Outside the coop was the yard, and the Devine farmhouse, and the garden sloping southward, and the old glassless glasshouse, and the row of cold frames broken down, and the couch grass and nettles where once had been blackcurrants and berries, and the walls of the walled garden, pitted with nails where apples and pears had once been carefully trained, and where there was now just mud, mud everywhere, and everywhere mud.

The Devine family farm wasn’t just deteriorating, it was sinking: the heavy and seemingly continual rain during the summer had not been kind to the two-hundred-year-old building. Parts of it had begun quietly to slip away-irreparable damage to outbuildings with leaky roofs and big old wooden doors and hardboarded windows that had swollen up like weeping eyes. And even in the main house, old carpets had had to be removed-the place was unprotected, like a sponge, the damp infecting and soaking in through the render and seeping down the walls providing the perfect environment for mold and for mushrooms. A fair crop of little crumble-capped fungi had sprung up on the wallpaper, and old Mr. Devine had simply brushed them off with the back of his hand, and scooped them up and tossed them onto the fire, and they’d filled the house with a sour, soapy smell that-mixed with the stench of damp cardboard and cabbage and chickens-was overwhelming, organic, fundamental: the unmistakable stench of decay. Israel gagged every time he went into the kitchen, which was decay, plus dogs, plus fat, plus Irish stew. Black mold, dry rot, condensation. Sum total: miasma. George did everything she could to maintain the property, but she was fighting a losing battle: it was simply impossible to fix everything that needed fixing, and paint everything that needed painting, and clean everything that needed cleaning. She often crawled into bed at midnight and then was up again at five to begin the day’s chores. The animals were cared for, but the windows were rotten, and the floorboards were rotten, and the walls were rotten; even the septic tank was rotten. There was continual surface runoff from the fields, and groundwater levels were rising; the farmhouse was like a rusting ship in an unforgiving ocean, and George was like Sisyphus, Tantalus, and Captain Smith of the Titanic. She could not cease in her lonely task, couldn’t leave her post, could not desert her command. Her duty was to the farm-and “the farm” they all called it, not “our” farm or “our house” or “our home.” It was “the farm” like the church was the church, and the government was the government, and the law the law. It was an entity, a being, an institution. It was not a way of life, it was life.

The farm was where George had grown up. It was where she remembered her parents living, and where she’d played down by the stream and had run around in the fields. The farm was her entire world: she could imagine no world without it, although outside, the world was passing it by, superseding it, speeding up and crashing, colliding, collapsing, and rapidly remaking itself. Outside was progress, for better or for worse; inside, the Devine household was stasis. The furniture was heavy and inherited; the carpets were orange and thin. Mr. Devine would sit in the good front room by the fire, with crumbling, swirling turquoise wallpaper coming slowly down upon him, with a large pair of foot-operated bellows made of wood and leather at his feet. There was still a butter churner in the kitchen, and earthen bowls, and old brass candlesticks, and a big old mahogany wall clock, with a TV in teak to match. At night George used a brass bed pan with a long wooden handle to warm her in her loneliness, and next to her bed sat an old-fashioned automatic tea maker, her only companion.

George’s bedroom was her sanctuary, or the closest thing to it, and she’d arranged it exactly as she liked: old Roberts radio next to the bed, and her library books in their thick plastic protective covers, and her one concession to luxury, a Cath Kidston floral bedspread that she’d had sent over from London, a concession not merely to luxury, indeed, but to herself: an allowance. Weighing heavily against it was the old woodworm-wracked pine clothes cupboard, made by her father and not made to last, and her parents’ old double bed-a rickety iron frame affair that had been in the farmhouse for generations. Inheritance. She’d been born in the bed and would probably die there too, just like her grandmother before her. The only picture in the room was a poor watercolor, painted by George’s mother when she was young and first married and had come to live there, a painting of the farm, all pure white against green fields and blue skies, expressive of all her hopes of the life she was going to live. Big dreams. Dark red Donegal tweed curtains hung at the windows and down over the deep window ledges, which had been painted over so many times that where the paint was chipped it was possible to see years of colors going back, from whites through creams and down to deep dark browns, like geological strata. Sometimes George would sit picking at the paint, staring out at the fields spread before her, wondering about her own deepening layers, and she would listen to the trills and calls of the birds, and if she closed her eyes she could see her father still, in rolled-up shirtsleeves, tall and spare, always on the go, out in the garden, or in the distance on the tractor. She’d kept all the old accounts books, their covers smudged with white mold, and sometimes she would read through them in bed, reading her father’s, her grandfather’s, and her great-grandfather’s careful detailing of income and expenses. She did all of the accounts on a laptop now-Brownie helped her when he was home from university. But she knew that ultimately it was pointless, that the forces of decay and modernity were about to overwhelm her and the farm and sweep them all away, and there was nothing she could do about it, that what had once been a farm employing half a dozen men was now little more than a small-holding and would soon become nothing.

And of course she spoke of this knowledge, these fears, to no one. And certainly not to Israel Armstrong, whose lodgings in the chicken coop brought the Devines almost half of their monthly income.

Israel had got up late, as usual, this Sunday morning, neurasthenically, and had washed, and dressed and not shaved, and had eaten his customary spoonful of peanut butter and drunk his customary pot of coffee and had now wandered, aimlessly but much refreshed, outside to the yard, where George was busy working, paintbrush in hand.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Erm. I’m guessing here…Painting?”

“Whitewashing,” corrected George.

“Is that the same as painting?”

George just looked at him, eyes wincing.

“Well, anyway,” continued Israel. “Sorry about Friday night, by the way.”

“It’s fine.”

“I…”

“It’s really fine.”

“I just had one or two too many.”

“It’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“OK, then. We’re fine, then?”

“Yes.”

“Well. That looks like fun.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Fun?”

“Absolutely. Nice way to spend a morning-”

“Afternoon.”

“Whatever. Painting, though. Brightening the place up a bit. Looks very satisfying.”

“Does it?” said George. “Well, here, you satisfy yourself, then.” She handed Israel the brush and stood with her hands on her hips.

“Well, that’s not an invitation I receive very often from a-”

“Just paint, Armstrong.”

“Well, I’d love to help, obviously, but I…erm. I have a few things I need to do.”

“Really?”

“Yes. It’s Sunday. I need to…go and see Pearce.”

“I see.”

“Yes. What’s the time?”

George looked up at the sky.

“About half past two.”

“How do you do that?” said Israel. “I’ve always-”