I won’t miss the stink, said Lucia. Zoe giggled.

Ten lines, said Cushla.

But, miss.

Twenty.

Cushla went to the blackboard and wrote:

If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.

That’s from Bambi, said Zoe.

You could learn a lot from Bambi, Zoe. And you can do twenty lines for laughing. The girls bent scowling to their pages.

You forgot to say a prayer, miss, said Jonathan.

That’s because I’m going to teach you the Hail Mary in Irish, she said. She had forgotten, but it would kill the first part of the morning. She rubbed out the Bambi quote and wrote the prayer on the blackboard. They lined up to sharpen their pencils in the parer that was clamped to her desk, turning the crank and examining the lead before returning to their seats.

Lucia and Zoe came to Cushla’s desk to show her their work. Zoe had drawn cascading stars in the margin. Lucia had corrected the grammar and written DON’T SAY ANYTHING AT ALL.

Good work. Go back to your seats, said Cushla. Rewarded for the good, punished for the bad. She pictured Michael Agnew in his robes, hair tamped down beneath the wig. The boys and men paraded in front of him, refusing to recognise a British court, answering in Irish they had taught themselves in Long Kesh. No juries, not what I signed up for, he had said.

She had not seen or heard from him since the ‘Irish night’ the previous week. Countless times she had replayed the evening in her head, searching for the word or gesture or pronunciation that had repelled him, that had shown she was too young, too unsophisticated, too Catholic. It seemed piteous now that she had opened her college Irish books at Penny’s messy, elegant table, desperate to impress him. Perhaps she had been too obviously besotted with him. Every time he lifted his glass or shifted in his seat she found herself gazing at him, as if she had never seen a man in her life. Several times she had raised her eyes to find one of the others looking away, as if they had been watching her, and once she saw Victor mouth something at Jim, who replied with a swift shake of the head, as if warning him to stop. She was tormented by what might have been said after they left, that she was the butt of Victor’s jokes, had made Michael a figure of ridicule. She had embarrassed them both.

The children had finished copying the prayer. She read it slowly from the blackboard, pointing to each word with the yardstick as she said it, relishing each syllable, the sonorous, guttural blur of it. She turned, expecting to find them bored. They cheered. She laughed and took a bow. Even if he rang her and asked her to join them again, Michael Agnew and his arsey friends could teach themselves Irish, or whatever they thought they were at. She would put him out of her mind.