‘I never thought I’d see a bridge,’ the woman on the cart said, ‘Isn’t it a wonder what they can do?’

He agreed it was. He had never before thought of his mother like that, out in a field with her clothes half off. He’d only pretended to understand when Holy Mullihan went on about saying prayers to cleanse him. It was why all of them were keen on making him touch the holy clay.

The woman said goodbye, shaking the reins to hurry the donkey up as it turned away on to the track that led to her cottage. In the distance Tom could hear the voices of the men working at the bridge, and when it came into sight he saw that it now extended over fourteen of the iron supports. Three lorries, empty of their loads, filled the air with dust as slowly they drove away. ‘A fellow at Confession,’ was how a joke of Neck Daly’s went.’ “Father, I sinned: I rode a woman from Carrigtohill.” “Well,” says the Father, “isn’t anything better than walking?” D’you understand that, Tom? D’you get the meaning of it?’

His grandmother would be frightened to be in a room with him, which was why they couldn’t go and see her in her house; his grandfather would be frightened to be near him at all. ‘We’ve mongrels enough,’ he’d heard Mr O’Hagan complaining, kicking at a dog that had climbed up on another one by Mr Coyne’s petrol pump. Mongrels were any old dogs, sometimes peculiar-looking, the street-corner curs that gathered dust and fleas, carelessly born also. ‘God takes back a soul,’ Holy Mullihan said; a soul was only on loan. There was a man out in the hills beyond the town who had a terrible disease, a man who lived alone in a hovel, blinded in both his eyes, hardly able to walk.

Holy Mullihan said he was like that because he’d been born in sin.

Hearing the sound of his returning footsteps on the gravel sweep, Villana turned down the page of her novel and with her cigarettes and lighter in one hand went to greet her husband. She poured him sherry. She made him tell her about his day. She listened to the detail of disputes that had arisen, and to his courthouse gossip. She was restless until, once more, he touched upon her girlish beauty and what it meant to him.

Letters came for John James. They were letters of apology, all of which he burnt without reading a second time. In passing, the money was mentioned, a statement to the effect that it didn’t matter, that between friends money never did. But in subsequent letters the sum referred to appeared to matter more. Attention was drawn to the circumstances of its withdrawal from the Munster and Leinster Bank, to its time in the hat-box, to its eventual arrival on the island. A loan had been agreed, one letter in particular stated, though no arrangement had been made for how it might be repaid, and in what manner.