By six o’clock, when the Angelus came on the television, followed by the news, several dozen mince pies were cooling on wire racks and the Christmas cake was frosted over, with a little plastic Santa standing almost knee-deep in icing, surrounded by reindeer. When he heard the forecast and looked out and saw the streetlights, Furlong could not sit for longer.
‘I might call out to see Ned,’ he said. ‘If I don’t go now, there won’t be time to call.’
‘Is that what’s ailing you?’
‘There’s nothing ailing me, Eileen.’ Furlong sighed. ‘Did you not say that the man wasn’t well?’
‘Then take him these,’ she said, wrapping up six mince pies in brown paper. ‘And tell him to call in over Christmas.’
‘I will of course.’
‘He’s welcome to come for his dinner on the day, if it suits him.’
‘You wouldn’t mind?’
‘Sure haven’t we a house full? What’s one more?’
With a type of relief, Furlong put on his overcoat and walked down to the yard. How sweet it felt to be out, to see the river, and his breath on the air. At the quay, a flock of huge, bright gulls floated in and skippered along past him, probably to forage, futilely, at the closed-down shipyard. A part of him wished it was a Monday morning, that he could just put his head down and drive on out the roads and lose himself in the mechanics of the ordinary, working week. Sundays could feel very threadbare, and raw. Why could he not relax and enjoy them like other men who took a pint or two after Mass before falling asleep at the fire with the newspaper, having eaten a plate of dinner?
One Sunday, years ago, while Mrs Wilson was still living, Furlong had gone out to the house. He was not too long married at the time – Kathleen was still in the pram. It was Furlong’s habit, on fine Sundays, to get on the bicycle after dinner and go for a visit. As it turned out, Mrs Wilson was not at home that afternoon but Ned was in the kitchen with a bottle of stout, having a smoke at the fire. He gave Furlong a welcome, as always, and soon began to reminisce over him being brought as an infant into the house, going over how Mrs Wilson used to come down daily to look in at him, in the basket. ‘She never once regretted it,’ he said, ‘or said a cheap word about ye or took advantage of your mother. The wage was small but hadn’t we a decent roof over our heads here, and never once did we go to bed hungry. I’ve nothing only a small room here but never did I go into it to find so much as a matchbox out of place. The room I live in is as good as what I’d own – and can’t I get up in the middle of the night and eat my fill, if I care to. And how many can say that?
‘But I did a horrid thing, one time. More than once, too, I did it. You were only toddling around back then but there was another man here in those days, milking alongside me in the mornings, and he had an ass and the ass was going hungry for want of grass so he asked me if I’d meet him at the foot of the back lane, at dark, and bring him a bag of hay. It was a hard winter, one of the worst we’d known, and I said I would, and every evening I filled a sack with hay and met him there, near the foot of the lane, where the rhododendrons are, at dark. For a good long while this went on but one night as I was going down the lane, something that wasn’t human, an ugly thing with no hands came out of the ditch, and blocked me – and that put an end to me stealing Mrs Wilson’s hay. It’s too sorry I am now over it, and never once did I tell it to a soul before this only in the confession box.’
Furlong stayed on late that night and drank two small bottles of stout and wound up asking Ned if he knew who his father was. Ned told him that his mother never did say but that many a visitor had come to the house that summer before Furlong was born; big relations of the Wilsons and friends of theirs, over from England, fine-looking people. They used to hire a boat and go fishing for salmon on the Barrow. So who knew whose arms his mother had fallen into?
‘God only knows,’ he’d said. ‘But didn’t it turn out all right in the end? Didn’t you have a decent start here, and aren’t you getting on rightly.’
Before Furlong left, Ned made tea then took up the concertina and played a few tunes before he set the concertina down and closed his eyes and sang ‘The Croppy Boy’。 The song and the way he sang it made the hairs stand up on the back of Furlong’s neck and he wasn’t able to leave without asking Ned if he would sing it again.
Now, driving up the avenue, the old oaks and lime trees looked stark and tall. Something in Furlong’s heart caught and turned over when the headlights crossed the rooks and the nests they’d built and he saw the house freshly painted, with electric lights burning in all the front rooms, and the Christmas tree on display in the drawing room window, where it never used to be.