The Glass Lake

  “No, of course you didn’t.” Grace grinned.

  “But I can’t stop thinking about it…all the time everywhere, at home, at work, in bed, even here. And I’m going to find out…I really am. I can’t sleep until I know.”

  “Not much sign of sleep recently.” Grace gently touched the dark shadows under Lena’s eyes. Lena wanted to cry and hold the woman close to her. But it was a public place, and she had years and years experience at hiding her feelings.

  “Think of something nice, think of something you really know is constant and true…”

  “My daughter,” Lena said.

  Grace looked up, startled. In all the time they had known each other the previous life had not been discussed. Only Ivy knew the whole story.

  “How old is she?” Grace asked gently.

  “Soon to be seventeen.”

  “That’s a great age, they’re lovely at seventeen. And can you talk to her?”

  “No, not directly.”

  “Why?”

  “She thinks I’m dead,” Lena said. And wondered had anyone in the world ever felt so lonely before.

  “Well well, don’t you look a treat,” he said in the restaurant.

  And indeed she did, Grace had worked miracles.

  “Have to send you off with a good memory of me,” she said, smiling at him.

  “I wish it wasn’t only the memory.”

  “So do I, but honestly it’s only a weekend…there’ll be others.” She was determined to make a virtue out of it now that it had to be done this way.

  His eyes were on her, she could feel them without looking up. “You look so alive…” he said.

  “Thank you, Louis.”

  “Let’s have a glass of wine and go home, hey…?”

  “What! We’ve only just arrived.”

  “We can be home in a few minutes…I can’t go away to the wilds and leave unfinished business behind me.” He wanted her now. She could still arouse him, make him desire her.

  Lena smiled. “Well, I said let’s have lunch like people do in the movies…but this is even better,” she said, and went ahead of him out of the restaurant.

  They ran like youngsters down the road, and if Ivy heard them come in she didn’t come out to make conversation.

  When they got into the flat he held her very tight. “There’s no other woman in the world for me except you, Lena,” he said. “Oh God, I need you so much. I can’t tell you how much I need you.”

  Afterward she helped Louis pack his case.

  “I’m a very understanding man,” he said as she folded his shirts.

  “And tell me, Louis Gray, how is that?” She was determined to laugh and be happy with him. No letting away with the memory of a grousing, sulking woman at home.

  “My wife doesn’t do her duty, her conjugal duty, and accompany me on a works outing.” His smile across the case was heartbreaking.

  “Aha, but I’m not your wife, Louis.”

  “Well, whose fault is that? I must be the only man in the world teamed up with a woman who is officially dead. I’d marry you tomorrow if I could. You know that.”

  “Do I?” She couldn’t help the question.

  “Well, if you don’t know you’ll never know.” He reached into the shelf of the cupboard where they kept his underwear. As he took out his folded underpants, vests, and socks two packets of condoms remained deliberately on the shelf.

  “Not much point in taking those if I can’t take you,” he said.

  “None at all,” Lena laughed.

  But her laugh was hollow. There were many chemists where such things could be bought between here and Scarborough.

  I suppose it’s because I’m so involved in an employment agency that I wonder about what you’ll do when you leave school, Lena wrote to Kit. You see, girls get such a poor start because nobody gives them any proper career advice at all. You don’t talk much about the future, and I am very interested in what you are going to decide to do.

  You never say whether you’d like to be taken on in the pharmacy or not, or whether you want to go to university.

  She didn’t expect a reply so soon.

  It’s funny you should ask that question just then, but I’ve been thinking I’d love to do hotel management. Now there are things for this and against. The main thing against is this boy, Philip O’Brien. I’ve told you all about him. He’s very nice, but he sort of likes me more than I like him. I’m not the kind of girl people fancy much, so it’s quite nice…but I wouldn’t want him to get the notion that I was going to enroll in Cathal Brugha Street, the hotel school, just to follow him, or be with him.

  Lots of times he has talked about us running the hotel together in Lough Glass, and honestly, Lena, if you saw it you’d prefer to be in partnership with the Draculas running their castle.

  I do know it, Lena thought grimly, and I never heard a better description. The letter went on.

  Your husband is in a hotel, maybe I could come and work in that for summer experience…if you could put in a word for me.

  Lena sat for a while with the letter in her hand. It was a grotesque thought that Louis might all unknowingly start a relationship with her daughter. A beautiful dark-haired girl with dancing eyes. Almost seventeen years old, a prize for any man who might think he was growing old. What a cruel fate to allow a situation where mother and daughter would be seduced by the same man. Where daughter and mother would share Louis Gray as a first lover. It was of course entirely impossible as a scene even to fantasize about.

  Kit could never come to London. Kit could never meet her. She only had Ivy’s address, with Ivy’s name. There were no names on bells that would identify their flat, suppose Kit were to come. Kit didn’t know the name of Millar’s Employment Agency. She didn’t know the name of the hotel where Louis worked. The name Dryden had not been allowed to appear in any letter.

  She knew Louis’s name, of course, but that was all.

  Lena wrote:

  The problem is, Kit, that everything has changed here. The hotel industry has changed. Louis never had any real written qualifications, so he’s moving. He’s going into marketing, everyone seems to think that’s where the future lies. He is in Scarborough at the moment trying to sort out his future…so he’d be no use to you at all. I miss him a lot I can tell you. The weekend seems very long…

  Kit read the letter. She read it over and over. It was obvious that Lena and Louis had had a row. They might even be going to separate, divorce possibly. It was England after all, where such things could happen.

  She wished she had a phone number, she could ring her and say something helpful. But what could she say, Kit McMahon, almost seventeen and studying for her Leaving Certificate. Kit who knew nothing about men except that she really didn’t want Philip O’Brien to go on kissing her. Imagine her being able to say something helpful to Lena Gray, who was so confident and ran a huge agency and had a handsome husband.

  Many times in her letters she had said things that made Kit know Louis was handsome. Like he had a new jacket, or how well he had looked in the car they had been lent that time, or the night he had worn the dinner jacket for the formal function. Kit knew that Lena Gray must be beautiful too. It was clear to see that Louis Gray would want to have a beautiful wife.

  On Saturday Lena played gin rummy with Mrs. Park.

  “I wish I had more people to play cards with…the days are very long,” she said.

  “Why don’t you move to the little close I was telling you about before…they have a dining room where everyone has their lunch, then you all go back to your own flats in the evening…that way there are plenty of people to play cards with all afternoon.”

  Was she imagining it, or did Mrs. Park look wistful? “Oh well, we’ll wait and see,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s not like you, Mrs. Park. A fine, decisive woman like yourself…surely you must make up your own mind.”

  “Lena, you don’t understand. You don’t have children of your own. Jess
ie is very dependent on me, she loves to come home and make my lunch. Her day is built around it. She might think I didn’t need her…”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Mrs. Park,” she said. “From what Jessie tells me, I know she’d love to think you had more of a life of your own.”

  “But what about her life?”

  “I could involve her in more social outings if I thought you were able to take care of yourself more. I don’t like to ask her to socialize when I think she feels she should go home to you.”

  “I’m not sure that you’re right.” Mrs. Park was doubtful.

  “I think I am, but then, I may not be. Why don’t you test it out, suggest it to Jessie when she comes home.”

  “And you’d be able to get her to go out a bit and meet people.”

  “I would, Mrs. Park, truly I would.”

  “You’re very kind, Lena Gray, but you don’t understand how it is between a mother and daughter. You want the very best for your girl, it’s like that from the moment they’re born. Nothing can ever get in the way of it…”

  “I’m sure you’re right, Mrs. Park,” said Lena Gray, with a forced smile on her face.

  Ivy moved her curtain. Lena stopped at the door.

  “All right, Florence Nightingale? Are you going to come in and have a chat?”

  “You don’t need to cheer me up,” Lena said.

  “No, selfish, I don’t. But maybe I want to be cheered up myself,” Ivy said.

  “You!” Lena raised her eyes to heaven.

  “Yes, me.” Ivy’s mouth was in a tight line. Perhaps for once she was in low spirits. Lena went in and sat down. “It’s Charlotte,” Ivy said.

  “Charlotte? What’s she done now?” Lena had scant patience with the dog-in-the-manger wife. Charlotte did not appear to want Ernest for herself, and yet she would let no one else have him.

  “She’s gone and got cancer, that’s what,” Ivy said.

  “No!”

  “Yes. That’s what he said. He left an hour ago. On the way back to the hospital. She won’t come out, Lena.”

  Lena looked at her blankly. It was one of those very rare times when she didn’t know what to say. Part of her wanted to be glad, glad that the unknown woman who had stood between Ivy and happiness would no longer be there. But she couldn’t rejoice in another woman’s cancer. “Where had she got it, Ivy?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “And an operation?”

  “No use.”

  “How is Ernest taking it?”

  “Hard to know. He was very quiet. He just said he wanted to sit here. We hardly said anything.” Ivy looked up at her pitifully, her eyes were red from crying. “Do you know, Lena. I’ve been sitting here thinking, it may be that there’s nothing to say.” Lena looked bewildered. She didn’t follow what Ivy meant. “We left it too long, too late.”

  “But you’re always so close, every Friday of the year…nearly.”

  “Fooling ourselves probably. When Charlotte’s gone it will all be gone. Mark my words.”

  “No, I won’t mark your words. What a silly expression. It’s like ‘wait and see.’ What do these things mean?”

  “It’s only a saying,” Ivy said. “You say lots of things that mean half nothing too, Irish things.”

  “Well, what were you trying to say?” Lena’s voice was more gentle.

  “I suppose I’m saying that it lasted only because it was impossible. Now that this bloody illness might make it possible he’s off like a bat out of hell.”

  Lena saw the pain in her friend’s face. “Listen, of course he’s upset. He’s guilty too, and relieved, and guilty about being relieved. He’s a mass of feeling, why pick out the worst one to dwell on…?”

  “If you’ve loved someone for as long as I have you can read them like a book.”

  “You can read them wrong sometimes,” Lena said.

  She might have been wrong herself about Louis. She might have imagined this whole thing about him being interested in someone else, asking some other woman to go on the trip with him and then being left suddenly in the lurch. It was possible after all.

  And look at how he had been so loving yesterday afternoon before he went on the train. And remember how excited he was about the new apartment. And how he said he’d miss her and find it hard to sleep without her in the bed, where she was meant to be. It was possible, wasn’t it, that she might have been working too hard and seeing dangers where there were none.

  Maybe somebody outside could see better. Like Grace, for example.

  “Had you thought he might have been telling the truth?” Grace had asked. “That he really didn’t know spouses were invited.”

  “No, I hadn’t thought that,” Lena had replied. “Which shows how very deeply I mistrust him.” And Grace had tried to give her a hope that she was brushing aside.

  Just as she was doing now to Ivy. Trying to convince her that the love of a lifetime had not been wasted. “Do you know, Ivy, women are wonderful. I wish the world were run by women.”

  “It is,” said Ivy, with a trace of her former self returning.

  Lena woke with a headache on Sunday morning. She would so love to have been waking in Scarborough in Louis’s arms. What was it that James Williams had said when he was describing it to her…just a little holiday to thank the employees for putting in such antisocial hours…a chance for them to be with their wives in nice surroundings.

  She must have been insane to have arranged all these million things to do. Minding Mrs. Park, supervising carpenters that she had hijacked from Ernest’s pub to do finishing touches to the new flat in Ivy’s house and to the office. She must have been crazy to offer those girls extra money to come in on Sunday and set the place up properly.

  The day seemed very long. She kept thinking of other things. Like what they were doing on a sunny Sunday in Lough Glass. She knew so much more about the place now than when she lived there. She could write a book about the people of the small lakeside community just based on Kit’s letters. She wondered about Jessie and Jim Millar. Maybe this weekend would be the one where they would make up their minds. Or rather Jim would. Jessie’s mind was already made up. She thought about Ivy and her love for the strange, dour Ernest. She thought of the woman Charlotte whom she had never met, lying in a hospital bed which she would never leave. Did this woman believe in God and that he was going to take her to heaven?

  But then, did anyone believe in God? Lena wondered.

  How could Martin McMahon, a man she could have sworn had a firm personal faith in a God who was all-powerful, possibly contemplate a bigamous marriage with Maura Hayes?

  He knew she was alive, Martin knew that he had a living wife.

  Lena shook her head in disbelief at the thought of him standing in the church in Lough Glass while Father Baily pronounced him and Maura man and wife, having asked anyone to say if they knew any reason why they shouldn’t be joined together.

  Possibly Kit was imagining it all. The child might be lonely, well she must be lonely otherwise she wouldn’t pour her heart and soul out like that in letters. Maybe she hoped for a pleasant, placid, unchallenging stepmother to replace the mother she had loved so much. The mother who was taken from her by her father’s arrogance and vanity.

  As these thoughts went through her head Lena worked on, organizing the new shelf space, encouraging the girls to fill it in the correct manner. Never again would they be confused about application forms, leaflets, documentation. This was a very professional setup.

  She had even thought of a picnic for them, and as they all sat down to eat at three-thirty Lena said that she thought they had done brilliantly.

  “But you’re paying us until six, we’d better eat up quickly,” Dawn said.

  Beautiful Dawn, who could have been a cover girl with her flawless skin and her shining hair. She looked years younger than she must be.

  “No, you’ve worked like slaves, you all get paid until six, but relax, let’s enjoy the feeling that we set up
a great office.” Lena raised her cup of coffee from the blue and gold mugs, the mugs that were used to give clients coffee when they came to call and discuss work.

  They tidied up and finished the sandwiches she had brought for them, and the shortbread biscuits. And she gave them each an envelope. “Go out and enjoy what little there is of the weekend,” she said.

  They ran like children released from school. They were hardly more than that, the two younger ones. Dawn hung back for a moment. “That was fun, Mrs. Gray, I did enjoy it…nobody could ever have told me that a while back…that I’d enjoy working on a Sunday, but I did.”

  “Don’t run yourself down, Dawn…you could be a business tycoon if you wanted,” Lena laughed at her.

  “No, I’m not cut out for it. Finding me a nice rich husband, that’s what I’ll start to doing soon.”

  “Marriage isn’t the only goal.”

  “How can you say that, Mrs. Gray…you’ve got a gorgeous husband.”

  “What…?” Lena had forgotten for a moment that of course Dawn had worked in the Dryden some time back. She would have known Louis then. “That’s true, Dawn, I’ve been very lucky.”

  “He’s lucky too,” Dawn said. She looked as if she were going to say more but changed her mind. Lena waited. “Very lucky too,” Dawn said. Then she went out into the warm London air.

  Lena sat at her desk and wondered whether Louis could possibly have had any kind of fling with Dawn Jones. Maybe he had even asked her to go to this conference with him and that she had changed her mind.

  Dawn Jones, born in 1932, would have been a golden-haired moppet when Lena went up the aisle to her loveless marriage. It wasn’t possible. Then she took a deep breath. No, it wasn’t possible. This was the way to go mad. The surefire way to end up in a mental hospital.

  Louis loved her, he told her that, he would be home to her tonight. Dawn was a brainless child. Louis probably hardly met her when she was in the Dryden, she had worked for James Williams. It was only because she was so tired and had so much on her mind. The phone rang shrilly beside her as she sat in the empty office. It was Jessie.