'And carried it with you,' her mother added.

'I've never trusted you again, that's all. And it's not true to say that I was distant and you couldn't get through to me. You were never on my side.'

'I did what I could for you,' her mother said, 'and you never gave me an inch. Even I remember when your exam results came in, you just looked at them, you wouldn't even smile. But that's all long past now. I'd love to see you in your own house, to see if you're any different there.'

'I remember one of those summers,' Helen said, 'after I finished my degree and I was alone in that flat in Baggot Street. I had bought a book on cookery, and there was a brilliant vegetable shop around the corner just beside the Pembroke, everything fresh, and herbs and spices and even vegetables I'd never seen before. I used to go in there and over to Stephen's Green, and I'd wake in the morning with the whole day to myself, to walk around in the sun, cook something, read the paper, read a book. I loved the area, the freedom, the quietness, and I thought to myself, If nothing ever happens to me like marriage or friendships, I'll have achieved this. I'll have got away. And I still feel that, and there's no point in saying I don't. I feel I got away.'

'From what?' her mother asked.

'From you.'

'What did I do to you?' her mother asked.

'I don't know, but as you yourself put it about the wedding, it was not nothing.'

'So why do you want your children to see me?'

'Because we can't go on like this.'

Helen went to the window.

Earlier her grandmother had made sandwiches, which were now piled up on a plate. She went towards Declan's room to announce that sandwiches and soup were ready.

Declan wanted two people to have their soup and sandwiches in his room. He did not "want to be left alone. Helen and Larry joined him.

'I've just been fighting with Mammy,' Helen said.

'One of the things I've noticed about the women in your family,' Larry said, 'is that they talk like they run things.'

'They do run things,' Declan said. 'But you've never seen them with men. I mean real men, not wimps like us. When real men are around, they shut up and make tea.'

'That is pure nonsense,' Helen said, laughing. 'Mammy has never once shut up in her whole life and when Granny makes tea it's a form of power play.'

As Declan went to the toilet, he told them to say nothing until he came back. He did not want to miss anything. Larry and Helen ate in silence.

When Declan came back, Larry resumed. 'I mean that even if there were men around, I bet that wouldn't change them very much. They'd still go on the same way.'

'Fighting with each other,' Declan said. 'What were you fighting about?'

'We were fighting about why she wasn't invited to my wedding.'

'Oh yeah, I've heard that one before all right,' Declan said.

'Your granny says that the two of you are exactly alike,' Larry said.

'That's all rubbish,' Helen said. 'I'm not like her at all.'

In the hour Helen and Larry sat in the room with Declan, he went to the toilet five or six times and came back each time looking exhausted and dispirited, curling up in the bed and closing his eyes. The morning's drizzle had cleared up now, although the ground was still wet. When she touched Declan, Helen knew that he had a temperature. The room, she thought, was too hot, the atmosphere too stuffy. She opened the window.

In the kitchen she told Paul that Declan was getting sicker.

'At some stage,' Paul said, 'he'll have to go back to the hospital, but nothing happens in hospitals at weekends, so there's no real point in him going back until Monday.'

Helen looked at her mother, who looked away. She realised that her mother was not speaking to her.

Helen told them that she was going to walk alone to Ballyconnigar along the strand and then take the road to Blackwater, where she wanted Paul to collect her in an hour and a half. She went to her room to change her shoes and put on a pullover.

'Maybe you'll think about some of the things I said to you,' her mother said when she came back into the kitchen.

Helen left without replying.

As she made her way down the rain-soaked edge of the cliff, she realised that at some point in the afternoon the opportunity had come and passed for her to put her arms around her mother, cry alongside her, forgive her everything, and promise to start a new relationship. She shuddered. Most people, she thought, would have been tempted, and would regret not having gone some way towards an enormous reconciliation. She shuddered again at the thought as she stepped on to the damp sand.

In all the talk about the past, there was one scene especially which haunted her, which remained strangely beyond her understanding. She could not tell her mother how that day when she came from Dublin with her husband's body, and Helen met her in the foreground of the cathedral for the first time in months, her mother had seemed regal, remote, the last person a little girl would want to hug or seek comfort from. She watched her mother that evening as much as she watched the congregation or the coffin. She seemed totally transformed. Helen knew as she knelt there why Declan had been kept away; her mother could not have maintained this stance, this proud, public bearing, with a small boy clinging to her. An older girl could be kept at bay much more easily. Her granny could look after her, or her father's sisters.

Helen remembered that the house that night was filled with people, with cups of tea and sandwiches being passed around, and more people arriving. She stayed close to her grandmother, and made sure that she and no one else was sleeping in her own bedroom. What she hated more than anything else was the familiarity people had with her; strangers knew her name, and, because her father had just died, impressed the idea on her that they were full of sympathy for her. They pointed at her and introduced her to people, and she wished, as soon as they arrived, that they would all go. Her mother held court.

Those days after her father's death were dream-days, as though captured on badly processed film. And all the time, as her father's body spent its first long days in the grave away from everyone who had loved him, her mother was at the centre of the strangeness, utterly placid, beautifully dressed, receiving people, talking calmly. Her daughter watched her from, the bottom of the stairs, or caught a glimpse of her each time a door opened, thinking sullenly: When all these people go, you will just have me, but you don't know that yet. And after a week or two, but especially when school term began, that was how it worked out. On nights when they did not go to Cush, and Declan went to bed, Helen sat by the fire relaxing, watching something on television in the half-hour before going upstairs. Her mother sat opposite her with no idea how to talk to her, how to treat her, none of the cosy companionship Helen had built up with her grandmother. Helen did nothing to help her; she turned the television off and stared into the fire and stretched. Without even trying, she was creating a barrier which would be hard now to break. Her mother smiled at her, asked if she was tired, and Helen nodded and packed her books for the next day, and yawned and went to her room, to her own realm, where she lay in bed and thought about the uneasy presence down below. Even then, she "was dreaming about getting away.

She walked close to where the waves broke and withdrew and broke again. There was no one else on the strand. She wondered where the small stones came from that studded the shore between here and Ballyconnigar. Did they come from the land or the sea? Did they remain deeply embedded in the mud and marl that made up the face of the cliff? And then when the slice of cliff or big boulder of cliff fell, did the sea wash them clean and deposit them here?