Small Things Like These(4)

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.