He did stay a long while, Tom assured her, and he always touched the clay. Sister Teresa Dolores worried about things like that. She was always wanting to make sure that the rosary was being said and that the senior girls under-stood the requirements of Confession. There was worry in her eyes when she looked at you, and in the pull of her mouth, its corners drawn back into her face. She didn’t want anyone to go to hell.

‘Don’t ever forget to go there, Tom.’

The well was at the ruined abbey on the island, where the saint had had his bed long before the abbey had been built to commemorate him. There was a slab of rock you could touch, which had been his pillow, and in a niche in the wall people left coins and rosary beads and crucifixes. You could put your hand down into the well and feel for the slightly moist clay. There wasn’t any water in the well any more.

‘I wouldn’t ever forget,’ Tom said.

He left the classroom and made his way to the Reverend Mother’s house, where Sister Conheady had her library in an upstairs room. The journey was familiar to him; he made it twice a week. He rang the doorbell and then waited until a lay sister opened it and admitted him to the dark, silent hall, the linoleum on its floor sombrely gleaming. He waited in the room where the books were, all of them covered in brown paper by Sister Conheady and arranged on shelves in a glass-fronted bookcase. Hardly making a sound, except for the swish of her habit, Sister Conheady entered a moment later.

‘Has she a couple to come back?’ She unlocked a drawer in the bookcase, where details of the borrowing were kept. ‘The Crescent Moon, is it? And Spring of Love?

Tom examined the handwritten titles on the brown-paper covers and thought they were probably that. ‘Yes,’ he said, handing Sister Conheady the books.

She was his favourite among the nuns. He considered her gentle, her pale face seeming’ delicate to him, her hands delicately thin. She reminded him of the picture of the glorified St Bernadette above the kitchen door in the gate-lodge. He couldn’t imagine her ever being cross like Sister Sullivan always was or like his mother was sometimes. She didn’t worry you with her eyes like Sister Teresa Dolores did, or not notice you like the Reverend Mother.

‘I have this one for her,’ Sister Conheady said.

She noted the title in a red exercise-book, taking her time because she was never in a hurry. She wrote with a pencil, and when she had finished she said she was sure the book would be enjoyed. ‘Are they well across?’ she enquired, and Tom said that as far as he knew the Rollestons were well.