‘You see – left to my own resources I should have long ago been lost.’”

Then their minds and bodies wandered apart so that he could make nothing of the girls. And because his own life felt like a fiction, these real people, real women, recalled O’Muichin to a physical and mental state of wellbeing he had rarely experienced. He watched a cow asleep, that was not asleep, for a moment later she flicked her tail, rose her head and looked over a wall topped with sweet broom. The wind gave a number of highly fraught hums. There were dogs asleep on a doorstep, not asleep. He looked into the worried, querying eyes of an ass, eyes affected with self-pity, as if the ass were approaching a fairly aggressive customer that she would fain be nervous of, but secretly despised. The despising was in the ass’s bone-shattering roar; and in the aftermath was the journey back into subservience again.

“Did you ever,” asked Catherine, “when you were half-way through writing a book find that you’d taken a wrong direction?”

“Touch wood,” he replied.

So ended the lessons on trees. And in such a state of mind O’Muichin approached his final evening in the Adams’ house.

The Sergeant wished to pay him, after supper was over, his two weeks’ wages.

“Half of that will do,” said O’Muichin. “I’ve been having a holiday.”

But Mr Adams pressed the money upon him. It was the first time he had touched the old man and he found to his surprise a sort of elegant strength travel down Jonathan Adams’ arm into his hand.

“I hope your fantasies do well,” he said.

“Thank you,” the teacher said.