The Glass Lake (50 page)

They talked about Mother Bernard and her drive to build a new wing on the convent; her fund-raising activities had Lough Glass demented.

Maura's mind wandered away from the conversation.

She thought of the way the nun had been so adamant it couldn't have been Helen McMahon she had seen in London. What it undoubtedly must be was the imagination playing tricks. Like a tree can take on the image of a dangerous bogeyman if you're frightened, like a shadow on the windowpane can look like an intruder rather than a branch waving. So it was when Maura had been thinking of Helen she would automatically think any woman of the same age and size might be she.

“I wasn't thinking about her, you see,” Maura had countered.

“How was she dressed?”

“She had dark glasses and a little hat. Purple feathers. It was
so
like her, Sister Madeleine.” The nun threw back her head and laughed away Maura's anxieties. “Well now, don't you believe me?”

“Helen McMahon in sunglasses? Indoors? And in a hat? In all the years I saw her here she never wore a hat…”

“But suppose…”

“You see, even though you weren't thinking of her consciously, you must have been on another level. That's why you transposed her features onto a totally different stranger standing beside you.” Sister Madeleine had beamed at the obvious explanation.

And of course Maura knew she must be right.

T
HEY
learned a lot in the catering college, but there was still some free time. Often Kit went to the cinema with Frankie, who was always planning some devilment and was great at negotiating late passes from the hostel for her friend Kit.

Frankie was cheerful and casual. She didn't have the hothouse intensity of Clio, nor did she criticize with such outrage if Kit didn't do exactly what she wanted. She invited Kit for a weekend to Cork to stay with her family. Kit would have loved to have gone, but it was at the end of the month and she had spent most of her allowance. She literally didn't have the train fare. Frankie shrugged. Another time. It was a relief. Kit thought of all the cross-questioning and analysis that she would have got from Clio.

There were some parties in flats, some of them marvelous with people singing and laughing way into the night, some of them messy evenings that shouldn't have been parties at all because they were just excuses for groping. Kit and Frankie thought that it was badly behaved to go in search of groping to a public place. This was a private matter, they said, and clucked at each other pretending to be nuns until they fell about laughing.

“What do you do all the time? I never see you,” Clio complained. Kit tried to explain but nothing she said met with any approval. “It sounds awful,” Clio said dismissively.

“Then you're just as well out of it.” Kit was unconcerned. “But I would like to meet you for coffee now and then. We are meant to be friends.”

Clio stopped sounding like a fourteen-year-old. “Let's go to Bewley's in Grafton Street tomorrow.”

         

“Have you gone all the way yet?” Clio asked Kit.

“Are you out of your mind?” Kit asked.

“Does that mean out of my mind, yes, or out of my mind, no?” Clio had an infectious grin. That was why their fights had never lasted long when they were young. They didn't have fights now. They were much too old for that sort of silliness.

“The answer is no, as you know very well,” Kit said.

“Me neither.” Clio was sheepish.

“I didn't ask, remember that. I am mature enough to think it's people's own business.”

“I wonder are we just the odd ones out. Like, is everyone else doing it and being mature and not telling?” Clio sounded very unsure.

“Well, we know Deirdre Hanley does it with everyone she sees. We know that Orla Dillon from the newsagent's at home was stupid enough to do it with that man from the mountains and is married to him now, which is about as bad as could happen.”

“I don't mean people like that,” Clio said. “I mean people like us.”

“Well, they are like us. They come from Lough Glass.”

“No, you know, middle-class people, upper-class people.”

“Clio, you sound like Margaret Rutherford in a film.” Kit pealed with laughter.

“I'm being serious. How would we know?”

“Well, I suppose people like us do if we want to and don't if we don't want to.”

“We don't if we're afraid we'll go to hell, or people might talk about us and give us a bad name.”

“I don't think it's simple as that.”

“Simple? I've spelled out every possiblity for you, every eventuality. What do you want?”

“It's just that Michael O'Connor, you know the fellow I was telling you about…”

Kit did know. A tall, unattractive commerce student with a very irritating laugh, a brother of Kevin O'Connor's in her own catering college…sons of a very wealthy family, each with his own car in Dublin, something unheard-of as regards luxury. Clio had spoken several times about Michael O'Connor.

“Yes, what about Michael?”

“He says everyone does it, and that I'm only being a foolish provincial. Out of step with the world.”

“And does he say it's good-bye unless you have sex with him?”

“He calls it making love.”

“Whatever it's called.”

“Well, he doesn't quite say that, but you'd know that's what's meant.”

“It's blackmail.”

“He says you can't love someone properly without…”

“I bet he does.” Kit sounded sarcastic.

Clio's eyes flashed. “He also says his brother Kevin did it with you.”

“He
what
?”

Clio looked alarmed at the emphatic response. “That's what he said, after some party apparently.”

Kit got up from the table, her face red with rage. “I have some advice for you, Clio…take it if you like or ignore it. That is a great big lie, his stupid ox of a brother did try to take the knickers off me one night and I refused, because whenever I lose my virginity it will not be with one of those pig-ignorant O'Connors, with their stupid laughs and their lies and thinking they're God-all-bloody-mighties in their cars going vroom vroom.”

The people at the other tables looked up with great interest as the handsome girl with the long black curly hair and the smart red jacket flung some coins on the table and stormed out of the restaurant. It wasn't every day that you overheard a conversation that covered lies and virginity and knickers and God-all-bloody-mighty.

Dublin was changing.

A hundred times Lena thought of an excuse to send Kit a short letter, a postcard even. But she always dismissed it as being too flimsy. The girl would shy away again if she were to attempt to contact her. After all, Kit's note had only been a belated thank-you letter for the dress and a warning about the presence of Martin and Maura in her city. It had not been a letter with any warmth or wish to rekindle a friendship.

But there might be something. Some possible excuse she could find that would give her a reason. Lena raked the local newspaper for any item of interest, something that might reasonably trigger a communication. She saw an item about the difficulties of getting employment in the hotel industry. She cut it out and pasted it on a sheet of paper. Then she added the Millar's Agency brochure on opportunities in the hotel trade and posted them to Kit at her college.

Kit was in her second year now. It would be time for her to think about positions and jobs. Surely she could not take offense at this.

Lena wrote the note over and over until she was satisfied with it. She made sure that the address was still the same, care of Ivy Brown. She wanted neither Louis nor her office colleagues to know of this correspondence with Ireland. In the end the note she wrote said:

Thought this might be of some interest to you and your fellow students
.

Hope the course is going well
.

Sincerest wishes for your success and happiness

And she signed it
L
.

I
T
was Maura who noticed that there was something the matter with Emmet.

He didn't want any fuss, he said. Anyway he was playing in a match. Brother Healy wouldn't take kindly to his crying off.

“I'll get Peter to have a look at you, if you don't mind,” Maura insisted.

“I'm quite grown up really, Maura. I'd know if there was something wrong with me.” They looked each other in the eye. This was their first confrontation.

Emmet was a handsome boy, slim and sometimes frail-looking. He was a wiry hurler and much in demand on the team. Maura knew that missing a match wasn't something that would be countenanced except in case of dire emergency. But the boy had aches and pains, his skin looked sallow, and the whites of his eyes were yellow.

She wasn't going to back down. “I know you are an adult, Emmet, believe me I do. And if it were a matter of asking you to come up and wait in the surgery and waste time and make it all official I wouldn't try to force it on you. But Peter is my brother-in-law…Is it all right if I ask him to look at you, just look, this evening?”

Emmet grinned. “You're too reasonable, Maura. That's the problem.”

Peter Kelly said that Emmet McMahon had acute jaundice. It could be cured at home. A darkened room, a lot of barley water, a heavy dose of those M and B tablets, examination of the urine, which was as red as port wine.

Maura came across twice a morning from her job in Stevie Sullivan's. His father came up twice a morning from the chemist's below. Anna Kelly was home from school recovering from measles. She called in too and read to him.

“What would you like? You wouldn't like
Desirée
, it's a great story about Napoleon's girlfriend.”

“No, I'd prefer something else if you wouldn't mind, poetry maybe.”

“Will I do some from our textbook? It could be revision for the exams.”

“No, the only good thing about all this is not having to think of revision or school. Do you know any funny poems?”

“Not by heart, no,” Anna said. They seemed to be at a loss. “I have a book of funny poems at home though…Ogden Nash…would that do?”

“Well, if you're passing.”

“I'll go and get it,” she offered.

“I don't want to waste all your time off.” He was solicitous.

“No, heavens no. Anyway, you're the one with the bad sickness, I only had measles.”

Emmet felt important that he had a serious illness, and was flattered that Anna had gone all the way up to Lakeview Road to get the book.

They loved Ogden Nash. The house rang to the sound of their laughter as they read to each other.

When Kit came back from Dublin she found them there together day after day—her brother Emmet with the yellow skin and the yellowed eyes, Anna Kelly with the dark brown rash of fading measles spots. They looked quite companionable together.