‘Where shall we go?’ he said.

‘I don’t mind. No. I do. Our special place.’

‘What shall we look for?’

‘I don’t mind.’

Joe felt himself blush, a sticky pink heat churning through his cheeks. It was all too much, as if he was walking into the sea, with cross-currents and rip tides tugging and pulling. He was out of his depth. But he couldn’t pull back to shore, not now.

‘I can’t stay long,’ she said that day.

‘Then we won’t go far.’

He pushed away on his too-big bike. Perhaps they’d see some swallows. Or swifts. Migrate in the winter, return in the summer. Perhaps Trude was like a migratory bird, going home to nest.

‘A swift,’ he said. ‘Listen.’

Soft, high trill, like a chorus, all together. Black against the sky.

‘I thought it was a swallow,’ Trude said.

Joe shook his head. ‘A swallow, now. They natter, like a couple of biddies, with their pale breasts and red throats. You can’t mistake them.’

He watched as she trained her ear, head on the side, then lifted the glasses and focused on the flock.

‘Remarkable birds,’ he went on. ‘They eat and drink and sleep on the wing.’

He followed her gaze. For all the world, they looked like a squadron of fighter planes in formation.

And for all the world, he should not be feeling like this, because now he wondered if he wasn’t falling for her. Or she him. No girl had ever fallen for him.

He should stop seeing her. But what could he tell her? It’s best we don’t see each other again. He couldn’t tell her the truth. I am falling in love. And what was wrong with a priest in love? He wasn’t being unfaithful, not to his calling. Infidelity meant carnal knowledge, that’s what they taught in the seminary. He wondered whether Trude wasn’t right: what would a priest know about love, what could they advise? Wondered too, whether, in a roundabout way, she was testing him, do you have a sweetheart, Father?

Birch and hawthorn were floating green, and the earth shimmered with the sapphire of bluebells and forget-me-nots. Joe spent his regular Monday afternoons with Trude and his solitary Wednesdays cycling over to Anse la Coupe.

The weather was warm at the very end of May, the ground dry enough to sit on. Trude said she couldn’t meet him anymore on Mondays.

‘Then Wednesdays,’ he said. ‘We’ll go to the dell.’

‘Our special place.’

‘Oh, that it is,’ Joe said.

They pedalled to the bay, he on his bike with the clickety spoke, she on her lady’s bicycle with the basket on the front, rubber tyres and a pump clamped to the down tube. It was a miracle it hadn’t been stolen.

He nodded to the red-headed nurse they passed as they freewheeled down the hill.