Small Things Like These

As he grew, Mrs Wilson, who had no children of her own, took him under her wing, gave him little jobs and helped him along with his reading. She had a small library and didn’t seem to care much for what judgments others passed but carried temperately along with her own life, living off the pension she received on account of her husband having been killed in the War, and what income that came from her small herd of well-minded Herefords, and Cheviot ewes.

‘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.’

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.

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.

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?

‘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.

‘Just take me as far as the river. That’s all you need do.’

She was dead in earnest and the accent was Dublin.

‘To the river?’

‘Or you could just let me out at the gate.’

‘It’s not up to me, girl. I can’t take you anywhere,’ Furlong said, showing her his open, empty hands.

‘Take me home with you, then. I’ll work til I drop for ya, sir.’

‘Haven’t I five girls and a wife at home.’

‘Well, I’ve nobody—and all I want to do is drown meself. Can you not even do that fukken much for us?’

Furlong pulled up and bade the man good evening.

‘Would you mind telling me where this road will take me?’

‘This road?’ The man put down the hook, leant on the handle, and stared in at him. ‘This road will take you wherever you want to go, son.’

‘What is it you know?’ Furlong asked.

‘There’s nothing, only what I’m telling you,’ she answered. ‘And in any case, what do such things have to do with us? Aren’t our girls well, and minded?’

‘Our girls?’ Furlong said. ‘What has any of this to do with ours?’

‘Not one thing,’ she said. ‘What have we to answer for?’

‘Where does thinking get us?’ she said. ‘All thinking does is bring you down.’ She was touching the little pearly buttons on her nightdress, agitated. ‘If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.’

‘Weren’t Mrs Wilson’s cares far from any of ours?’ Eileen said. ‘Sitting out in that big house with her pension and a farm of land and your mother and Ned working under her. Was she not one of the few women on this earth who could do as she pleased?’

When he managed to get her out, and saw what was before him—a girl just about fit to stand, with her hair roughly cut—the ordinary part of him wished he’d never come near the place.

‘And we see another of yours in the choir now. She doesn’t look out of place.’

‘They carry themselves well.’

‘Won’t they all soon find themselves next door, in time to come, God willing.’

‘God willing, Mother.’

‘It’s just that there’s so many nowadays. It’s no easy task to find a place for everyone.’

Deciding to say no more, Furlong went on out and pulled the door closed, then stood on the front step until he heard someone inside, turning the key.

‘Have ye change for the collection box?’ Eileen asked the girls, smiling, as they were entering the chapel grounds. ‘Or has your daddy given it all away?’

What most tormented him was not so much how she’d been left in the coal shed or the stance of the Mother Superior; the worst was how the girl had been handled while he was present and how he’d allowed that and had not asked about her baby—the one thing she had asked him to do—and how he had taken the money and left her there at the table with nothing before her and the breast milk leaking under the little cardigan and staining her blouse, and how he’d gone on, like a hypocrite, to Mass.

People could be good, Furlong reminded himself, as he drove back to town; it was a matter of learning how to manage and balance the give-and-take in a way that let you get on with others as well as your own. But as soon as the thought came to him, he knew the thought itself was privileged and wondered why he hadn’t given the sweets and other things he’d been gifted at some of the houses to the less well-off he had met in others. Always, Christmas brought out the best and worst in people.

‘Take no offence, Bill,’ she said, touching his sleeve. ‘Tis no business of mine, as I’ve said, but surely you must know these nuns have a finger in every pie.’

He stood back and faced her. ‘Surely they’ve only as much power as we give them, Mrs Kehoe?’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’ She paused then and looked at him the way hugely practical women sometimes looked at men, as though they weren’t men at all but foolish boys. More than once, maybe more than several times, Eileen had done the same.

‘Don’t mind me,’ she said, ‘but you’ve worked hard, the same as myself, to get to where you are now. You’ve reared a fine family of girls—and you know there’s nothing only a wall separating that place from St Margaret’s.’

As they carried on along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been—which he could have to live with for the rest of his life. Whatever suffering he was now to meet was a long way from what the girl at his side had already endured, and might yet surpass. Climbing the street towards his own front door with the barefooted girl and the box of shoes, his fear more than outweighed every other feeling but in his foolish heart he not only hoped but legitimately believed that they would manage.