Martin McMahon had very little interest in such things. “Give me what you think,” he’d say, and take an order of expensive bath soaps and assorted lipsticks.
They were badly displayed, often fading in the window and never sold. Kit’s mother had said that the women of Lough Glass were like women everywhere, they would like to look their best. These cosmetics companies would give little training courses, tell the chemists’ assistants how best to display the products, how the women customers should use them for best advantage. But Kit’s father was adamant. They didn’t want to be pushing paints and powders on people who couldn’t afford them, selling magic potions promising eternal youth…
“I wouldn’t do that,” Helen McMahon had argued often. “I’d only learn how to make the best of them and give them advice.”
“They don’t want advice,” her husband said. “They don’t want temptation either, don’t they look fine the way they are. And anyway would I want people to think that I had to have my wife out working for me, that I can’t earn a living for her and my children?” Father would always laugh when he said this and make a funny face.
He loved a joke and he could do card tricks and make coins disappear. Mother didn’t laugh as much, but she smiled at Father and she usually agreed with him. She didn’t complain like Clio’s mother did when he worked late, or when he went with Dr. Kelly to Paddles’ bar.
Kit thought that Mother would have liked to work in the pharmacy but she realized that for people such as they were it would have been unsuitable for Father to have let her work there. Only people like Mrs. Hanley who was a widow and ran the drapery, or Mona Fitz who was the postmistress because she wasn’t married, or Mrs. Dillon whose husband was a drunk…worked in businesses. It was the way things were in Lough Glass, and everywhere.
Kit didn’t usually think about it much, but she couldn’t get the vision of her mother’s tears out of her mind as they went home from Sister Madeleine’s. She walked up the stairs slowly, almost unwilling to go in and discover what was wrong. Perhaps there was some very bad news. But what could it be?
Dad was fine, he was there closing up the chemist’s. Emmet was home safely from rolling around in the dirt or whatever he did after school. So there couldn’t be anything wrong with the family. With a sense of walking on eggshells Kit went into the kitchen where they all ate their meals. Everything was normal. Mother’s eyes might have been a bit bright, but that’s only if you were looking for something. She wore a different dress, she must have changed.
Mother always looked so gorgeous, like a Spanish person even. Someone had sent them a postcard from Spain of a dancer, where the dress was of real material, not just a photograph. Kit always thought it looked just like Mother, with her long hair swept up in a roll, and her big dark eyes.
Dad was in great form so there couldn’t have been a row or anything. He was laughing and telling them about old Billy Sullivan coming in for some tonic wine. He had been barred from every other establishment that sold alcohol, and suddenly he had discovered his salvation in the shape of tonic wine. Dad did a great imitation of Mr. Sullivan trying to appear sober.
“I suppose that’s why he saw the angels, due to the drink,” Kit said.
“God knows what he’ll see after the Emu Burgundy,” her father said ruefully. “I’ve had to tell him that’s the last of the stock, that you can’t get it anymore.”
“That’s a lie,” said Emmet.
“I know it is, son, but it’s tell a lie or have the poor fellow lying on the road, roaring up to the skies.”
“Sister Madeleine says that we’re all a bit mad; it’s what makes us different to other people,” Kit said.
“Sister Madeleine is a saint,” Mother said. “Did you go to see her yet, Rita, about the other thing?”
“I will, Mrs. McMahon, I will,” Rita said, and put the big dish of macaroni cheese on the table.
Even though they ate in the kitchen Mother always insisted that everything was elegantly served. They had colored place mats instead of a tablecloth, and there was a big raffia mat for the casserole dish. It was decorated with sprigs of parsley, one of Mother’s touches for making food look nice.
“Wouldn’t it all taste the same no matter the way it looked, Mam?” Rita used to say at one time.
“Let’s have it looking nice anyway,” Mother would say gently, and now it was second nature for Rita to cut tomatoes into triangles and slice hard-boiled eggs thinly. Even though the Kellys ate in a separate dining room Kit knew that their meals were not served as graciously as they were in her home. It was another thing that made her feel her mother was special.
Rita was made part of the family, unlike the Kellys’ maid. Emmet loved Rita, he was always very curious about her comings and goings. “What other thing?” Emmet asked.
“Helping me with reading.” Rita spoke out clearly before Emmet could be asked not to be nosy. “I never learned it properly at school, you see. I wasn’t there often enough.”
“Where were you?” Emmet was envious. It was so wonderful to be able to say casually that you skipped school.
“Usually looking after a baby, or saving the hay, or making the turf.” Rita spoke in a matter-of-fact way. She didn’t sound bitter about the book learning missed, the years of child-minding, growing old before her time, culminating in going out to mind other people’s children and clean their houses for them.
Not long after tea Mr. Sullivan saw devils everywhere. In the fading light he noticed them creeping with pitchforks into the houses along the street. Including the chemist’s. Maybe they had gone in through the floorboards and through cracks in the wall. Kit and Emmet listened giggling from the top of the stairs to their father remonstrating with Mr. Sullivan, while issuing orders out of the corner of his mouth.
“You’re all right, Billy, there isn’t a devil here except yourself and myself.
“Helen, ring Peter will you.
“Now sit down, Billy, here, and we’ll talk the thing out, man to man.
“Helen, let him know how bad it is.
“Billy, listen to me. Am I a man who’d let fellows with pitchforks into my house?
“As quick as he bloody well can, with any kind of tranquilizer he can get into a syringe.”
They sat on the stair top and waited until Clio’s father arrived. The cries, and shouts of panic, and the hunt for devils stopped.
They heard Dr. Kelly saying to their father that it was the County Home now. Billy was a danger to himself and everyone else.
“What’ll happen to the business?” Dad asked.
“One of those fine sons he threw out will come back and learn to run it for him. At least the uncle sent the boys to school. They may be able to turn it into something rather than the doss-house it is.”
Emmet was sitting with his chin in his hands. His stutter always came back when he was frightened. “Are they going to lock him up?” he said, his eyes big and round. It took him ten attempts to get his tongue around the word “lock.”
Kit thought suddenly that if she had been given a wish now at this very moment it would have been that Emmet’s stutter would go. Sometimes it would be that she had long blond hair like Clio, or that her mother and father might be friends with each other like Dr. Kelly and Mrs. Kelly were. But tonight it would have been Emmet’s speech.
When Mr. Sullivan had been taken away Dad and Clio’s father went for a drink. Mother went back inside without a word. Kit saw her mother moving around the sitting room, picking up objects and putting them down, then she went to the bedroom and closed the door.
Kit knocked.
“Come in, sweetheart.” Mother was sitting at the dressing table, brushing her hair. She looked like a princess when her hair was down.
“Are you all right, Mam? You seem a bit sad.”
Mother put her arm around Kit and drew her toward her. “I am fine, just fine. What makes you think I’m sad?”
Kit didn’t want to tell about the sighting through
the kitchen window. “Your face.”
“Well, I suppose I am sad about some things, like that poor fool being tied up and taken off to a mental home for the rest of his life because he couldn’t drink in moderation. And about Rita’s selfish, greedy parents who had fourteen children and let the older ones rear the younger ones until they could send them out as skivvies and then take half their wages from them…otherwise I’m fine.” Kit looked at her mother’s reflection in the mirror doubtfully. “And are you fine, my little Kit?”
“Not really. Not completely fine.”
“What would you like that you haven’t got?”
“I’d like to be quicker,” Kit said. “I’d like to understand things immediately the way Clio does, and to have fair hair, and to be able to listen to one thing while saying another. And be taller.”
“I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I told you that you were twenty times more beautiful than Clio, and much more intelligent.”
“Oh Mam, I’m not.”
“You are, Kit. I swear it. What Clio has is style. I don’t know where she got it, but she knows how to make the most of everything she has. Even at twelve she knows what looks well on her and how to smile. That’s all it is, it’s not beauty, not like you have, and you have my cheekbones, remember. Clio only has Lilian’s.”
They laughed together, grown-ups in a conspiracy of mockery. Mrs. Kelly had a plump face and no cheekbones at all.
RITA went to Sister Madeleine on Thursdays, her half day. If anyone else called Sister Madeleine would say, “Rita and I are reading a bit of poetry, we often do that on a Thursday.” It was such a tactful way of telling them that this was Rita’s time, people began to recognize it as such.
Rita would bake some scones, or bring half an apple tart. They would have tea together and bend over the books. As the weeks went on and the summer came, Rita began to have new confidence. She could read without putting her finger under the words, she could guess the harder words from the sense of the sentence. It was time for the writing lessons. Sister Madeleine gave Rita a fountain pen.
“I couldn’t take that, Sister. It was given to you as a gift.”
“Well, if it’s mine, can’t I do what I like with it?” Sister Madeleine rarely kept anything that she had been given for more than twenty-four hours.
“Well, could I have a loan of it then, a long loan?”
“I’ll lend it to you for the rest of your life,” Sister Madeleine said.
There were no boring copy books, instead Rita and Sister Madeleine wrote about Lough Glass and the lake and changing seasons.
“You could write to your sister in America soon,” Sister Madeleine said.
“Not a real letter, not to a person.”
“Why not? That’s as good as any letter she’ll get from these parts, I tell you.”
“Would she want to hear all this about home?”
“She’d be so full of happiness to hear about home you’d nearly hear her thanking you across the Atlantic Ocean.”
“I never got a letter. I wouldn’t want them to be thinking above in McMahon’s that I was in the class of having people writing to me.”
“She could write to you here.”
“Would the postman bring letters to you, Sister Madeleine?”
“Ah, Tommy Bennet is the most decent man in the world. He delivers letters to me three times a week. Comes down here on his bicycle whatever the weather, and he has a cup of tea.”
Sister Madeleine didn’t add that Tommy never came without some contribution to the store cupboard. Nor that she had been instrumental in getting his daughter quickly and quietly into a home for unmarried mothers and keeping the secret safe from the interested eyes and ears of Lough Glass.
“And you’d get enough post for that?” Rita said in wonder.
“People are very kind. They often write to me,” Sister Madeleine said with the same sense of wonder.
CLIO and Kit had learned to swim when they were very young. Dr. Kelly had stood waist-deep in the water to teach them. As a young medical student he had once pulled three dead children from the Glass Lake, children who had drowned in a couple of feet of water because nobody had taught them how to swim. It had made him very angry. There was something accepting and dumb about people who lived on the edge of a hazard and yet did nothing to cope with it.
Like those fishermen over in the West of Ireland who went out in frail boats to fish in the roaring Atlantic, and they all wore different kinds of jumpers so they would know whose family it was when a body was found. Each family had its own stitch. Complicated and perverse, Dr. Kelly thought. Why hadn’t they taught the young fishermen to swim?
As soon as the young Kellys and McMahons could walk they were taken to the lakeshore. Other families followed suit; the doctor was a figure of great authority. Young Philip O’Brien from the hotel learned and the Hanley girls. Of course, Old Sullivan from the garage told him to keep his hands off other people’s children so Stevie and Michael probably couldn’t swim to this day.
Peter Kelly had been in other countries where lakes like this one had been tourist attractions. Scotland, for example. People came to visit places just because there was a lake there. And in Switzerland, where he and Lilian had spent their honeymoon, lakes were all-important. But in Ireland in the early fifties nobody seemed to see their potential.
People thought he was mad when he bought a small rowing boat jointly with his friend Martin McMahon. Together they rowed out and fished for perch, bream, and pike. Big ugly fish all of them, but waiting for them on the ever-changing waters of their lake was a restful pastime.
The men had been friends since they were boys. They knew the beds of reeds and rushes where the moorhens sheltered and sometimes even the swans hid from view. They occasionally had company on the lake as they went out to fish, a few local people shared their enthusiasm, but normally the only boats you saw on Lough Glass were those carrying animal foodstuff or machinery from one side to the other.
Farms had been divided up so peculiarly that often a farmer had bits of land so widely separated by great distances, the journey across the water could well be the shortest route. Yet another strange thing about Ireland, Peter Kelly often said, those inconvenient things that weren’t laid on us by a colonial power we managed to do for ourselves by incessant family feuds and differences. Martin was of a sunnier disposition. He believed the best of people, his patience was never-ending. There was no situation that couldn’t be sorted out by a good laugh. The only thing Martin McMahon ever feared was the lake itself.
He used to warn people, even casual people who came into his chemist’s shop, to be careful as they went along the paths by the lakeshore. Clio and Kit were old enough to take a boat out alone now. They had proved it a dozen times, but Martin still felt nervous. He admitted it to Peter over a pint in Paddles’ bar. “Jesus, Martin! You’re turning into an old woman.”
Martin didn’t take it as an insult. “I suppose I am, let me look for any secondary signs, I haven’t developed breasts or anything, but I don’t need to shave as often…you could be right, you know.”
Peter looked affectionately at his friend, Martin’s bluster was hiding a real concern. “I’ve watched them, Martin. I’m as anxious as you are that they don’t run into trouble…but they aren’t such fools when they’re out on the water as they seem to be on dry land, we’ve drilled that into them. Watch them yourself and you’ll see.”
“I will, they’re going out tomorrow. Helen says we have to let them go and not wrap them in cotton wool.”
“Helen’s right,” Peter said sagely, and they debated whether or not to have another pint. As always on these occasions they made a huge compromise by ordering a half pint. So predictable that Paddles had it ready for them when they got around to ordering it.
“MR. McMahon, will you please tell Anna to go home,” Clio begged Kit’s father. “If I tell her it only starts a row.”
“Would you like to go for a walk with m
e,” Kit’s father suggested.
“I’d like to go in the boat.”
“I know you would, but they’re big grown-up girls now, and they want to be having their own chats. Why don’t you and I go and see if we could find a squirrel?” He looked at the girls in the boat. “I know I’m a fusser. I just came down to be sure you were all right.”
“Of course we’re all right.”
“And you’ll take no chances? This is a dangerous lake.”
“Daddy, please!”
He went off, and they saw Anna grumbling and following him.
“He’s very nice, your father,” said Clio, fitting the oars properly into the oarlocks.
“Yes, when you think of the fathers we might have got,” Kit agreed.
“Mr. Sullivan up in the home.” Clio gave an example.
“Tommy Bennet, the bad-tempered postman.”
“Or Paddles Burns, the barman with the big feet…”
They laughed at their lucky escapes.
“People often wonder why your father married your mother though,” Clio said.
Kit felt a bile of defense rise in her throat. “No they don’t wonder that. You might wonder it, people don’t wonder it at all.”
“Keep your hair on, I’m only saying what I heard.”
“Who said what? Where did you hear it?” Kit’s face was hot and angry. She could have pushed her friend Clio into the dark lake and held her head down when she surfaced. Kit was almost alarmed at the strength of her feeling.
“Oh, people say things…” Clio was lofty.
“Like what?”
“Like, your mother was a different sort of person, not a local person from here…you know.”
“No, I don’t know. Your mother isn’t from here either, she’s from Limerick.”
“But she used to come here on holidays, that made her sort of from here.”
“My mother came here when she met Dad, and that makes her from here too.” There were tears in Kit’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Clio said. She really did sound repentant.