“Cunt,” he said. And before they had time to take this in he immediately turned and pointed at a magpie. “Snag breac,” he said quickly. “An snag breac,” he said again while they mulled over the wild consonants and soft vowels of the cléirseach. He spelt out the letters of the snag breac, smiling to himself.

“Meaning the piebald thief,” he explained. They looked at the magpie while they thought of the thrush. “Isn’t that good?” he asked. He went on to the chough, the corncrake, and the peregrine.

“There’s one,” said Catherine. “I don’t suppose you have in Irish – what of the phalarope?”

“I’m afraid I never heard of him.”

“He is,” she said, holding his gaze, “perhaps the opposite of the cléirseach.”

“Indeed?”

“A tiny wader, in fact.”

“Oh,” said their teacher, shyly. “Is that so?”

Across the sky a bank of threatening clouds gathered. A sharp wind, tough as hail, blew in. Within seconds, rain was falling on the islands. The girls took their teacher into a dried-up drain that ran under a dense wind-beaten arch of shrubbery. With sudden drops of rain tumbling through, they walked stooped for ages along the passage with its gold roof of crystals of rain and sun. Shafts of light struck their faces. O’Muichin was mesmerized. Sara whistled as she walked ahead, looking behind her now and then to make sure that the others were following. When they emerged from the tunnel the sun had given the mountains and sea a quality for which there are no words. The new hallucinatory light that precedes the rainbow covered everything, killing all colours except the simple green that cannot be defined as colour only, but is a state of being that follows on the heels of summer rain.

And, as always in such a light, Catherine, as she walked with the others, felt the uncanny sensation of being in the company of an illusion. She was part of a film being made. Sara’s face loomed and blurred. As for O’Muichin, he became faceless and strange. The two were talking to each other in a familiar way that Catherine could not understand. I’m burning inside, she thought, for someone to tell me how beautiful I am. From the wet grass came the sound of birds like shook dice. As Catherine made a great effort to catch up with the others, she stumbled and her hand inadvertently touched O’Muichin’s bottom, and she withdrew it in shock, not because her touch was accidentally rude, but because she was amazed to find his trousers were so cold.

You would have expected, she told Jack Ferris years later, an Irish teacher’s bum to be warm.

“I’ll put a cup of tea on,” O’Muichin said to Jonathan Adams.

It was seven in the morning. The day outside was sandy-coloured and wet.

“Thank you,” said the old Presbyterian.