He says it is. He knows that Esmeralda Coyne is inquisitive about what is going to happen now. More than ten years have passed since she remarked, meeting him as casually as this, that people couldn’t help how they came into the world, how could they? Nobody these days gave tuppence about a thing like that, she’d said.

‘It’s a grand old house they’ve left behind, Tom.’

‘It’s shook enough in places.’

‘It wouldn’t take much to put it right.’

She does not disguise her interest. Whenever people in the shops or the public houses look at him in a certain way he knows Esmeralda Coyne has come into their minds. The oldest of her sisters married Slattery, who’d taught Tom how to climb up and look through the billiard-hall windows. They have the garage and the petrol pump now, and Esmeralda lives in the house with them.

‘A hotel’s the coming thing in Ireland, Tom. The Yanks are here in droves.’

I’ve heard it, all right.’

‘We’ll pull the blinds down for her funeral.’

On the promenade two nuns dressed differently from Sister Teresa Dolores and Sister Sullivan walk briskly. It’s hard to become used to the dress they wear now, not to think of them as lay workers of some kind. They glance in his direction, but do not greet him. It’s well known that he puts in time on the promenade while a race is being run, that afterwards he’ll return to Spillane’s for an hour or so, win or lose. He wonders if the nuns remark that he is feckless, wasting time when he should be working. Being unmarried himself, he has something in common with them, but they cannot be expected to see that, any more than Sister Teresa Dolores or Sister Sullivan might once have felt they occupied a common ground with Briscoe or Mr McGrath and Mr Tobin of the Rose of Tralee boardinghouse. Briscoe married in the end, and so did Mr Tobin, but Mr McGrath did not, nor did Mr O’Hagan, and the ferryman was always too old. Tom has never wanted to marry himself, Esmeralda Coyne or anyone else. ‘There’s some like that by nature,’ the ferryman used to say, the subject of bachelors always a favorite with him. He had not meant priests, of course. He had excluded the ruling of a priest’s vocation.

Shops have crept into the promenade; a supermarket sprawls. The old billiard-hall has been demolished. The wasteland that was to have been the Father Quirke Park is still a wasteland.

He turns and walks back again, past the brass plates and the window where the white cat stared out disdainfully. Not far from here he had his last conversation with Holy Mullihan before Holy Mullihan left the town. Fifty yards further on, Traynor’s Picture Palace is a furniture store.