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. - P35
The convent was a powerful-looking place on the hill at the far side of the river with black, wide-open gates and a host of tall, shining windows, 37facing the town. Year round, the front garden
The Good Shepherd nuns, in charge of the convent, ran a training school there for girls, providing them with a basic education. They also ran a laundry business. Little was known about the training school, but the laundry had a good reputation: restaurants and guesthouses, the nursing home and the hospital and all the priests and well-off households sent their washing there. Reports were that everything that was sent in, whether it be a raft of bedlinen or just a dozen handkerchiefs, came back same as new. - P38
He‘d carried on to a small, lighted chapel where he found more than a dozen young women and girls, down on their hands and knees with tins of old-fashioned lavender polish and rags, polishing their hearts out in circles on the floor. As soon as they saw him, they looked like they‘d been scalded - just over him coming in asking after Sister Carmel, and was she about? And not one of themwith shoes but going around in black socks andsome horrid type of grey-coloured shifts. One girlhad an ugly stye in her eye, and another‘s hair hadbeen roughly cut, as though someone blind hadtaken to it with shears. - P41
‘Well, I‘ve nobody - and all I want to do is drown meself. Can you not even do that fukken much for us?‘ - P41
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