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uncles travelled the world. And I’m a world away from that now. And I’ll never get back. A family can spin itself out, you know. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. Once upon a time and a twelve year time it was, as they say, there was me and my younger brother and my father and my mother—a small universe created in a mismatch. It split off and my mother went back to her grand house trailing two sons and we were trailed off, I suppose you could say, to boarding school and after a few years I ran away—to sea, as it happens—and when I got back she was dead. And there was no way back from that. I was lost in every way. They for gave, they said, but I made a few more mistakes. I seemed incapable of making the world bend to even my smallest wish. I shrugged my shoulders at the world, I suppose. I was a failure, Mr. Middlehoff, at everything. At business, and they were generous to me helping me set up things—but nothing worked or maybe I just didn’t care enough. Maybe one triumph is enough in life. And Sissy was mine. Anyway, back to money—the great subject for some people. Money has been made over to me as a balm I suppose. Not a lot. I’m still not reliable, you see. But I am not here as a pauper.”
    “This isn’t harsh patronage Mr. O’Hara. If I part with the gate, and forgive me I need some time to think about it, it will be a gift to you. I liked the boy.”
    “Who didn’t?”
    “You said at the inquest you knew he was playing with these things … these chemicals …”
    “I did. It’s no use now to talk of what I should have done.”
    “I didn’t mean to.”
    “There was nothing in his head but crackpot ideas. Tell me a boy in the world who is without crackpot ideas? Olivia explained better than I did at the inquest. He was building a rocket. Bravado! It was a terrible accident. He was in heaven—strange phrase, I suppose, now—playing around with beakers and powders from school—and then Mr. Kelly, the chemist, took a shine to him. Oh the lad was full of mad thoughts, childish thoughts of being a rocket scientist. For God’s sake, when did an Irish Midlands town last produce a rocket scientist? Sure, have we ever produced any kind of scientist? Poets yes—and the lad loved poetry. They don’t normally go together, they say, cleverness with words and at science, but they did with him. Anyway, the truth is, I didn’t pay attention. Our little daughter was sick for a long time then we lost her less than a year ago. So. We weren’t vigilant, Sissy and me. We missed the danger in what he was doing and we were punished for that. ‘His death is not a punishment, Tom,’ Bishop Fullerton told me. He didn’t react well when I told him we were serving the toughest penance any priest could hand out and that it will never end. It’s not his fault but somehow I felt Bishop Fullerton had let me down. Talked about the Risen Christ; strange choice of image for a father mourning his son. Anyway, the Risen Christ would heal the wound. Time, of course. He threw that old lie about time into the equation. To tell you the truth we were both a bit embarrassed at the end. But I know time will make no difference to us. He was ripped from us, you see—not like the long slow defeat with our little girl. It’s like the difference between a deep sigh and a scream, I suppose. Not that I’ve screamed. Men don’t much though I suppose you’ve heard them scream. In war. Wounds, I suppose.”
    “Yes.”
    He looks away.
    “Wounds! I dream myself, and I’m not a woman, of remaking his body. I dream of putting it together again. And I only imagine how he was after it happened. In the morgue—well, they dressed him up. What’s there to say? I feel as if we’ve sent him back to God, unmade, as if we were careless and sent him back to Him broken; as if someone had given us a precious vase to look after, rare, like one of those vases my uncles would bring back from the East, irreplaceable, and one day you just move