He shakes his head. ‘Do you not think I didn’t spend my whole life trying to, Mother?’ he says. ‘Do you believe it was easy to have every neigh like a rattling storm jarring my senses? Lambs bleating and frolicking in fields making my brain foggy, do you think it was easy? A blessed existence, perhaps? Young cattle released on fresh grass for summer driving me out of my skin? To nearly lose my mind and my life in stable after stable after stable, as though I were in a brothel with unlimited coin, and a thousand young whores were wagging their unclipped tails at me? To see swirling shapes when a flock of sheep would—’

‘Enough,’ Raghnailt says, repulsed, waving her hands. ‘I am ill with your talk. You set yourself against the great common feeling of humanity, the wisdom of its prohibitions, and the wishes of your mother and your wife. You must try to stop this perversion. You are killing me.’

Colca sinks into himself, like something already dead. He runs a chain through his fingers.

‘The body has its needs, no?’ he says. ‘This lust that lies on its side always sleeping next to a man, attached to him by the hip; that is his stalking shadow; that commands him completely. I could perhaps stop, but I can never stop wanting.’

‘You act as though the great common feeling of the masses were created solely to stifle you,’ Raghnailt says, ‘as though their object was to harm you rather than to form you into a shape that would fit you easier into themselves. You do not see the good sense of the people. Do you hate them so much?’

Colca looks at her, his mouth hanging open, as though he could never imagine her being so stupid. ‘Of course I hate them,’ he says. ‘For one transgression they have thrown me outside of them. My ostracism is too enormous for what I have done. Even when I repent I am still shunned. I confess, and once my confession is done, they accuse me of having done what I have just confessed to. Is that propitious to my sin?’

‘The people are clumsy and violent,’ Raghnailt says, ‘but their reasons are deeper than your needs. They are the undercurrent that ties the generations together; and if you continue in this manner they will tear you apart.’

‘It is I who am on the side of the coming generations, not them,’ Colca says. ‘Would your father have imagined his grandson marrying a Gael, no? It would have been unthinkable then, but who is to say my grandchild won’t marry a horse while your generation is mocked and scorned for its cruelty in prohibiting all those beautiful unions that could have been?’

‘Why are you this way, son?’ she says ‘Why? Is it my fault? Did my blood do this to you? Did I make you this way when I bore you?’