The Furys by James Hanley Page A

Nothing particular. Just happen to be going your way.’
    â€˜Oh!’ Mr Fury said. Then after a long pause, ‘I see.’ The two men passed out into the street.
    â€˜See Desmond’s gone foreman of that gang now,’ he said.
    â€˜Foreman! Oh aye!’ Mr Fury looked astonished. First he had heard about it.
    â€˜Yes. I was talking to him last night,’ said the man. Mr Fury laughed. ‘You’re lucky,’ he said. ‘I’ve only seen my lad twice since he got skipped.’ They halted at the bottom of Hatfields. Mr Fury looked at the man, the man at him. They both seemed a little embarrassed, as though the one were waiting his cue from the other. Then abruptly Mr Fury said, ‘So long,’ and started up the street. He disappeared into the entry. Mr Fury never went in by the front door. There was something about the front door that he did not like. And people were always at the doors, or sitting on their steps. And always talking. Mr Fury hated them. Once he had been a seaman. Now he felt he was nothing. He was unused to living ashore; a street was only another sort of monstrous stone cage, behind the brick bars of which the human monkeys chatted incessantly. Mrs Fury had fallen, quite unconsciously, into her husband’s habit of using the rear entrance. Such habits, when formed in a street like Hatfields, naturally assumed a little of the mysterious. People talked, people whispered, flung out hints. Why did folk have to slink in by their back doors? Mr Fury hated the street. They had been arguing for some time as to whether they ought to change their abode. Mr Fury was full of the idea. But somehow Mrs Fury clung tenaciously to Hatfields.
    Fanny Fury was standing at the back kitchen door as her husband came up the yard. The man knew at once that she had had news from Ireland. He could always tell when his wife had exciting news to communicate. Invariably he prefaced her breaking of such news with a laconical ‘Well?’ as he did so now.
    â€˜Well?’ he said.
    â€˜Brigid has just wired me,’ said Mrs Fury. ‘She’s crossing over tomorrow night, with Peter.’
    Mr Fury put his hands in his pockets and stopped dead.
    â€˜Who? Brigid? What for?’ Then before he could give Mrs Fury time to reply, he pushed past her into the kitchen. Dennis Fury had never liked his sister-in-law. Mrs Fury followed him, her temper rising. If anything served to rouse the woman’s anger, it was her husband’s laconical ‘Well?’ It smacked of indifference.
    â€˜For goodness sake, Denny!’ she exclaimed; ‘you can’t think the boy can come over on one of those boats, and him just out of a seminary.’
    The man laughed. He couldn’t see anything to stop Peter coming, and he couldn’t see anything wrong with the boats.
    â€˜Sorry,’ he said. He took off his hat and flung it on to the sofa. His dinner was already laid out on the table. Mrs Fury went upstairs. The man sat down and commenced to eat. ‘Thinks I’ve slighted her now,’ he said to himself. ‘Aye, Fanny’s a queer’n all right.’ The woman came downstairs again. Mr Fury drew her chair in to the table, but Mrs Fury went on through the lobby into the parlour. She felt her husband’s remark was nothing less than a direct affront to her sister. Why shouldn’t Brigid come over? Who else could come with Peter? Of course he had never liked her people. How well she understood the significance of her husband’s ‘sorry’. It simply meant ‘Oh! shut your mouth.’ That was generally the end of it. The man finished his dinner.
    He went into the lobby. At the parlour door he stopped and called out, ‘I say, Fanny, what time do you expect he’ll arrive?’ He could not enter the room. Somehow it had taken on a sort of sacred privacy that he could not invade. He stood outside the door.
    â€˜You know as well