‘Oh, I think coppers will be spent all right.’ Sister Teresa Dolores, though patient and well liked, was not given to making jokes, or recognising them. ‘When they could be saved for something sensible.’

The priest wagged his head deploringly, but was unable to control the smile that was wrenching his florid face in half. ‘There’s one boy I’m sure wouldn’t be bothered with it. Isn’t that right, Tom?’

‘I’m going, Father.’

‘Aren’t you the holy terror, Tom!’

Derek Birthistle wasn’t going to the knife-throwing. The day before he’d said his father wouldn’t let him. Tom had watched the Protestant boy tightening his lips in disappointment when he’d confessed that. He went red in the face now, fearful in case Father Pierce asked him; he was ashamed because of his father.

‘Well, that’s great,’ Father Pierce said instead, and he handed out sweets, one Rainbow Toffee each, to every member of the class. ‘Ye’re great scholars,’ he said.

They all stood up to receive the sweets and remained standing while the priest was still in the classroom because that was the practice. When he reached the door he turned as though he’d just remembered something, and surprised Tom by addressing him again. It was most unusual for a pupil to be addressed more than once in the same morning by Father Pierce.

‘I hear they began work on the bridge,’ he said. ‘First thing they were at it, Tom.’

Tom hadn’t known that, although he was aware of the talk there’d been about a bridge for the island, just as he’d been aware for so long of the talk about a tinned meat factory.

‘I didn’t know they’d started,’ he said.

Father Pierce made his familiar gesture with his head, inclining it and wagging it at the same time. It would be a great easement for the island people, he said. It was a great decision that had been taken.

He left the classroom, not closing the door behind him. In the passage one of the senior girls rang the handbell, clanging it noisily the way that particular girl always did. The new bridge wouldn’t make the journey from the gate-lodge easier. It would make it longer and more difficult because the bridge was being built where the water was narrowest, on the east side of the island, a much longer walk from the Carriglas gate-lodge than the walk to the pier. The ferry would cease as soon as the bridge was there, the ferryman said whenever the subject came up, adding that he’d be glad of an excuse to rest his bones.

‘Are you looking after the well?’ Sister Teresa Dolores asked, her eye picking Tom out as he began to leave the classroom. ‘You’re not forgetting it now?’

‘I go there all right.’

‘Stay beside it a long while when you’re there. Touch the holy clay.’