He called my brother Hugh because Hugh is still a child, I suppose. He observed that were it later in the summer Hugh would have been there to greet me himself, and I replied that my brother began another term at Bandon Grammar School yesterday, the Easter holidays having ended.

‘You’re welcome, Miss Pollexfen,’ Haverty said. He carried my suitcases through the town. It was a fair step down to the quays, he said; we’d take it easy. We walked by bleak façades, through streets in which shawled women begged and children in filthy clothes ran barefoot. Men played pitch and toss, or sullenly muttered, taking no notice as we went by. When we arrived on the quays Haverty pointed across at the island—stone-walled fields above a sandy shore, bright splashes of gorse, a house looming among trees.

He rowed me across in a green boat, and when we arrived at a pier on the other side there was a horse and dog-cart waiting there, the horse’s reins untied. At a quarter past seven I’d had a boiled egg in the rectory kitchen and then Father drove me in the trap the eleven miles to Bandon railway station. Later I’d had to wait three hours in Cork for another train, which had then been tediously slow. ‘Oh, very pleasant,’ I replied when Haverty asked me what this journey had been like.

The horse was allowed to pick its own way over scrubby grass to a road whitened by dust. ‘You can take the boat in nearer to the house,’ Haverty said, ‘only the old landing-stage isn’t to be trusted. There’s a ferryboat crosses to the pier these days.’

We passed between fuchsia hedges; skylarks and swallows darted high above our heads, and I wondered if there was a cuckoo on the island. ‘Cuckoo?’ Haverty repeated. I blushed, thinking suddenly that perhaps there never were cuckoos on small islands or in this particular region of the coast. ‘Come on out of that,’ Haverty called out to the horse, which had not changed pace and did not do so now. ‘We have martins that arrive up at the house,’ he remarked a moment later. ‘Terrible damn pests.’

The high white gates which Hugh had anticipated for me stood open at the head of a sunless avenue, with a gate-lodge on the left. Moss and cropped grass softened the surface beneath the horse’s hooves, making our journey eerily soundless. Beech trees curved their branches overhead. The shiny leaves of rhododendrons were part of a pervading greenness.

‘Did you know the Carriglas rhododendron is famous?’ Haverty said.

I shook my head.

‘The length and breadth of Ireland, miss.’