One summer’s morning Jonathan Adams decreed that an extra place be set for dinner. There was a visitor arriving. Then the family went through the house with a fine-tooth comb to make sure there was no evidence of his previous life on show. He and the girls drove to Belmullet town.

Mr Thomas MacDonagh, who had arrived early, was standing where the bus had left him.

“Mr MacDonagh?” asked Jonathan Adams.

“Sin ceart,” said the Kerryman. He was stout with thin fair hair, rimless glasses and sensual lips. The daughters were introduced. He gave Catherine one damp, limp hand and looked at Sara as if he was seeing two of her.

“Come, Sara,” said her father, “what have you been told about staring?”

MacDonagh shook his finger disapprovingly. “As Gaelige, maith se do thoil,” he said. In Irish, please.

Sara blushed and felt mortified.

It was not a good beginning. As Gaelige became a phrase that rang constantly, like some dread commandment from the Old Testament, throughout the house. They grew to hate that sound. Thomas MacDonagh soon learned that the use of the vernacular was at a low ebb in Adams’ of Corrloch. And though he had been hired to teach young girls, his main student was in fact the father. Old Adams had no vocabulary and a reading accent which bordered on Arabic. When MacDonagh greeted her, as was customary, with a short nasal Dia guit, Maisie Adams returned a mindless response.

“I didn’t catch that.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr MacDonagh,” she’d reply and skip away.

The Sergeant, out of irony, he called A mhaister. Master, he exclaimed with rueful satisfaction. His early attempts to conduct all conversation at meal times in Irish ended with his finely modulated questions turning aggressive and abrupt. He’d start again. No reply ensued. Instead, he was met with a timorous, well-mannered silence. Their restraint perplexed the Irish teacher, while dinner time taxed the Sergeant. He’d speed through an English-Irish dictionary on his lap and with a word start a train of talk which had nothing to do with what had gone before.

“It surprises me that you did not get an Irish teacher from the locality,” said MacDonagh.

“I did not want to be drawing attention to ourselves,” said the Master.

“Is that so?” The inquisitive face broke into an alarming sneer. And in reply, Jonathan Adams’ cold superiority: “I would watch my facial expressions, if I was you, Mr MacDonagh.”

“What?”

MacDonagh tried to lord it over the girls, but from the beginning they were not given to submission in any language, and seemed to have entered into a conspiracy against him. They had a code of gesture and laughter which used to raise his hackles. They were too old to be precocious, too young to be sophisticated. The sexual tang of their presence shocked him deeply. Often during his first few days there he felt like shaking them. But he got on with it.