Tom waited for Sister Conheady to appear. The linoleum of the floor had been waxed that morning and the smell of polish was still in the air. It was never warm in the room, and the glass-paned bookcase doors were never unlocked when the lay sister showed him in to wait for Sister Conheady. He wondered how many books there were. He wondered who else ever borrowed them. He’d never seen another person in the room.

‘Ah, Tom, where’d we be without you?’ Sister Conheady said, soundlessly arriving. Her grasp of the doorhandle, and the movement of the door itself, had not betrayed her entrance: only her greeting ever did that. She unlocked the bookcase and then the drawer where she kept her red exercise-book.

‘Has she read Darkened Rooms? D’you remember that name?’

He examined the title, printed in ink on the brown-paper cover; he opened the book. By Philip Gibbs, it said inside.

‘That’s not one I’ve brought over,’ he said.

Sister Conheady replaced on a shelf the book he had returned to her. Miss V. Rolleston, she wrote in the red exercise-book, and then made a cross sound with her tongue. She corrected the entry to Mrs. V. Balt. It was the eighth time she’d made that slip. Tom had counted.

‘Now,’ she said, handing the book to him.

As he received it, he tried to touch her fingers with his, to see if she’d draw them away. He didn’t manage to do so because she was holding the other side of the book. He wondered if she was holding it there on purpose, because a nun had to be extra careful.

‘You get used to writing down a name,’ she said, which was what she’d said on the seven previous occasions, is Mrs Balt well these days?’

‘I think she is.’

‘Bring her this one too. I have it put by in the drawer for her.’

Again there was a chance to discover if she would permit his hand to touch hers. Out of the Ruins, he read on the cover of the book she handed him. But she held it in the same way, the fingers grasping it well away from his.

She locked the glass-paned door, and then she locked the drawer where she kept the red exercise-book and the books she sometimes put aside. He liked the smell of cloth that always came from her, and the way it rustled sometimes, and the way her beads jangled when she reached up to a high shelf. Deso Furphy said a nun had no hair on her head.

‘Sister Conheady,’ he said, ‘would you be frightened to touch me?’

Her high, smooth forehead, a shade less white than the wimple that framed it, wrinkled immediately. The empty eyes, that had never in his presence betrayed emotion, clouded perceptibly. A hand searched for the beads that hung within the folds of her habit.

‘To touch you, Tom?’