The countryside was empty now, and for an age past. Theresa and Martin sat at the kitchen table and waited for the oven to warm up, which it never really did. Martin, and then Theresa, thought about going to bed, ate some cheese and crackers, threw away the raw lasagne, and went to bed.

There were two kinds of silence, one inside that was a still and boundaried quiet, and another outside that was like the totality of all absences that, when the lights were out, forced its way through the thick white cottage walls to where they lay, and confronted them with the sounds of their thoughts, their bodies. The house they had left behind, their home, pulsed and groaned and hummed, and these layers of sound ran unperceived through their lives, protecting them from so much of the burden of their everything. They had chosen a holiday that had returned them to the noiseless parts of themselves and there would be no escape from noticing until their time was up.

As the sun came cold over the mountain, Martin was pretending to be asleep, knowing that Theresa was pretending to be asleep, who in turn knew that Martin was pretending to be asleep. Ana, their youngest, was not pretending to be asleep. She was standing above them in the silver dawn light, breathing lightly, cheeks aglow, hair straggles hanging down her grubby blue pyjama top. Ana was waiting to smile, but really could not wait. She whispered.

‘I’m here, you know.’

‘We know,’ Martin and Theresa said together.

Ana threw herself across the air and landed between them, placing one hand, one arm, on and around, pulling them together. She nuzzled each in turn several times.

‘Love you Mama. Love you Dada.’

They hugged Ana and kissed her face and stroked her hair, and she got up, full of what she needed, grabbed Martin’s phone and ran downstairs to the living room to play.

‘Shouldn’t be on that yoke at least until after breakfast,’ said Martin.

‘Even if it is the holidays,’ said Theresa.

‘I’ll go down in a sec. It’s late anyhow. Late-ish. I’ll go down in a sec.’

They lay still. They slept.

Theresa pushed her feet back onto Martin’s legs, expecting to feel warmth. He was always fierce warm, a furnace of a man. But Martin was cold.

Theresa rolled round. Martin was unmoving, with his eyes closed, the lids fluttering, faintly violet. The skin on his face was taut and a waxy white.

‘Martin, are you alright?’ she said, not loud enough for her voice to carry downstairs.

Martin did not stir. Up on her knees, she gave his shoulder a gentle push with both hands.

‘Down,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Down … in a sec.’

She put her hand on his chest, over his heart. The beat was regular but faint and slow. There was no signal on her phone. The broadband hadn’t worked in the three days they’d been at the cottage. She had rung to complain but the local who took care of things was away on holiday, and the owner, in Cork city, was on business in Frankfurt and hadn’t even returned her message. Her messages.

Theresa had been calm before, when their son, Paulie, had fallen off the monkey bars directly onto the concrete, directly onto his head, when her da had his first stroke, and his second, worse, stroke, when Ana had the meningitis scare that ended in hospital but turned out to be nothing, when Theresa had the miscarriage, alone, the bad one. She was calm now, but later she would think what she always did: where does the fear go?

She stroked his head and spoke close to his ear.

‘Martin, luvya, come round now. Back to me now.’

‘Ana?’ he said faintly.

‘She’s downstairs. She’s fine, love.’

He opened his eyes and turned, unseeing, to where her voice had been.

‘I’m right here, love. I’m with you, darling.’

‘I’m fine, Tissie. I’m fine now.’

The grey billows that had hid Theresa from him were dissipating, letting the light in. He regained a sense of the shape of the room and what was beyond it, before her face appeared to him, full of light: the blue-grey eyes, set in fine lines, the pink cheeks and the brown complexion, the soft hair going in every direction. She ran her hand through her hair. She knew what he saw.

An hour later, Theresa and Martin were sitting at the kitchen table, and the man who did odd jobs for the owner turned up. He introduced himself as ‘the Didfer’, but his real name was Dermot, and it turned out, as it will, that he was married to a second cousin of Martin’s, who Martin had met once on some long-ago summer holiday, and somehow still remembered.

After his bit of mowing around the cottage, Dermot got confidential over a cup of tea and said that the ‘superfast broadband’ had never worked, not even for a minute, but the owner kept it on the website because it was what people expected these days. He said that there was a spot by the gate, past the games room, where, for some reason, you could almost always get a mobile signal.

Ana ran outside to caper about in the sunshine, in the new cut grass. Paulie was still in bed.

Dermot stopped talking and took another of the stale complimentary biscuits. He glanced around the kitchen at the useless cooker that he’d got off DoneDeal for eighty euros, and which had never really worked, and, almost incidentally, caught a slight and then a keen look at Martin’s face, in which he saw something familiar. He silently reproached himself for not copping on at once, though, in fairness, Martin had made a good fist at normality.

‘I’ve got the number for the practice at Kenmare on my phone,’ he said. Theresa hesitated. ‘Or maybe, you’d be better off going to Bantry General, though that’s the best part of an hour’s drive from here.’

‘I wouldn’t want to worry the kids,’ said Martin.

‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ said Dermot. ‘But don’t be a bloody fool.’

‘I wanted to ring 112 but I couldn’t get a signal,’ said Theresa.

Dermot handed her his mobile and Martin didn’t protest.

There was going to be quite a wait for an ambulance. Dermot had another job to go to, but he insisted that the weeds could wait another day. More tea was made.

Martin and Theresa and Dermot went outside with their mugs and sat on the weathered chairs.

‘There’s a cillín out the back,’ started Dermot cheerfully, ‘a way up the rise.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Theresa.

‘Older than the cottage, so it is,’ said Dermot.

The sun came through the clouds and lightened the blue of the world some.

‘All the little ones, all those unsuitables, away in the stony ground. We should think of them,’ said Martin.

A whole round of the land could be seen, alive with the heather and the saxifrage and the crowberry, all the ferns and the four-petaled white flowers of the bedstraw, the roseroot and the clubmoss, flourishing. The silent work of insects was everywhere. Time folded into itself, and over, merged into the scent rising off the world, carried off on the wings of the bees. A falcon rose and fell.

Ana rose out of the heather where she’d been napping and began to run about, playing one of her mystery games. Paulie appeared, gave everyone a nod, rubbed his head and went back inside.

‘Ana, darling,’ called Theresa.

‘Yes, Mammy.’

‘Go inside and ask Paulie to make you your tea, will you? There’s spaghetti hoops and a sliced pan, and some iced buns for afterwards. You can have a Fanta with it if you like?’

‘Yes, Mammy,’ she said, and skipped inside.

‘The easiest child that ever there was,’ said Martin.

‘We were owed that, if nothing else,’ said Theresa.

Theresa and Martin checked their phones.

There was soon no afternoon, and the lateness took the sun down. The mild heat of the day had departed.

‘Martin, how are you now?’

‘I’m … grand, actually. A bit stiff from sitting in this chair.’

‘The rest was good for you,’ said Dermot.

‘No sign of the ambulance,’ said Theresa.

Theresa and Dermot took out their phones. Neither had any signal.

‘I am going to take a walk,’ said Martin.

Theresa gave him an appraising glance.

‘We might get a signal,’ said Dermot.

The three took the path out. When they stopped by the gate the bars were still flat on their phones. The blue darkness took sudden hold, and the gravel grew louder under their feet. The clouds cleared and constellations without number showed themselves. The path curved into woodland and a breeze came up and began to move through the trees and about the walkers. A deer rose in flight out of a black sea of ferns and crossed the path in mid-air, just a few paces from them, landed silently and took off through the Scots pines.

Around the bend after the next bend was the lake, still and hovering, between blue and black, depending on how it was looked at, scattered with tiny lambencies borrowed from the sky, ringed by jags and ridges of mountains.

Martin walked ahead, found a good, flat rock and sat down. Theresa and Dermot followed. The silence was complete but for the occasional popping rise and swallowing fall of the fish, which might have been trout or pike.

Martin spoke low –

‘The dead might come down from the Caha Mountains to greet me as one of their own.’

The blue and the black of the lake and the mountains, the blue and starlight of the sky continued.

‘I don’t think they’re coming,’ said Theresa.