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the glasshouse. Each breath emerges from him slowly, visible in the cold morning air, like a laboured questionmark. He knew George, knew Nina Hardy, knew George’s sister Jane, but can no more connect the memories from his childhood with the scene before him than he could with a witch’s sabbath. He remembers three figures on a hayrick, swaying on the back of an unsteady tractor in the late evening sunlight. He remembers the beautiful girl, the woman really, in the floral print dress, walking past the pennant of the eighteenth-hole green towards the tennis-club dance. He remembers the scent of heather and cut grass and the sound of a Percy French song drifting from the clubhouse. Oh the nights of the Kerry dances, oh the ring of the piper’s tune, lingers on in our hours of madness . . . The conclusive line evades him for more than a minute, then, in the way of memory, comes just when he has stopped straining for it . . . Gone, alas; like our youth—too soon! He wonders idly how one sentence can contain so much punctuation. Then he hears the sound of a car chugging beyond the gaunt bulk of the house, and he feels relieved, that whoever has to plumb the realities of the scene before him, it will not be him. At least not him alone.
    The car stops by the gates, deposits a policeman who closes them ceremoniously; his presence draws a knot of children coming home from school for lunch, whose presence in turn stops the milk van on its rounds, and a tractor carrying a mound of winter feed. By lunch time the sun has broken through the clouds, the grasses are dry, the inquisitive crowd by the gates has grown and the lawns are progressively trodden by policemen moving with large, somnambulist steps. There are no raised voices, no eruptions of emotion and the tragedy, if tragedy it was, seems already to have happened a long time ago. Another car arrives, dispenses policemen who proceed to traverse the grounds the way the first ones did, while those who have already traversed stand stamping their feet in the cold winter sunlight, smoking, talking in lowered voices. Towards evening a third car arrives, an unmarked one this time, pushes its way through the knot of the curious, waits while the gates are opened, then crunches its way up the gravelled driveway to the back of the house, which is revealed to be in fact the front.
    Buttsy Flanagan stands in the low arch that encloses the courtyard and recognises the utterly silent, bowed profile in the back seat. He sees a man emerge from the front, in a white hospital coat, open the back door, hold an expectant arm forwards. He sees George emerge, place one enormous fist in the crook of the white-coated arm. He waits as George is led towards him, moves to one side and walks with them, following the irregular trail of blood towards the glasshouse. He observes George’s eyes, mute and uncomprehending, then follows again, when doctor and patient move, under whose impulse he cannot be sure, towards the river. There is a boat rocking in its concentric circle of waves, two policemen dragging the silt below with lead-weighted lines. George stares, his eyes sunk behind flickering lids, and stays mute. Then he disengages his arm from the doctor’s, turns and shuffles slowly away. The doctor moves to intercept him but Buttsy shakes his head, rapidly, surreptitiously. They let George walk then, and let themselves follow along the curve of river, up the rough field of marsh grasses that leads to the copse of ash and elder. They follow him through it with difficulty, an irregular path through the brambles and the darkening trunks. The light is now failing and they hold their breath as they walk, anticipating some Armageddon. They hear voices beyond them, ghostly voices drifting tonelessly through the ash trees. A shape up ahead, the curved eaves of a cottage from a forgotten fairytale. The voices continue, unaware, it seems, of the sound of three approaching pairs of feet. Then George edges the door