And there would be no questioning, no trying to defend the indefensible.
As it was here in Earl’s Court in the busy room where there was hardly a square inch of the wallpaper showing. The wall was covered with shelves of knickknacks and there were pictures of outings long ago. A big mirror was almost useless as a looking glass since so many letters and postcards had been wedged into its frame. There were vases of colored glass, gnomes, little egg cups, and souvenir ashtrays. And yet the place had the same feel. A place where you could be yourself.
And where no one would demand any explanation that you might not be ready to give.
And very simply, as if it had all been intended, Lena Gray began to tell Ivy Brown the story. The tea was poured, the packet of biscuits opened. And when it got to the bit about last Sunday, the discovery of the newspaper, the phone call home, Ivy stood up and without a word produced two small glasses and a bottle of brandy. Lena opened her handbag and showed the cutting. At no stage did Ivy’s small, quizzical face look anything except sympathetic. It registered no shock, no disbelief, not even as they smoothed out the newspaper page and read of the death that had distressed everyone so much. Ivy seemed to take it all in, and to realize the enormity without resorting to panic.
Sister Madeleine never reached out and touched you. She gave warmth and support without the clasp or the embrace. Ivy Brown was the same. She stood across at the far side of her sitting room and leaned against the chest of drawers that held all her records.
Her arms were crossed. She looked like the kind of picture you would see in a newspaper to illustrate the British housewife. All that was needed was to have her hair in curlers. Her floral apron was tied tightly around her small frame, her mouth set in a grim line as she listened to the tale unfolding. The waves of solidarity and support were almost tangible. If she had held a weeping Lena close to her breast, she couldn’t have radiated more concern.
“Well, love,” she said after a long pause. “You’ve made up your mind, haven’t you?”
“No.” Lena was surprised. She had never been so much at sea.
“You have, Lena.” Ivy was very sure.
“Why do you say that? What have I decided to do?”
“You’re not going to phone them, love. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re not going to do a thing. You’re going to let them think you’re dead.”
They talked for what must have been hours.
Lena told of how Louis had loved her and left her. How he had come back. How this was the life she had dreamed of. She painted a picture of Martin McMahon that she hoped was fair. Until yesterday she would have spoken with admiration and deep affection. There would have been guilt, even though she had kept her part of the bargain to the letter.
But the letter was it.
His reaction had killed any feeling that she ever had for him. The man was a monster, a victim of small-town respectability. They went through it bit by bit, as she had done with Louis. The possibility of the letter not getting to him. The eventual knowledge that this must not be a reasonable thing to suppose.
But with Ivy it was not tense to talk. She didn’t have to fear upsetting her at every turn. And in the end Ivy was as unshaken as she had been at the outset.
Louis Gray was the love of Lena’s life. She had waited for him for thirteen years, and now they were together. Ivy and Lena both knew that nothing would be done that would jeopardize this.
“But my children?” Lena’s voice was shaky. It was as if she knew that tears were not far away.
“What can you give them by going back?” Ivy asked. The silence between them was not a hostile one. Lena tried to think. She could hold them, and stroke them. But that would be taking, not giving. She might shame them. And then she would leave them again anyway. “Why do you have to leave them twice?” Ivy asked. “Wasn’t once hard enough?”
“If they drag the lake and don’t find a body, they’ll know I’m not dead…they’ll start looking…” As she spoke Lena knew she had begun to make up her mind. She was in fact only hunting for flaws or danger areas in the plan.
“You said it was a deep lake.”
“Yes, yes.”
“So there may well have been people who drowned there and were never found.”
“Yes, that’s true…”
“You love him, Lena…let him know you’re not going back to your other life. Let him be very sure. He doesn’t want you wavering or dithering.”
“He left me to waver and dither for half a lifetime.”
“Yes. But you forgave him, you ran off with him. Don’t end up losing them all.”
“Maybe I only ran after a dream.” Lena did not sound convinced. She said it only so that Ivy would contradict her.
“It seems substantial enough. Don’t lose him, Lena. There’ll be too many waiting to catch him if you let him fall from your grasp.” She seemed to speak with great authority.
“Do you know all this because you did it?”
“No, love. I know it because I didn’t do it.” Lena looked at her blankly. “Ernest, in the pub. He may not be a looker like your Louis is…but he’s the man I loved…and still do.”
“Ernest? That we met on Friday?”
“Ernest that I’ve met every Friday for years now.”
“Why do you meet him on Fridays?”
“Because it’s what makes the week have a bit of purpose for me…and because his cow of a wife goes to her mother on Fridays.”
“And what happened?”
“I hadn’t the guts. I wasn’t brave enough.” Again the silence was an easy one. Ivy refilled their brandy glasses. “I worked in the pub with him. I’d just started when the war broke out. Ron, that’s my husband, he was called up. Anyway, it was a good time then. It sounds silly to say we all enjoyed the war, but you know what I mean. Folk were very friendly. You didn’t know whether anyone would be here next week. It made for a lot of shortcuts. I might never have got to know Ernest if it hadn’t been for the time…. You see, there were air-raid warnings, and we went down to shelters, and we all listened to the radio in the pub. It was very close, like people being wrecked together after a ship goes down.”
Ivy smiled at the memory of it all. “He had two children and Charlotte was all eyes of course, suspecting things before they even began. And there was lots of chat about our brave boys fighting at the front and the tarts of wives having a great time running around. Everyone got the drift of it, it made things very unpleasant.”
“And did you love Ron at all?”
“No. Not like I knew love was when I met Ernest. You see, girls just got married then. And I wasn’t a raving beauty as you can see. I didn’t get many offers. I was glad to take Ron. I was twenty-nine, nearly thirty, when we married. He was ten years older. He wanted everything just so. He liked a nice clean house, a good meal on the table. He didn’t ever want to go out. When we didn’t have children he didn’t seem all that put out. I think he thought they’d mess up the house. I went and got myself tested and all, but he wouldn’t. I said we might adopt and he said he wouldn’t raise another man’s son.”
“Oh Ivy, I’m so sorry.”
“Yes. Well, it was no worse than a lot of people had. And from what you say, people in your Lough Glass put up with whatever hand they were dealt too.”
“Absolutely. All of them except me.”
“Well, I had your chance and didn’t take it. That’s why I know what I’m talking about….”
“Ernest?” Lena asked.
“Yes. He said we should go off together. But I was guilty. I was dead guilty. There I was, my husband out fighting for his country. Ernest with a wife and family. I was afraid. Afraid he’d regret it, that I wouldn’t be woman enough for him. Afraid that Ron would have a breakdown…. I didn’t go, you see.”
“And what happened in the pub?”
“The pub. Yes. There was more action there than there was out at the front, I tell you. Charlotte seemed to know all about it by radar. She kne
w when he had asked me to go with him, and when I had said no. She picked her time perfectly. She said that she’d like me to leave and not darken the door again while she was on the premises. I left that day.”
“What did you do?”
“I went back to our flat and I cleaned it until it shone. When Ron came home from the war he had less to say than before he went. He was very discontented…the country didn’t appreciate the soldiers, he said. There was no pleasing him. And then the lovely Charlotte wrote to him and told him that she thought he ought to know. It drove him over the top. He said I was filth and I was disgusting and he didn’t want to know. There’s a nice depressing story for you, isn’t it, love?”
“What are you telling me?”
“I’m telling you I have my Friday nights.”
“And Ron?”
“He left. It was strange really. He just said he wanted to hear no more about it. He moved out that very week, the week he heard from Charlotte.”
“And did you want him to stay?”
“At the time I suppose I did. I was frightened. I had no one, I had nothing to show for my life. But of course he had to go, he hated me, and I didn’t even know him. I moved here to this flat…it was as different to the place we had together as you could imagine. I cleaned the house, and I did cleaning in other houses. I got the money together and when the house went on the market I got a mortgage and bought it.”
“Wasn’t that wonderful?” Lena’s eyes shone with admiration.
“Cold comfort, as they say. Believe me, Lena, very cold. When I think of what I could have had.”
“And did you think…will she…suppose she…”
“It’s too late, love, I made my decision. I let go of my chance.”
There was a silence.
“I know what you’re telling me,” Lena said eventually.
“You have him, you love him, you’ve always loved him. If you ring them at home you’ll have lost everything.”
“So I have to fake being dead?”
“You never pretended to be dead. You left a letter telling what you did. You can’t be blamed for what they think.”
“Kit and Emmet?” Lena’s face was white.
“This way they’ll remember you with love, not hate.”
“I don’t think I can do it.”
“I’ve seen you look at him. You’ll do it,” said Ivy.
Louis was back in high good humor at seven-thirty in the morning. “So you’re going to take the day off and spoil me?” he asked, head on one side, looking at her with the half smile she loved so much.
“Better than that,” Lena said to him. “I’m going to drag you into bed with me now, and love you to death, then let you sleep peacefully for the day.”
He was about to complain. But she had already taken off her blouse slowly in the way he liked to see her undress. “You’re a very bossy lady,” he said. She had started to unbutton his shirt.
He was asleep before she left the flat.
“You always look so bright and cheerful, Mrs. Gray,” said Mr. Millar approvingly. She looked up at him from her desk, pleased.
She had crept from her bed so as not to wake Louis, she had dressed in the bathroom, she had run along through the rush hour crowds on wet streets. Her mind was racing at the enormity of allowing her children to think of her evermore as having drowned in the lake beside their home. She had miscarried a child.
And yet this man thought she looked bright and cheerful.
Back in Lough Glass people always thought she looked tired. “Have you had the flu, Mrs. McMahon?” they might ask in Hickey’s, the butchers. “Do you need a tonic at all?” Peter Kelly had boomed so often. “You look pale, Helen my love,” Martin must have said a hundred times a year.
But here in the midst of terrible confusion but with the man she loved they all told her she looked blooming and happy. It must prove something.
“It’s a very nice place to work, Mr. Millar, and it’s great to be in at the start of such new changes with you and Miss Park.”
Lena Gray had brightened up their office and their lives. She could see this in their faces and it made her feel better than ever.
The days passed. Sometimes they flew by, and Lena wondered how it could be time to close, she could hardly remember having reached lunchtime. Other days time went so slowly, she wondered was the world coming to an end and had everything slowed down. She roamed the secondhand shops and auction rooms of London and found wonderful wall hangings and Indian bedspreads to drape the shabby furniture in the flat. She bought a briefcase, a leather one with brass locks, for Louis. She polished it until it shone.
“Not really essential for a hall porter,” he said ruefully.
“Come on out of that. How many times have they asked you to do night manager? Your portering days are drawing to a close.”
And indeed they did.
Soon Louis was working on the night desk three times a week. And it didn’t seem fitting for the guests to meet someone they had known in the administration to appear carrying their bags.
One evening Lena went with him to see where he worked.
“I can imagine you much better if I see it,” she said.
He hadn’t wanted it at first. “It’s very hard to explain why…” he said. “I sort of play a role at work, you know, I’m not my real self.”
“Neither am I,” Lena agreed.
And he had let her come.
Mr. Williams, the manager, had been impressed with the handsome dark-haired woman the Irishman had produced. “No wonder he had been keeping you hidden,” Mr. Williams said.
Lena knew just how to reply. “Ah, that’s very flattering of you, Mr. Williams, but it’s all my fault. I’m still so unfamiliar with London…” She was throwing herself on his mercy, saying she was a country person who didn’t understand the big city.
Not flirting, that would have been crass.
It was exactly the right course to have taken. Mr. Williams, a large, bluff man, became protective and gallant. “I hope you have both taken to the place. Louis is a very valued employee.”
“Oh, we intend to make a good life here, I assure you. London has so much to offer.”
“I’m surprised you can leave this attractive wife and work here at night…”
Lena spoke quickly. “It wouldn’t be my choice, Mr. Williams. But I know that if Louis wants to work his way to working on the desk in the daytime, he has to put in his hours at the more antisocial end of things as well.” They all smiled. This was not a couple who groaned or complained. But it was a couple who intended to move upward.
It was not long before Louis Gray was offered a position on the desk as an assistant manager. He was unfailingly courteous to those who had worked with him as porters. Particularly the head porter, who had been so difficult when he came first.
The Christmas lights were going up in London. Lena forced her mind away from the trains of thought that brought her down the road to Hickey’s to order the turkey. There would be no decorations above McMahon’s pharmacy this year.
As she had guessed, Ivy did not refer to the conversation they had had together on the wet Tuesday night when Lena had decided against ringing Lough Glass. If Ivy understood how strange and hard the decision had been she gave no sign, instead just little gestures of friendship. A pot of homemade jam that someone had given her, a couple of records that she didn’t play anymore. Lena knew that these were a gift because she had heard Louis say how much he loved Singing in the Rain.
Ivy made no mention of Christmas. She must have known that it would be a time of tension and drama for the young couple on the second floor. Sometimes Lena wondered about the kind of Christmases Louis had spent during the long years of their separation. But part of the promise and the plan had been that they would not talk about the past.
He would not ask about sleeping with her husband. She would not ask him about the times and the people and the places she knew nothing of.
I
t worked very well. They had their own little world. Sometimes he came to Sunday Mass with her, sometimes not. It was easier when he didn’t go with her, then she could buy the paper and read about what was happening in Lough Glass and the places for fifty miles around it. She read of land bought and sold—of children born, of people buried.
And on Sunday, December 21st, when she went to the big church in Quex Road, Kilburn, to pray that God would help her sort out how to make Christmas a good Christmas for Louis and herself, Lena made a deal with God. She said to him that he had always loved sinners, and shown them mercy and that if her only sin had been to run away with Louis, then God might see it with a more forgiving eye.
“So,” Lena said, “I don’t cheat, I don’t steal, I don’t lie, apart from the one big one that we are husband and wife. I don’t say bad things about people, I don’t blaspheme, I don’t miss Mass.” She had no way of knowing if God went along with the deal. But then, even if you weren’t living in mortal sin you often didn’t know whether God was going along with the deal either. You had to try and interpret his answers in your heart. It was hard to interpret sometimes. Especially in a big strange church with a lot of coughing and sneezing. It was a cold December day.
Lena went to the kiosk and bought the paper that told her of home. She read that her body had been found in the lake. That a verdict of death by misadventure had been returned. And that a large crowd had attended her funeral at the parish church in Lough Glass. Through her tears she saw that the chief mourners had been the late woman’s husband, Martin McMahon of the Lough Glass pharmacy, her daughter, Mary Katherine, and her son, Emmet John. Their mother was dead and buried now in the churchyard. Someone else’s bones had been found. And identified as hers.