‘Sister,’ Furlong said.
‘Can I help you?’
‘I was just looking for Sister Carmel.’
‘She’s gone across to St Margaret’s,’ she said. ‘Maybe I can help you.’
‘I’ve a load of logs and coal for ye, Sister.’
As soon as she realised who he was, she changed. ‘Was it you that was out on the lawn, upsetting the geese?’
Furlong, feeling strangely chastised, took his mind off the girl and followed the nun out to the front, where she read over the docket and inspected the load to make sure it matched the order. She left him then, going back in the side while he put the coal and logs in the shed, before coming out through the front door, to pay. He took stock of her while she was counting out the notes; she put him in mind of a strong, spoiled pony who’d for too long been given her own way. The urge to say something about the girl grew but fell away, and in the end he simply wrote out the receipt she asked for, and handed it over.
As soon as he got into the lorry, he pulled the door closed and drove on. Farther on, out the road, he realised he’d missed his turn and was heading in the wrong direction with his boot to the floor, and had to tell himself to settle, and go easy. He kept picturing the girls down on their hands and knees, polishing the floor, and the state they were in. What struck him, too, was the fact that when he was following the nun back from the chapel he’d noticed a padlock on the inside of the door that led from the orchard through to the front, and that the top of the high wall separating the convent from St Margaret’s next door was topped with broken glass. And how the nun had locked the front door after her, with the key, just coming out to pay.
A fog was coming down, hovering in long sheets and patches, and there was no space on the winding road to turn, so Furlong took a right onto a by-road, and then, farther along, took another right onto another road, which grew narrower. After he’d taken another turn and passed a hayshed he wasn’t sure he hadn’t already passed, he met a loose puckaun trailing a short rope, and came across an old man in a waistcoat with a bill-hook, out slashing a crowd of dead thistles on the roadside.
Furlong pulled up and bade the man good evening.
‘Would you mind telling me where this road will take me?’
‘This road?’ The man put down the hook, leant on the handle, and stared in at him. ‘This road will take you wherever you want to go, son.’
*
That night, in bed, Furlong considered going over no part of what he’d witnessed at the convent with Eileen, but when he told her, she sat up rigid and said such things had nothing to do with them, and that there was nothing they could do, and didn’t those girls up there need a fire to warm themselves, like everyone? And didn’t the nuns always pay what was owing and on time unlike so many who would put everything on the slate until you had to put the squeeze on, and there the trouble would come.
It was a long speech.
‘What is it you know?’ Furlong asked.
‘There’s nothing, only what I’m telling you,’ she answered. ‘And in any case, what do such things have to do with us? Aren’t all our girls well, and minded?’
‘Our girls?’ Furlong said. ‘What has any of this to do with ours?’
‘Not one thing,’ she said. ‘What have we to answer for?’
‘Well, I didn’t think there was anything but listening to you now, I’m not so sure.’
‘Where does thinking get us?’ she said. ‘All thinking does is bring you down.’ She was touching the little pearly buttons on her nightdress, agitated. ‘If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.’
‘I’m not disagreeing with you, Eileen.’
‘Agree or disagree. You’re just soft-hearted, is all. Giving away what change is in your pocket and—’
‘What ails you tonight?’
‘Nothing, only what you don’t realise. Wasn’t it far from any hardship that you were reared.’
‘Far from what hardship, exactly?’
‘Well, there’s girls out there that get in trouble, that much you do know.’
The blow was cheap but it was the first he’d heard from her, in all their years together. Something small and hard gathered in his throat then which he tried but felt unable to voice or swallow. In the finish, he could neither swallow it down nor find any words to ease what had come between them.
‘I’d no call to say that to you, Bill,’ Eileen cooled. ‘But if we just mind what we have here and stay on the right side of people and soldier on, none of ours will ever have to endure the likes of what them girls go through. Those were put in there because they hadn’t a soul in this world to care for them. All their people did was leave them wild and then, when they got into trouble, they turned their backs. It’s only people with no children that can afford to be careless.’