The Glass Lake (18 page)

“I'll get change,” he said. His mouth was in a grim line as he went to the bar.

Lena drank the entire brandy in one gulp. It felt like swallowing nettles.

They didn't phone from the bar, there was too much noise. But just along the road they came to a public box.

“What will you say?” Lena asked for the tenth time.

Louis had said little, but now as they heard the phone ringing he held her face in one hand and said, “I'll say what's right, trust me. I'll wait to see what he says first.”

She gripped his hand tight and leaned very close so that she could hear.

“Lough Glass three double nine.” It was Kit's voice.

Lena raised the hand that held Louis's hand to her lips to bite back the words. Then the operator came on the line. “A call from London for you…go ahead, caller.”

“Hello.” Louis spoke in a slightly altered voice. “Is that McMahons'?”

“Yes, this is McMahons' in Lough Glass.”

“Is Mr. McMahon there please?”

“No, I'm sorry. He's out at the moment….” Lena's eyes widened. Martin should be well back from Mass by now. They should have started their lunch. The house had gone to pieces since she left. Then she remembered this was a house in mourning, a house where everyone professed to think that she was drowned.

“When will he return?”

“May I ask who is calling please?” Lena smiled proudly. Only twelve and already practical and efficient. Don't give information until you get information.

“My name's Smith. I'm a commercial representative. I've been to your parents' chemist's in the nature of business calls.”

“This is our home, not the chemist's,” Kit explained.

“I know, and I'm sorry to intrude on you. Might I have a word with your mother?” Lena squeezed his hand so hard it hurt him. Her eyes were enormous. What was the child going to say?

It seemed an age before she answered.

What did she want Kit to say? Something like “There's been a lot of confusion over where my mother is, but it will all be sorted out before Christmas.”

“You're ringing from London?” Kit said.

“That's right, yes.”

“Then you won't have heard. There's been a terrible accident. My mother was drowned.” There was a pause as she struggled to get her breath again.

Louis said nothing. His face was white. Then in a choked voice he said, “I'm very sorry.”

“Yes, I know you would be.” The voice was very small.

Lena had often fantasized about her children talking to Louis. She knew they would like each other. Somehow she had felt it would turn out to be all right. But that was before this. Before this terrible turn in events.

“So where is your father now?” he asked.

“He's having lunch with friends of ours. They're trying to take his mind off things a bit.”

That would be the Kellys, thought Lena.

“And why did you not go?” Louis sounded genuinely caring. The lump in Lena's throat was enormous.

“I thought someone should be here in case there was any news, you know…”

“What kind of news?”

“Well, they haven't found…in case they found Mummy's body,” said Kit. Louis's face was working but he couldn't speak. “Are you still there?” she asked.

“Yes…yes.”

“Will I ask my father to ring you?”

“No, no. It was just a call, in case I was going to be passing that way. Please don't tell him and disturb him. I'm so sorry to have intruded…at such a time…”

“It was an accident,” Kit said. “They had prayers for the repose of her soul at Mass today.”

“Yes, I'm sure. I'm sure.”

“So that she'd be at peace,” Kit explained. “So I won't say you rang?”

“No. No. And is your little brother managing all right?”

“How did you know I had a brother?”

“I think your father and mother said it when I was in the shop.”

“I bet she did, she was always talking about us.” Kit's voice was near tears. “It was only the winds, you know. It would have been all right but for the winds.” There was a silence. The silences had eaten up a lot of the three minutes.

“Do you want further time, caller?” asked the operator.

“No, thank you. We have finished,” Louis said.

And across the distance on that wet November Sunday they heard Kit's voice saying “Good-bye” and again, hesitantly, in case she hadn't signed off properly, “Good-bye now.”

They hung up and held each other tight in the phone box as the rain lashed against the window. And anyone who came hoping to make a call saw the anguish between them and went away. Nobody could ask a couple who had obviously had such bad news to leave a phone box and go out into the real world.

         

“I could kill him,” Louis said when they were at home sitting in this half world of disbelief.

“If he did it on purpose.”

“Let's go through it again.”

Louis would ask “How could he
not
know?” and always it was unanswerable.

         

They couldn't sleep even though they needed to. They both had jobs to go to in the morning.

Once Louis asked in a wide-awake voice, “Did he think people wouldn't buy his bloody cough bottles if they thought his wife had run away, but they would if she had drowned?”

“Don't ask me. I don't know him at all.”

“You lived with him for thirteen years of your life.”

She was silent. Then an hour later she asked, “What did Kit mean about the winds…what winds?”

“I suppose the night we left.”

“I don't remember any winds.”

“Neither do I, but then…”

He didn't need to say any more. They would have noticed neither thunderstorm nor snow on the night they began their new life.

She had crossed to the far side of the lake before the gypsy camp where Louis was waiting with his car, well, his friend's car. His friend had known nothing of the plan, only that Louis needed transport for the day. They had driven to Dublin and taken the tram to Dun Laoghaire. They were the first people on the boat. And they had talked all night from Holyhead to Euston, and laughed over their breakfast in a Lyons Corner House.

And all this time, every day and night since then, people in Lough Glass had assumed that Helen McMahon was at the bottom of their lake.

Louis was right. Martin's bitterness must have been greater than any of them could ever have realized.

         

Jessie had a mother who was poorly. She had been poorly for a long time. Nothing that you could put your finger on. Lena learned this in a lot of detail on her first full day at work, on that first Monday.

“Why don't you pop back and see her at lunchtime?” Lena suggested.

“Ooh, I couldn't do that.” Jessie was very timid.

“Why ever not? I'm here, aren't I. I can hold the fort.”

“No. I wouldn't like to.”

“Jessie, I'm not going to take your job. I'm your assistant. I'm not going to go out and leave the place wide open to the public. If anything comes in that I can't handle I'll ask them to see Miss Park later on. What's the sense of us both sitting here when you're worried about your mother…?”

“But suppose Mr. Millar comes in?”

“I could say that you have gone to investigate better stationery. You could, too, on your way. There's a big place on the corner. Why don't you see if they have any discounts for bulk buy? We do get a lot of envelopes at a time. They should give us a reduction.”

“Yes…I could do that.” Jessie was riddled with doubt.

“Please go,” Lena insisted. “Isn't this why I was hired, to be a nice sensible mature woman who can keep things ticking over. Let me earn my wages.”

“Will you be all right?”

“I'll be fine, I've lots to do.” Lena felt her smile was nailed onto her face. If only Jessie Park knew how much she did have to do, how many decisions she had to make if she could just get a little peace to make them.

While she was pretending to keep down a real job Lena Gray was going to have to decide today whether or not to telephone Lough Glass and say that Helen McMahon was alive and well. Hours of conversation with Louis had not convinced her. She couldn't write her own obituary and move out of the lives of Kit and Emmet.

Even if the baby she had been carrying had continued to live within her she would still have had to face the fact that she had somehow allowed her son and daughter to believe she was dead. It was no use railing against Martin and his weakness of character. She wanted some time to think. Time on her own, where she had access to a telephone.

That's why it was so important to get poor Jessie out of the office.

Lena delayed looking up the job opportunities for Louis. After all, a lot depended on what she did now. If she were to telephone home and tell the news that she was alive and well, then it might change everything. It might mean that she and Louis would not be starting their life as planned here, in London. It might mean that she would have to return home and face the consequences of everything she had done.

So it would be folly to try to set up interviews for him when she did not even know whether they would still be here. She tried to imagine the scene of Louis escorting her back to Lough Glass.

Her imagination let her down. She could not begin to run the conversation that would take place among the three of them, Martin, Louis, and herself, in the sitting room. There were no words, no explanations. She thought of the children holding her, clutching her. Of Kit saying “I knew you weren't dead. I just knew it.” Of Emmet with his stutter getting worse until every word seemed to choke him.

She thought of Rita being discreet in the background and baffled. She thought of the false conversation with Peter and Lilian. Of Maura, Lilian's sister, being determinedly cheerful and saying that life was short and they should all rejoice in the good fortune that had resulted from all this instead of dwelling on the bad side.

All the time she tried to imagine a role for Louis and couldn't find one. His smile, his charm, his love for her, would all be so inappropriate.

She knew she would have to go alone. And she supposed she would have to go. You couldn't tell two innocent children the news that their mother was not dead without telling it to their faces. She didn't even think about talking to Martin. The years of respect for him had just vanished away. She could not believe that anyone could have behaved in such a way over a blow to his pride.

She must really not have known Martin at all.

Jessie left, and took her incessant chatter with her. Lena hoped for some time on her own. But the lunch hour was one of the busiest times in Millar's Employment Agency. All those already in jobs which they hoped to change used their lunch break to seek details and to register for other posts.

Lena was rushed off her feet. Perhaps it was all for the best, she thought as the wire trays filled up with application forms and personal details. Perhaps she would not have been able to work anything out even if she did have the free time. Twice she had lifted a telephone receiver and twice she had replaced it. If she had spoken to Martin in the pharmacy she would not have been able to control her anger with him. Maybe she should wait until the children were home from school.

Or should she go through someone else? But who?

Not the Kellys. Never the Kellys. Now, if Sister Madeleine had had a telephone. Lena smiled at the notion of a modern instrument like a telephone in the hermit's little cottage.

“You're smiling, that's good,” Jessie said to her.

“Do you mean I don't always smile?” Lena pulled herself together.

“You look a different woman today than the one that was here on Saturday. I thought you had something bad happen to you over the weekend.” Jessie looked eager to hear.

But Lena was well able for her. “No, divil a bit of it…now, how was your mum? Glad to see you?”

“Well, it was a good thing I did go back.” Jessie began another lengthy tale of her mother's difficulty in digesting her food.

Up to this Lena had thought that Mrs. Hanley in the drapery at Lough Glass was the only woman in the world whose food passed through a hundred different stages, all of them fascinating to herself, before it was digested. Now she realized that Mrs. Hanley had a sister figure in West London.

Lena had thirteen years' experience in molding her face into an expression of interest in awful Mrs. Hanley's gullet. It was no problem to assume acceptable interest in the digestive tract of Jessie Park's mother.

Her hands were busy putting new and clearer labels on the files, her mind was hundreds of miles away by a winter lake in Ireland.

         

She knew when she saw Louis's face that there would be no conversation about it tonight. This was not a man who would sit down to work out yet again the best way to tell her children that she was still alive.