Carriglas does not let go of Sarah. The idyll of those years, passed with a family she came to find so attractive, haunts the grim rectory that becomes her home again. It also haunts the establishment where she is next employed. The Misses Goodbody’s School for Protestant Girls is recorded as occupying a notable position in a prosperous Dublin suburb: a house built by a cooper who’d become an alderman of the city, a plain brick building, new classrooms in an annexe, a brown dining-room that smells of old bread. The Misses Goodbody are likened to elderly horses who have rummaged for their clothing at a jumble sale; Miss Fawson, who assists them, ‘her lips drawn back from large teeth’, is reported to utter generously whenever she has occasion to speak, as if ‘keen to offer value’. Thirty-five Protestant girls at a time grow through their difficult years at the Misses Goodbody’s: daughters of hardware merchants and coal merchants, of bank managers and grocers, farmers’ daughters and drapers’ daughters, clergymen’s daughters at reduced fees. ‘Tenants of a landless empire,’ one of them colourfully remarks. ‘We are the Jews of Ireland.’ The city suburb oppresses Sarah Pollexfen, its terraces dull and similar, its hall-doors tightly closed, the blank stare of its windows seeming like eyes gone blind.

The Misses Goodbody’s, March 2nd, 1919. Their two horselike heads touched over a tea-tray as they chided me. ‘Ivanhoe’, the older said. ‘We would rather you read the girls Ivanhoe on Sundays.’ In their fusty study the dark-blue blinds are always three-quarters drawn; there is an odour of rotting flower-stems from the vases. ‘Another matter,’ the younger said. ‘The Pollack girl has been keeping a private journal. I have it here. You will take it to Mr Leary’s furnace, Miss Pollexfen.’ The older smeared blackberry jam on a slice of fruitcake. Together they lifted their teacups, their grey heads close again.