It is a dirty day, getting dark by four. Sean peels and steeps the potatoes, then goes up to do the curtains. The radiator under the landing window is warm, and he leans into it, and gazes out over the townland beyond. The gorse and the scrub and the hedgerows are disappearing into deeps of darkness. Night clouds are banking, and the sun is slow-sinking behind a creep of cloud, and then gone. Away to America.  

By day, he can look from this landing and count twenty houses – a few standing in wee clusters, the rest scattered across rough fields. But by night, the way of it reveals itself. More than half of the houses are empty, a good lot of them are derelict. The house lights are few and far between. Friel’s and Doherty’s and Coyle’s – he counts them in. Men home from work and weans back from school, and dinners being made. Each kitchen warm with the smell of soup or stew, or a bake of bread. Young ones at the table, getting their homework done.

For so much of his life he has been haunted by kitchen windows at dusk. All those times he had looked from the upper deck of a bus or from a train trundling through the edges of a city and seen houses lit up in winter twilight.  And thought of his own home, far from him, and the days, farther still, when the kitchen was a glow of amber light, his mother busying at the range. When ...