“They must have been expecting us,” said Matti.

In the centre of the city itself a guard waved them into a parking space. They saw that in every doorway the Holy Family stood.

“You’ll have to stop there for a bit, I’m afraid,” he said.

“Is there something wrong?”

“Not a thing.”

Jonathan Adams took stock of the guard’s over-sized trousers and dull shoes, the whiskey glint in the eyes.

“Up North,” said Jonathan, “I might have had that man taken in for questioning.”

“I’ll just hop over the road for a minute,” said Matti as they waited. “I have to relieve myself.”

He disappeared into a pub. Then suddenly a gigantic crowd came round the corner celebrating what a banner called the Solemn Novena. Women, praying in blue, passed in marching lines. The Virgin, also in blue, under a white canopy, was steered down the street. Behind her came a priest flanked by altar boys swishing clouds of incense from thuribles. The priest was reading out the rosary through a microphone, and behind him the others answered, heads back, while thousands of beads moved through their fingers.

When the procession had passed, Matti Bonner climbed back in.

“I took the chance, if you don’t mind, to get myself a whiskey,” explained the labourer.

“You can go now,” said the guard, “just cut across through there and you’ll be right as rain for Rathkeale.”

“Thank you, Constable,” said the Sergeant.

“Well, lo and behold you,” the guard replied, “that’s the first time I was ever called that.”

They arrived to Maisie’s farm in the late evening. Old Ruttle greeted them on the doorstep. His daughter, he said, would be down in a few moments. A sloe-coloured sky lay behind the house. Dark-nosed swifts were darting round a snug Dutch barn at the back. A timbered porch, like the one Matti had built in Fermanagh, opened onto a garden of beehives. In the distance was another farm, just like Ruttle’s, and beyond that another, and another, each similar and each with an orchard. And from everywhere came the honk of geese as they roamed the orchards looking for fallen fruit.

In the kitchen they drank cold lemonade with a ham salad and homemade bread. Maisie shyly made her appearance.

She took them across the fields to meet her neighbours. Matti Bonner was installed with Walter Bovinger. Jonathan Adams in Arthur Teskey’s. They met Pamela Gilliard, Gareth Shier, Walter Sparling. Hazel Gardener handed the groom a bouquet of freshly picked flowers. They walked up the disused railway that used to take the American emigrants on to Foyle when the seaplanes were in operation. In the cool dark they sat in a handball-alley and kissed.