In the grounds of the rectory William discovers a disused and seemingly ancient well, connected somehow to an underground stream. She was just another girl, one of many eager to offer themselves up to a superstar of classical music, caressed at night and forgotten by morning. The Covid pandemic is at its height, and when she is at the rectory she wears a mask: could this be the reason William doesn’t recognise her? Alas, no, even though they had slept together, that time in Brighton. And then the third time, “in Brighton, and the less said about that the better, maybe”.

Then there was a concert at Wigmore Hall when she plucked up the courage to congratulate him on his performance. She didn’t win, but received a diploma and an honourable mention. They first met when Tara was a young music student in Dublin and William – “a rather thin, tall and indefinably distracted figure” – was brought over from London to judge a music competition in which she was taking part. As it will turn out, however, this end is really a beginning.Īlthough William has to be reminded of it, they have encountered each other before three times, in fact. He hires her, she does the job more than assiduously – “So she unpacked his life” – and in time, with the inevitability of these things, ends up in his bed. The plot becomes as intricate as any reader could wish, and ends with a twist that few will foreseeĮnter Tara, a middle-aged piano teacher who replies to William’s advertisement for a cleaner at the former rectory that is his home. Music had abandoned him, but who remained when it had gone? Or what?” He lives alone, without partner or child, and the last thing he expects is that before the story is done he will have acquired, or reacquired, both. “And so began his reacquaintance with himself. He seems reconciled to his loss, more or less, and to the loss of much else in his life. He has had to give up the piano because of an incapacitating and, so say the doctors, incurable case of psoriasis in his hands.

The place is as dull as anywhere else can be but will become, for him, the capital of Tír na nÓg – the Land of Youth. A retired English concert pianist, William Barrow, has settled in an unnamed west Cork village.

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