In the morning Mr MacDonagh would descend the stairs very ashamed of himself and fearful that these orgies he conducted nightly with his person might have been heard throughout the house. He was afraid that they might see it in his eyes. He would start the lesson with the girls in a distracted manner.

“As Gaelige,” he’d whisper.

His guilt made him likeable. To see the girls he had dreamed of so licentiously now attend to his lessons made his voice break on such words as pog, sneachta, taithneamh. Kiss, snow, shining. He wondered where his antagonism used to come from. Now it seemed that Catherine had lost her loathing of him. That Sara had lost her distrust. Yet his cheerfulness did not last long. Embryos, swathed in green light, bathed in his hangover. He could not stand the protection the girls’ manners gave them. Only through pitting himself against the enemy could he normalize himself. Beyond that hovered a space his spirit could not fill. He was a man who makes a language stand still, and so he stuck resolutely to the constraints of Irish grammar, for to venture beyond that was to invite period blood, the smell of the silk worm, the mushroom smell. As the day progressed his old prejudices would reassert themselves, his sexual guilt would give way to a puritanism that drove even Jonathan Adams, himself inclined to an excess of religious zeal, to remonstrate.

The Master one afternoon made the claim, when once again his language class had dissolved into political argument, that it was the Presbyterian had sided with the Catholic against the Protestant.

“For their own reasons,” said MacDonagh, smiling.

“I see you know no difference between the history of the Presbyterian and the Church of Ireland.”

“If there is one it escapes me.”

But the old policeman was not to be stopped. He argued that the first Presbyterians of Ireland – to the North they came, he said – brought the concept of the Republic with them. Ha, ha, ha, went MacDonagh. They came not as colonists, but settlers. What’s the difference? asked the teacher. The Presbyterians wanted to put England behind them. “The Presbyterian wished to begin again,” concluded Adams, “in new, in more congenial surroundings.”

“Am I to take it that you believe Catholicism to be corrupt?”

“No,” said Mr Adams, correcting himself, yet not knowing where such an implication was issuing from.

“Well, go on.”

But the old man carefully held his silence as if the matter was finished. Then MacDonagh rose and said: “I’m afraid, Master Adams, that you have the wrong end of the stick. You take great leeway.” The Master warily waved him on. “I think you hold some spirited views, which I respect,” MacDonagh opened the palm of his hand, “but I know which side I would be on.”

“You are free to hold that view, Mr MacDonagh.”