The Glass Lake

“Talk to her.” He gestured eagerly to Maura.

  “Oh, Maura.” Kit burst into tears. “I was so afraid something might have happened to you. Thank God it was only batty old Kathleen.”

  Maura held the receiver for a while before replacing it. She was hardly able to speak with the emotion she felt, that her stepdaughter should cry over her possible safety. It was more than she had ever hoped for. That, and the look of relief and love in Martin’s eyes as he poured them all a large brandy. Purely medicinal of course.

  Sister Madeleine poured out a cup of tea for Mrs. Dillon. “It’s a hard world to understand all right,” she said.

  “I came to you, Sister Madeleine, because you know all about the wickedness that goes on and you’re not above in a pulpit preaching about it and forgiving people or not forgiving them as the case may be.” Mrs. Dillon from the newsagent’s and confectioner’s nodded her head vigorously as she spoke. This was serious praise for the hermit.

  Sister Madeleine accepted the high regard. She didn’t say that it wasn’t actually her position to forgive sins or to ascend a pulpit. It was easier to let people think they had a second line of approach. An alternative confession, if you liked to put it that way.

  The woman was very worried about the behavior of her daughter Orla. “Maybe she should never have married into that clan,” Mrs. Dillon said. “But Father Baily was very anxious that it should be done as quickly as possible not to give scandal, or ‘any more scandal,’ as he put it.” Madeleine murmured and sighed as she always did, and people always took great comfort from it. No blame was being attributed. That was why people loved to come and see her. It was more soothing than anything. But when advice was being sought, she let you work it out.

  “I fear that Orla may be neglecting her child and that I will not stand for.” Mrs. Dillon’s head bobbed up and down. “But Sister Madeleine, you can’t talk to young people these days. They’re not afraid like we were.”

  “She might be afraid of her husband’s brothers though,” Sister Madeleine said eventually. “If you were to hint that they had been drinking somewhere and that a rumor had come to their ears. You might find that that would work wonders.”

  Mrs. Dillon left, thanking the nun as if she had performed a miracle. This is exactly what she would do. That was precisely the route to take. Neither of them commented on the fact that it was a trick, a lie even. It would work.

  Alone now, Sister Madeleine poured a saucer of milk for the blinded kitten that some children had brought her. The vet had said that it would be kinder to have put the animal to sleep but Sister Madeleine said that she would care for it, point it at the food, and keep it safe from anything that might be a danger. It was a frail little thing, trembling as well it might after all that had happened to it in its short life. But she was rewarded with the purring when it realized that its face had been pointed toward something as comforting as bread and milk.

  Then she heard the sound. It was a rough, gasping breath. And very near her door. At first she thought it was an animal; once a deer had come right up to the water’s edge in front of her cottage. But there was a grunt as well.

  Sister Madeleine never felt fear. When the big form loomed up at the doorway she was calm, calmer than the man with the bushy eyebrows and blood-streaked arm, a man who had been in some fight and had been injured. He had very wild eyes and he was more startled to see her than she him. He had thought that the cottage was empty.

  “Don’t move and you won’t get hurt,” he shouted at her.

  Sister Madeleine stood without stirring; her hand was at her neck fingering the simple cross she wore on a chain. Her hair was pulled as always into a short gray veil. Her clothes marked her out as a nun. Not one that lived in a convent perhaps, but with the gray skirt and cardigan, the sensible laced shoes, she could be nothing else. The most nunlike thing about her was the fact that when asked not to move she stayed so utterly still. Her eyes never left his face.

  After what seemed like a very long time his face began to crumple. “Help me, Sister. Please help me,” he said. And the tears began to pour down his face.

  Very gently so as not to frighten him Sister Madeleine moved toward him, and motioned him to a chair. “Sit down, friend,” she said in a slow, calm voice. “Sit down and let me look at your poor arm.”

  “At least it’s not the tinkers,” Sean O’Connor said to his wife.

  “Why should it be the unfortunate tinkers?” she defended them.

  “That’s what I’m saying. No one can say it was them, they’ve all gone off on some outing or horse fair, or whatever it is they do.”

  “If you talked to them more instead of frightening the daylights out of them you’d know what they do,” said Maggie O’Connor.

  “Jesus, isn’t it hard to say anything to anyone these days without being taken up wrong,” said Sean O’Connor, feeling very hard done by.

  They had no idea who had robbed Sullivan’s and battered Kathleen so severely. It looked to be the work of a madman. But how had a madman got away so skillfully? It wasn’t as if anyone in the neighborhood would hide him.

  “It’s no concern of anyone else’s,” Sister Madeleine said as she washed the man’s wound.

  He kept asking her to look out the door, fearing that she would run off and tell someone that he was there. “Don’t get out of where I can see you,” he said, his great frown darkening even further.

  “I have to get more water.” Sister Madeleine spoke simply, without fear or any sense of making excuses. “It comes from the pump outside and then I have to boil it.” He lay back in the chair. There was something about her that made him feel she wouldn’t turn him in.

  “I’m in trouble,” he said eventually.

  “I’m sure you are.” She said it mildly, as if he had said he was from Donegal or from Galway, a matter of no huge concern. She said that the wound didn’t need to be stitched as far as she could see. If she bandaged it up the skin would probably knit together. “You might like to give yourself a bit of a splash out at the pump there. Mind your poor arm of course, try not to wet it…but it would make you more comfortable before we had tea.”

  “Tea?” He couldn’t believe it.

  “I was going to put a lot of sugar in it, it gives you energy when you’ve had an accident.”

  “It wasn’t an accident.”

  “Well, whatever it was. And I have some nice fresh bread that Mrs. Dillon brought…”

  “People come here?” He was alert and watchful.

  “Not at night. Go on now.” She was gentle and firm at the same time.

  Soon he was sitting, half washed and more relaxed, at her table swallowing cup after cup of sugared tea. He had gulped slices of warm buttered bread. “You’re a good woman,” he said eventually.

  “No, I’m the same as anyone else.”

  “You wouldn’t want to let people like me come in and take a loan off you like this. Some of them wouldn’t be decent men like I am.”

  If she was hiding a smile he didn’t see it. “No, I generally find people are generous and decent if you let them be.”

  He pounded on the table with his spoon in agreement. “That’s exactly it, but people don’t let them be. That’s where you’re right.”

  “Would you care to sleep the night here by the fire? There’s a rug and a cushion.”

  His big face almost crumpled. “You don’t understand…you see.”

  “I don’t have to understand. The fire is there if you’d like to stay rather than going out into the wind.”

  “Well, you see, Sister. There’s a possibility that people would come looking for me.”

  “Not in my house, not in the night they wouldn’t.”

  “I wouldn’t sleep easy, I really wouldn’t.”

  She sighed and took him to the door. “Do you see in a straight line from here a big tree on its own away from the others?”

  “Yes.” He squinted into the night.

  “There’s a tree house up there
. Steps in the trunk and up there a secret tree house. Children made it a long time ago.”

  “And would they want it now?”

  “They’re grown up and away from it now.”

  It was the talk of the town. For days Mona Fitz said that her heart was in her mouth because those kind of gangs came back and did post offices, she had read of this happening. Wall’s Hardware put padlocks on every door. If the gang had made their getaway down the back lane they might have seen all the pickings that lay waiting for them in Wall’s. They could come back again another day.

  Dan and Mildred O’Brien in the Central Hotel were depressed. The place was bad enough, they said, without having the reputation of a town where there were armed robberies. And of course it was written up in the local press.

  THERE was extensive coverage in the paper that Lena bought every week. She read the details of what seemed a violent and senseless crime. Without having to be told she could sense the town’s relief that Maura McMahon had been on an errand of mercy and was not in her customary position. Reading between the lines, she knew that Kathleen Sullivan would have been snooping.

  It was not news that gave her any pleasure to read but at least it provided an excuse to write again to Kit.

  I read with concern about the events in the garage across the road from where you live. I just wanted you to know how sympathetic I feel and how I hope everyone has recovered from the shock. I do not wish you to feel that you always have to acknowledge every note I write to you. But when I feel such an urge to let you know how very involved and concerned I am, I’m sure you will forgive me for writing.

  She signed it Lena.

  “KIT, I was going to sort of say that you and I were going off together for a weekend,” Clio said on the phone.

  “Why were you going to sort of say that?”

  “Because I’m going off for a weekend.”

  “And…”

  “You know the way Aunt Maura’s always poking her nose into things and asking am I all right…”

  “Yes.” Kit didn’t mind it, as it happened. Maura only asked enough to make sure that they had enough money, entertainment, sources of clean clothes. She didn’t question them about their friends. But then, of course, Clio was probably up to no good and felt threatened by even the simplest request for information.

  “So I thought I’d say you and I had gone to Cork. It’s the kind of thing we might do.”

  “It’s nothing like the kind of thing we might do.”

  “Well, will you go along with it?”

  “When for? Where are you going, Clio?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “You do. You’re going off to lose your virginity with that terrible Michael O’Connor, aren’t you?”

  “Kit, really!”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Well, possibly.”

  “Oh, you’re such an eejit.”

  “Sorry, Sister Mary Katherine, I didn’t realize I was talking to a fully professed nun.”

  “I didn’t mean it, I mean him.”

  “Just because you don’t like his brother…”

  “I don’t like him and neither do you, Clio. You only like that they’re rich.”

  “That’s not true. I’ve met his family and I like them. I don’t care whether they’re wealthy or not.”

  “I’ve met a bit of their family in that fellow Kevin and I don’t like him at all. I especially don’t like what he’s been saying about me. I wish I could get back at him…I’ll think of a way.”

  “Oh, don’t make such a drama out of it,” Clio complained. “They’re very nice really. They have this elder sister, Mary Paula. You never saw anything like her clothes, you wouldn’t believe it. And she’s been everywhere…hotels in Switzerland, France…everywhere.”

  “Did she train? As a hotel manager?”

  “No, I think it was just experience. She was in this great skiing place.”

  “Lots of opportunities for skiing jobs in Ireland,” Kit said sarcastically.

  “Oh, stop condemning them all. Listen, what are you doing that weekend anyway?”

  “As it happens I am going to Cork to stay with Frankie,” Kit said. “But you can’t come, either of you.”

  “That’s all right, I’ll just say I’m going there and that will provide some kind of smoke screen. What’s her second name?”

  “Who?”

  “Frankie?”

  “I don’t know, I never asked.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a pain and a prig, Kit…I’ll make up a name. God, you’re so uncooperative. Sometimes I think you’re getting as mad as your mother.” There was a silence.

  Kit hung up.

  Frankie and Kit laughed all the way down to Cork on the train.

  A fat old man bought them fizzy orange drinks and chocolate biscuits. He said he loved to see young girls eat and drink and laugh.

  “That’s all he’s going to see,” Frankie whispered to Kit.

  “We can’t take another one. Stop, Frankie, you’re going too far.” Kit felt guilty as the man looked at them excitedly, hoping for something…possibly a squeeze…in return for his heavy investment.

  “It’s his choice,” Frankie said.

  They got a bus to the town where she lived in County Cork. It was bigger than Lough Glass but not much. Frankie’s father ran a pub…he said that when he had a daughter a hotel manager and a son a solicitor he was going to retire, sell the pub and that was his plan. Frankie’s mother said he would never retire. He would be carried out of the pub with his arm still up in the position of pulling pints. He had done it since he was eighteen years old, he knew no other life.

  They were happy, easygoing people. Much less full of nonsense and questions about her background than the Kellys would have been, but somehow less stylish and elegant than her mother would have made her house for a guest. Kit wondered why she thought of her mother suddenly. The house in Lough Glass had been run by Maura for a sizable time now. Why did she think of it as her mother’s place still?

  She wondered if she should write to Lena again but there wasn’t a reason. She was not going to start a correspondence all over again. Not after all the lies. All the deception.

  Frankie’s brother Paddy came home from Dublin too. He had got a lift from a fellow who had a hopeless car; he wasn’t in until nearly midnight.

  “Oh good,” he said when he saw Kit. “A nice bird for the weekend.”

  “Not really,” Kit said loftily.

  “You know what I mean, it was a term of admiration,” he said.

  “Oh well, thank you, then,” she said good-naturedly.

  Paddy was a law student. He attended lectures in the Four Courts, he said. And that was the bit that had some freedom about it, the rest was being apprenticed to his mother’s brother, which was like being a galley slave.

  “He’s not that bad, is he?” Frankie defended her uncle.

  “Easy to say if you don’t have to work for him…still, it’s a good training.”

  They sat companionably in Frankie’s father’s pub. Paddy was drinking half pints of stout, the girls were drinking bitter lemon. A few regulars who didn’t feel it necessary to observe the licensing hours were sitting around with the air of people who had a perfect right to be there and wouldn’t cause any trouble just as long as they were left in peace.

  Paddy told the girls about some of the work he had to do.

  Debt collecting was the side of it he hated most. It meant going into houses where women with children in their arms tried to explain why money hadn’t been paid by a man who was not there to make the explanation himself.

  You saw all of life in a solicitor’s office, he said. They had people with no lights on bicycles, applications for publican’s licenses, a woman who had choked eating a piece of poultry that had not been properly carved. Now they’d better watch out for that sort of thing when they were hotel managers, because she had got quite a lot of compensation, as it happened.

>   And there was a claim for damages for a woman who got a big scar on her face. It diminished her chances of marriage so she would get a lump sum.

  “Is it only women who get that money for disfigurement, or is it men as well?”

  “Only women, in terms of losing marriage prospects,” Paddy said cheerfully. “Men could get married if they had faces crisscrossed with scars, it wouldn’t affect their chances at all.”

  “That’s very unfair, isn’t it?” Kit said. “It sort of says that women can get married only if they look all right.”

  “It’s true,” Paddy said. “And this woman is entitled to big compensation. What does a woman have to offer anyway except her appearance and her reputation?”

  Frankie laughed. “That’s straight from the nuns,” she said.

  “Well, it’s case law, as it happens,” Paddy said. “If you take a woman’s reputation away falsely you have to pay.”

  “Tell me more about that,” said Kit, her eyes shining with excitement. “Tell me all about that, I’m fascinated.”

  They had great fun during the weekend writing the letter. Paddy said that the more threatening you made it, the greater the chance of there being a craven response.

  “We’re looking for high compensation here,” he said. “That fellow is the son of Fingers O’Connor. He’s very well known, he wouldn’t want any scandal getting out. He’ll pay all right.”

  “I don’t expect him to pay,” Kit said. “I just want to terrify him.”

  “Anyway, you’re not a real solicitor,” Frankie said.

  “He won’t know that if we use the office stationery,” Paddy said.

  Kit sent a postcard to Lena. It was a picture of the Blarney Stone in Cork, the place you were meant to kiss and then you got the gift of the gab forever, or so they told the tourists.

  Having a nice weekend here with friends. Thank you for your inquiry about the drama in Lough Glass. It’s all passed over now, though nobody has a clue who did it or why.

  Look after yourself,