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. Gráinne dressed in an odious brown convent uniform. She had long black hair. She looked at Boris. From the look in her eyes Magella afterwards realized she’d fallen in love with Boris at that meeting.
    What were they flaunting an affair for? At first they were flaunting it so openly no one believed it was happening. Such things didn’t happen in Laois in the 1950s. People presumed that the young Russian had taken a priestly interest in the older possessed woman. And when they brought their affair to Belfast, Boris in a very natty dark suit and in a tie of shining dark blue, a gaggle of relatives thought that there was something comic going on, that Magella had got a clown to chaperone her and prevent her from acts of murderous madness. They brought glasses of orange onto the street for the pair—it was a very sunny day—and oddly enough there was a spark of bunting on the street, the ordination of a local priest recently celebrated. A bulbous-cheeked, Amazon-breasted woman spluttered out a comment: ‘Sure he reminds me of the King of England.’ She was referring to the King who’d resigned, the only member of royalty respected in nationalist Belfast.
    But behind the screen of all the presumptions—and it was a kind of smokescreen—something very intense, very carnal, very complex was going on. Magella was discovering her flesh for the first time and Boris was in a way discovering a mother. She’d always been the licentious one in her family but flailing her flesh around cornfields at night when she’d been young brought her no real pleasure. In the carnality, in love-making now, she’d found lost worlds of youth and lost—yes, inchoate—worlds of Russia. She was able to travel to Boris’s origins and locate a very particular house. It was a house in a wood away from the dangers of the time. In this house she put Boris’s forebears. In this house, in her sexual fantasies, she made love to Boris, his forebears gone and only they, random lovers, left in it, away from the dangers and the onslaught of the time. There was a tumultuous excitement about being lovers in a house in a wood with many dangers outside the borders of that wood. There was a titillation, a daring, and even a brusqueness about it. But those dangers eventually slipped their moorings in the world outside the wood.
    Early in the second summer of their affair someone saw them making love in the summer house. A little boy. Tremulous though he later was about the event he was matter of fact enough to wait for a good view of Magella’s heavy white thighs. He was the butcher’s son. A picture was soon contrived all over the village, Magella and Boris in an act of love that had a Bolshevik ferocity. Killing your husband was one thing but making love to a young Russian was another. Within the month Magella was in a mental hospital.
    The funny thing was that she’d had a premonition that all this was going to happen some weeks before the little boy saw them. Fondling some budding elderberries in the woods she remarked to Boris, looking back at the visible passage they’d made through the woods, that they, she and he, reminded her of the legendary Irish lovers, Diarmaid and Gráinne, who’d fled a king into the woods, feeding on berries. They’d invested Irish berries with a sense of doomed carnality, the berries which had sustained them, right down to the last morsels of late autumn. Here in these woods many of the berries had been sown as parts of gardens and it was difficult to distinguish the wild berries from the descendants of a Protestant bush—the loganberry, redcurrant, raspberry. These woods had been a testing ground for horticulture and parts of the woods had been cultivated at random, leaving a bed of mesmeric flowers, an apple tree among the wildness. Diarmaid and Gráinne would have had a ball here, Magella said. But for her and Boris the climate was already late autumn when the trees were withered of berries. Their days were up.