“They only speak the Irish among themselves.” The neighbour smiled. “And in time you might pick up a word or two.”

“Say something in Irish,” asked Catherine.

“Taim go maith,” said the woman.

“Taw im guh my,” repeated Catherine, “What does it mean?”

“I am good,” she replied.

“Not an appropriate beginning in a new language for you, Miss,” said her father.

Jonathan Adams marched round the house, then set off for home. But in Ballina they stopped and while Maisie and the girls went off shopping he entered a nearby bookshop. He was about to buy a local history of West Mayo when he discovered it was really a listing of local Catholic churches and the saints who had visited the area. Every history book he looked at concerned itself with Craoch Patrick, known as The Reek, a small mountain that stood in the distance on a clear day like a child’s sandcastle on a beach. Each year troops of stalwart pilgrims climbed to its summit. He studied their faces closely in the book as if he were viewing evidence of a New Guinea tribe that had stepped suddenly out of a forest. He took down from the shelves small ecclesiastical books on the story of Knock, a tiny village in Mayo where the Virgin Mary had appeared. He looked furtively through the photographs as if he were reading pornography.

He had entered Mayo – a county of graven images; pilgrimages with bagpipes, fiddles and whiskey; apparitions. The wanton songs of men and women. Images that should nowise be worshipped. There shall be no making of images, nor bowing down to them, nor to idolaters, Augustine cried.

“Can I help you?” the male assistant asked.

“Aye. Just looking,” said Jonathan Adams.

And everywhere he looked Catholicism was rampant. Davitt and the Land League. Parnell in Crossmolina. A Book of Ancient Superstitions and Cures. The Famine. 1916.

He was about to make a hasty retreat, when he found the wary eye of the shop assistant on him. He turned towards the shelves of fiction.

Eventually, out of panic and embarrassment at standing around in the shop so long, he bought a school edition of A Tale of Two Cities. It was nigh on fifty years since he’d read it, in a bedroom he shared with his brother in another older barracks under the old RIC where his father had been Sergeant. That barracks had been blown sky high in the 1920s and A Tale of Two Cities, its print small as porridge meal, went with it. Now, out of confusion, he had bought the book again. This time in very large print. He heard the opening sentence echo faintly in his head: “It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” To give his purchase some credibility he also bought a map.

“Are you going far?” asked the shop assistant without looking at him.

“Cork,” lied the Sergeant.