AS soon as Daniel came in through the farmhouse door she knew from the wide smile on his face that he had caught fish. He had been away from the house and down by the riverbank for about two hours.

“You caught a few?”

“I got five! Nothing at all for the first hour and then they got hungry, down below at the Cotter’s Pool and . . . five . . . one after the other! They are small but they’ll be sweet. Did you peel the spuds?”

“I did. I’ll put them on and make up a salad. Will you do the fish? You’re better at them than me?”

“Right.”

They worked side by side in the kitchen. Daniel got a sharp knife and gutted and cleaned the brown trout as she worked away to his left. 

Outside the window of the slated farmhouse they’d bought 17 years before and converted, there was the silvery loop of the river the fish had come from, broadening out as it reached for its last mile to the Atlantic near the Cliffs of Moher.

She was washing the lettuce for the salad in the tin colander and she nodded in the direction of the Cliffs.

“Jack came past with the post.”

“I saw the van. Did he say anything about your man above at the Cliffs?”

“He’s still there, the same as this morning. Jack saw him. There’s a fair crowd there but the guards are keeping them well back from him, God love him, whoever he is. Jack heard him shouting that he was going to jump. He thinks he will too.”

“Is he Irish or a foreigner?”

“Foreign, Jack says, about 50 or so, a big man with a beard. He’s wearing no shirt, just a pair of trousers, he’s barefoot. Jack says he’s out of it entirely. 

“The guards and the priest and the coast guards are talking to him. The guards gave him cigarettes and a burger and chips from one of the vans. 

“There’s some lady that was camped with him and she’s there, talking to him in their own language, but he won’t let her near him, Jack says, and the guards think she’s doing more harm than good. She’s crying. Jack says he’ll jump all right, God love him.”

The spuds on the top of the cooker were steaming away now. Daniel got the frying pan and put it on one of the front rings. He switched on the gas. It hissed like a snake before he lit it. 

He seasoned the five trout with salt and freshly ground black pepper. He spilt a little olive oil on to the pan from the bottle she’d used for the salad and then added a knob of butter. He laid the trout down on the pan as delicately as any woman.

“There’s too many of them going up to the Cliffs to jump these last few years. What’s getting into the people at all? It’s a strange world.”

She added tomatoes, cucumbers, spring onions, two sliced hardboiled eggs and a clove of garlic to the lettuce. She added another drop of the olive oil and began tossing the salad in its wooden bowl and laying the table in the room behind the kitchen. 

When she came back to watch him turning the trout over, the white flesh gently sizzling, she nodded at the Cliffs again.

“What I notice, though, is that they must be just looking for attention. A lot of them threaten to jump but few enough do. They want to be talked out of it.”

“There were two or three jumped this year already, that’s more than usual.” He spoke as he was taking the warmed willow pattern plates out of the oven with a cloth.

“I know, but there were a lot talked out of it as well, God love them all.” She nodded her head quickly towards the black backside of the Cliffs again. 

“I don’t know how they can do it. Here, let me help you with one of those plates. Let’s forget about the poor man up there for a minute.”

They sat down together at the table to eat. She’d found about three-quarters of a bottle of wine left over from when the Moohans had dropped in the previous evening. It was red wine but they enjoyed it with the succulently cooked trout and the crispy salad. 

The potatoes were floury. Daniel, as always, ate them with their jackets on, more butter atop. She peeled them. Cassandra the cat came in, attracted by the aroma of fish, and sat down beside their feet. 

When the meal was over the September sky was almost purple yet still lit with sunlight through the window. The river was black. The bulk of the Cliffs of Moher was blacker still.

Daniel collected the plates and brought them out to the kitchen. He said he’d make the coffee.

He scraped the bones of the trout and the skins into Cassandra’s plate on the kitchen floor. He was in his stocking feet, having taken off the waders, and he was walking as silently, she thought, as the cat. The cat began to eat delicately. 

Daniel prepared two cups of coffee and switched on the small radio on the shelf over the sink for the seven o’clock news. He got the biscuit tin and left it out on the table beside her. She was sipping the last of her glass of wine and looking out towards the sea.

The kettle boiled and clicked off just as the headlines came on the radio. He put sugar and milk in the two Spanish mugs of coffee and carried them out to the table.

“He jumped?” She’d been listening to the radio.

“He jumped.”

“God rest him and keep him,” is what she said.