The kitchen is enormous, the biggest Felicia has ever been in. Its wooden ceiling is stained with the vapours of generations, a single ham hook all that remains of the row there must once have been. Two dressers are crowded with china; a long deal table occupies the central area; pairs of tights hang from drying-rails on a pulley. There are four upright chairs, a step-ladder against one wall, an old sewing-machine in a corner, a mangle. The refrigerator and an electric stove seem out of place. ‘They’re near by,’ the man who hasn’t yet told her his name says, running water into an electric kettle. ‘The places where the Irish boys meet up. I could run you over.’ ‘You mean now?’ ‘It’s early yet. The Blue Light’s a fish bar. I have high hopes of the Blue Light, a feeling in my bones. To tell you the truth, it would lift me to go out. If you wouldn’t mind a drive.’ Half-heartedly, Felicia shakes her head. ‘No. No, I wouldn’t mind.’ Her tone is bleak. It won’t be any good. All that’s left is the chance of borrowing money. ‘We’ll have a bite to eat first.’ She wonders if his wife’s body has been brought back to the house, and as though something of this thought has crept into her expression he says the funeral was this morning. She sees him noticing the tights on the drying-rack. He turns away from her while in silence he lowers the rack and clears it. When he has folded them and placed them in a drawer, he deposits liver and vegetables on the table and sets about preparing them. He opens a tin containing different varieties of biscuits and invites her to help herself while she is waiting, inviting her also to sit down. ‘That’s very bad about your money,’ he says. ‘I know.’ ‘Have you nothing left at all?’ She tells him: how much she has now, how because the Salvation Army hostel was full she spent last night in a house that was being rebuilt. ‘You’ll try the Sally hostel again tonight?’ ‘I don’t know.’ She doesn’t want to say it will be too late if they go out to the places he has heard about, but from the way he nods ruminatively, while cutting the green off carrots, she can tell that this has dawned on him. And he says: ‘Perhaps we should leave it for tonight. I’ve delayed you enough with my talk. I’m sorry about that.’ ‘I’d like to go tonight.’ He nods again, in that same way, as if he has guessed this would be her response. ‘I’m sorry about your wife,’ she says. With his back to her, he washes the carrots under a running tap. Ada was devout, he says; she came of a devout family. All that was a help to her towards the end. ‘She would be happy to see you back with us, dear. She’d be happy to see us going out to look for Johnny.’ Slicing liver, he tells her about the funeraclass="underline" the Reverend Arthur Chase, and a large turn-out, a great spread of wreaths. ‘I apologized on account I couldn’t invite them back to the house, not being up to anything social. But the Reverend Chase said come in for a bite and a few of us did. A few of my regimental cronies were there, always had a soft spot for her. And of course her friends from the voluntary service, out in force. I have to say it was touching, what they commented about her.’ They eat in the dining-room. Felicia’s deadened gaze passes over the mahogany expanse of dining-table and sideboard, the tallboy in the bow window, the portraits in pride of place on three walls, the set of brown Rexine-covered chairs. On the mantelpiece there’s a framed photograph of a plump-cheeked woman with a black ribbon trailed around it. ‘A crematorium service,’ he says, and she imagines a church, not knowing what a crematorium is. When he has poured tea and offered the tin of biscuits again, they collect up the dishes they have eaten from. Pausing by the photograph before they leave the dining-room, his massive shoulders heave, and the bulge of his neck heaves also. When he turns to address her, to remark that his wife was a wonderful woman, his pinprick eyes are lost behind his misted spectacles. She feels ashamed all over again that she took fright after he’d been so good to her, having time for her when there was the worry of his wife’s operation. No one has been as concerned: she remembers the hostile faces in the Gathering House, and the suspicion in Mrs Lysaght’s face, and her father calling her a hooer. Lena and George walked off, wanting to be on their own. She remembers Miss Furey warning her to be careful about what she said. ‘It’s good of you to say it,’ her benefactor replies when she stumbles through an apology for going off. ‘Like I say, dear, no offence was taken.’ There is a generosity in his voice, a warmth that cheers her up.