THE FIREPLACE in the children’s bedroom had to be swept out and dusted so that Father Christmas would have a place to put his feet when he came down the chimney. Lily and Margaret Bagot watched their mother, who knelt close in to the grate, brushing the last few flecks of ash out of the corners. Lily was eight and Margaret was six, and the long white nightgowns they wore fell in a rumpled line to their ankles. They wore no dressing gowns although the room was cold — they would be getting into bed in a minute. It was a square room, the back bedroom, with faded garlanded wallpaper in blue and pink and green, and it was lighted by a single bulb that hung from the middle of the ceiling. One large window looked out onto the garden and the adjoining gardens. Mrs. Bagot had pulled the blind down all the way to the sill. She wanted the children to have their privacy and, beyond that, she wanted them to be safe. She didn’t really know what she meant by safe — respectable, maybe, or successful in some way that she had no vision of. She wanted the world for them, or else she wanted them to have the kind of place that was represented to her by lawyers and doctors and people like that. She wanted them to go on believing in Father Christmas and, more than that, she wanted to go on believing in Father Christmas herself. She would have liked to think there was someone big and kind outside the house who knew about the children, someone who knew their names and their ages, and that Lily might go out into the world and make something of herself, because she was always reading, but Margaret was very defenseless and unsure of herself. Lily was maybe a bit too sure of herself, but at the same time she was very soft, very nice to people who maybe wouldn’t understand that it was her nature and that she wasn’t the fool she seemed to be. Father Christmas knew that Lily was clever, always getting good marks at school. No matter where the presents came from, Father Christmas came down the chimney, Mrs. Bagot was sure of that. He was probably hovering over Dublin now, seeing how the city had changed since last year. The children were all older, that was the great change. It was always the great change, every day, not just once a year. She placed her dusting brush across the paper in the scuttle and stood up.

“Now Father Christmas will have a place to put his feet,” Lily said.

“He wears big red boots,” Margaret whispered.