Upstairs, in her parents' bedroom, his suits and jackets and trousers and shirts and ties lay in the wardrobe. She opened the wardrobe and touched one of the suits and it swayed on its hanger. When she pushed the hangers along, she found a pair of braces that he must not have worn for years. She ran her fingers along them and then recoiled, putting all the hangers back evenly in place.

She went to the window and looked across the valley at the Turret Rocks and Vinegar Hill, and then down into the street, at the carefully tended front lawns bordered with flower-beds. There was no one on the street. The neighbours must have not seen her arriving or they would have come to knock on the door immediately.

Her father's shoes under the bed surprised her more than anything. They needed polish on the toes, and the laces on one of them were somewhat frayed. More than anything else in the room, they suggested her father's presence rather than his absence, as though he could arrive at any moment to sit on the bed and slip them on, and lean over to tie up the laces.

On the back of the door was her mother's dressing-gown and behind it hung two ironed white shirts. She took one of them down and held it up against her and looked in the mirror. She put her feet into his shoes, which were much too big for her. She opened the wardrobe again and found a dark grey suit. She put it on the bed and went through the ties, searching for one which was dark but not too dark, with dots or stripes. She put a few ties against the suit, as she had observed her mother do, to see if they matched, and eventually chose one with grey and white stripes on black. She opened a drawer and found a white vest and white underpants and in another drawer she found a pair of socks.

She laid the suit full-length on the bed. She put the shirt inside the jacket and stuffed the sleeves of the shirt into its arms, and opened the buttons of the shirt and put the vest inside, and then closed up the buttons. She put the tie around her own neck, as if it were her school tie, and tied a knot in it and placed it inside the collar of her father's shirt and tightened it. Then she put the underpants inside the trousers and laid the trousers out, tying up the buttons of the fly, and tucking the shirt into the trousers. She found the socks and put one inside each shoe and placed the shoes at the bottom of the trouser legs, but they didn't look right.

She went downstairs and picked a pile of books from the bookcase in the front room and brought them upstairs. She placed books on either side of the shoes, and, on realising that she needed more, she went downstairs and carried up another armful. She propped the shoes, the toes facing upwards, between the books.

She looked at the figure on the bed and decided he needed something else. She went downstairs to the press under the stairs where the coats were kept and she found a cap hanging on a hook. She found a small pillow in her bedroom and brought it into her parents' room. She put the pillow resting against her parents' pillows, close to the neck of the shirt; she placed the cap over the pillow, as though her father had fallen asleep with his cap on his face. And then she stood back and watched.

She closed the wardrobe door and the drawers, and then left the room and stood out on the landing with her eyes shut. Slowly, she walked back into the bedroom. It was the shoes that made the difference, made it seem that he was lying there asleep and she could come and lie beside him. She placed herself on her mother's side of the bed, carefully and gingerly so as not to disturb him. She reached out and held the hand that should be there at the end of the right-hand sleeve of the jacket. She reached over and lifted the cap and kissed where his mouth should be. She snuggled up against him.

By the time she heard them, Mrs Morrissey and Mrs Maher were already in the hall. She realised she would have to move very fast and very quietly, but she knew that if they came upstairs now she would be caught and it would be impossible to explain. She reached for the shoes and put them on the floor, leaning over the figure she had made of her father. Without making a sound, she bundled up the suit and shirt and tie and underwear and socks. She placed the books on the floor and took the clothes and the pillow and the cap and moved slowly towards her own room, knowing that the creaking floorboards would soon alert the two women downstairs to her presence. She did not have time to smooth the bedspread or check the room.

'Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph, is there someone upstairs?' Mrs Morrissey shouted.

Helen shoved the clothes under her own bed and sprang to attention, calling over the bannisters.

'It's me! It's Helen!'

'Helen!' Mrs Maher shouted. 'You're after giving us a terrible fright. What are you doing here in the name of God? What are you doing here? You're meant to be down in Mrs Byrne's.'

'My granny said I was to come up here,' Helen said, and then rushed into her parents' bedroom to check that she had left nothing important on the bed. She smoothed out the bedspread and went back to the landing and walked downstairs.

'Well,' Mrs Maher said, 'you gave us a fright.' She had put white plastic bags full of large sliced pans on the kitchen table, and other bags on the draining board and the kitchen floor.

'You shouldn't be here on your own,' Mrs Morrissey said. 'If your mammy heard you were here on your own!'

'That's what my granny said, I was to come here,' Helen said.

'Well, I'll get Jim to drive you down to Mai Byrne's. Isn't Declan down there?'

'But they're all boys down there,' Helen said. 'They'll just tease me. I can't go down there.'

'Isn't she very precocious! Isn't she a little lady!' Mrs Maher said.

For the next two hours, Helen worked with them, buttering the bread, making ham sandwiches, chicken sandwiches, salad sandwiches for people who would come back to the house after the removal of her father's remains.

'There'll be a big crowd tonight,' Mrs Maher said.

'And an even bigger crowd tomorrow. The whole of Fianna Fail in the county Wexford will be there.'

Mrs Maher and Mrs Morrissey talked while they worked, but Helen only half listened to them. She wondered was her father in his coffin yet, and did they open the coffin again, or was it closed now for ever? She wondered if they covered his feet, or left them bare.

As each pile of sandwiches was made, it was placed back into the greaseproof wrapping paper to keep the bread fresh. Mrs Maher held a cigarette between her lips while she worked. Each time the ash grew long, Helen watched to see if it would fall into one of the sandwiches, but she always tipped it into the sink before it fell.

Mrs Morrissey hoovered the downstairs rooms. After a while, when she knew that they were both busy, Helen slipped upstairs to her room and found the underpants, the vest and the socks and put them back into the drawers where they had been. She checked downstairs again by looking over the bannisters and, when she was sure that she would remain undisturbed, she disentangled the rest of the clothes, untying the tie and putting the shirt back on its hanger. Her mother would believe, she thought, that it had wrinkled because it had been unused there so long. As she left it on the back of the door, she tried to crease the other shirt which hung there too. She put the suit back in the wardrobe and closed the wardrobe door. She flushed the toilet before she went back downstairs. She had forgotten the tie, but she knew she would be able to deal with that later.

She carried on helping their two neighbours make the sandwiches. When they were finished, Mrs Morrissey said, she could come over to their house and have her dinner and wait for her mammy to come. It would be quiet, Mrs Morrissey said, and it was a sad day and she'd have to look after her mother.