‘Errah, go on with you!’ She nudged him also. ‘Don’t be codding me,’ she said, and then forgot about him because for an unpleasant moment she thought she’d lost her bag with the money in it. She felt for it at her feet and to her relief found that it was safely there. She opened it and counted the notes. ‘I have money for a motor-car,’ she explained to the clergyman, ‘I’m not due at the breakfast, to tell you the truth. Only there’s business to be fixed.’ She tried to explain the same thing to the young fellow in the overcoat, but he was slow on the uptake so she left it.

‘Motor-car?’ the clergyman said.

‘There’s a French car that Coyne has. D’you know Coyne at all?’

She described the garage man in case the clergyman would have seen him on the streets—the rosary-bead eyes and the way his head shone, and his paunchiness. He kept the little strands of his moustache tidy with hair oil, she said. He had a wife and eleven daughters.

‘I’m in no way acquainted with this man,’ the clergyman said, and she agreed that he probably wouldn’t be. She explained that the car they’d come from the church in was the vehicle in question. According to Coyne, there wasn’t one to touch it on the roads of Ireland. According to what he’d said to her, you couldn’t beat the Frenchman when it came to building a motor-car. The Frenchman reigned supreme in the motor-car department.

‘I see,’ was the reply she received, without an accompanying smile.

‘Balt has a Ford. You see it in the streets. IF 92.’

‘I know nothing about motor-cars.’

The notes were all present, still held by the rubber-band Corcoran in the Munster and Leinster had put around them. She thought about asking the man if he knew Corcoran at all, but she changed her mind and asked him his name instead.

‘I’m the Bishop of Killaloe.’

‘Well, glory be to God!’

The maid placed a plate of food in front of her, not that she was hungry. Down at the end of the table he was carving a fish, and the brother was cutting at a ham and a couple of chickens. The brother was good-looking in his way. No doubt about it, all three of them had looks.

‘Just a slice of chicken breast,’ the fellow in the overcoat said, handing back his plate of fish.

‘I’m Noreen Moledy,’ she said, ‘I married into a house in the town.’