Small Things Like These(11)

‘Is it the night time or the day?’

‘Tis the early morning,’ Furlong explained. ‘Twill soon be light.’

‘And that’s the Barrow?’

‘Aye,’ Furlong said. ‘There’s salmon and a big current running there.’

For a moment he wasn’t sure that she wasn’t the same girl he’d seen in the chapel that day the geese had hissed at him – but this was a different girl. He shone the torch on her feet, saw the long toenails, black from the coal, then switched it off.

‘How did you come to be left in there?’

When she made no reply, he felt something of what she must be feeling and rooted emptily in his mind for something comforting to say. After a time, during which some frozen leaves drifted across the gravel, he took a hold of himself and helped her as far as the front door. If a part of him wondered over what he was doing, he carried on, as was his habit, but found himself bracing as he pressed the bell then flinched when he heard it ringing within.

Before long, the door opened and a young nun looked out.

‘Oh!’ She let a little cry, and quickly shut it.

The girl at his side said nothing but stood staring at the door, as though she might burn a hole through it with her eyes.

‘What’s going on here at all?’ Furlong said.

When the girl again said nothing he again grasped emptily for something to say.

For a good while they waited there in the cold, on the front step. He could have taken her on then, he knew, and considered taking her to the priest’s house or on home with him – but she was such a small, shut-down thing, and once more the ordinary part of him simply wanted to be rid of this and get on home.

Again, he reached out and pressed the bell.

‘Won’t you ask them about my baby?’

‘What?’

‘He must be hungry,’ she said. ‘And who is there to feed him now?’

‘You have a child?’

‘He’s fourteen weeks old. They’ve taken him from me now but they might let me feed him again, if he’s here. I don’t know where he is.’

Furlong began thinking freshly over what to do when the Mother Superior, a tall woman he recognised from the chapel but had seldom dealt with, opened the door wide.

‘Mister Furlong,’ she said, smiling. ‘How good you are to come and spare us your time so early on a Sunday morning.’

‘Mother,’ Furlong said. ‘Tis early, I know.’

‘I’m just sorry you’ve had to encounter this,’ she said, before turning on the girl. ‘Where were you?’ she changed. ‘We’re not long after finding that you weren’t in your bed. We were about to call the Gardaí.’

‘This girl was locked in your shed all night,’ Furlong told her. ‘Whatever had her there.’

‘God love you, child. Come in and get yourself upstairs and into a hot bath. You’ll catch your end. This poor girl can’t tell night from day sometimes. Whatever way we are going to mind her, I don’t know.’

The girl stood in a type of trance, and had begun to shake.

‘Come on in,’ the Mother Superior told him. ‘We’ll make tea. This is a terrible business.’

‘Ah, I’ll not,’ Furlong stepped back – as though the step could take him back into the time before this.

‘You’ll come in,’ she said. ‘I’ll not have it otherwise.’

‘There’s a hurry on me, Mother. I’ve yet to go home and change for Mass.’

‘Then you’ll come in until the hurry goes off you. Tis early yet – and more than one Mass is being said today.’

Furlong found himself taking his cap off and following, as he was bid, helping the girl along the hall and on through to the back kitchen where a pair of girls were skinning turnips and washing heads of cabbages at a sink. The young nun who’d answered the door was standing at a huge black range, stirring something, and had a kettle on the boil. The whole place and everything in it was shining, immaculate: in some of the hanging pots Furlong glimpsed a version of himself, passing.

The Mother did not pause but carried on, along a corridor of tiles.

‘This way.’

‘We’re making tracks on your floor, Mother,’ Furlong heard himself say.

‘No matter,’ she said. ‘Where’s there’s muck, there’s luck.’

She led them on to a fine, big room where a freshly lighted fire was burning in a cast-iron fireplace. A long table, covered in a snow-white cloth, stood surrounded by chairs, and there was a mahogany sideboard, glassed-in bookcases. Hanging over the mantelpiece was a picture of John Paul II.

‘Sit in at the fire there now and warm yourself, won’t you?’ she said, handing him his coat. ‘I’ll take care of this girl, and see about our tea.’

She went on, closing the door behind her, but hardly had she gone before the young nun came in, with a tray. Her hands weren’t steady, and a spoon fell.

‘Ye must expect a visitor,’ Furlong said.

‘Another visitor?’ She looked alarmed.

‘Tis only a saying,’ Furlong explained, ‘over when a spoon drops.’

‘I see,’ she said, and looked at him.

She carried on then, as well as she could, putting out the cups and saucers but struggled in taking the lid off a tin before lifting out a wedge of fruit cake which she sliced up quickly, with a knife.