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her on the forehead, relieved to have found her.
    “In town. What can I do to help?”

Philip
    The morning after the move, Philip and Kate escaped the new cottage to go swimming. Built years ago in Dulough’s ramparts, the pool was separated from the lake by a low, lichen-encrusted wall, so that from far away it was impossible to tell where the pool stopped and the lake began.
    In the cottage, they had slipped their swimming togs on under their clothes. They knew that there was nothing for it but to throw them off and dive in without thinking. To pause was to be beaten by the icy water, and neither was going to give up in front of the other. Each year, when the weather got warmer, in May or June, Francis would drain the pool of its winter casualties. There were the usual leaves, rotted, disintegrated, but there were other things too, things which had sunk to the bottom—birds, mice, even badgers. When the water froze, Philip and Kate could see the carcasses suspended there, halfway between the surface and the bottom of the pool. When it unfroze, Francis scooped them out with a net, their animal skin falling away from their bones. This ritual had not yet been performed; the children would have to try not to think about what was below them.
    Philip was first in. Kate hesitated for a moment, watching as the debris closed over the hole he made in the water. A few seconds went by. She ran at the pool and jumped high into the air, careful to miss where his body might be. When she came up, there he was, laughing, spluttering. “Ha, ha,” he said gleefully. She pushed his head under, only now registering the cold shock of the water that had not so long ago been ice.
    After Francis fished out the pool’s winter catch, he would drain it and give the blue bottom a good scrubbing. The children would help him throw the buckets of hot, soapy water, which he spread around with a coarse-bristled sweeping brush. The paint was chipped now, and the blue was marred by clouds of white. Francis said that it could do with being repainted, but there wasn’t the money, and there were more important things to be fixed. As they swam in circles, Philip stopped and asked Kate whether it would be painted now that the tourists were coming.
    “Prob-ly not,” she said. “I don’t think people from warm places would want to swim in a cold Irish pool.”
    When Francis had finished, it was refilled with clean water, but it was mostly rain they were swimming in now. He would kill them if he knew. But the gasping, freezing shock of jumping in had done them both good. It erased, if only for a few moments, the dullness that had settled on them since yesterday.
    They were grateful that there was enough hot water when they got back to the cottage for them to have baths. When they sat back down at the kitchen table, their skin still tingled. Kate put the tea on; as they drank, they made shapes from the damp that had risen up to stain the bare concrete floor. Philip saw a tree and a car, Kate traced the outline of a jagged mountain with her finger. The walls were bare, too. According to their mother, most of Dulough’s pictures were far too big to fit into such a cramped little house. But the furniture had slid magically into the places Philip had thought it would go. The mahogany wardrobe towered over his parents’ room and seemed to lean in slightly, as if, were the earth to tremor, it would fall flat on the bed. The bed itself had been pushed into a space under the window; the iron headboard with its gold swirls reached nearly all the way to the ceiling. There was room for only one bedside table, and Philip wondered which of his parents would get it. It reminded him of the dwellings from The Wind in the Willows, the tiny rooms eked out of the riverbank or the trunk of a tree, with furniture cluttered about, far too much of it, so that Mole and Ratty could barely move.
    When they had finished their tea, they began their work. At Philip’s insistence,