“I don’t want to go back there,” she said. She found her mother at her again. The room was still dark. She could not tell where she had been. Her mother swung her feet on to the floor and, shivering, Catherine hurried from her nightgown into her dress in one blind movement, then immediately into her coat. Sara was already in the kitchen. Both school briefcases were packed. No fire was lit. “Do we have to go?” Catherine asks. “Yes,” Maisie says. Cold, disorientated, like sleepwalkers, the girls follow their parents to the car. Dawn is just breaking on the Atlantic and the sea is wild. Everything is blowing. There is hardly a word said as they drive through the salty light. Even the geese are quiet. The girls prop their chins on their palms and look far beyond what they see. Leaving Mullet again for Fermanagh, an intense nostalgia overcomes them. A fondness.

Jonathan asked his daughters: “What are the three laughing stocks of the world?”

“An angry man,” answered Sara, “a jealous man, and I can’t remember the other.”

“A niggard,” added Catherine.

“Good,” he said. “And what are the three angry sisters?”

“Blasphemy,” recalled Catherine. “Blasphemy, strife, cursing.”

“I’m sure they sound better in Irish,” explained Jonathan Adams. “Now, what are the three excellences of dress?”

But the girls did not know.

“You are wallowing,” he said, “in the cesspool of your own ignorance. You’ve come no speed at all.”

Catherine, one summer, lay with a man much older than herself in a desolate field above the cliffs in Glenlara. He was a bird watcher who had hitched from Wicklow over to Mullet to see a bird unique in Europe. He was searching, he said, for a sight of the phalarope, a tiny rare red-necked wader on its way from the Arctic to Africa.

“Here, take a look,” he said.

She followed a tern going one way, then a shag going the other. He guided her eyes out to the islands. As she lay on her stomach looking through his binoculars, his hand rested lightly on her buttocks.

She continued to look out to sea as his hand moved. She lay perfectly still as his courtship began. She did not move to stop him as he touched her. She thought it would all happen as it had back home. He’d lie on her a moment, moan, and turn away with his trousers wet. This man’s slowness she took for tenderness. His softness for concern. He was touching her all over. She left down the binoculars and lay there on her stomach letting it happen. And she lost herself for a while, until, just casually, she opened her eyes and saw a hand.

With terror she wondered who owned the hand.

When she found the hand led to a stranger, she suddenly sat bolt upright.