A sin of that type, Holy Mullihan added, would afflict the child who came out of it. The sin would only go from a person after death, and then only if there’d been penance enough and sufficient Hail Marys said. ‘There would be people who’d be frightened of the sin, Tom. They wouldn’t mean harm to an afflicted person, only it’s the way they’d see it. You might see them crossing a street if they saw you coming. Another thing is, they mightn’t like to touch you.’

In the town the summer crowds increased. They spread themselves on the sand, each family claiming a length of breakwater to hang their bathing towels on. They spent all day in the sunshine, were cooled by the seaside breeze, and returned at half-past five to the boarding-houses of the promenade. Bookmakers and publicans, insurance salesmen, commercial travellers: all came with their families and stayed a week. St Vincent de Paul excursions brought trains full of slum children for a day by the sea.

When they tired of the strand the visitors climbed the sandhills beyond the promenade, where an old woman kept a shop during the summer months. This was a small black hut of corrugated iron standing by itself and selling whatever the old woman wheeled in her pram to it each day, usually an assortment of Willwood’s sweets and the rock-cakes she sold at two a penny. She was accompanied by a small dog with a yapping bark that most of the time frightened the visitors away. Sometimes a lone man would walk among the pampas grass of the hills, with a newspaper like a baton under his arm. Sometimes a couple would wander in search of seclusion.

The people of the town varied in their reception of the visitors and were affected differently by the summer weather that attracted them. The poor remained in their lanes and cottages, their half-doors closed, their babies impatient for food. On Sundays the poor brought the smell of poverty to Mass, but they did not ever choose to venture on to the promenade, nor to mingle with the visitors.