'Small Things Like These: teaching notes 3
Third tranche of teaching notes on Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These in the light of the Comparative section of the Leaving Certificate, covering Section 4, from pages 37 to 47, and Section 5 from pages 49 to 72 in the Faber paperback edition.
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Also in this series:
SECTION 4: PAGES 37 TO 47
37 - ‘It was a December of crows’: the gathering in black batches, their scavenging. Look forward to the cat on 104 which is eating the carcass of a crow. Immediately after in the next paragraph the black is echoed in the gates of the convent. CK takes 37 pages to get to this most important location in her story. The front is ‘kept in order with shaved lawns, ornamental shrubs growing neatly in rows, the tall hedges cut square’: the façade of order, the face the nuns present to the world. It is ‘like a Christmas card’. Later, in the key confrontation the Mother Superior gives Furlong a hurriedly-written card accompanying the money as a form of bribe.
38: first mention of the laundry, which ‘had a good reputation’ (see 14 - St Margaret’s is ‘the only good school for girls in the town’. ‘Good’ as a communal word of approval) but also ‘there was other talk’ - that the girls were ‘of low character … doing penance by washing stains out of the dirty linen.’ The irony of the stains on Ireland’s history that the laundry system left. A place of some mystery and gossip: no-one truly knows what goes on.
39: the poor state of the girls of ‘low character’: some think ‘the place was no better than a mother-and-baby-home where common, unmarried girls went in to be hidden away after they had given birth’. Again, the censorious class judgment of that ‘common’, and a reference to the mother-and-baby homes mentioned in the first dedication.
40: Furlong’s visit, his discovery of the dozen young women in the chapel. 41: he is asked for help by the girl with the roughly cut hair. He ‘felt himself stepping back’, the grammar of ‘felt himself’ showing his involuntary instincts, and he says cannot help, since he has five girls and a wife. See another ‘stepping back’ on page 63 (but eventually he will not step back). The shocking directness of her response: ‘all I want to do is drown meself’. He leaves without commenting.
43 - Furlong is disturbed, discomfited. He has noticed the padlock, the broken glass on top of the high wall separating the convent from St Margaret’s School (the thin boundary between the lives of his daughters and the young girls/women in the laundry). 44: he asks the young man about where the road will take him. ‘Wherever you want to go, son’. A decision is coming, a fork in the road (like Frost’s poem ‘The Road Not Taken’).
44: back home in bed, Eileen’s dismissal of his concerns, her defence of the nuns (‘It was a long speech’). What matters is their own girls. Her hard realism (45), compared to him being ‘soft-hearted’: ‘All thinking does is bring you down’, and her insistence that you need to ignore some things ‘if you want to get on in life’. She reminds him of his own background, and then apologises (46). But her hardness is relentless: again she points out that none of the girls is theirs, and the privilege of Mrs Wilson’s life. And Furlong’s life was so close to taking a different road (Robert Frost again). Consider: is Eileen similar to her husband in her consciousness of life’s fragility but different in how she handles this?
47: Eileen’s hardness about Mrs Wilson, pointing out that she was ‘one of the few women on this earth who could do as she pleased.’ Later, Mrs Kehoe also checks Furlong about his privileges as a man.
SECTION 5: PAGES 49-72
49: ‘On Christmas week, snow was forecast’. A cold poor world: the yard is closing for 10 days, and people are panicking about their orders (far from the plenitude of Irish society now).
50: he checks with Kathleen that none of the men has been ‘giving you guff’ a euphemism for sexualised comments, which he has already been concerned about on page 11. His daughter is coming to the same time of life as his mother was when she became pregnant.
51: Furlong wakes up to deliver early to the convent. Paragraph 51-52 - the dog licking the tin can, the crows are out, tearing of the pizza box (and link to the clergy - reminding Furlong of the pretentious young curate, linking to the Church).
53: after leaving the house and his (mostly) sleeping family, at the yard gate he ‘felt the strain of being alive … but he made himself carry on’. Visiting the neighbour for her kettle to thaw the frozen gate padlock, and knocking ‘softly, on the door’, there is an erotic undertow when he encounters the young woman from the West (‘Furlong saw an impression, which was unintended, of her breast, loose, under the cotton’ 54), and this prompts ‘a part of his mind turn loose to stray off and imagine what it might be like to live there, in that house, with her as his wife’ 55. As if the erotic impulse when he looked at his sleeping wife on 52 has transferred its momentum to this woman. His sense ‘that so much of life was left to chance’ 55. The road not taken, and Furlong’s continuing sense of the fragility and contingent nature of all life. He is missing one crucial part of his own jigsaw - who was his father, did he go to England? The thawing of the frozen lock is like a mental loosening of his own imagination.
56+: Furlong’s anxiety over the lorry starting (and he is already anxious about its tires) and his anxious checking of the load, the yard, the office in the prefab. Then he locks the door (57) before he knocks on the next door at the coal house (see 58).
57+: Furlong goes to the convent (the reflection in the windowpanes makes it feel ‘as though he was meeting himself there’, which in a sense he will: he will meet the core of himself).The convent is still, ‘but why was it not ever peaceful?’ 57.
58. He wonders ‘if he had not turned into a man consigned to doorways, for did he not spend the best part of his life standing outside of one or another, waiting for them to be opened’. He will have to make a choice about a pushing open of a metaphorical door soon.
59: A moment of ‘escalation’ (George Saunders - see separate post). He discovers the cowering girl, freezing, her own excrement around her and ‘the ordinary part of him wished he’d never come near the place’ 59 - but there is another part to him. Will it come alive? When he rings the front door bell ‘a part of him wondered what he was doing.’ 61. And ‘once more the ordinary part of him simply wanted to be rid of this and get on home’. 61.Then her distress over her 14 week-old baby, which is such a sensitive and personal thing for him - top 62, ‘You have a child?’ is a moment that changes things and pushes him closer to involvement.
62: the Mother Superior’s smooth semi-plausible pretence of care for the girl, the suggestion she was going to call the Guards out of concern. 63: Furlong’s instinctive obeisance to the nun’s authority as he ‘found himself taking his cap off and following, as he was bid’ - again the grammatical construction ‘found himself’ indicates a deep-rooted deference to authority, as if he is without agency). Similarly on 64 he ‘heard himself say’ to the Mother Superior that he was dirtying the floor.
63: When the Mother Superior asks him in for tea, he ‘stepped back - as though the step could take him back into the time before this.’ [See page 41 where he also steps back]. But it cannot - he has started down that road now and will not be able to reverse. That ‘escalation’ (the word from the Latin for ‘ladder’) cannot be ignored or undone.
64: ‘The whole place and everything in it was shining, immaculate’ and again (see 57) Furlong sees his reflection, this time in the hanging pots, in which he ‘glimpsed a version of himself, passing.’ Which version of himself will Furlong turn out to be? Which will he choose? Which road will he go down?
65: the Mother Superior’s sly introduction of the topic of Furlong’s home, and his daughters, and her suggestion that there might not be space for them (66); on 65 she calls him by the boyhood name ‘Billy’, a kind of attempted emasculation of his adult self. The threat is hinted at in the final line of 65: ‘And don’t you have another two next door.’ No question mark - just a full stop. She is not asking a genuine question: it is a statement of knowledge, a tool of power.
66: the threat is made explicit: ‘It’s just that there’s so many nowadays. It’s no easy task to find a place for everyone’ while at the start of the page she alludes to Furlong’s past, that ‘we see another of yours in the choir now. She doesn’t look out of place.’ Why would she? On page 25 Furlong was moved by the sight of Joan in the choir and ‘how she looked like she belonged there, with all the others.’ However, he is not threatened by the catty remark about not having a son, where he is on ‘known ground.’
67: the girl from the shed returns cleaned up and is ‘treated’ with tea and cake.
69: a turning point, as Furlong pushes back against the power-play of the Mother Superior suggesting a fry for the girl. ‘Furlong watched the girl being taken away and soon understood that this woman wanted him gone - but the urge to go was being replaced now by a type of contrariness to stay on, and to hold his ground.’ He knows the kind treatment has just been for show, for his benefit. That ‘contrariness’ is echoed on 71 (see below). He is now ‘encouraged by this queer, new power.’ 69
70: his exchange with the Mother Superior about the foreign sailors, and her dismissive ‘I’d hardly compare Our Lord to those fellows’. She is overplaying her cards.
71: the Mother Superior’s bribe, which Furlong takes, though ‘reluctant’. As he passes the girl he pauses ‘contrarily’ (see ‘contrariness’ 69).
72: the connection between the girl and his mother, both called Sarah, though the girl has been denied this by being called ‘Enda’, a male name, in the convent, attempting to erase her identity. She says her people are from beyond Clonegal (CK has said the girl might be the one from Foster - what happened to her after that story?). He leaves her his name, and where to find him: so they exchange names, an intimate connection (the girl in Foster does not have a name). When he leaves, ‘he heard someone inside, turning the key’, an echo of the start of this section and the thawing of the lock to his own yard. As readers, we don’t expect that that door is now closed for good.