“Ernest is coming around tonight,” Ivy said.
“Great stuff. Have you said ‘Thank you, Lena’?”
“No, I haven’t. I’ve said I wonder why I am now cast in the role of a screaming alcoholic.”
“You could be a reformed alcoholic. Men love that,” Lena suggested.
“I’m actually pleased,” Ivy said.
“I know you are.”
“But I don’t want to put too much hope in it.”
“No, of course not.” Lena lay down on her bed and drifted off to sleep.
When she woke, Louis was standing beside her. “How’s my poor drunk?” he said, full of sympathy and love.
“I’m so sorry, Louis, was I disgusting?”
“No, you were sweet, you were like a floppy bunny, you couldn’t sit or stand or anything…” He handed her a cup of tea which she drank thirstily.
“And what was I saying?” She was ninety percent sure she hadn’t mentioned the Regent Palace Hotel, the journey to spy on the newly married couple.
“Nothing too intelligible, great difficulty in pronouncing words with an ‘S’ in them.” He stroked her forehead. “More tea, then I’ll scramble you some eggs…that’s all you’ll be able for. Trust Uncle Louis.”
Lena closed her eyes. How strange it all was. Here she was lying in bed while Louis Gray got her a cup of tea. A couple of miles away Maura Hayes was lying in bed while Martin organized the hotel to get them tea also.
Lena let her mind wander back to the way they looked…Martin and Maura. At ease together, like people who had been friends and loved each other for years and had only just realized it. Martin wasn’t straining and struggling to please her as he would have been with Helen. Maura was making no effort to concentrate.
They were well matched.
Lena wondered whether there was any passion between them. There must be some sexual love. They would hardly enter into a relationship unless they had planned to consummate it.
But she found herself unable to imagine it.
She could hardly remember her own coupling with Martin. Sex had always meant Louis, from the very first time she had known him and known he was for her. It didn’t make her uneasy thinking about Martin and Maura making love on their London honeymoon, nor about Maura sleeping beside Martin in the bedroom that Helen McMahon had abandoned early in their marriage.
It was just that she couldn’t imagine it at all.
Jessie and Jim came back from their honeymoon. They were anxious that the wedding party had been a success.
“I think everyone enjoyed it,” Jessie said.
“Oh yes, it was wonderful,” Lena assured her.
“My brother didn’t say much about it, but then, he’s a silent man,” said Jim Millar.
This was an understatement, he had been almost wordless through the ceremony and the lunch that followed it.
“My mother enjoyed it though?” Jessie was hoping it had been the great social event that she wanted to remember it as.
“It was a wonderful day,” Lena said. “A marvelous happy occasion. We won’t ever forget it.”
She was rewarded by the relief and pleasure in Jessie’s eyes, and in Jim’s when she looked at him triumphantly.
The truth was that Lena had hardly any memory whatsoever of anything that day except standing beside Martin and Maura as they waited to go upstairs.
Ivy grumbled from time to time that Ernest had taken a very strong stance about things like sherry trifle. He said it could be the beginning of the slippery slope. But still it seemed a small price to pay to have him back in her life.
He called regularly. Sometimes Lena spoke to him. “I owe you a great debt of gratitude,” he said once conspiratorially. “I always thought that Ivy was a woman who could take care of herself, run her own life. I never knew she’d gone to pieces.”
The months passed in Lough Glass as they did everywhere else, and people were so accustomed to seeing Martin McMahon and his wife Maura walking together exchanging affectionate smiles that the memory of Helen had faded from the forefront of every mind.
“She’s a lot dumpier than her predecessor,” Mildred O’Brien said, looking out the hotel window at the McMahons striding along with Rusty, their red setter puppy. Mildred had never liked Helen when she was alive, but she didn’t seem to be pleased either with the second Mrs. McMahon.
Dan sighed. “She doesn’t have Helen’s way with her, that’s true,” he said, thinking back wistfully on the slow swish of Helen McMahon’s skirt as she walked down the lane behind the hotel, her hair tumbling down her back, her eyes restless.
Maura went from time to time to see Sister Madeleine. Once she brought a pane of glass and some putty. “At least you won’t give this away,” she said, knocking out the broken window with a hammer and collecting the shattered glass on old newspapers.
“Don’t be too sure of it. There are plenty of people worse off than I am,” said the hermit.
“This is the first window I’ve ever put in, you wouldn’t destroy my faith in myself by taking it out to give to some ne’er-do-well.”
“You sound very happy, Maura.”
“I am, thank God, very happy indeed. And what’s more, I’m blessed in those two children.”
“You wouldn’t be if you weren’t so good to them.”
“I was wondering…” Maura lined the window frame with the putty as she spoke. “I was wondering whether you’d put my mind at rest over something…”
“My own mind is so confused, Maura, I’m never one to set myself up as an adviser to other people’s minds.”
“It’s just, you know, dreams, and superstitions, and sort of thinking you see things…”
“Go on.”
“Would that be real at all, or would it be just from being overtired?”
“Would you tell me a bit more and maybe I’d know the drift.”
“It sounds very silly.”
“Things always do.” Madeleine went to the fire to move in the old black kettle over the flames.
Maura eased the glass into place. “There now, isn’t that a dream,” she said, standing back to admire the slightly crooked window which was a great deal better than the cracked frame with several pieces out of it which had been there before.
“It’s beautiful, Maura. Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” said Sister Madeleine, looking at it with admiration.
“I’ve put in an extra bit of putty at the top, where there was a bit of a gap on the top corner. I don’t think you’d see it.” Maura bit her lip looking at it.
“I only see a lovely clean shiny window keeping out the wind and rain. Thank you again, Maura.” The tea was poured. “And what did you see or dream that disturbed you.”
“It’s so odd. But it was when we were in London…a woman came and stood beside us…”
“Yes?”
“And I was absolutely sure it was Helen.”
They were having dinner at the golf club as they did every Saturday. It was such an easy foursome and sometimes they were joined by other couples. The talk turned to the hermit.
“She won’t let me listen to her chest,” Peter Kelly said. “I don’t think she has any truck with modern medicine, you have to be a mystic or a gypsy for her to take any notice.”
“She’s warm enough in there, the place is quite snug,” Maura said.
“Ah yes, it’s warm all right, but what’s she inhaling? Turf smoke, and her bedding could be damp. Still, you might as well be talking to the wall, she was always full of cracked notions. She’ll live and die by them.”
“I tried to give her a preparation for chilblains last year and she thanked me and said they’d go in their own time.” Martin shook his head about her.
“But I think she’s fairly sound in her own head,” Maura said.
“She certainly cured Emmet’s stutter,” Martin agreed.
“And she calmed Clio down when she was behaving like someone bound for the gallows,” Lilian added.
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“She doesn’t encourage foolish fantasies. She’s as practical as Mother Bernard in many ways,” Maura said.
They talked about Mother Bernard and her drive to build a new wing on the convent; her fund-raising activities had Lough Glass demented.
Maura’s mind wandered away from the conversation.
She thought of the way the nun had been so adamant it couldn’t have been Helen McMahon she had seen in London. What it undoubtedly must be was the imagination playing tricks. Like a tree can take on the image of a dangerous bogeyman if you’re frightened, like a shadow on the windowpane can look like an intruder rather than a branch waving. So it was when Maura had been thinking of Helen she would automatically think any woman of the same age and size might be she.
“I wasn’t thinking about her, you see,” Maura had countered.
“How was she dressed?”
“She had dark glasses and a little hat. Purple feathers. It was so like her, Sister Madeleine.” The nun threw back her head and laughed away Maura’s anxieties. “Well now, don’t you believe me?”
“Helen McMahon in sunglasses? Indoors? And in a hat? In all the years I saw her here she never wore a hat…”
“But suppose…”
“You see, even though you weren’t thinking of her consciously, you must have been on another level. That’s why you transposed her features onto a totally different stranger standing beside you.” Sister Madeleine had beamed at the obvious explanation.
And of course Maura knew she must be right.
THEY learned a lot in the catering college, but there was still some free time. Often Kit went to the cinema with Frankie, who was always planning some devilment and was great at negotiating late passes from the hostel for her friend Kit.
Frankie was cheerful and casual. She didn’t have the hothouse intensity of Clio, nor did she criticize with such outrage if Kit didn’t do exactly what she wanted. She invited Kit for a weekend to Cork to stay with her family. Kit would have loved to have gone, but it was at the end of the month and she had spent most of her allowance. She literally didn’t have the train fare. Frankie shrugged. Another time. It was a relief. Kit thought of all the cross-questioning and analysis that she would have got from Clio.
There were some parties in flats, some of them marvelous with people singing and laughing way into the night, some of them messy evenings that shouldn’t have been parties at all because they were just excuses for groping. Kit and Frankie thought that it was badly behaved to go in search of groping to a public place. This was a private matter, they said, and clucked at each other pretending to be nuns until they fell about laughing.
“What do you do all the time? I never see you,” Clio complained. Kit tried to explain but nothing she said met with any approval. “It sounds awful,” Clio said dismissively.
“Then you’re just as well out of it.” Kit was unconcerned. “But I would like to meet you for coffee now and then. We are meant to be friends.”
Clio stopped sounding like a fourteen-year-old. “Let’s go to Bewley’s in Grafton Street tomorrow.”
“Have you gone all the way yet?” Clio asked Kit.
“Are you out of your mind?” Kit asked.
“Does that mean out of my mind, yes, or out of my mind, no?” Clio had an infectious grin. That was why their fights had never lasted long when they were young. They didn’t have fights now. They were much too old for that sort of silliness.
“The answer is no, as you know very well,” Kit said.
“Me neither.” Clio was sheepish.
“I didn’t ask, remember that. I am mature enough to think it’s people’s own business.”
“I wonder are we just the odd ones out. Like, is everyone else doing it and being mature and not telling?” Clio sounded very unsure.
“Well, we know Deirdre Hanley does it with everyone she sees. We know that Orla Dillon from the newsagent’s at home was stupid enough to do it with that man from the mountains and is married to him now, which is about as bad as could happen.”
“I don’t mean people like that,” Clio said. “I mean people like us.”
“Well, they are like us. They come from Lough Glass.”
“No, you know, middle-class people, upper-class people.”
“Clio, you sound like Margaret Rutherford in a film.” Kit pealed with laughter.
“I’m being serious. How would we know?”
“Well, I suppose people like us do if we want to and don’t if we don’t want to.”
“We don’t if we’re afraid we’ll go to hell, or people might talk about us and give us a bad name.”
“I don’t think it’s simple as that.”
“Simple? I’ve spelled out every possiblity for you, every eventuality. What do you want?”
“It’s just that Michael O’Connor, you know the fellow I was telling you about…”
Kit did know. A tall, unattractive commerce student with a very irritating laugh, a brother of Kevin O’Connor’s in her own catering college…sons of a very wealthy family, each with his own car in Dublin, something unheard-of as regards luxury. Clio had spoken several times about Michael O’Connor.
“Yes, what about Michael?”
“He says everyone does it, and that I’m only being a foolish provincial. Out of step with the world.”
“And does he say it’s good-bye unless you have sex with him?”
“He calls it making love.”
“Whatever it’s called.”
“Well, he doesn’t quite say that, but you’d know that’s what’s meant.”
“It’s blackmail.”
“He says you can’t love someone properly without…”
“I bet he does.” Kit sounded sarcastic.
Clio’s eyes flashed. “He also says his brother Kevin did it with you.”
“He what?”
Clio looked alarmed at the emphatic response. “That’s what he said, after some party apparently.”
Kit got up from the table, her face red with rage. “I have some advice for you, Clio…take it if you like or ignore it. That is a great big lie, his stupid ox of a brother did try to take the knickers off me one night and I refused, because whenever I lose my virginity it will not be with one of those pig-ignorant O’Connors, with their stupid laughs and their lies and thinking they’re God-all-bloody-mighties in their cars going vroom vroom.”
The people at the other tables looked up with great interest as the handsome girl with the long black curly hair and the smart red jacket flung some coins on the table and stormed out of the restaurant. It wasn’t every day that you overheard a conversation that covered lies and virginity and knickers and God-all-bloody-mighty.
Dublin was changing.
A hundred times Lena thought of an excuse to send Kit a short letter, a postcard even. But she always dismissed it as being too flimsy. The girl would shy away again if she were to attempt to contact her. After all, Kit’s note had only been a belated thank-you letter for the dress and a warning about the presence of Martin and Maura in her city. It had not been a letter with any warmth or wish to rekindle a friendship.
But there might be something. Some possible excuse she could find that would give her a reason. Lena raked the local newspaper for any item of interest, something that might reasonably trigger a communication. She saw an item about the difficulties of getting employment in the hotel industry. She cut it out and pasted it on a sheet of paper. Then she added the Millar’s Agency brochure on opportunities in the hotel trade and posted them to Kit at her college.
Kit was in her second year now. It would be time for her to think about positions and jobs. Surely she could not take offense at this.
Lena wrote the note over and over until she was satisfied with it. She made sure that the address was still the same, care of Ivy Brown. She wanted neither Louis nor her office colleagues to know of this correspondence with Ireland. In the end the note she wrote said:
Thought this might be of s
ome interest to you and your fellow students.
Hope the course is going well.
Sincerest wishes for your success and happiness
And she signed it L.
IT was Maura who noticed that there was something the matter with Emmet.
He didn’t want any fuss, he said. Anyway he was playing in a match. Brother Healy wouldn’t take kindly to his crying off.
“I’ll get Peter to have a look at you, if you don’t mind,” Maura insisted.
“I’m quite grown up really, Maura. I’d know if there was something wrong with me.” They looked each other in the eye. This was their first confrontation.
Emmet was a handsome boy, slim and sometimes frail-looking. He was a wiry hurler and much in demand on the team. Maura knew that missing a match wasn’t something that would be countenanced except in case of dire emergency. But the boy had aches and pains, his skin looked sallow, and the whites of his eyes were yellow.
She wasn’t going to back down. “I know you are an adult, Emmet, believe me I do. And if it were a matter of asking you to come up and wait in the surgery and waste time and make it all official I wouldn’t try to force it on you. But Peter is my brother-in-law…Is it all right if I ask him to look at you, just look, this evening?”
Emmet grinned. “You’re too reasonable, Maura. That’s the problem.”
Peter Kelly said that Emmet McMahon had acute jaundice. It could be cured at home. A darkened room, a lot of barley water, a heavy dose of those M and B tablets, examination of the urine, which was as red as port wine.
Maura came across twice a morning from her job in Stevie Sullivan’s. His father came up twice a morning from the chemist’s below. Anna Kelly was home from school recovering from measles. She called in too and read to him.