“My father was a labourer. And his father before him, Mr MacDonagh,” said Maisie Adams. “Before I met that man there I had no life.” She turned to the girls. “Not until I met your father. He was a Northerner. I thought the Northerners had something about them. They were handsome creatures.” Then she turned to the Irish teacher. “If I keep the Queen on my chest of drawers or on my mantelpiece or wherever I so choose it’s because I was envious of a princess.”

“Not every woman is,” MacDonagh ventured.

“Every woman,” said Maisie derisorily, “unless she would be king.”

MacDonagh’s laugh was a loud howl. Then, disbelievingly, he followed old Adams upstairs to continue with the Irish lessons.

What MacDonagh had found was a conservative household the like of which he had never encountered before. It was beyond him that such a family could have succeeded in living in such ignorance in Ireland with all that was happening not a hundred miles up the road. Yet, though he felt superior to the Adamses, their quaint domestic life and lack of bitterness would somehow entice him in. But not for long. When he found out in O’Malley’s that, besides being a Protestant, it was rumoured that Jonathan Adams had also held some important government job, the penny dropped.

“Do you tell me that?” he said. “I thought he didn’t look like a Cadbury’s man.”

“He was high up, too.”

“I might have known,” he said. “He has the head of one.”

“Oh, they’re decent, good-living people,” replied O’Malley.

But now the inclination of Master Adams towards Irish and Irishness became contemptible in MacDonagh’s eyes. What was driving the old bollacks? It derived from guilt over violence done. He had probably taken part in some vile deed in the past. His wish was not reconciliation, but to disguise himself in another culture. There was no other explanation.

“Are you aware there is a war going on in this country?” he asked over dinner.

“Yes,” said Jonathan Adams quietly. “Thank you.” Then he looked at MacDonagh with bitter, implacable scorn.

The teacher smiled uneasily.

“Yes,” Jonathan Adams repeated, “we are aware, thank you, Mister MacDonagh.”

There was such an air of finality about these words, of restrained tribal rage, of suppressed wrath, that MacDonagh wanted to let the matter be.

But the Sergeant, growing angrier, stood and said: “I would remind you that you are a paid guest in this house. You would delude yourself, Mr MacDonagh, if you think you understand my people.”

MacDonagh lifted a piece of buttered potato to his mouth.

“I would not claim to understand you,” he said quietly, and began to chew.