Small Things Like These(15)

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.

Slowly, he drove round the back and parked up in the yard, and turned the engine off. A part of him felt disinclined to go near the house or to make any conversation but he made himself get out and cross the cobblestones, and knocked on the back door. He stood for a minute or two listening before he knocked again – then a dog barked, and the yard light came on. When a woman opened the door and greeted him in a strong, Enniscorthy accent and Furlong explained that he’d come to visit Ned, she told him that Ned was no longer there, that he’d gone into hospital more than a fortnight back, after catching pneumonia, and was now convalescing, in a home.

‘Whereabouts?’

‘I don’t rightly know,’ she said. ‘Would you like to speak to the Wilsons? They’ve not sat down to their supper yet.’

‘Ah, no. I’ll not disturb them,’ Furlong said. ‘I’ll leave it so.’

‘Easy knowing you’re related.’

‘What?’

‘I can handy see the likeness,’ she said. ‘Is Ned an uncle of yours?’

Furlong, unable to find a reply, shook his head and looked past her into the kitchen whose floor was now covered over with lino. He looked at the dresser, too, which was much the same as it had always been with its blue jugs and serving plates.

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to let them know that you’re here?’ she said. ‘I’m sure they wouldn’t mind.’

He could feel her bristling over the door being left open, his letting in the cold.

‘Ah, I’ll not,’ he said. ‘I’ll head on, but thanks anyhow. Won’t you tell them that Bill Furlong called, and wish them a happy Christmas?’

‘I will, of course,’ she said. ‘Many happy returns.’

‘Many happy returns.’

When she closed the door, Furlong looked at the worn, granite step and drew the sole of his shoe gratingly across it before turning to see what he could of the yard: the stables and the haybarn, the cow-house, the horse-trough, the wrought-iron gate leading to the orchard where he used to play, the steps to the granary loft, the cobblestones where his mother had fallen, and met her end.

Before he got back into the lorry and pulled the door closed, the yard light went off and a type of emptiness came over him. For a while he sat watching the wind blowing through the tops of the bare trees, the flinching branches, taller than the chimney pots, then he reached out and ate a mince pie from the brown paper. For a good half hour or more he must have sat there, going over what the woman inside had said, about the likeness, letting it stoke his mind. It took a stranger to come out with things.