‘Was it out at Wilson’s you were?’
‘Ah, I was only thinking back over a few things.’
‘I thought as much.’
‘Do you not go back over things, Eileen? Or worry? I sometimes wish I had your mind.’
‘Worry?’ she said. ‘I dreamt last night that Kathleen had a tooth rotten and I was pulling it with the pliers. I near fell out of the bed.’
‘Ah, everyone has those nights.’
‘I suppose,’ she said. ‘Coming up to Christmas and the expense of it and all.’
‘Do you think they’re getting on all right, the girls?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know,’ Furlong said. ‘I wondered over Loretta not going in to see Santa there this evening.’
‘She’s young yet,’ Eileen said. ‘Give her time. Won’t she find her stride.’
‘But aren’t we all right?’
‘Money-wise, do you mean? Didn’t we have a good year? I’m still putting something away into the Credit Union every week. We should get the loan and have the new windows in the front before this time next year. I’m sick of the draught.’
‘I’m not sure what I mean, Eileen.’ Furlong sighed. ‘I’m just a bit weary tonight, is all. Pay no heed.’
What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry. Getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, then coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again. Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?
Lately, he had begun to wonder what mattered, apart from Eileen and the girls. He was touching forty but didn’t feel himself to be getting anywhere or making any kind of headway and could not but sometimes wonder what the days were for.
Out of the blue, he remembered a job he’d done in the mushroom factory one summer when he was off from the technical school. On his first day there, he’d done his best to keep up but had been slow, compared to others, in cutting the line. When he’d reached its end, he was sweating and had paused to look back down the line to the point where he’d started, and saw there the young mushrooms already starting to push through the compost again – and his heart had fallen, knowing the same would happen all over again, day after day, for the whole summer long.
For a minute he endured a strong, foolish need to go over this with Eileen but she perked up and began sharing the news she’d carried from the Square: the middle-aged undertaker people said would never marry had proposed to a young waitress, half his age, who worked at Murphy Flood’s Hotel in Enniscorthy, had taken her into town and bought her the cheapest ring off the tray at Forristal’s. The barber’s son, a young electrician who was still serving his time, had been diagnosed with some rare type of cancer and was given no more than a year to live. There was a report that several more out at Albatros would be made redundant after Christmas – and people said that the circus might come to town early in the new year, of all times. The postmistress had given birth to triplets, all boys, but that was yesterday’s news. She’d heard, too, that the people out at Wilson’s had sold off all the livestock and hadn’t more than a few dogs about the place, that all the land was leased out and under tillage now, and that Ned had a touch of bronchitis.
When the talk dried up, Eileen reached out for the Sunday Independent and gave it a shake. Not for the first time, Furlong felt that he was poor company for her, that he seldom made a long night shorter. Did she ever imagine how her life would be if she had married another? He sat on, not unhappily, listening to the clock ticking on the mantel and the wind piping eerily in the flue. The rain had come on again, was blowing hard against the windowpane and making the curtain move. From inside the cooker, he heard a lump of anthracite collapsing against another, and put a little more on.
At some stage, the need for sleep came over him but he made himself sit on, dozing and waking in the chair, until the hour hand of the clock hit three and a knitting needle, pushed down deep into the heart of the Christmas cake, came out clean.
‘Well, the fruit’s not fallen anyhow,’ Eileen said, pleased, and baptised it with a Baby Power.
4
It was a December of crows. People had never seen the likes of them, gathering in black batches on the outskirts of town then coming in, walking the streets, cocking their heads and perching, impudently, on whatever lookout post that took their fancy, scavenging for what was dead, or diving in mischief for anything that looked edible along the roads before roosting at night in the huge old trees around the convent.