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answering quietly, “It’s only a saying that He was six feet tall. Does it matter very much? Did you never hear it?”
    â€œOf course I heard it,” he cried, beside himself. “I’m not deaf, unfortunately. If you listened long enough to everything said around here you’d soon hear the Devil himself talkin’.”
    Then he grew quieter and said without passion, as ifbrooding, “Surely you’re not gettin’ like the rest of them, girl?”
    She drew closer. She felt herself no longer a woman growing old. She wasn’t conscious of herself any more, of whatever beauty had been left her any more than her infirmities, for she was needed.
    â€œNo, but does it matter what they say?” she said. “Hadn’t the night to pass?”
    The night had to pass, but not in that manner, was how he reacted. He turned towards the radio that stood on a small shelf of its own, some bills and letters scattered beside its wet battery, between the sideboard and curtained medicine press.
    â€œSuch rubbish to have to listen to,” he muttered. “And in front of the childer.… And the same tunes night-in, night-out, the whole bloody year round.”
    He switched on the radio. The Sweepstake programme was ending. To soft music a honeyed voice was persuading, “It makes no difference where you are—You can wish upon a star.”
    It should all make you want to cry. You were lonely. The night was dark and deep. You must have some wish or longing. The life you lead, the nine to five at the office, the drudgery of a farm, the daily round, cannot be endured without hope.
    â€œSo now before you sleep make up your mind to buy a Sweepstake ticket and the first prize of £50,000 out of a total of £200,000 in prizes on this year’s Grand National may be yours.”
    The music rose for the young night. It was Venice, the voice intoned. There was moonlight on the sleeping canals as the power of longing was given full sway. A boy and a girl drift in their boat. There is a rustle of silken music from the late-night taverns. They clasp each other’s hands in the boat. The starlight is in her hair and his face is lifted to hers in the moonlight. He is singing softly and his voice drifts across the calm water. It is Venice and their night of love.…
    In spite of themselves they felt half-engulfed by this inducedflood of sentimentality and sick despair. Reegan switched it off as the speaking voice faded for a baritone to ease the boy’s song of love into the music. The house was dead still.
    â€œThe news is long over,” he said. “Are ye all ready for the prayers? We should have them said ages ago.”
    He took a little cloth purse from his watch pocket and let the beads run into his palm. He put a newspaper down on the cement and knelt with his elbows on the table, facing his reflection in the sideboard mirror.
    Elizabeth’s and the children’s beads were kept in an ornamental   white vase on the dresser. Willie climbed on a chair to get them from the top shelf. Elizabeth’s beads were a Franciscan brown, their own pale mother-of-pearl with silver crosses that they’d been given for their First Communion.
    They blessed themselves together and he began:
    â€œ Thou, O Lord, will open my lips ”,
    â€œ And my tongue shall announce Thy praise ,” they responded.
    They droned into the Apostles’ Creed . Then Our Fathers and Hail Marys and Glory be to the Fathers were repeated over and over in their relentless monotony, without urge or passion, no call of love or answer, the voices simply murmuring away in a habit or death, their minds not on what they said, but blank or wandering or dreaming over their own lives.
    Elizabeth’s fingers slipped heedlessly along the brown beads. No one noticed that she’d said eleven Hail Marys in her decade. She had tried once or twice to shake herself to attention and had lapsed