Small Things Like These

As a schoolboy, Furlong had been jeered and called some ugly names; once, he’d come home with the back of his coat covered in spit, but his connection with the big house had given him some leeway, and protection. He had gone on then, to the technical school for a couple of years before winding up at the coal yard, doing much the same work as his own men now did, under him, and had worked his way up. He’d a head for business, was known for getting along, and could be relied upon, as he had developed good, Protest­ant habits; was given to rising early and had no taste for drink.

Now, he lived in the town with his wife, Eileen, and their five daughters. He’d met Eileen while she was working in the office of Graves & Co. and had courted her in the usual ways, taking her to the cinema and for long walks along the towpath in the evenings. He was attracted to her shiny black hair and slate eyes, her practical, agile mind. When they engaged to marry, Mrs Wilson gave Furlong a few thousand pounds, to start up. Some said she had given him money because it was one of her own that had fathered him – sure hadn’t he been christened William, after the kings.

But Furlong never had found out who his father was. His mother had died suddenly, keeled over on the cobblestones one day, wheeling a barrow of crab-apples up to the house, to make jelly. A bleeding to the brain, was what the doctors had called it afterwards. Furlong was twelve at the time. Years later, when he’d gone into the registry office for a copy of his birth certificate, Unknown was all that was written in the space where his father’s name might have been. The clerk’s mouth had bent into an ugly smile handing it out to him, over the counter.

Now, Furlong was disinclined to dwell on the past; his attention was fixed on providing for his girls, who were black-haired like Eileen and fairly complexioned. Already, they were showing promise in the schools. Kathleen, his eldest, came in with him to the little pre-fabricated office on Saturdays and for pocket money helped out with the books, was able to file what had come in during the week and keep an account of most things. Joan, too, had a good head on her shoulders and had recently joined the choir. Both were now attending secondary, at St Margaret’s.

The middle child, Sheila, and the second youngest, Grace, who’d been born eleven months apart, could recite the multiplication tables off by heart, do long division and name the counties and rivers of Ireland, which they sometimes traced out and coloured in with markers at the kitchen table. They, too, were musically inclined and were taking accordion lessons up at the convent on Tuesdays, after school.

Loretta, their youngest, although shy of ­people, was getting gold and silver stars on her copy-books, reading her way through Enid Blyton, and had won a Texaco prize for her drawing of a fat, blue hen skating across a frozen pond.

Sometimes Furlong, seeing the girls going through the small things which needed to be done – genuflecting in the chapel or thanking a shop-keeper for the change – felt a deep, private joy that these children were his own.

‘Aren’t we the lucky ones?’ he remarked to Eileen in bed one night. ‘There’s many out there badly off.’

‘We are, surely.’

‘Not that we’ve much,’ he said. ‘But, still.’

Eileen’s hand slowly pushed a crease out of the bedspread. ‘Did something happen?’

It took him a moment to answer. ‘Mick Sinnott’s little chap was out on the road again today, foraging for sticks.’

‘I suppose you stopped?’

‘Wasn’t it spilling rain. I pulled over and offered him a lift and gave him what bit of change was loose in my pocket.’

‘I dare say.’

‘You’d think it was a hundred pound I’d given him.’

‘You know some of these bring the hardship on themselves?’

‘Tis not the child’s doing, surely.’

‘Sinnott was stotious at the phone box on Tuesday.’

‘The poor man,’ Furlong said, ‘whatever ails him.’

‘Drink is what ails him. If he’d any regard for his children, he’d not be going around like that. He’d pull himself out of it.’

‘Maybe the man isn’t able.’

‘I suppose.’ She reached over and sighed, turned out the light. ‘Always there’s one that has to pull the short straw.’

Some nights, Furlong lay there with Eileen, going over small things like these. Other times, after a day of heavy lifting or being delayed by a puncture and getting soaked out on the road, he’d come home and eat his fill and fall into bed ­early, then wake in the night sensing Eileen, heavy in sleep, at his side – and there he’d lie with his mind going round in circles, agitating, before finally he’d have to go down and put the kettle on, for tea. He’d stand at the window then with the cup in his hand, looking down at the streets and what he could see of the river, at the little bits and pieces of goings on: stray dogs out foraging for scraps in the bins; chipper bags and empty cans being rolled and blown roughly about by the driving wind and rain; stragglers from the pubs, stumbling home. Sometimes these stumbling men sang a little. Other times, Furlong would hear a sharp, hot whistle and laughter, which made him tense. He imagined his girls getting big and growing up, going out into that world of men. Already he’d seen men’s eyes following his girls. But some part of his mind was often tense; he could not say why.

It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything, Furlong knew. Although he did not venture far, he got around – and many an unfortunate he’d seen around town and out the ­country roads. The dole queues were getting longer and there were men out there who couldn’t pay their ESB bills, living in houses no warmer than bunkers, sleeping in their overcoats. Women, on the first Friday of every month, lined up at the post-office wall with shopping bags, waiting to collect their children’s allowances. And farther out the country, he’d known cows to be left bawling to be milked because the man who had their care had upped, suddenly, and taken the boat to England. Once, a man from St Mullins got a lift into town to pay his bill, saying that they’d had to sell the Jeep as they couldn’t get a wink of sleep knowing what was owing, that the bank was coming down on them. And early one morning, Furlong had seen a young schoolboy drinking the milk out of the cat’s bowl behind the priest’s house.

While making the rounds, Furlong wasn’t inclined to listen to the radio, but he sometimes tuned in and caught the news. It was 1985, and the young people were emigrating, leaving for London and Boston, New York. A new airport had just opened in Knock – Haughey himself had gone down to snip the ribbon. The Taoiseach had signed an agreement with Thatcher over The North, and the Unionists in Belfast were out marching with drums, protesting over Dublin having any say in their affairs. The crowds down in Cork and ­Kerry were thinning out but some still gathered at the shrines, in the hope that one of the statues might move again.

In New Ross, the shipyard company had closed and Albatros, the big fertiliser factory on the far side of the river, had made several redundancies. Bennett’s had let eleven employees go, and Graves & Co., where Eileen had worked, which had been there for as long as anyone could remember, had closed their doors. The auctioneer said business was stone cold, that he might as well be trying to sell ice to the Eskimos. And Miss Kenny, the flor­ist, whose shop was near the coal yard, had boarded up her window; had asked one of Furlong’s men to hold the plywood steady for her one evening while she drove the nails.

The times were raw but Furlong felt all the more determined to carry on, to keep his head down and stay on the right side of people, and to keep providing for his girls and see them getting on and completing their education at St Margaret’s, the only good school for girls in the town.

3

Christmas was coming. Already, a handsome Norway spruce was put standing in the Square beside the manger whose nativity figures that year had been freshly painted. If some complained over Joseph looking overly colourful in his red and ­purple robes, the Virgin Mary was met with general approval, kneeling passively in her usual blue and white. The brown donkey, too, looked much the same, standing guard over two sleeping ewes and the crib where, on Christmas Eve, the figure of the infant Jesus would be placed.

The custom was for people to gather there on the first Sunday of December, outside the Town Hall, after dark, to see the lights coming on. The afternoon stayed dry but the cold was bitter, and Eileen made the girls zip up their anoraks and wear gloves. When they reached the centre of town, the pipe band and carol singers had already assembled, and Mrs Kehoe was out with a stall, selling slabs of gingerbread and hot chocolate. Joan, who had gone on ahead, was handing out carol sheets with other members of the choir, while the nuns walked around, supervising and talking to some of the more well-off parents.

It was cold standing around so they walked about the side streets for a while before sheltering in the recessed doorway of Hanrahan’s, where Eileen paused to admire a pair of navy, patent shoes and a matching handbag, and to chat with neighbours and others she seldom saw who had come from farther out, taking the opportunity to draw and share what news they carried.

Before long, an announcement was made over the speaker inviting everyone to assemble. The Councillor, wearing his brasses over a ­Crombie coat, got out of a Mercedes and made a short speech before a switch was flipped, and the lights came on. Magically, then, the streets seemed to change and come alive under the long strands of multi-coloured bulbs which swayed, pleasantly, in the wind above their heads. The crowd made soft little splashes of applause and soon the band piped up – but at the sight of the big, fat Santa coming down the street, Loretta stood back, anxious, and began to cry.

‘There’s no harm,’ Furlong assured. ‘Tis just a man like myself, only in costume.’

While other children queued up to visit Santa in the grotto and collect their presents, Loretta stood in tight and held on to Furlong’s hand.

‘There’s no need to go if you don’t want, a ­leanbh,’ Furlong told her. ‘Stay here with me.’

But it cut him, all the same, to see one of his own so upset by the sight of what other children craved and he could not help but wonder if she’d be brave enough or able for what the world had in store.

That evening, when they got home, Eileen said it was well past time they made the Christmas cake. Good-humouredly, she took down her Odlum’s ­recipe and got Furlong to cream a pound of butter and sugar in the brown delft bowl with the hand mixer while the girls grated lemon rind, weighed and chopped candied peel and cherries, soaked whole almonds in boiled water and slipped them from their skins. For an hour or so they raked through the dried fruit, picking stalks out of sultanas, currants and raisins while Eileen sifted the flour and spice, beat up bantam eggs, and greased and lined the tin, wrapping the outside with two layers of brown paper and tying it, tight, with twine.

Furlong took charge of the Rayburn, putting on tidy little shovelfuls of anthracite and regulating the draught to keep the oven low and steady for the night.

When the mixture was ready, Eileen pushed it into the big square tin with the wooden spoon, smoothing it out on top before giving the base a few hard bangs to get it all into the corners, laughing a little – but no sooner was it in the oven with the door closed than she took stock of the room and told the girls to clear down so she could get on, and start the ironing.

‘Why don’t ye write your letters to Santa now?’

Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same – or would they just lose the run of themselves? Even while he’d been creaming the butter and sugar, his mind was not so much upon the here and now and on this Sunday nearing Christmas with his wife and daughters so much as on tomorrow and who owed what, and how and when he’d deliver what was ordered and what man he’d leave to which task, and how and where he’d collect what was owed – and before tomorrow was coming to an end, he knew his mind would already be working in much the same way, yet again, over the day that was to follow.

Now, he looked at Eileen, unwinding the cord and plugging the iron into the socket, and at his daughters sitting in at the table with their copy-books and pencil-cases to write out their letters – and reluctantly he found himself remembering back to when he was a boy, how he had written away, as best he could, asking for his daddy or else a jigsaw ­puzzle of a farm in five hundred ­pieces. On Christmas morning, when he’d gone down to the drawing room Mrs Wilson occasionally let them share, the fire was already lighted and he’d found three parcels under the tree wrapped in the same green paper: a nailbrush and bar of soap were wrapped together in one. The second was a hot water bottle, from Ned. And from Mrs Wilson he’d been given A Christmas Carol, an old book with a hard, red cover and no pictures, which smelled of must.

He’d gone outside then, to the cow-house, to hide his disappointment, and cry. Neither Santa nor his father had come. And there was no jigsaw. He thought about the things children said about him in school, the name he was called, and understood this to be the reason. When he’d looked up, the cow, chained to her stall, was ­pulling hay from the rack, contented. Before going back into the house, he’d washed his face at the horse-trough, breaking the ice on the surface, pushing his hands down deep in the cold and keeping them there, to divert his pain, until he could no longer feel it.

Where was his father now? Sometimes, he caught himself looking at older men, trying to find a physical resemblance, or listening out for some clue in the things people said. Surely some local knew who his father was – everyone had a father – and it didn’t seem likely that someone hadn’t ever said a word about it in his company for people were bound, he knew, to reveal not only themselves but what they knew, in conversation.

Not long after he’d married, Furlong decided to ask Mrs Wilson if she knew his father but hadn’t, on any evening he’d gone out to visit, been able to summon the courage; to her it might have seemed ill-­mannered after all she’d done for them. Not more than a year afterwards, Mrs Wilson took a stroke and was taken into hospital. When he had gone in to see her, on the Sunday, she’d lost the use of her left side and was past speech but she recognised him, and lifted her good hand. Like a child she was, sitting up in the bed, gazing out the window, a flowery nightgown buttoned to her chin. It was a blustery afternoon in April; beyond the wide, clear panes, a blizzard of white blossom was being torn and blown off the roused-up cherry trees, and Furlong had opened the pane a little as she had never liked being in a closed room.

‘Did Santy ever come to you, Daddy?’ Sheila now asked, eerily.

They could be like young witches sometimes, his daughters, with their black hair and sharp eyes. It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind. He’d had moments, in his marriage, when he’d almost feared Eileen and had envied her mettle, her red-hot instincts.

‘Daddy?’ Sheila said.

‘Santy came, surely,’ Furlong said. ‘He brought me a jigsaw of a farm one year.’

‘A jigsaw? Was that all?’

Furlong swallowed. ‘Finish your letter, a ­leanbh.’

Some small disagreements rose up between the girls that night as they struggled over choosing which presents they should write away for and what might or could be shared among them. Eileen coached on what was enough and what was too much while Furlong was consulted over spellings.

Grace, who was reaching that age, found it queer that the address wasn’t longer.

‘ “Santa Claus, The North Pole”. That can’t be all?’

‘Everyone up there knows where Santa lives,’ Kathleen said.

Furlong winked at her.

‘How will we know if they get there on time?’ Loretta looked up at the butcher’s calendar whose last page of December with its changes in the moon was lifting slightly in the draught.

‘Your daddy will post them, first thing,’ Eileen said. ‘Everything for Santa goes by express.’

She had finished with the shirts and blouses and was starting on the pillowcases. Always, she tackled the hardest things first.

‘Turn on the telly there so we can get the news,’ she said. ‘I’ve a feeling Haughey will snake back in again.’

Eventually, the letters were put in envelopes which were licked along the gummed seals and placed on the mantel for posting. Furlong looked at the framed photographs of Eileen’s family up there, of her mother and father and several ­others belonging to her, and the little ornaments she liked to collect which somehow looked cheap to him, having grown up in a house with finer, plainer things. The fact that those things had not belonged to him didn’t ever seem to have mattered, as they were gladly given the use of them.

Although the next day was a school day, the girls that night were allowed to stay up late. Sheila made up a jug of Ribena while Furlong stationed himself at the door of the Rayburn, toasting slabs of soda bread, comically, on the long fork, which the girls buttered and spread with Marmite or ­lemon curd. When he burned his black but ate it anyway, saying it was his own fault as he hadn’t been watching and had kept it too close to the flame, something caught in his throat – as though there might never again be another night like this.

What, now, was touching him on this Sunday evening? Again, he found himself thinking back to his time out at Wilson’s, and reasoned that he’d just had too much time to dwell and had turned senti­mental because of all the coloured lights and the music, and the sight of Joan singing with the choir, how she looked like she belonged there, with all the others – and the scent of the lemon which took him back to his mother at Christmastime in that fine, old kitchen; how she used to put what was left of the lemon into one of the blue jugs with ­sugar to steep and dissolve overnight and had made cloudy lemonade.

Before long, he caught a hold of himself and concluded that nothing ever did happen again; to each was given days and chances which wouldn’t come back around. And wasn’t it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past for once, despite the upset, instead of always looking on into the mechanics of the days and the trouble ahead, which might never come.

When he looked up, the time was nearing eleven.

Eileen clocked his gaze. ‘It’s well past time ye girls were in bed,’ she said, replacing the iron in a hiss of steam. ‘Go on up now and brush your teeth. And not one peep do I want to hear out of ye before morning.’

Furlong rose then and filled the electric kettle to make up their hot water bottles. When it came up to a boil, he filled the first two, pushing the air from each out in a rubbery little wheeze before twisting the caps on tight. As he waited for the kettle to boil up once more, he thought of the hot water bottle Ned had given him all those Christmases ago, and how, despite his disappointment, he’d been comforted by that gift, nightly, for long afterwards; and how, before the next Christmas had come, he’d reached the end of A Christmas Carol, for Mrs ­Wilson had encouraged him to use the big dictionary and to look up the words, saying everyone should have a vocabulary, a word he could not find until he discovered the third letter was not a k. The next year, when he’d won first prize for spelling and was given a wooden pencil-case whose sliding top ­doubled as a ruler, Mrs Wilson had rubbed the top of his head and praised him, as though he was one of her own. ‘You’re a credit to yourself,’ she’d told him. And for a whole day or more, Furlong had gone around feeling a foot taller, believing, in his heart, that he mattered as much as any other child.

After the girls had gone to bed and the last of the ironing was folded and put away, Eileen turned off the television and took two sherry glasses from the cabinet which she filled with the Bristol Cream she’d bought to make the trifle. She sighed, sitting in at the Rayburn, then took her shoes off and loosened her hair.

‘Your day was long,’ Furlong said.

‘What matter,’ she said. ‘That much is done. I don’t know why I put the cake on the long ­finger. There wasn’t another woman I met there this evening who hadn’t hers made.’

‘If you don’t slow down, you’ll meet yourself coming back, Eileen.’

‘No more than yourself.’

‘At least I’ve Sundays off.’

‘You have them off but do you take them, is the question.’

She glanced at the door at the foot of the stairs and lifted herself, as though she could sense ­whether or not the girls were sleeping.

‘They’re down now,’ she said. ‘Stretch up your hand there, won’t you, and we’ll see what’s in the post.’

Furlong took down the envelopes and together they opened and read over what was there.

‘Isn’t it nice to see them showing a bit of manners and not asking for the sun and stars?’ Eileen said, after a while. ‘We must be doing something right.’

‘Tis mostly your doing,’ Furlong admitted. ‘Where am I ever only away all day then home to the table and up to bed and gone again before they rise.’

‘You’re all right, Bill,’ Eileen said. ‘We’ve not a penny owing, and that’s down to you.’

‘Their spelling has come on rightly – but what about Loretta with her “Deer Santa”?’

It took a while to go over everything and to decide, between them, what should and should not be bought. In the end, they stretched it out to as much as they could afford: a pair of jeans for Kathleen, who’d been watching the ad for 501s on television; a Queen album for Joan, who’d glued herself to the Live Aid concert that summer and had fallen in love with Freddie Mercury. Sheila had written the shortest letter, asking plainly for ­Scrabble, ­providing no alternative. They decided on a spinning globe of the world for Grace, who wasn’t sure what she wanted but had written out a long list. Loretta was not in two minds: if Santa would pleese bring Enid Blyton’s Five Go Down to the Sea or Five Run Away Together or both, she was going to leave a big slice of cake out for him and hide another behind the television.