'I'll see you back there, so,' Helen said.

'Do you know your way into Wexford?' her mother asked.

'I'll find it,' she said.

She phoned Hugh from the coinbox in Blackwater. His mother answered the phone and was full of worry about Declan and Helen's mother and grandmother.

'It's a hard time for all of you,' she said, 'and you can be sure our prayers are with you.'

Hugh told her that the boys were fast asleep. Manus had to be carried sleeping all the way home from the pub, he said.

'The pub?' she asked.

'They remembered the pub from last year, and they forgot I existed until they needed money.'

'Are they all right?'

'They're fine, they're asleep. I'm going back down to the pub myself'

'Don't fall into bad company,' she said.

'I won't,' he said. 'I am keeping myself pure and holy.'

She drove back to Cush to find her mother and grandmother dragging the mattress into the house. She felt that she could have lain down here on the cold cement in front of the house and fallen into a deep sleep. She was worried about the night to come, that she would once more sleep deeply for a short time and then wake and spend the night brooding over things.

When they had placed the mattress on the bed-frame they began to make the bed. Helen thought that all the linen her mother had brought was brand new, had never been used before. Her mother must be making a lot of money. They plugged in the lamp and put it on a chair beside the bed.

The cats stared down suspiciously as Helen came into the kitchen to find Declan watching television. The bruise on his nose seemed much darker and uglier under electric light.

'Are you really allergic to cats?' she asked.

'Yeah, they would do something to my stomach.'

She told him that she had been in their mother's house.

'It's amazing during the day,' he said. 'It's really beautiful.'

'Why didn't you want to go there?'

'It gives me the creeps,' he said.

'Does this place not give you the creeps too?'

'I need these creeps,' he said. 'I don't know why.' He laughed.

Helen noticed that her mother and grandmother seemed happier and more satisfied now that they had made the bed and lit the lamp. Declan, too, seemed brighter.

'It's great being out of hospital,' he said.

Helen wondered if he knew how close to the end he was, or if he could live for much longer than anyone predicted. She wondered how much they had told him; it was something, she thought, she must remember to ask Paul. She imagined for an instant them turning on the news and hearing that a cure for AIDS had been invented and would have instant success even for people who'd had the disease for years.

When Declan went to bed, the three women sat in the kitchen eating sandwiches. There was an uneasy peace between them; they chose topics with care and then moved cautiously, alert to the friction which even a stray word could cause. Eventually Helen went out to Declan's car and brought in the groceries she had bought in Dublin and also the rest of the bedclothes from her mother's car.

As she passed Declan's room, she saw that the lamp was still on. He was lying on his back staring at her.

'It's strange being here, isn't it?' he said.

'Yes, I couldn't sleep last night thinking about it.'

'You can close the door,' he said. 'I'm going to turn off the lamp and try and sleep.'

'Declan,' she said, 'if you wake in the night and need someone, you can come into my room and wake me.'

'I'll be all right,' he said. 'I hope I'll be all right.'

CHAPTER FIVE

Helen woke and looked at her watch; it was ten o'clock. She heard sounds: voices and something being pulled or pushed. She lay back and dozed, and then woke fully and lay with her hands behind her head. Her mind kept wandering back to her mother's house, and the glimpses she had had the previous day of her new life. She could not understand how her mother faced going back to that house after a day's work, or why she had chosen to live alone so far from the town.

She remembered hearing from Declan how the old house had been sold. Declan had mentioned this casually, as though he were telling her that their mother had changed her car. He was surprised at how upset Helen had become, and admitted that although he had known it for some time he did not think it was important enough to tell her. When had the sale happened, she had asked him, and he told her that their mother had moved to Wexford four or five months before. And who had bought the house? Declan told her that he had not the slightest idea. And what had happened to the furniture, the ornaments, the pictures, the photographs? Declan laughed at her concern about these and said he didn't know.

'There were things belonging to me in that house,' Helen said to him.

'What things? Don't be so stupid!'

'Things in my room. Books, photographs, things that mattered to me.'

'She cleared out your room years ago.'

'She had no right to do that.'

The house was gone now. In her mind, she went through the rooms again, how each door closed – the door to her parents' room almost noiseless, the door to Declan's room more stubborn, impossible to open or close without alerting the whole house \a151 or the light switches – the one outside the bathroom which Declan when he was tall enough loved turning off while someone was inside, the light switch inside her bedroom door, firm and hard, to be turned on and off decisively, unlike the light switch in her parents' room, which could be switched on and off with a little flick.

She pictured the house empty and ghostly, like a ship under water, as though it had been left as it was on the last day she saw it. The box of Mass cards and sympathy cards for her father under her parents' bed, and another box full of old photographs. The opening to the attic covered by a square of wood which could be shifted sideways on a windy night.

Someone else lived there now. This was what happened to houses, Declan told her. Get over it, he said in a mock American accent.

In the days after she heard about it, however, nothing about the sale of the house seemed to her normal or inevitable. In the first year of their relationship, she had made an agreement with Hugh that she would tell him when she was upset or worried, that she would not keep things bottled up, as was her habit, withholding something important from him so that he would find out only months later the cause of a period of silence and blackness. But she could not tell him about the house and her feeling on hearing the news of the sale because she could not think why she should mind so much.

She was angry with her mother, having tried to feel nothing about her for years, and having believed that her mother would never be able to provoke her again. She remained for days in a silent rage. Hugh watched her pretending it was nothing until she realised that she would have to tell him what it was. He was puzzled by the source of the anger, and he wondered if it was not about something else.

He told her that she would have to resolve it by talking about it; he loved the language of emollience and reconciliation. They went to bed early and she talked for hours while he held her and listened. He tried to understand, but the conflicts were too sharp and too deeply embedded for him to fathom. She felt she needed to revisit the rooms of the old house, even in her imagination, knowing that something had ended. She needed, she thought, to let it end, to ease it out of herself. These rooms no longer were hers; instead, now, the rooms of the house she shared with Hugh and the boys belonged to her.