Sublime

Not one person they met addressed Sarah or asked where he was taking her.

‘I’ve to go faster?’

Sometimes Furlong, seeing the girls going through the small things which needed to be done – genuflecting in the chapel or thanking a shop-keeper for the change – felt a deep, private joy that these children were his own.

And for a whole day or more, Furlong had gone around feeling a foot taller, believing, in his heart, that he mattered as much as any other child.

wouldn’t be too sure.’ She paused then and looked at him the way hugely practical women sometimes looked at men, as though they weren’t men at all but foolish boys.

In the finish, he could neither swallow it down nor find any words to ease what had come between them.