do believe, don’t you? That you’re my bride? Dean Hannon wouldn’t be wrong. He had a sharp mind. Too sharp.’ He paused, and then, in an attempt to force her into making positive conversation, he talked on. It was amistake. ‘As for me, it isn’t likely a man would turn into some kind of church-lawyer to get his desire. Not in a town like this, where you can have nearly anyone for a shirt or a shred of tobacco.’
    That ’ s an apish thing to say ,he was telling himself before he’d got as far as shred of tobacco. He could not believe that he’d said anything so apparently slighting to Ann. However, the words stood, far too barefaced for him to try to tone them down. All he could do was to cock his ear and hope that she was as preoccupied with the kitchen as she pretended to be.
    No chance.
    She brought her anger close to the wall beyond which Halloran waited.
    â€˜You could never have me for a draper’s full of shirts.’
    â€˜I didn’t mean you, Ann.’
    â€˜What do you want, Halloran? An angel or a whore? Which? You talk about what you learned in Wexford. In what town do they teach men wisdom?’
    â€˜I know, I know. I should go there. I’m sorry, Ann. You’re all things to me. In my confusion’ (he punched his forehead) ‘I can say that. You’re all things.’
    But the dead kitchen creaked. The hearth grunted. She had left him alone in his windiness.
    He now had an image of himself as he must seem, flustered amongst the Blythes’ decaying vegetables, butting the wall, expounding, jabbing at himself. On the slope behind him stood a leering, entirely disreputable hut. It belonged to the male felon who did the wood-hewing and water-carrying for the house. It stood like a wrecked collier, and the rocks holding on its bark roof seemed the result of a collision rather than of design. In its bay of scabrous timber, it was altogether a poor comment on Halloran’s vehemence.
    Now, because he was certain of the old lag’s ironic presence behind him, he made a late attempt at dissembling. With studied mannishness, he stared through the slaty trees at the very still indigo water. He stared with the patronizing eyes one kept for porpoises or native canoes. Breath on a mirror, a land-breeze stippled the face of