He came in from the garden with a clump of yellow gazanias. His hair and face were damp. He placed the flowers very carefully on the sink. Turned and put an outstretched hand upon the table. “Oh,” he said as if remembering something. Then O’Muichin saw that Jonathan Adams had turned wretchedly pale. “Mr Adams!” said O’Muichin. The old man shook his head. Another seizure of pain passed through him. He placed both hands on the table, leaned his head forward and down and stayed there like a man in the starting blocks.

After a while he lifted his eyes and looked at the teacher.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I get these touches of indigestion. I’ll go upstairs to my study now.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“No, thank you,” said Jonathan Adams, “I’ll just go above.”

He stopped at the foot of the stairs again. Another cramp pinned him to the bottom step. It passed.

O’Muichin’s only bad points were flicking cigarette ash over the kitchen table, singing songs in Gaelic to himself at all hours of the night, suddenly cursing in a sharp Dublin aside, and shying away from all intimacy with the girls, beyond what his teaching called for. In the morning, Maisie would find the bed made, the hearth in his room littered with the stubs of cigarettes, and the candles he had brought with him burnt to a spit on the mantel.

“Why the candles?” she asked him.

“For the same reason that I love to listen to the rain,” he explained.

Religion was another matter. Each Sunday he attended a different church. And yet if he was asked, as he was by Catherine once, did he believe in God, he answered: “We have been alone for such a long time and then one day, one man comes along. Yes, Christ. I suppose it must mean something.” Then he considered her question. “But God? Well, I love the man who made the world, but I don’t believe in him.” For a while it appeared he might continue, but then he winked and smiled, and Sara bared her bottom teeth to keep herself from laughing, for he seemed a very timorous man to be taking on the whole world. But he did not enter into such matters while he instructed the Master in his study of Sweeney, or the pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne, or the Children of Lir.

“Have you been to the Island of Purity?” asked the Sergeant.

“What’s that?” asked the teacher.

“Inishglora.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“You should go, for that’s where those swans ended their days.”

“I didn’t know. One has to assume certain things.”

“That is your error. You can assume nothing. Nothing at all.”