‘I can fix it.’

‘He’d know what I’d be up to on a Sunday. I’d be frightened he’d follow me.’

‘Is he the same about it?’

‘He’ll always be the same about it.’

For a long time the two women again sat in silence. The promenade was crowded, an excursion train having recently arrived. New powder pictures had been completed on the sand, peacocks in a garden, a waterfall and a glen. The elderly man who created them was just beginning another, skilfully working his garish powders. Tom drew his mother’s attention to them, but she hardly looked.

‘Tom looks after the holy well,’ she said. ‘He was asked would he do it by Father Pierce.’

‘Father Pierce was good to you, Brigid.’ She’d never visited the well, she said to Tom; she’d never been over on the island, ‘I’ve heard tell it has holy clay.’

‘You can feel it wet in your fingers.’

‘Tom felt it often,’ his mother said, and from the tone of her voice Tom knew she was telling his grandmother this so that his grandmother could understand he benefited from the holiness of the well. She’d always been eager herself for him to look after it. ‘Father Pierce was on about you,’ she’d said. ‘I told him you didn’t neglect the well.’ When Father Pierce had arranged with Mrs Rolleston that he should go to the convent nobody had said it was on account of it being necessary for him to be near the holiness of the nuns, but he knew now that was what Father Pierce and his mother considered.

‘It’s good you look after the well,’ his grandmother said. ‘That’s grand for me to know.’

Without warning she wept.

Tom turned away and gazed over the sea at the island, at the grey bulk of Carriglas, and the green hillsides speckled with yellow. The distress continued beside him. The latest picture on the sand was of a woman holding a bunch of flowers. He watched while colour was smeared over a tulip. His mother’s voice murmured consolation.

‘Dear Mother of God,’ his grandmother sobbed, struggling with the words. ‘Dear Mary forgive you, Brigid.’

He didn’t arrive. She waited until a quarter to five, worrying in case the ferry had sunk. A dozen times she looked from her window but the boat was still chugging back and forth, every hour or so. He must be suffering from something, she thought in the end, summer ‘flu or stomach. Carefully, yet again, she went over his visit of a week ago. There hadn’t been a word between them. He’d come out with only a single one of his hurtful remarks, not that he ever intended to cause pain, inexperience really.