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Coming into Moher over the bridge, you may see a terrace of houses by the river. They are to the left of the bridge, below it. Their narrow height and faded air of importance make them seem to mark the approach to some larger town. The six dwellings unite into one frontage, colour-washed apricot years ago. They face north. Their lower sash windows, front steps and fanlit front doors are screened by lime trees, making for privacy. There are area railings. Between them and the water runs a road with a parapet, which comes to its end opposite the last house.

On the other side of the bridge picturesquely rises a ruined castle – more likely to catch the tourist’s eye. Woods, from which the river emerges, go back deeply behind the ruin: on clear days there is a backdrop of Irish-blue mountains. Otherwise Moher has little to show. The little place prospers – a market town with a square, on a main road. The hotel is ample, cheerful, and does business. Moreover Moher is, and has been for ages, a milling town. Obsolete stone buildings follow you some way along the river valley as, having passed through Moher, you pursue your road. The flour-white modern mills, elsewhere, hum.

Round the square, shops and pubs are of many colours – in the main Moher looks like a chalk drawing. Not so the valley with its elusive lights.

You could, I can see, overlook my terrace of houses – because of the castle, indifference or haste. I only do not because I am looking out for them. For in No. 4 lived Miss Banderry.

She was the last of a former milling family – last, that is, but for the widowed niece, her pensioner. She owned the terrace, drew rents also from property in another part of the town, and had acquired, some miles out of Moher, a profitable farm which she’d put to management. Had control of the family mills been hers, they would not have been parted with – as it was, she had had to contend with a hopeless brother: he it was who had ended by selling out. Her demand for her share of the money left him unable to meet personal debts: he was found hanged from one of the old mill crossbeams. Miss Banderry lived in retirement, the more thought of for being seldom seen – now and then she would summon a Ford hackney and drive to her farm in it, without warning. My uncle, whose land adjoined on hers, had dealings with her, in the main friendly – which was how they first fell into talk. She, a formidable reader, took to sending him serious magazines, reviews, pamphlets and so on, with marked passages on which she would be dying to hear his views. This was her way of harrying him. For my uncle, a winning, versatile and when necessary inventive talker, fundamentally hated to tax his brain. He took to evading meetings with her as far as possible.

So much I knew when I rang her doorbell.

It was July, a sunless warm afternoon, dead still. The terrace was heavy with limes in flower. Above, through the branches, appeared the bridge with idlers who leaned on the balustrade spying down upon me, or so I thought. I felt marked by visiting this place – I was fifteen, and my every sensation was acute in a way I recall, yet cannot recall. All six houses were locked in childless silence. From under the parapet came languidly the mesmeric sound of the weir, and, from a window over my head, the wiry hopping of a bird in a cage. From the shabby other doors of the terrace, No. 4’s stood out, handsomely though sombrely painted red. It opened.

I came to return a copy of Blackwoods. Also I carried a bunch of ungainly roses from my uncle’s garden, and a request that he might borrow the thistle cutter from Miss Banderry’s farm for use on his land. One rose moulted petals on to her doorstep, then on to the linoleum in the hall. ‘Goodness!’ complained the niece, who had let me in. ‘Those didn’t travel well. Overblown, aren’t they!’ (I thought that applied to her.) ‘And I’ll bet,’ she said, ‘he never sent those!’ She was not in her aunt’s confidence, being treated more or less like a slave. Timed (they said) when she went errands into the town – she dare not stay talking, dare not so much as look into the hotel bar while the fun was on. For a woman said to be forty, this sounded mortifying. Widowed Nan, ready to be handsome, wore a cheated ravenous look. It was understood she would come into the money when the aunt died: she must contain herself till then. As for me – how dared she speak of my uncle with her bad breath?

Naturally he had never thought of the roses. He had commissioned me to be gallant for him any way I chose, and I would not do too badly with these, I’d thought, as I unstrangled them from the convolvulus in the flowerbed. They would need not only to flatter but to propitiate, for this copy of Blackwoods I brought back had buttery thumbmarks on its margins and on its cover a blistered circle where my uncle must have stood down his glass. ‘She’ll be mad,’ he prophesied. ‘Better say it was you.’ So I sacrificed a hair ribbon to tie the roses. It rejoiced me to stand between him and trouble.

‘Auntie’s resting,’ the niece warned me, and put me to wait. The narrow parlour looked out through thick lace on to the terrace, which was reflected in a looking-glass at the far end. Ugly though I could see honourable furniture, mahogany, had been crowded in. In the middle, a circular table wore a chenille cloth. This room felt respected though seldom entered – however, it was peopled in one way: generations of oil-painted portraits hung round the walls, photographs overflowed from bracket and ledge even on to the centre table. I was faced, wherever I turned, by one or another member of the family which could only be the vanished Banderrys. There was a marble clock, but it had stopped.

Footsteps halted heavily over the ceiling, but that was all for I don’t know how long. I began to wonder what those Banderrys saw – lodging the magazine and roses on the table, I went to inspect myself in the glass. A tall girl in a sketchy cotton dress. Arms thin, no sign yet of a figure. Hair forward over the shoulders in two plaits, like, said my uncle, a Red Indian maiden’s. Barbie was my name.

In memory, the moment before often outlives the awaited moment. I recollect waiting for Miss Banderry – then, nothing till she was with me in the room. I got over our handshake without feeling. On to the massiveness of her bust was pinned a diamond-studded enamelled watch, depending from an enamelled bow: there was a tiny glitter as she drew breath. – ‘So he sent you, did he?’ She sat down, the better to look at me. Her apart knees stretched the skirt of her dress. Her choleric colouring and eyeballs made her appear angry, as against which she favoured me with a racy indulgent smile, to counteract the impression she knew she gave.

‘I hear wonders of you,’ said she, dealing the lie to me like a card.

She sat in reach of the table. ‘My bouquet, eh?’ She grasped the bundle of roses, thorns and all, and took a long voluptuous sniff at them, as though deceiving herself as to their origin – showing me she knew how to play the game, if I didn’t – then shoved back the roses among the photographs and turned her eyes on the magazine, sharply. ‘I’m sorry, I –’ I began. In vain. All she gave was a rumbling chuckle – she held up to me the copy of Blackwoods open at the page with the most thumbmarks. ‘I’d know those anywhere!’ She scrutinized the print for a line or two. ‘Did he make head or tail of it?’

‘He told me to tell you, he enjoyed it.’ (I saw my uncle dallying, stuffing himself with buttered toast.) ‘With his best thanks.’

‘You’re a little echo,’ she said, not discontentedly.

I stared her out.

‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘He’s a handsome fellow.’

I shifted my feet. She gave me a look.

She observed: ‘It’s a pity to read at table.’

‘He hasn’t much other time, Miss Banderry.’

‘Still, it’s a poor compliment to you!’

She stung me into remarking: ‘He doesn’t often.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you’re a great companion for him!’

It was as though she saw me casting myself down by my uncle’s chair when he’d left the room, or watching the lassitude of his hand hanging caressing a dog’s ear. With him I felt the tender bond of sex. Seven, eight weeks with him under his roof, among the copper beeches from spring to summer turning from pink to purple, and I was in love with him. Such things happen, I suppose. He was my mother’s brother, but I had not known him when I was a child. Of his manhood I had had no warning. Naturally growing into love I was, like the grass growing into hay on his uncut lawns. There was not a danger till she spoke.

‘He’s glad of company now and then,’ I said as stupidly as I could.

She plucked a petal from her black serge skirt.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘thank him for the thanks. And you for the nice little pleasure of this visit. – Then, there’s nothing else?’

‘My uncle wants –’ I began.

‘You don’t surprise me,’ said Miss Banderry. ‘Well, come on out with it. What this time?’

‘If he could once more borrow the thistle cutter …?’

‘“Once more”! And what will he be looking to do next year? Get his own mended? I suppose he’d hardly go to that length.’

His own, I knew, had been sold for scrap. He was sometimes looking for ready money. I said nothing.

‘Looking to me to keep him out of jail?’ (Law forbids one to suffer the growth of thistles.) ‘Time after time, it’s the same story. It so happens, I haven’t mine cut yet!’

‘He’d be glad to lend you his jennet back, he says, to draw the cutter for you.’

‘That brute! There’d be nothing for me to cut if it wasn’t for what blows in off his dirty land.’ With the flat of her fingers she pressed one eyeball, then the other, back into her head. She confessed, all at once almost plaintively: ‘I don’t care to have machinery leave my farm.’

‘Very well,’ I said haughtily, ‘I’ll tell him.’

She leaned back, rubbed her palms on her thighs. ‘No, wait – this you may tell my lord. Tell him I’m not sure, but I’ll think it over. There might be a favourable answer, there might not. If my lord would like to know which, let him come himself. – That’s a sweet little dress of yours,’ she went on, examining me inside it, ‘but it’s skimpy. He should do better than hide behind those skirts!’

‘I don’t know what you mean, Miss Banderry.’

‘He’d know.’

‘Today, my uncle was busy.’

‘I’m sure he was. Busy day after day. In my life, I’ve known only one other man anything like so busy as your uncle. And shall I tell you who that was? My poor brother.’

After all these years, that terrace focuses dread. I mislike any terrace facing a river. I suppose I would rather look upon it itself (as I must, whenever I cross that bridge) than be reminded of it by harmless others. True, only one house in it was Miss Banderry’s, but the rest belong to her by complicity. An indelible stain is on that monotony – the extinct pink frontage, the road leading to nothing but those six doors which the lime trees, flower as they may, exist for nothing but to shelter. The monotony of the weir and the hopping bird. Within that terrace I was in one room only, and only once.

My conversation with Miss Banderry did not end where I leave off recording it. But at that point memory is torn across, as might be an intolerable page. The other half is missing. For that reason my portrait of her would be incomplete if it were a portrait. She could be novelist’s material, I daresay – indeed novels, particularly the French and Irish (for Ireland in some ways resembles France) are full of prototypes of her: oversized women insulated in little provincial towns. Literature, once one knows it, drains away some of the shockingness out of life. But when I met her I was unread, my susceptibilities were virgin. I refuse to fill in her outline retrospectively: I show you only what I saw at the time. Not what she was, but what she did to me.

Her amorous hostility to my uncle – or was it hostility making use of a farce? – unsheathed itself when she likened him to the brother she drove to death.

When I speak of dread I mean dread, not guilt. That afternoon, I went to Miss Banderry’s for my uncle’s sake, in his place. It could be said, my gathering of foreboding had to do with my relation with him – yet in that there was no guilt anywhere, I could swear! I swear we did each other no harm. I think he was held that summer, as I was, by the sense that this was a summer like no other and which could never again be. Soon I must grow up, he must grow old. Meanwhile we played house together on the margin of a passion which was impossible. My longing was for him, not for an embrace – as for him, he was glad of companionship, as I’d truly told her. He was a man tired by a lonely house till I joined him – a schoolgirl between schools. All thought well of his hospitality to me. Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?

I left No. 4 with ceremony. I was offered raspberry cordial. Nan bore in the tray with the thimble glasses – educated by going visiting with my uncle, I knew refusal would mark a breach. When the glasses were emptied, Nan conducted me out of the presence, to the hall door – she and I stopped aimlessly on the steps. Across the river throve the vast new mills, unabashed, and cars swished across the tree-hidden bridge. The niece showed a reluctance to go in again – I think the bird above must have been hers. She glanced behind her, then, conspiratorially at me. ‘So now you’ll be going to the hotel?’

‘No. Why?’

‘“Why?”’ she jibed. ‘Isn’t he waiting for you? Anyway, that’s where he is: in there. The car’s outside.’

I said: ‘But I’m taking the bus home.’

‘Now, why ever?’

‘I said I would take the bus. I came in that way.’

‘You’re mad. What, with his car in the square?’

All I could say was: ‘When?’

‘I slipped out just now,’ said the niece, ‘since you want to know. To a shop, only. While you were chatting with Auntie.’ She laughed, perhaps at her life, and impatiently gave me a push away. ‘Get on – wherever you’re going to! Anybody would think you’d had bad news!’

Not till I was almost on the bridge did I hear No. 4’s door shut.

I leaned on the balustrade, at the castle side. The river, coming towards me out of the distances of woods, washed the bastions and carried a paper boat – this, travelling at uncertain speed on the current, listed as it vanished under the bridge. I had not the heart to wonder how it would fare. Weeks ago, when first I came to my uncle’s, here we had lingered, elbow to elbow, looking up-river through the green-hazed spring hush at the far off swan’s nest, now deserted. Next I raised my eyes to the splendid battlements, kissed by the sky where they were broken.

From the bridge to the town rises a slow hill – shops and places of business come down to meet you, converting the road into a street. There are lamp posts, signboards, yard gates pasted with layers of bills, and you tread pavement. That day the approach to Moher, even the crimson valerian on stone walls, was filmed by imponderable white dust as though the flourbags had been shaken. To me, this was the pallor of suspense. An all but empty theatre was the square, which, when I entered it at a corner, paused between afternoon and evening. In the middle were parked cars, looking forgotten – my uncle’s was nearest the hotel.

The hotel, glossy with green creeper, accounted for one end of the square. A cream porch, figuring the name in gold, framed the doorway – though I kept my back to that I expected at any moment to hear a shout as I searched for the independence of my bus. But where that should have waited, I found nothing. Nothing, at this bus end of the square, but a drip of grease on dust and a torn ticket. ‘She’s gone out, if that’s what you’re looking for,’ said a bystander. So there it went, carrying passengers I was not among to the scenes of safety, and away from me every hope of solitude. Out of reach was the savingness of a house empty. Out of reach, the windows down to the ground open upon the purple beeches and lazy hay, the dear weather of those rooms in and out of which flew butterflies, my cushions on the floor, my blue striped tea mug. Out of reach, the whole of the lenient meaning of my uncle’s house, which most filled it when he was not there … I did not want to be bothered with him, I think.

‘She went out on time today, more’s the pity.’

Down hung my hair in two weighted ropes as I turned away.

Moher square is oblong. Down its length, on the two sides, people started to come to the shop doors in order to look at me in amazement. They knew who I was and where he was: what should I be wanting to catch the bus for? They speculated. As though a sandal chafed me I bent down, spent some time loosening the strap. Then, as though I had never had any other thought, I started in the direction of the hotel.

At the same time, my uncle appeared in the porch. He tossed a cigarette away, put the hand in a pocket and stood there under the gold lettering. He was not a lord, only a landowner. Facing Moher, he was all carriage and colouring: he wore his life like he wore his coat – though, now he was finished with the hotel, a light hint of melancholy settled down on him. He was not looking for me until he saw me.

We met at his car. He asked: ‘How was she, the old terror?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘She didn’t eat you?’

‘No,’ I said, shaking my head.

‘Or send me another magazine?’

‘No. Not this time.’

‘Thank God.’

He opened the car door and touched my elbow, reminding me to get in.