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of souls lost in a mire of nonchalance. On Tottenham Court Road she said goodbye to him.
    ‘See you next rehearsal,’ she said.
    He stood there when she left and wanted to tell her she’d awakened in him a desire for a country long forgotten, an awareness of another side of that country, music, drama, levity but there was no saying these things.
    When the night of the play finally arrived he acted his part well. But all the time, all the time he kept an eye out for her.
    Afterwards there were celebrations, balloons dancing, Irish bankers getting drunk. He sat and waited for her to come to him and when she didn’t, rose and looked for her.
    She was speaking to an elderly Irish labourer.
    He stood there, patiently, for a moment. He wanted her to tell him about Christmas lights in Ireland long ago, about the music of Ó Riada and the southern-going whales. But she persevered in speaking to this old man about Christmas in Kerry.
    Eventually he danced with her. She held his arm softly. He knew now he was in love with her and didn’t know how to put it to her. She left him and talked to some other people.
    Later she danced again with him. It was as though she saw something in his eyes, something forbidding.
    ‘I have to go now,’ she said as the music still played. She touched his arm gently, moved away. His eyes searched for her afterwards but couldn’t find her. Young men he’d acted with came up and started clapping him on the back. They joked and they laughed. Suddenly Liam found he was getting sick. He didn’t make for the lavatory. He went instead to the street. There he vomited. It was raining. He got very wet going home.
    At Christmas he went to midnight mass in Westminster Cathedral, a thing he had never done before. He stood with women in mink coats and Irish charwomen as the choir sang ‘Come All Ye Faithful.’ He had Christmas with an old aunt and at midday rang Marion. They didn’t say much to one another that day but after Christmas she came to see him.
    One evening they slept together. They made love as they had not for years, he entering her deeply, resonantly, thinking of Galway long ago, a river where they swam as children.
    She stayed after Christmas. They were more subdued with one another. Marion was pregnant. She worked for a while and when her pregnancy became too obvious she ceased working.
    She walked a lot. He wondered at a woman, his wife, how he hadn’t noticed before how beautiful she looked. They were passing Camden Town one day when he recalled a nun he’d once known. He told Marion about her, asked her to enter with him, went in a door, asked for Sister Sarah.
    Someone he didn’t recognize told him she’d gone to Nigeria, that she’d chosen the African sun to boys in black jerseys. He wanted to follow her for one blind moment, to tell her that people like her were too rare to be lost but knew no words of his would convince her. He took his wife’s hand and went about his life, quieter than he had been before.

A Marriage in the Country

    She burned down half her house early that summer and killed her husband. He’d been caught upstairs. It was something she’d often threatened to do, burn the house down, and when she did it she did it quietly, in a moment of silent, reflective despair. She had not known he’d been upstairs. She’d put a broom in the stove and then tarred the walls with the fire. The flames had quickly explored the narrow stairway. A man, twenty years older than her, had been burned alive, caught when snoozing. Magella at his funeral seemed charred herself, her black hair, her pale, almost sucrose skin. She’d stooped, in numbed penitence. There was a nebulous, almost incandesced way her black curls took form from her forehead as there was about all the Scully girls. They made an odd band of women there, all the Scully girls, most of them respectably married. Magella was the one who’d married a dozy publican whose passion in life had been genealogy and whose