They walked the beach. Sergeant Adams had found a home from home, and carefully ignorant of the politics of the South, he walked the unending bogs thinking of the politics of the North. Evenings, he drove with Maisie and sat in his car to watch the salmon boats coming in to Ballyglass pier.

Here again he might by chance have seen Jack Ferris. For Jack, that year, had left college and come to Mullet to work the fishing boats for the summer. Perhaps one day it might have been Jack Ferris’ turn to toss the rope onto the pier, and the old Sergeant might have held it till the boat was secured. The fishermen got to know him and sold him plastic bags of herring, or pollack. Sometimes they refused his money, but he would have none of that.

“We’d be throwing them away anyway,” they’d say.

“I’m sorry, I can’t have that,” he’d reply and try to press the money upon them.

He admired the dour unspeaking presence of the fishermen when they returned after a long haul in the Atlantic. They’d step off the boat onto the pier like zombies. Their eyes would have a glazed, exhausted look, a mindlessness. Yet they’d carry out what duties remained. Jonathan Adams would have admired that, tired men finishing what they’d begun.

On days like that he did not approach them but sat in the car watching while Maisie sewed. From the safety and privacy of their car they watched events and people all over the peninsula.

Guilt and strangeness had fixed Jonathan Adams in the role of observer of a culture that satisfied some tortured need in him. It was a culture to which he could not belong, but felt he once had when that same culture had existed in its purest form, as it had once on Inishglora, Island of Purity.

The mechanics of everyday political life in the Irish Republic were a source of constant amusement to the Adamses. Like many Northerners, Catholic and Protestant, they felt superior to the Southern Irish in education, in manners, in politics, in commerce. The war in Northern Ireland had made them very sophisticated political creatures.

The civil war in the South and the insurrection of 1916 were trivial affairs compared to the Somme, to the cruel undertow the Loyalists felt dragging at them.