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signal. He caught my hand and squeezed it, just the once, and he was gone, out into the bright, noisy street full of morning traffic. Dad walked him to the station. It was what Liam wanted. He’d sent his luggage on ahead.
    Beck’s blue-sheened eyes searched the hall. I got down on my hunkers and put my face in his fur. ‘He’ll be back.’ He
wagged his tail, panting in the heat, though it wasn’t yet nine o’clock.
    ‘He’s only gone for training.’ Matt stared through the open door at the empty step, the bright street and the Gardens beyond it, a jarvey passing by. The horse’s hooves clopped along, a metronome. ‘It’ll be over before he has to fight.’
    ‘Please God,’ Mother said. Lockie closed the door and we all went our various ways.
    Lockie and I went upstairs to strip Liam’s bed and turn the mattress before making up the bed for me. It felt like treachery, even though it had been Liam’s idea. Lockie watched me wrestle a pillowcase from the bolster. ‘Don’t fash yourself, girl.’
    I couldn’t help it – I was all thumbs. She unfolded a sheet and threw me a corner. We made the bed in silence. One of the things I loved about Lockie was that she never wasted words. Everything she did was smooth and large: the way she swept the broad palm of her hand across the surface of the crisp clean sheet to even out the creases, the easy way she lifted the heavy corners of the mattress to tuck in the edges.
    ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ she said, when we’d finished. She looked around the room, then at me. ‘Make the most of it, Katie. He didn’t leave it for you to be miserable in. He thought you’d like it.’ She swept her hand across the eiderdown one last time, though it was perfectly smooth already. ‘There’s a mirror in the box room, behind the gun cupboard. I’ll look it out for you later.’
    After she’d gone back down to the kitchen, I moved my clothes from the chest of drawers I shared with Florrie in our room at the front of the house. I carried them, drawer by drawer, across the landing to Liam’s room in the back, swapped their contents with his and returned them to Florrie’s room. It didn’t take long. It turned out there wasn’t much in our room that was actually mine.
    When everything was laid out and neat in Liam’s room, I didn’t want to stay there, cuckoo that I was. I should have let Matt have it, after all. I opened the window, as wide as it would go, and went downstairs after Lockie.

October 1914
    ‘Did we make a mistake about the university?’ Dad asked me as we walked across town together, on a fine evening early in October.
    We were on our way to a lecture about Georgian Dublin, in the Mansion House. It was Dad’s idea. ‘Should be right up your street, Catkin,’ he’d said. He most likely wanted to get me out from under Mother’s feet to a respectable, fixed location where he could keep an eye on me to her satisfaction, but I was happy enough to go. There were worse ways to spend your time than thinking about the Georgians and their prosperous city.
    How things change. Liam was in a training camp in Dorset. We liked knowing he was safe, but he was keen to get to France, or Flanders, somewhere that mattered. I want to do my part, he wrote in his letters home. To me, he wrote about the boredom and exhaustions of drill. He said he knew there were momentous tests in store; he wanted to get out and face them. The waiting, he said, was what kept him awake at night, in spite of days of more physical activity and fresh air than he’d ever known.
    ‘I’m worried about you, Catkin,’ Dad said. ‘You spend too much time alone.’
    ‘Far from it, I don’t get enough time alone.’
    The atmosphere in the house was horrible. Mother and I grated on each other’s nerves. She said she wanted to stop me brooding, but I had my own ideas as to what she was at when she devised things to keep me busy. I had got into the habit, whenever I could escape the house, of