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man, it’s too much for a girl on her own to run.’
    Puzzled, Ella drew back and was about to quiz her aunt when the two of them got caught up in a discussion about her father’s prowess as a boxer with an old school friend of his.
    ‘A Wexford champion so he was!’
    ‘He had his first fight when he was sixteen!’ murmured the old man proudly, ‘and I was the one who tried to floor him.’
    It was well into the night when the funeral party finally ended and the last of the neighbours made their way home. Liam insisted on escorting most of them to the front door, though he hadn’t spoken to many of them since he was a young fellow and it was Ella that they had come to pay their respects for Martin to.
    Sean had hugged her closely on the doorstep as they said goodnight, his lips clinging to hers, wanting more.
    Ella began to lift cups and saucers, and glasses and ashtrays.
    ‘Leave it, Ella,’ suggested Liam. ‘We can do it in the morning.’
    She watched as Carmel and he, arms wrapped around each other, made their way upstairs. She turned out the lamps and checked that Monty was safely asleep in the kitchen before going to bed herself. Through the stone walls she could hear their grunting lovemaking, and turned her face to her pillow, tears scalding her eyes.

Chapter Five
    ELLA CLEARED OUT the wardrobe in his bedroom, his suits hanging to the left, his tweed jackets and his trousers to the right. The shirts she had ironed were still stiff and suspended; he didn’t like too much starch in the collar. The jacket smelled of him – soap, sweat, skin and tobacco. In the pocket she discovered a mint humbug, his favourite sweet. He must have been saving it. She had already parcelled up his vests and socks and pyjamas to give away, and taking the garments from the metal bar placed them carefully in the brown box her aunt had given her. Someone would benefit from her father’s demise.
    His shoes were too big for Liam and carried the shape of the way he walked, his footfall. Someone else might be glad to wear them. She didn’t put the jacket away into the box; she couldn’t. It reminded her too much of him and like treasure was secreted and buried in the back vaults of her own wardrobe.
    * * *
    Ella walked the fields for hours. She knew every hill and hedgerow in the place, every stick and stone of it was precious to her. She remembered each fence her father had laid, each ditch he’d dug. The land he’d deliberately left fallow, believing every piece of earth had a time and a season. The livestock that he’d bred and raised; did the animals know he was gone? She doubted it. Monty grieved him. The old collie had adored Martin and had been his constant companion for more than twelve years. Dogs were loyal. She would be his master now, a poor substitute.
    ‘Come, Monty!’ she called, leading him down by Lough Garvan. It was so peaceful down there, she had forgotten how much its still blue waters soothed her. The long thin rushes caught in the breeze, setting a dancing wildness rippling like a wave along the shore. She watched as a pair of wild swans glided by, long white necks arched. Soon there would be cygnets, dabbling in the lake. When she was small she used to think that their swans were ‘the Children of Lir’ and had kept hoping to catch them one day returning to their human form. Her father had never disillusioned her.
    It must have been hard for the old man raising a daughter on his own, though he had never complained. He’d been content to sit in by the fire with her night after night, until she was old enough to be left on her own. He’d helped her with her homework, listened to her spelling lists, read the newspapers out to her, listened to programmes on the wireless with her. He’d never courted another woman after the death of her mother, never even looked at one. He’d been a good father, no matter what Liam thought. Her experience of him had been totally different from that of her brother. It