“Go on,” he said impatiently.

The boy looked up in surprise. “It’s your turn, Father.”

“Lord hear my prayer,” muttered Father Conroy.

“And let my cry come to Thee,” Gabriel shot back.

Say the Mass properly, anyway, Father Conroy told himself as he went up the step to the altar. Don’t be giving scandal to the young fellow – God knows he’s only waiting for the chance to be scandalized.

Or was he? Turning around to say “The Lord be with you,” and to wait for Gabriel’s, “And also with you,” Father Conroy looked down suspiciously at the eyelids lowered over the missal, at all that shining innocence exposed to view. Please God, he thought, let Gabriel’s piety (if it is piety) be set against my carelessness, and so, accept this Mass from us.

From then on, the mechanics of the ceremony came easily, the offering of the bread and wine, the washing of the hands. He went through the motions simply, as something necessary like shaving, whose doing he had never questioned. Only once did his attention wander, when, genuflecting suddenly, he found his left knee was gone stiff. “That cursed pony,” he muttered, and though the pain was no longer there, felt it was waiting inside him, ready to strike again.

After Mass, when the boy had gone clattering out of the house, he went down to the kitchen and looked in the shopping bag to see if he had anything for breakfast. There was only a loaf, a bit hard, which he had bought at the shop because nobody had been in with homemade bread. He set it on the table and took a half-pound of butter, still in its wrapper, from the cupboard of the dresser. There were no eggs either; it was time for him to do some foraging. Gabriel had brought the milk; he poured it into a jug and took a good, long, thirsty drink of it. He lit the primus, and when it was well pumped, set on it the kettle for tea. As he waited for the water to boil, he prowled around the kitchen. It was the time when the day usually shaped itself, the calls, the interviews, the visits, but now his mind waited in case the pain should strike again.

He switched on the radio. “The soft, creamy lather of Marley soap,” came a Dublin voice, deepened in slightly adenoidal sexiness. “Cuddle yourself in a cocoon of it, so smooth, so soft, so little extra cost...”

He threw himself on the radio, killing the voice. And as he did so, the memory of his dream flashed into his mind, so that he stood for a moment appalled by the pent-up violence that had faced him in the stable. What did it mean? What could have prompted it? And then he relaxed, thinking that it must have been the pony. Yes, that was it, the damn pony.