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highway from Dublin to Cork; granite poking up through the green hills. Something else struck him and he said: ‘I meant to tell you. I talked to Paul and he said we can have the cottage next weekend.’
    ‘It sounds nice.’
    There were other people arriving now, and he watched them lounging forward over the lawn. The men, who had names like Danny and Ben, he assumed were younger versions of himself: junior managers in accountancy firms, apprentice lawyers. They hunkered down on the grass, cradling glasses of wine in their hands, or went into the kitchen and twitted Serena about the food.
    The chicken flared beneath his hand. He thought about next weekend and what sort of a time he could expect. Lucy’s sunglasses lay on the bench beside him. Charlotte looked up from a conversation she was having with one of the apprentice lawyers. ‘Oh poor you,’ she said. ‘You seem to be doing all the work.’
    It was two o’clock now. He wondered what the children were doing, and whether he oughtn’t to be spending Easter with them rather than in a suburban garden with a horde of people he hardly knew. Without warning, the name of the place where they’d had the picnic and Naomi had danced ahead of him down the forest path stole into his head: Loftholdingswood. It had always struck him as a beautiful name. Twelve years later it seemed more beautiful still.
    Lucy had disappeared back inside the house. As he badly wanted a drink and there was none to hand he supposed he had better follow her. Serena passed him on the patio. ‘Sterling work,’ she said. Did it sound patronising? He couldn’t tell. The kitchen was full of Dannys and Bens. Professionally, he had evolved a technique for dealing with men a decade and more younger than himself: man-to-man, while encouraging an awareness of responsibilities on both sides. The Dannys and Bens were affable. They said things like, ‘Absolutely right’, and, ‘Where’s bloody Nigel got to, then?’
    Back in the garden Lucy and Serena were deep in conversation again on the bench. He saw that the grill had nearly extinguished itself: smoke rose vertically into the dead air. Grinning at the memory of the woods, Naomi’s rapt, unfallensmile, he moved towards it, hearing the voices drift back on the air.
    ‘A bit… long in the tooth.’
    ‘
Honestly
, Lu.’
    ‘Of course, he’s very attentive. But it takes simply ages to do anything, where it
matters
. I mean… You just have to lie there and think of England.’
    ‘God, all this smoke.’
    He bent over the grill and studiously, almost reverently, began to rake the charcoal back and forth, waiting confidently for the pale streaks of heat – like memory, he thought – to take root and flicker. In a bit he would go home and phone the children. It was their voices, he realised suddenly, that he wanted to hear.
     
    —2002

 
    H e came by so early that the sun had climbed only half-way to its accustomed place above the slatted roofs of Mr O’Hagan’s building on the far side of the street, and her mother, her voice detached and ghost-ridden behind the bedroom door, said nervously, ‘Who’s that, Ruthie, calling at this hour?’ and she paused in the brushing of her hair before the big oval mirror that hung in the sitting room and replied, ‘Now mother, you know that it’s only Huey,’ punctuating the words with strokes of the brush, and then looked curiously into the mirror as the last echoes of the three smart raps at the door faded into nothing, as if she had never seen herself before and wondered who in all of Chicago the pale-faced girl in the floral print dress could be. There was warm, molten light pouring in through the street window, making the room look dusty and confined, and as she went to the door her eye fell on such things as old newspapers, a handbill for the state agricultural fair, a card that a girl who shared her workbench at Lonigan’s had given her, all of them irradiated by the light and somehow magical