The Glass Lake (30 page)

“Well, it's her loss, Mother, I tell you that. And I don't want to go back to my family, they don't need me and they only upset me. Also…” She paused.

“Do you have a young man in Lough Glass possibly?” Mother Bernard was coy.

“No, not a fear of it, Mother. No, what I was going to say, I don't like to be too far from Emmet and Kit. My heart goes out to them.”

“Kit seems to be managing very well, better than I would have thought.”

“Yes, of the three of them she does seem to have found some kind of peace. It's as if she had a secret. Maybe she prays to her mother, do you think?”

Mother Bernard didn't want to go as far as this.

Although it would be a sin against charity to go around repeating it, Mother Bernard was one of the very sizable number who believed that Helen McMahon might well have ended her own life, and would therefore not be in a place where anyone might pray to her with any hope of an answer.

Chapter Five

M
AURA
was very reassuring to her sister Lilian Kelly. “They're all terrible between thirteen and sixteen. It's their glands…it's to do with nature.”

“Nobody has a nature like Clio. I'll swing for her before it's over, I really will.”

“No, no. I see it everywhere. It's their bodies, you see. They're all ready to breed and raise families, but society won't let them, and so it's a very confused time…”

“All we need is for them to be breeding all round us. That's the only thing she hasn't done yet.” Lilian Kelly's mouth was grim.

Clio was a handful. The odd thing was that Kit, the motherless girl who had been restless and wild herself, seemed to have settled down. Clio's blond good looks had caught the attention of many a young man, but her parents had been strict. There would be no outings of that sort until the summer she left school. Lessons were important. Fun could come later.

Maura came down almost every weekend. She said it was no distance from Dublin. She loved seeing them all. And as the months and indeed years went by the weekends had fallen into a pattern. There would be a supper up at Kellys' on a Friday night. And the next day spent playing golf. Martin McMahon had been assured by his friend the doctor that exercise was essential for a man in his forties. They would have dinner at the golf club on a Saturday night.

Martin had to be persuaded that it was a good thing to leave his children to their own devices some of the time. “I'm sure Helen would want you to encourage them to be independent,” Maura had said. And that had settled it. Martin McMahon liked the easy way that she mentioned his dead wife. So many people dropped their voices when they mentioned her. If they mentioned her at all.

But while every other girl fought with a mother, Kit McMahon developed a friendship that became closer and closer with her mother's friend, Lena. Lena's typed letters arrived at Sister Madeleine's cottage week after week, pages and pages of conversation and memory and reaction to things that Kit wrote to her.

Sister Madeleine mentioned the letters once. And only once. “She writes long letters, your mother's friend?”

Kit had paused for a moment. “I'd show them to you, Sister Madeleine, but it's hard to say…it's kind of…not exactly a secret but you'd get the feeling she's writing only to me.”

“Oh, child. Don't think for a moment that I'd want to read what she says. She tells you good things about your mother…”

“Marvelous things, they must have known every single thing about each other. But then, they wrote to each other a lot. You know that because they must have written through here.” Sister Madeleine looked into the fire and said nothing. “I feel so much better about Mother. I know her properly, what she was like as a child and everything. It's like finding her diary or something…”

“That's a great blessing for you,” Sister Madeleine said, and she watched the little flame catch the wood.

L
ENA
had a ritual about reading the letters.

It was in Ivy's flat at the kitchen table, surrounded by the cluttered shelves and the walls on which there wasn't an inch of free space, so great was the festooning of postcards, scarves, ornaments, and posters.

She would sip her small brandy and be transported to a world of breezes on the lake, end-of-term exams, Father Baily's being an hour late because he had forgotten that the clocks went on.

She read about her own son's getting his tonsils out, and eating only jelly and ice cream, and how Rita had done her secretarial course but fortunately hadn't left to go to Dublin and get a good job, she was working in the office of Sullivan's garage across the road.

Lena read of people she had disliked for thirteen years that she now found fascinating.

The Hickeys weren't speaking to each other, it appeared. If anyone went into the butcher's and asked for three lamb chops Mrs. Hickey would repeat the phrase in the tones of a Christian martyr and then Mr. Hickey would go and chop them. The days when she would talk to the customers and shout in to her husband were gone. Kit wrote that it was better than going to a play just to go in and watch them. Sometimes she begged Rita to let her go and do the shopping just for the sheer fun of it.

She read about Philip O'Brien's being so nice, and his mother's being so awful. How Clio was fighting with her mother too, and how Deirdre Hanley wasn't in the door of Hanley's Drapery before she and her mother had a row.

“I sometimes think that if my mother had lived we would have had a fight too. Otherwise it wouldn't be natural.”

Lena's hands shook as she read this. She wrote page after page about it.
Your mother always spoke of you so lovingly, you were so strong, so full of courage. You would never have fought, you would have seen her for all she was, her weaknesses as well…

Then she stopped and tore the pages up. She mustn't give herself away. She had been so careful for these years she must not throw it all away now.

R
ITA
kept the accounts for Stevie Sullivan.

His mother, a mournful woman, felt that there was something not entirely appropriate about this. There was that maid of the McMahons' coming across the road and putting on airs as she did so. She decided she would set the relationship off on a correct footing.

“I'm glad you're going to be with us in the mornings, Rita.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Sullivan.”

“And I thought maybe I'd leave a little ironing a couple of days a week…” Rita looked at her politely. But said nothing. “To do in your own time, of course.”

“What was that you said, Mrs. Sullivan?”

Kathleen knew when she was beaten. She began to retreat. “If there's time, of course…”

“That's always the problem, isn't it. Your son is paying me to work three hours a morning. I hope we'll be able to get all his books and correspondence dealt with in that time. It's certainly going to be a challenge, isn't it?”

“And then you'll go back to domestic work across the road?” It was a barb.

But Rita didn't pretend to see it. “I've always felt McMahons' was my home in many ways. I wouldn't dream of leaving Mr. McMahon until his children are reared.”

In Paddles' bar Peter Kelly asked Martin about Rita's job.

“She seems to be doing very well.” Martin was proud of Rita. “She's cleaned it up for a start.”

“I know, didn't I see it. Fresh paint, shelves, filing cabinets, in old Sullivan's! Could you believe it?”

“I'd say she has a hard time with Kathleen.”

“Everyone has a hard time with Kathleen,” said Peter Kelly. “But on the other hand, she wasn't dealt much of a hand herself, and she's got a handful in those two boys.”

“Stevie's a bit of a lad, isn't he?”

“We'll have to lock up our daughters, Martin. Stevie Sullivan knows a lot more than you and I knew when we were nineteen.”

“And the young lad, Michael, a hooligan. Himself and young Wall were found drinking the dregs of empty bottles behind Shea's the other night. Little pups.”

But Peter Kelly was not as outraged as he might have sounded. He was very tolerant of what other people in Lough Glass regarded as the criminal side of young people. He couldn't see that it was all that very bad for Clio to have gone out in her mother's black satin slip to the pictures on a summer night, but Lilian still hadn't recovered from the outrage.

“It's a great blessing that Maura comes down so regularly,” he confided to Martin. “Lilian would be at Clio's throat a lot of the time if we didn't have company to be pleasant in front of, so to speak…”

Martin's face brightened up. “She's great company Maura. I'm surprised that she's able to find so much time to visit, but it's grand to see her.”

Peter Kelly sipped his pint thoughtfully. He knew very well why Maura found so much time to come and visit. He wondered would Martin McMahon ever realize that he was the main attraction.

Rita realized it, however. She spoke about it to Sister Madeleine.

“I thought that might be the way the land was laying all right.”

“How on earth would you know, Sister? You don't go visiting…how do you know things?”

“I just feel them.”

Sister Madeleine knew that Kit mentioned how her father laughed when Clio's aunt was around, and that the golf had become a regular feature of the weekends. When Emmet came to read his poetry with her, he sometimes mentioned Anna Kelly's aunt. She liked poetry too, apparently, and had often asked him to read for her because she had forgotten her glasses.

“And is she a kind woman?” Sister Madeleine asked.

“Very, I'd say.”

“Well, maybe he should ask her to supper, don't you think?”

“I was wondering about that, with the Kellys would you say?”

“Oh, I'd say so, the first time anyway.”

…and next week we've asked the Kellys and Clio's aunt Maura to supper. It's a mad idea really, but Rita said that Dad was getting too many meals up in their house, and not giving any in return. I said that Dad paid for meals in O'Brien's Hotel or up at the golf club, but Rita said hadn't he got his own home to entertain them in. So that's it. Not us, mind you, not Emmet and me, or Clio and Anna or anything…just grown-ups. There'll be soup and roast lamb and trifle. And wine. Dad's delighted. I'm in two minds. You might think this is very silly but I feel it's a bit disloyal. You see, when Mother was here she
could have cooked a meal for the Kellys and their aunt Maura anytime she wanted to. Mother was such a terrific cook. It seems silly all of us struggling to make a dinner when she could have done it so easily. But she didn't. Perhaps she didn't like the Kellys. It's so hard to know. I have this feeling that if she had liked them then she would have had this dinner…

Lena felt her eyes mist over. How little escaped the quick mind of a child. She had neither liked nor disliked the Kellys; they represented all that was safe and dull about Lough Glass. She had deliberately held herself from confiding in them from a wish to stay separate and free, as if she knew Louis would come back one day and take her away.

And now she had left the legacy of that indifference with this innocent girl who thought so well of her that even after her death she didn't want to do anything to compromise her memory.

Lena wrote immediately.

I don't know if you're right about the Kelly family. Helen always spoke of them in her letters as people she liked. She said you and Clio had such a stormy friendship—sometimes it was till death do us part, other times worst enemies. I know she didn't want to play golf with them, but she sometimes felt guilty about depriving your father of it. She used to urge him apparently, but he'd say no, not without her
.