Lena thought suddenly, and knew somehow, God had acted for her. Perhaps he had answered her prayers. Lena had no decision to make now.
Now she could never go home.
Chapter Four
LILIAN Kelly brought up the subject again. “Peter, I wish you’d put it more clearly to Martin. Tell him to bring the lot of them here for their Christmas dinner.”
“I suggested it…”
“Ah, you only suggested it. Tell them it would be the right thing to do. And that girl of theirs in the kitchen too if he’s worried about her. She can help Lizzie here, Lizzie’d be glad of it. They don’t want to be sitting looking at each other in that house after all that happened there.”
“Nothing happened there, Lilian,” Peter Kelly said. He was reading a medical journal as always, and seemed to give little attention to his wife.
Lilian appealed to her sister Maura, who had come to join them for the Christmas holiday. “Come on, Maura. Tell him they can’t sit there looking at each other….”
“But they’re going to have to sometime,” Maura said. “Maybe they should get used to it rather than running away.”
Peter looked up, surprised. “That’s what Martin said himself.”
“Well then.” Maura seemed pleased.
In the hotel Dan O’Brien asked Mildred did she think they should ask the McMahons in for their Christmas dinner.
“We don’t want to be imposing on them.”
“It wouldn’t be imposing, it would be a kindness.” Dan didn’t relish the thought of yet another empty celebration with his wife and son, and little conversation. At least the presence of the McMahons might force some talk around his dinner table.
“I think they’re going to have their own kind of a meal, you know, to make things seem normal,” Philip suggested. He too would have loved Kit sitting at his table and to have stood to serve her, but he knew it wouldn’t happen.
“Well, there you are, then,” said Mildred O’Brien. She had never liked that arty Helen McMahon, and everyone knew that there was something suspicious about her death. Note or no note, there were a lot of people in Lough Glass who thought she had ended her own life.
Mrs. Hanley in the drapery was having severe trouble with her daughter Deirdre. “You want to go where on Christmas Day?” she asked.
“Out for a walk, visiting graves, you know.”
“No, I don’t know. Whose graves?”
“People who died, Mam. That’s what’s done on Christmas Day, they go and say prayers for the dear departed.”
“You have no dear departed at the moment. Except yourself might be heading that way if you’re not careful.”
“You’re a very selfish, unfeeling person.”
“Tell me, who would you pray for if you went out on Christmas Day…just one.”
“Well, I could pray up at the graveyard for Stevie Sullivan’s father.”
“He’s not buried there, he’s buried in a madhouse thirty miles away!” Deirdre Hanley’s mother was triumphant.
“Well, for Kit McMahon’s mother.”
“She’s barely buried. Come on out of that, Deirdre, you want to go out to get up to no good with someone, and when I find out who it is there’ll be trouble, I tell you.”
“Who could get up to no good in this town?” Deirdre asked with a sigh.
“You could. And I have my eye on you. Is it that young fellow, Dan O’Brien’s son?”
“Philip O’Brien!” There was genuine horror and revulsion in Deirdre Hanley’s voice. “Philip. He’s a child, an awful child.”
Mrs. Hanley knew she had to look elsewhere for the suspect.
Sister Madeleine refused invitations for Christmas Day, but it was said that she had more on her table than most of the people in Lough Glass. They tactfully found out what others were bringing so that items would not be duplicated.
Rita said she’d just take her a loaf of bread. “At least I know you’ll eat that. You’ll be giving the plum pudding to the gypsies and the slices of turkey to the little fox or whatever you have nowadays.”
“I have a big lame goose,” said Sister Madeleine. “And it would be very undiplomatic of me to feed her something as nearly related as a turkey. But you’re right, I love the bread.”
“It’ll be very hard above in the house there on Thursday,” Rita said.
“No harder than any other day.” Sister Madeleine was surprisingly unsympathetic.
“But you know, thinking back on other Christmas Days…”
“It’s better that she’s safely buried. It does give people a sort of peace, you know.”
“Would you mind where you were buried yourself, Sister Madeleine?”
“No, not at all. But then, I’m as odd as two left shoes. You know that.”
“Is there anything I should do, do you think?”
“No, I don’t believe in putting on an act. Whatever’s going to happen will happen.”
“I wish they’d talk about her.”
“They might at Christmas.”
“BROTHER Healy! Always good to see you. They tell me that the Christmas Crib down at St. John’s has to be seen to be believed.” Mother Bernard was loftily gracious.
“All the work of that young criminal Kevin Wall. Apparently the hermit gave him greenery and hay and all kinds of things. The Lord moves in mysterious ways, Mother Bernard.”
“And isn’t it a good thing that the Lord directed them where to find the body of poor Helen McMahon in time to have her buried in holy ground before Christmas.” The nun spoke as if it were another tiresome problem that God had conveniently tidied up and got out of the way before the Christmas season.
But Brother Healy knew what she meant. “Lord have mercy on her. It was indeed,” he said. Teachers hear more than they are meant to, and he had heard a lot of speculation, mainly in the schoolyard.
There was some complicated story that young Wall had taken out the McMahons’ boat and that this meant that Emmet’s mother had not drowned from it. And then there were rumors that she might have been having a romance with one of the gypsies. Maybe she had run away with him. Or they were hiding her in their caravans.
Nothing you’d want to burden Sean O’Connor with up at the Garda station, but all the same, it was great when that body had been found. Mother Bernard was right, it had been good of the Lord to direct them to find Helen McMahon and finish her troubled life off as every life should be finished, with hymns being sung and Father Baily accompanying the coffin to the churchyard.
“What does Emmet think about Santa Claus?” Clio asked on Christmas Eve.
“He thinks like we all think.”
“No, I mean would he be expecting something…your father mightn’t remember.”
“It was always Mam that did it.” Kit was defensive in the recall of her mother’s good deeds.
“Oh!” Clio was surprised.
“It’s all right. He knows, but I’ll do it for him anyway. Something beside the chimney.”
“And who’ll do it for you?”
“Dad might leave me some soap from the chemist’s.” She sounded doubtful.
There were so many things that Mother used to do, things that everyone took for granted. At Christmastime she used to fill the house with holly boughs; Father used to laugh and say it was like living in a forest. He would never say that again. Mother used to go to town and buy presents ages before Christmas and there was never a trace of them around the house. Kit still didn’t know how she had got the bicycles home with her the year of the bikes, or how she had hidden the record player last year. Was it only last year when everything had been all right?
And Mother knew the right kind of clothes to get Rita, always something brand-new in a box from the big town. Kit and Father wouldn’t even know what size Rita was and couldn’t go looking or measuring or anything. Mother always had boxes of crackers stored somewhere, and long paper chains that crisscrossed the kitchen. Kit wondered should they look for them. They weren?
??t in the kitchen cupboards; perhaps they were in Mother’s room, her little secret surprise.
But they were in mourning, maybe they wouldn’t have a Christmas tree even. They would have to have a crib, with the straw in it. That hadn’t to do with celebrating, that had to do with welcoming baby Jesus. Kit sighed with the weary burden of it all.
Clio thought it was still about the Christmas stockings. “We could do them for you, you know, my mother and father could. They’d be glad to do something,” Clio said, her eyes full of tears.
Kit shook her head. “No, I’ll manage it, thanks very much all the same. The Santa Claus bit isn’t the worst bit, let me tell you.”
“What is the worst bit?”
“She won’t know how I turn out. She’ll never know.”
“She’ll know from heaven.”
“Yes,” Kit said. The silence lay between them. Despite the comforting words that Father Baily had intoned over the coffin, Kit knew that her mother had not been met by the angels and led into Paradise. She had committed the great sin against Hope, for which there is no forgiveness.
Kit’s mother was in hell.
“CHRISTMAS Eve can be hell on earth,” Ivy said to Lena. “Everyone running round doing their last-minute shopping. It’s as if Christmas comes on people by surprise, as if they hadn’t known for weeks it was on its way.”
“We work until lunchtime…though I don’t know why. Nobody wants to come to look for a job on Christmas Eve.”
“Probably Mr. Millar and Jessie Park have nowhere to go,” Ivy said shrewdly.
“I’m sure you’re right.” Lena realized that this was indeed true.
Some people’s lives just revolved around their work. In the hotel where Louis worked they stayed open for Christmas mainly because the staff had nowhere else to go. Mr. Williams had told them there would be a big staff meal at four o’clock. He would be honored if Lena would join them. It had indeed been an answer to all her problems. There would be no false re-creating of a Christmas scene for the two of them. The flat had been nicely decorated but it would make things much easier for her if they had a duty dinner to attend.
“And what will you do for the day?” Lena looked into Ivy’s face as she spoke and she knew the other woman was lying.
“Oh, don’t let me begin. I have to go here, there, and everywhere. I’m like a doctor on Christmas Day…too many obligations from the past.”
Lena nodded sympathetically. It was better that way.
“ISN’T this a barbarous country that they don’t open the pubs on Christmas Day?” Peter Kelly said to Kit’s father as they all walked home from Mass.
“Aren’t you the one who’s always saying it’s the number of pubs that has us in the state we’re in, as a nation.”
“Ah yes, but that’s a different argument entirely.”
“Would you like to come in then and have something sociable?” Kit thought her father looked wretched. A morning of having people sympathize all over again had taken its toll.
Dr. Kelly seemed to sense this too. “Not at all. You’ve enough of chat, go back to the family.”
“Yes.” The word hung there, empty and sad.
They took off their coats and blew on their fingers.
“That smells very nice, Rita.”
“Thank you, sir.”
They sat down together the four of them, as they had done since Helen had left that day two months before. Martin sat in the seat that Helen had used, and Kit had moved to her father’s place. Emmet had moved up one, and Rita sat in the place that Emmet used to have.
When Helen McMahon had been alive they still ate in the kitchen, but Rita had taken her meal at the end of the table, or sometimes she had just served and eaten her own meal later. It might appear that the departure of the mistress had somehow equalized things more, had done away with the class distinctions, but this was not Mother’s fault, and Kit wanted that known, defined in some way.
“You could always have had your Christmas dinner with us, Rita, do you know that? I mean, it was just that you’d be standing up, making gravy and everything…”
“Of course I know that,” Rita said.
“Rita doesn’t need to be told such a thing.” Her father sounded sharp.
“But Daddy, in a way people have to say things. Sister Madeleine says that we don’t often say the most important things, we say little silly ones.”
“True for her, true for her,” Father nodded. He looked very old, Kit thought. He nodded like an old man would nod and repeat things. They were silent for a while after that, as if none of them knew what to say.
Rita spoke eventually. “Will I serve it, sir, dish it up for you…for us all?”
“Yes, please, Rita. That would be fine.” Father’s face looked wretched, he had great dark hollows under his eyes. He must not have slept at all last night, remembering, the way they had all remembered all the Christmas Eves before…when there was so much to do. This one had seemed unbearably long.
“Well, we have grapefruit first,” Rita said. “The mistress taught me to cut it with a jagged edge, you see, so that it looks a bit like an ornament or something…and to put a glacé cherry on top of each one divided into four like a flower, and a bit of angelica pretending to be the stem of the flower…. The mistress said it didn’t hurt to make things look nice…presentation was what she called it.”
They all studied the grapefruit, trying to think of something to say about it.
There was a lump in Kit’s throat. “No one else in Lough Glass or anywhere else would be having anything as nice as this,” she said in a voice that sounded unnatural in her own ears. It was as if she were reading lines from a play.
“Oh, that’s right, that’s right,” her father said. “Nobody else would have a dinner like this, we always said so…” He didn’t quite finish the sentence because it was obvious that he realized that nobody else was having a dinner under such circumstances. Everywhere else behind the closed curtains of Lough Glass people were eating and drinking…they were planning an afternoon laughing or arguing or sleeping in front of the fire. They weren’t sitting bolt-upright, trying to swallow sections of a grapefruit so bitter it stuck on their tongues and made their eyes water again.
And when the turkey came to the table they all looked away from Father’s face. Mother used to say that it was well he had chosen to be a chemist and not a surgeon or the population here would have been wiped out. Mother had taught herself to carve, and did it deftly. Rita had not liked to usurp her position.
“Isn’t this grand?” Father said with a death’s-head grin on his face, trying to cheer them up. “This is the grandest turkey we ever had.” They said that every year too, and talked about the Hickey family going to the turkey market five miles away and picking the best, the plumpest and younger birds. There was a silence. “Isn’t it grand, Emmet?” Poor Father was waving the carving knife, trying to smile and spread cheer. He didn’t realize he looked like a butcherous murderer in a film, or in one of the mobile theatres that came to the town every two years.
Emmet looked at him mutely.
“Say something, lad, your mother wouldn’t want you to be moping there and all of you sitting in silence, she’d like there to be a bit of chat. It’s Christmas Day, and we’re all here and you have the memory of a great mother to keep with you for the rest of your lives. Isn’t that grand?”
Emmet looked at his father’s red face. “It’s not grand at all, Daddy,” he said. “It’s t-t-t-t-errible.” His stutter was as bad as it had ever been before.
“We have to pretend that things are all right, Emmet son,” he said. “Don’t we, Kit? Don’t we, Rita?”
They looked at him wordlessly.
Then Kit said, “Mother wouldn’t pretend. I don’t think she’d have said things were grand if they weren’t.”
They could hear the clock on the landing ticking. In other houses people would barely hear a word anyone else was saying, but in this house they could hea
r the purring of the old cat, the ticking of a clock, and the gurgling sounds of saucepans still simmering on the Aga cooker beside them.
Father’s face was grim, gray and grim. Kit looked at him in anguish. Father must still be turning in his bed at night wondering why Mother had left that night and got drowned.
For the hundredth time she wondered if she had done the right thing in burning that letter. And yet again she told herself that she had. Think of what would have happened when Mother’s body had been found if her daughter had not acted in the way she had. And Father must have heard too the story that fool Kevin Wall had told about how he took the McMahon boat out on the night that Mother had drowned. As if anyone would believe Kevin Wall even if he told you today was Christmas Day.
Father was speaking again. “I’m going to start by telling the truth just like your mother did…” His voice broke. “And the truth is that it’s not all right,” he said through his tears. “It’s terrible. I miss her so much I can’t be comforted by the thought of seeing her in heaven later on. I’m so lonely for her…” His shoulders heaved. The mood changed. Kit and Emmet left their places to go and put their arms around him. They crowded together for what seemed a long time. Rita sat at her place. She was like the background. Like the kitchen curtains, like old Farouk asleep on the stool beside the Aga. Like the gray wet rain outside.
And then they stopped, and it was as if a thunderstorm had cleared the air. They spoke with lighter voices; the tightrope of pretense had been taken away. Wasn’t it extraordinary that Sister Madeleine had more or less foretold to her that this would happen?
Into the midst of this came a sharp shrill sound. It was the telephone ringing. On Christmas Day, a day when nobody made any calls except for an emergency.
IN the Dryden Hotel they made a great effort to have a cheerful Christmas for the staff. A lot of them had been there a long time, most had weathered the war years with loyalty, and as James Williams knew, there were many who had no real homes to go to.