The Glass Lake (22 page)

“And what will you do for the day?” Lena looked into Ivy's face as she spoke and she knew the other woman was lying.

“Oh, don't let me begin. I have to go here, there, and everywhere. I'm like a doctor on Christmas Day…too many obligations from the past.”

Lena nodded sympathetically. It was better that way.

“I
SN'T
this a barbarous country that they don't open the pubs on Christmas Day?” Peter Kelly said to Kit's father as they all walked home from Mass.

“Aren't you the one who's always saying it's the number of pubs that has us in the state we're in, as a nation.”

“Ah yes, but that's a different argument entirely.”

“Would you like to come in then and have something sociable?” Kit thought her father looked wretched. A morning of having people sympathize all over again had taken its toll.

Dr. Kelly seemed to sense this too. “Not at all. You've enough of chat, go back to the family.”

“Yes.” The word hung there, empty and sad.

         

They took off their coats and blew on their fingers.

“That smells very nice, Rita.”

“Thank you, sir.”

They sat down together the four of them, as they had done since Helen had left that day two months before. Martin sat in the seat that Helen had used, and Kit had moved to her father's place. Emmet had moved up one, and Rita sat in the place that Emmet used to have.

When Helen McMahon had been alive they still ate in the kitchen, but Rita had taken her meal at the end of the table, or sometimes she had just served and eaten her own meal later. It might appear that the departure of the mistress had somehow equalized things more, had done away with the class distinctions, but this was not Mother's fault, and Kit wanted that known, defined in some way.

“You could always have had your Christmas dinner with us, Rita, do you know that? I mean, it was just that you'd be standing up, making gravy and everything…”

“Of course I know that,” Rita said.

“Rita doesn't need to be told such a thing.” Her father sounded sharp.

“But Daddy, in a way people have to say things. Sister Madeleine says that we don't often say the most important things, we say little silly ones.”

“True for her, true for her,” Father nodded. He looked very old, Kit thought. He nodded like an old man would nod and repeat things. They were silent for a while after that, as if none of them knew what to say.

Rita spoke eventually. “Will I serve it, sir, dish it up for you…for us all?”

“Yes, please, Rita. That would be fine.” Father's face looked wretched, he had great dark hollows under his eyes. He must not have slept at all last night, remembering, the way they had all remembered all the Christmas Eves before…when there was so much to do. This one had seemed unbearably long.

“Well, we have grapefruit first,” Rita said. “The mistress taught me to cut it with a jagged edge, you see, so that it looks a bit like an ornament or something…and to put a glacé cherry on top of each one divided into four like a flower, and a bit of angelica pretending to be the stem of the flower…. The mistress said it didn't hurt to make things look nice…presentation was what she called it.”

They all studied the grapefruit, trying to think of something to say about it.

There was a lump in Kit's throat. “No one else in Lough Glass or anywhere else would be having anything as nice as this,” she said in a voice that sounded unnatural in her own ears. It was as if she were reading lines from a play.

“Oh, that's right, that's right,” her father said. “Nobody else would have a dinner like this, we always said so…” He didn't quite finish the sentence because it was obvious that he realized that nobody else was having a dinner under such circumstances. Everywhere else behind the closed curtains of Lough Glass people were eating and drinking…they were planning an afternoon laughing or arguing or sleeping in front of the fire. They weren't sitting bolt-upright, trying to swallow sections of a grapefruit so bitter it stuck on their tongues and made their eyes water again.

And when the turkey came to the table they all looked away from Father's face. Mother used to say that it was well he had chosen to be a chemist and not a surgeon or the population here would have been wiped out. Mother had taught herself to carve, and did it deftly. Rita had not liked to usurp her position.

“Isn't this grand?” Father said with a death's-head grin on his face, trying to cheer them up. “This is the grandest turkey we ever had.” They said that every year too, and talked about the Hickey family going to the turkey market five miles away and picking the best, the plumpest and younger birds. There was a silence. “Isn't it grand, Emmet?” Poor Father was waving the carving knife, trying to smile and spread cheer. He didn't realize he looked like a butcherous murderer in a film, or in one of the mobile theatres that came to the town every two years.

Emmet looked at him mutely.

“Say something, lad, your mother wouldn't want you to be moping there and all of you sitting in silence, she'd like there to be a bit of chat. It's Christmas Day, and we're all here and you have the memory of a great mother to keep with you for the rest of your lives. Isn't that grand?”

Emmet looked at his father's red face. “It's not grand at all, Daddy,” he said. “It's t-t-t-t-errible.” His stutter was as bad as it had ever been before.

“We have to pretend that things are all right, Emmet son,” he said. “Don't we, Kit? Don't we, Rita?”

They looked at him wordlessly.

Then Kit said, “Mother wouldn't pretend. I don't think she'd have said things were grand if they weren't.”

They could hear the clock on the landing ticking. In other houses people would barely hear a word anyone else was saying, but in this house they could hear the purring of the old cat, the ticking of a clock, and the gurgling sounds of saucepans still simmering on the Aga cooker beside them.

Father's face was grim, gray and grim. Kit looked at him in anguish. Father must still be turning in his bed at night wondering why Mother had left that night and got drowned.

For the hundredth time she wondered if she had done the right thing in burning that letter. And yet again she told herself that she had. Think of what would have happened when Mother's body had been found if her daughter had not acted in the way she had. And Father must have heard too the story that fool Kevin Wall had told about how he took the McMahon boat out on the night that Mother had drowned. As if anyone would believe Kevin Wall even if he told you today was Christmas Day.

Father was speaking again. “I'm going to start by telling the truth just like your mother did…” His voice broke. “And the truth is that it's
not
all right,” he said through his tears. “It's terrible. I miss her so much I can't be comforted by the thought of seeing her in heaven later on. I'm so lonely for her…” His shoulders heaved. The mood changed. Kit and Emmet left their places to go and put their arms around him. They crowded together for what seemed a long time. Rita sat at her place. She was like the background. Like the kitchen curtains, like old Farouk asleep on the stool beside the Aga. Like the gray wet rain outside.

And then they stopped, and it was as if a thunderstorm had cleared the air. They spoke with lighter voices; the tightrope of pretense had been taken away. Wasn't it extraordinary that Sister Madeleine had more or less foretold to her that this would happen?

Into the midst of this came a sharp shrill sound. It was the telephone ringing. On Christmas Day, a day when nobody made any calls except for an emergency.

I
N
the Dryden Hotel they made a great effort to have a cheerful Christmas for the staff. A lot of them had been there a long time, most had weathered the war years with loyalty, and as James Williams knew, there were many who had no real homes to go to.

A Christmas tree that had been set up in the hall to establish a festive mood for guests was now in the dining room, and everyone had a role, including spouses. Lena's job was to do place cards.

Louis gave her the list. “They want artistic writing,” he explained. “It's a mad idea, but you did volunteer.”

“No, I think it's a good idea. It'll be a souvenir of the day,” she said. She asked him to bring her a sheaf of Dryden Hotel notepaper, so that she could stick the name on top of each card. “It's more like an invitation, then,” she said, and painstakingly wrote out the names. Barry Jones, Antonio Bari, Michael Kelly, Gladys Wood…Each one with great attention and little holly leaves and berries drawn as a border.

At the start they were shy, awkward to be allowed to sit down at the tables instead of serving at them or sweeping up under them. But James Williams kept circulating with the bowl of punch and soon the inhibitions went. By the time they were carving the turkey some of them had already pulled the Christmas crackers which were meant for the plum pudding stage. There was a roar of conversation from the twenty-nine strangely assorted people sitting around the table.

Lena slipped away to the ladies' room and just beside the door she saw the little booth for the telephone. It was five-thirty in the afternoon. This time last year she had been down by the lake with the children, walking off the effects of the dinner. That's what she would have called it, but escaping the stifling walls of the house is what it would have been. Martin had looked at her eagerly, but she had advised him to have a little sleep by the fire. At the time she had felt guilty denying her husband the simple pleasure of a walk with his own wife on Christmas Day.

Now she felt no pity, only rage with the man she had begged to play fair. If it had not been for Martin she could have spoken to Kit and to Emmet this Christmas, sent them presents, told them that she loved them, planned for them to come and see her at Easter.

Anger rose in her throat. She could feel it. Before she realized what she was doing she was in the phone box and dialing the operator. She gave the number and waited.

The operator came back. “It appears that Lough Glass is a small place, caller, with a manual exchange. Unless the call is in the nature of an emergency it cannot be put through on Christmas Day.”

“It is an emergency,” she said in a tight voice.

She heard the clicks and the sounds as the phone rang in the post office on the corner of Lakeview Road and the main street. It seemed to ring endlessly. Lena wondered that Mrs. Hanley next door hadn't come in and answered it. She was as nosy as anyone in the town, surely she wondered who could be ringing for what emergency.

But eventually the slow feet of Mona Fitz must have moved themselves to the phone. Lena heard her halting voice and the sense of outrage that she had been woken from her sleep.

The number of the house was given.

“It's only emergency calls on Christmas Day,” Mona said.

Lena clenched her fists with impatience. What trouble was it to the stupid woman just to plug the bloody piece of equipment into one of the row of holes in front of her. She could have it done and finished with by the time she went into all this tiresome explanation and cross-questioning.

“That's what the caller says; it is an emergency.”

“Very well, so.”

Lena could imagine her putting on her glasses to direct the call a few yards down the street.

A few rings and she heard Martin reply. “Hallo,” he said, his voice hesitant and doubtful. Did he know that she would ring on Christmas Day? That he couldn't keep her from her children forever just by pretending she was dead. Was he frightened now, and in an agony wondering how he was going to explain the whole terrible mess that he had created? “Hallo,” Martin said again. “Who's that?”

The whole terrible mess. It could be undone in a moment. But so would Lena's life. The life that had only just begun. She said nothing and clicked the bar in the cradle that held the receiver. She could hear the operator in London saying, “Are you there, caller? Your number has been reached…”