‘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.
Before long, he caught a hold of himself and concluded that nothing ever did happen again; to each was given days and chances which wouldn’t come back around. And wasn’t it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past for once, despite the upset, instead of always looking on into the mechanics of the days and the trouble ahead, which might never come.
When he looked up, the time was nearing eleven.
Eileen clocked his gaze. ‘It’s well past time ye girls were in bed,’ she said, replacing the iron in a hiss of steam. ‘Go on up now and brush your teeth. And not one peep do I want to hear out of ye before morning.’
Furlong rose then and filled the electric kettle to make up their hot water bottles. When it came up to a boil, he filled the first two, pushing the air from each out in a rubbery little wheeze before twisting the caps on tight. As he waited for the kettle to boil up once more, he thought of the hot water bottle Ned had given him all those Christmases ago, and how, despite his disappointment, he’d been comforted by that gift, nightly, for long afterwards; and how, before the next Christmas had come, he’d reached the end of A Christmas Carol, for Mrs Wilson had encouraged him to use the big dictionary and to look up the words, saying everyone should have a vocabulary, a word he could not find until he discovered the third letter was not a k. The next year, when he’d won first prize for spelling and was given a wooden pencil-case whose sliding top doubled as a ruler, Mrs Wilson had rubbed the top of his head and praised him, as though he was one of her own. ‘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.