‘Fifteen shillings. Don’t lose the note now.’

He said he wouldn’t, knowing he wouldn’t because he never had, because there wasn’t a hole in his trousers’ pocket. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ Mrs Rolleston said, but he knew she was only saying it. She was always nice like that, which was why he never minded going up to her bedroom.

‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ the ferryman was saying on the ferry when Tom climbed on to it. ‘Ireland was always famous for its bachelors.’

The ferryman hadn’t started his engines yet. He was sitting on a side seat, where the passengers usually sat, beside one of the girls from Renehan’s, who was conveying a basket of turkey eggs which she had placed on the boards at her feet. One of the girl’s hands was bandaged, and Tom guessed she couldn’t work in the fish sheds because of it. When the ferryman asked him, he had to confess he was uncertain about what a bachelor was.

‘It’s a man,’ the ferryman said, ‘that wouldn’t have married a woman. D’you see that, boy? This lassie here has her eye on young Briscoe, only I’m after telling her that in my opinion Briscoe’s the kind to remain a bachelor.’

Other bachelors were cited. The ferryman was a bachelor himself. So was Guard Ryan, and Sheehy in the coal yard, and Mr McGrath and Mr Tobin. Tom knew them all by sight. Sheehy always had a cigarette behind one of his ears. Guard Ryan was red-complexioned. Briscoe had white eyelashes and a broad flat face like a holy wafer. Mr McGrath and Mr Tobin were the two boarders in the Rose of Tralee boarding-house, Mr Tobin employed in the corn offices, Mr McGrath in the gasworks.

‘I would have stated one time,’ the ferryman ponderously continued, ‘that Mr Balt was the kind to have remained a bachelor also, but I am proved mistaken.’

‘Won’t it be a great wedding?’ interjected the girl, is it soon, Tom?’

‘On the twenty-sixth.’

The ferryman nodded his square, brown head. He was invited to the house, he said; he had not been forgotten. He’d heard Mr O’Hagan was assisting Haverty with the transport. ‘Now, that’s another bachelor we have. Mr O’Hagan. Are you going into the post office, Tom?’

‘I am.’

‘Will you tell Mr O’Hagan from me that Butt Nolan says hold back off Drummer’s Lady?’

‘I will.’

‘Good man yourself.’