How still it was up here but why was it not ever peaceful? The day had not yet dawned, and Furlong looked down at the dark shining river whose surface reflected equal parts of the lighted town. So many things had a way of looking finer, when they were not so close. He could not say which he rathered: the sight of town or its reflection on the water. Somewhere, voices were singing ‘Adeste Fideles’。 Most likely these were the boarders at St Margaret’s, next door – but surely those girls had gone home? The day after tomorrow was Christmas Eve. It must have been the girls in the training school. Or was it the nuns themselves, practising before early Mass? For a time he stood listening and looking down at the town, at the smoke starting up from the chimneys and the small, diminishing stars in the sky. One of the brightest fell while he was standing there, leaving a streak like a chalk mark on a board for just a second before it vanished. Another seemed to burn out and slowly fade.
When he let down the tail board and went to open the coal house door, the bolt was stiff with frost, and he had to ask himself if he had not turned into a man consigned to doorways, for did he not spend the best part of his life standing outside of one or another, waiting for them to be opened. As soon as he forced this bolt, he sensed something within but many a dog he’d found in a coal shed with no decent place to lie. He couldn’t properly see and was obliged to go back to the lorry, for the torch. When he shone it on what was there, he judged, by what was on the floor, that the girl within had been there for longer than the night.
‘Christ,’ he said.
The only thing he thought to do was to take his coat off. When he did, and went to put it round her, she cowered.
‘There’s no harm,’ Furlong explained. ‘I’ve just come with the coal, leanbh.’
Tactlessly, he again shone the light across the floor, on what excrements she’d had to make.
‘God love you, child,’ he said. ‘Come away out of this.’
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.
‘You’re all right,’ he said. ‘Lean in on me, won’t you.’
The girl didn’t seem to want him close but he managed to get her as far as the lorry, where she leant against the warmth of the bonnet and looked down at the lights of town and the river, then far away out, much as he had done, at the sky.
‘I’m out now,’ she managed to say, after a while.
‘Aye.’
Furlong pulled the coat a little way around her. She didn’t now seem to mind.
‘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?’