She listened as a wave knocked them against each other like chattering teeth, and then retreated. In the time when they had come here after her father died, when all the funeral crowds and sandwich eaters had gone, and there was just Lily and Helen and Declan and their grandparents, Lily would sit at her mother's kitchen table and innocently talk without stopping: all her woes, all her hopes would spill out. Helen could not listen to her; she had vivid memories of corning down here to this strand with the landscape slowly being eaten away and willing the sea to come more quickly towards them, taking the house and the fields, removing all trace of where her grandparents had lived. She imagined the sea, angry and inexorable, moving slowly towards the town, everything dissolving, slowly disappearing, the dead being washed out of their graves, houses crumbling and falling, cars being dragged out into the unruly ocean until there was nothing any more but this vast chaos.

She pictured her mother now, sitting at the kitchen table having more tea made for her. At some stage when she was a little girl, Helen thought, Lily had worked out a way of doing whatever pleased her, of liking and disliking people and things at will, and of always being supported. For years no one had argued with her, or asked her to stop, and for three days now she had been openly rude to Paul and Larry, clearly hostile to them. The first thing she would do when she got back, Helen thought, would be to shake her mother, force her to be polite to Paul and Larry, treat them like friends of Declan's who had been there for him when no one else was. But thinking about changing Lily was stupid, Helen knew; no amount of shouting or shaming would make any difference. Her mother was best left alone, tolerated and kept at bay, because nothing now would change her or improve her. It was too late.

Helen inspected the ruins of the Keatings' house. She stopped once more to look at the shreds of wallpaper and the floorboards and the half-rooms open to the wind and the sea. She wished that she could pray now for something – for Declan to be better, or for Declan not to be worse. But she realised as she walked through the car park and then up through the fields that she could not pray. She could only wish; and she fervently wished that what was coming could be delayed or stopped as she made her way along the road into the village.

It struck her as she walked along – still brooding over her mother \a151 that the view of Lily she had been offered during the previous four or five days confirmed all her prejudices. It was that hopeless mixture of looking for sympathy and demanding attention; it was the ability to turn hot and cold, swamp you with affection and then turn her back because she was busy. As Helen passed the limekiln she could picture her mother's head over the crowd at the funeral, and she pictured her again now as she sat at the table in Cush, and Helen saw in both versions of her mother's face a desolation and a helplessness, and, more than anything, a fear that would never leave her now.

Helen realised that she would never in her life experience that fear and desolation and helplessness she had seen in her mother's face. Some time in the year around her father's death, she had trained herself to be equal to things, whatever they would be. And this was what she was now resisting, something she had killed in herself, which in her mother was coming to the fore again, unadulterated and unashamed. All those early raw emotions which Helen had watched her mother direct at everyone but her, emotions which were flaunted in public and hardly used in private, these were now back at the kitchen table in Cush. And she was being asked to become friends with their owner.

Hugh would smile and say that she was taking things too hard. It would all mend, that was his view. He wanted her to see her mother and grandmother, but he would not accept that this would mean yielding something in her own nature. 'Talk to her, that's all you can do,' he said.

They had been married for more than a year when Hugh's father died. Helen had loved her father-in-law in the short time she had known him, and deeply regretted – she was pregnant with Cathal then \a151 that her children would not know him. He had been a big, smiling, friendly man and he lay in an open coffin in the hallway of the house. The expression on his face was mild and satisfied. Helen's mother-in-law sat close to the coffin, turning sometimes to look at him, or touch his face, as though to admire it or make sure that no great change was coming over it. And Hugh's brothers and sisters wandered in and out of the hallway, stopping for a while to touch the coffin or touch their father's hand. All of them cried at various times, and all of them took turns to sit by the coffin while their father's body lay there, lit only by candles, his skin waxen in the flickering light, his presence increasingly shadowy and distant.

No one in Hugh's family watched things as Helen did. She looked out for a niece or nephew or cousin or aunt or brother or sister who watched everything, who took everything in as though it were not happening to them. But there was no one like that except Helen herself at this funeral; they were all involved in being themselves, and this surprised her and impressed her. She wished she had been like that at her father's funeral instead of watching everybody, instead of observing her mother as though she were someone she had never seen before. And she "wondered, as she passed the ball-alley on her way into Blackwater, how different she would be now if she had spent those days after her father died openly grieving for him. Would she be happier now?

In the village she found Paul outside Etchingham's pub. He was agitated.

'I thought I should phone the hospital,' he said, 'but there was no one there I could talk to, so I phoned Louise at home, but she's out. They're expecting her back any minute but not for long, so I've got to keep trying. Your grandmother is going to have to get her mobile phone working, if only just for one or two nights.'

'Is Declan really sick?' Helen asked.

'If he's like this so early in the evening, there are real possibilities for serious diarrhoea and high temperatures and headaches in the middle of the night.'

'Does he have a headache?'

'He's beginning one.'

'And what's his temperature?'

'At the moment it's a hundred and two, which is very high for so early in the evening, and he could be dehydrated too.'

'And what could they do?'

'If the headache got worse, there's a slow-release morphine they could use, and there's an injection they could give him, but you'd need a doctor to write the prescription or give the injection.'

'You sound like a doctor,' Helen said.

'I've been through this with Declan a good few times, and I know Louise,' Paul said.

After a while he got through to Louise. Helen watched him talking to her, knitting his brow and listening and then talking again. He hung up. 'She'll be back at ten o'clock,' he said, 'so if things are worse we're to phone again. We're to keep him cool. She's worried about the diarrhoea and she knows how bad the headaches have been in the past. So we'll call her at ten if we need to.'

They drove back to Cush in silence. As soon as they came into the house, they could hear voices in Declan's room. Paul walked past Helen, sensing that something was wrong.

'It's all right. It's nothing,' Declan was saying as his mother and grandmother stood over the bed.

'He's had a bit of an accident,' Larry said, having signalled Paul to leave the room with him. 'I think there's diarrhoea all over the bed and vomit as well.'

Paul went back into the bedroom. 'It would be better if everyone left the room,' he said. He turned to Mrs Devereux. 'Could you get fresh sheets?' he asked her. He turned to Lily then and asked her to switch on the shower and make sure that it was hot enough. He asked Larry to get a basin of water and some soap. His tone was brusque, almost bossy. 'Could we clear the room? It needs to be much less stuffy in here.'