Better, always, to think of the past. This was one lesson he had learned in this month of steadily increasing pain. Even with all its darkness, the past was better. It was over and done with. It was better than a present that was threaded with pain, with regret and guilt. He remembered a steep, ocean-facing hillside on the northern coast of Ireland. Long ago: twenty-five years and more ago. The colours, sights, smells, the wide landscape: all were vivid in his mind. He was clear about what he was doing: this was a time of grace, at least for him. A time when their lives were, or seemed to be, intact. This landscape was a palette of greens, changing with height into the deeper green-brown of bracken, purple of heather, hard silver glint of scree-strewn slopes. Sheep roamed on the upper slopes; and a few tethered goats grazed the rough grass. The lower fields were terraced, some of them, moulded onto the contours of the land – and the potatoes were already up on the west-facing slopes, line after neat line: the soil was dry, crumbling, after days of sunshine and steady southerly winds.
