Nothing more was said on the journey to the mainland. Because of the noise of the engines, the fish-shed girls and the convent girls did not speak, nor did the women with their baskets, nor did the ferryman, nor the men with the churns. When the boat had edged its way in to the quay, after its engines had dwindled and the ropes were thrown and tied, the ferryman lit a cigarette and the island women exchanged remarks about the fineness of the morning with the men on the creamery lorry. Loitering, Tom watched the exchange of the full churns for the empty ones, and the arrival of a bale of barbed wire and two calves for transportation to the island. He didn’t want to walk through the town with the four convent girls, which was sometimes unavoidable if they fell into step with him. When they were well ahead he began on the journey himself, turning off the quays into Narrow Lane. They were senior girls at the convent, years older than himself.

‘That’s a nice morning,’ remarked the shopman from the London and Newcastle Tea Company in South Main Street. Tom replied, saying he hoped the bright weather would keep up. ‘Ah, it will of course,’ the man predicted.

Sergeant Kealy propped his bicycle against the lamp-post outside the Guards’ barracks and bent down to take off his bicycle clips. Horses and carts rattled back from the creamery with empty churns, returning to the farms they’d come from. The green wooden shutters had not yet been lifted down from the windows of Meath’s nor the red ones from Dungan’s. The windows of the public houses were empty except for notices that said Guinness is Good for You and John Jameson. Padlocks secured the doors of Traynor’s Picture Palace.

Further along the street, past Spillane’s public house and Barry’s confectionery and tobacconist’s, Mr Coyne was unlocking the petrol pump outside Jas. Coyne Motors. He didn’t notice Tom, but a shawled woman carrying baskets of fish asked him how his mother was. ‘Ah, the poor creature,’ she said when he replied that his mother was all right. She always asked the same question and made the same comment, and Tom often wondered why she did so. ‘Hey, mister,’ Humpy Geehan called across the street at him, which was what Humpy Geehan shouted at everyone, being half-witted as well as deformed. Briscoe, the porter at the Provincial Bank, sauntered to work, a cigarette hanging from his mouth.