“What would you like? You wouldn’t like Desirée, it’s a great story about Napoleon’s girlfriend.”
“No, I’d prefer something else if you wouldn’t mind, poetry maybe.”
“Will I do some from our textbook? It could be revision for the exams.”
“No, the only good thing about all this is not having to think of revision or school. Do you know any funny poems?”
“Not by heart, no,” Anna said. They seemed to be at a loss. “I have a book of funny poems at home though…Ogden Nash…would that do?”
“Well, if you’re passing.”
“I’ll go and get it,” she offered.
“I don’t want to waste all your time off.” He was solicitous.
“No, heavens no. Anyway, you’re the one with the bad sickness, I only had measles.”
Emmet felt important that he had a serious illness, and was flattered that Anna had gone all the way up to Lakeview Road to get the book.
They loved Ogden Nash. The house rang to the sound of their laughter as they read to each other.
When Kit came back from Dublin she found them there together day after day—her brother Emmet with the yellow skin and the yellowed eyes, Anna Kelly with the dark brown rash of fading measles spots. They looked quite companionable together.
Kit debated for a long time about writing to Lena. The brochure had to be acknowledged. But did Lena not have a right to know that her son had been very ill and had recovered. Of course she had forfeited any rights when she went away. But if she had been able to have the letter she left delivered…then she would at least have had some knowledge of her children and their well-being. If the letter had been delivered rather than burned…then Father and Maura could never have married.
It was always the same circle of thoughts. Kit never got any further in her understanding of them. You just had to make it all fit in with the way things were rather than wishing and wondering.
Thank you very much for the brochures, she wrote eventually. It’s interesting the range of opportunities that are on offer in Britain. We do the same examinations here so anyone from our college would be qualified. We hear all the time of the huge opportunities which will come our way as soon as tourism in Ireland begins to take off properly, but it is very interesting to read about the specialization that is already happening over in England.
Emmet is now recovering from a bad bout of jaundice. He was well looked after and cared for, and he should be back in school in two weeks.
I just thought you would want to know.
I too send you kind wishes,
Kit.
Lena read about her only son lying in bed with jaundice, which after all was a form of hepatitis.
She felt jealous too. Jealous of Maura Hayes, who got to bring him beef tea and chicken broth, who made a little gauze cover for his jug of lemon barley water. Lena would have done all that and more. She could have stroked his forehead and changed his pajamas. She would have sat and told him stories and read poetry to him. Her mind was far away, thinking about it.
Louis touched her hand. She always arranged that they had a relaxed breakfast together. Real coffee, a warmed roll and honey. She set the table nicely with a pink cloth. It helped to give him a good start to the day.
“And what were you dreaming about?” he asked.
“I was thinking that my son has jaundice…and I hope he’ll be all right,” she said before she could check herself.
“How on earth do you know that?” He looked alarmed.
But she had recovered. “You asked me what I was dreaming about. That’s what I dreamed.” Her smile was reassuring.
He looked sympathetic. “I don’t go on about it because there’s no point in speculating. But I do know how hard it is for you.”
“I know, Louis. I know you know.”
“It’s a pity we never had a child, you and I.”
“Yes, it is.” Her voice was dead.
“But still, you must think of the boy and girl…I know that.” It was as if he were forgiving her, excusing her for harking back to her son and daughter.
“From time to time, yes.”
“You’re not sorry ever that you left?” He knew what the answer was going to be.
She paused before she said it. His face had a flicker of anxiety but then it creased into a great smile. “You know, Louis, that I loved you all my life, any time away from you was wasted time…how can you ask me do I regret doing anything that meant I had the chance to be with you?”
He seemed moved. Did he ever feel any guilt at having jilted her, abandoned her all those years ago? About being so constantly unfaithful to her now? He said over and over that she was the only woman with the power to hold him. But that could easily mean she was the only woman foolish enough to stay with him through such a series of humiliations. Was that what he considered holding him?
Years ago when she had told Martin McMahon that she couldn’t marry him because she still loved the memory of another man…he had said in a puzzled way that surely this wasn’t love, it was infatuation. At the time it had irritated her terribly. It was so silly to try to define things by words, she had said. What did one person mean by infatuation or obsession and another mean by love. The whole thing couldn’t be tidied away with neat little labels.
She still believed that. She looked at the line of Louis Gray’s jaw and the shadow of his eyelashes, and wondered what a different turn her life might have taken if she had been able to forget him when he had gone away and left her the first time, if she had been able to say no when he came back to collect her.
“What would you like to do this weekend?” he asked her.
What she really would like to have done was to have flown to Dublin, put on her headscarf and dark glasses, got the train and bus to Lough Glass, let herself into the house and gone to her son’s room. She would like to have come in, during the afternoon when he might be asleep, and have touched his forehead, whispered to him that his mother loved him and knew all about him…every heartbeat…then she would have kissed him. And when he woke he would remember it all, but as if it were a dream.
She would have gone down to Sister Madeleine’s cottage and thanked her for being a lifeline for so long. She would have told the old nun that she had found happiness. Then she would meet Kit and walk a bit by the lake. It would make her so free. It was such a fanciful idea. And she knew it was dangerous to think of it even for a few moments. It was to contemplate betraying even more people than she’d betrayed already.
“Do you know where I’d love to go? I’d love to go to Oxford or Cambridge and stay the night.” She sounded like an eager child.
He thought about it. “Well, they’re not far on a train, certainly.”
“And then we could take a tour and see the way they live their lives there…”
“And we could be up for one of them in the boat race because we’d been there,” he said, entering into the spirit of it.
They picked Oxford. He’d inquire at work about a nice hotel. It was easy to be the only woman in the world who could hold Louis Gray. All you had to do was walk around with your eyes closed and your mind open. Oxford and Cambridge were two places he had never gone on business trips. They would be safe places to go to.
“HOW’s the young lad?” Stevie asked.
“Over the worst of it. He’s as yellow as a duck’s foot but he’s on the mend.” Maura spoke with relief and concern. She had been worried by the illness.
“That’s good. Listen, Maura. I’ll be out for a few hours this afternoon. In fact, I mightn’t be back at all. It’s all under control, isn’t it?”
“The business is, Stevie yes.”
“What on earth do you mean by that?”
What she had meant was that Stevie Sullivan’s private life was in no way under control. Maura McMahon had eyes in her head. She knew about the pretty little Orla Dillon from the newsagent’s shop. Orla, who had married in great haste a couple of years back and liv
ed with her husband’s family in a faraway parish.
Orla had been spotted with Stevie a couple of times in places which were, to say the least of it, unwise. She had telephoned this morning—even though she gave another name Maura knew her voice. Obviously an afternoon meeting was planned.
“I don’t mean anything, Stevie.” She lowered her glance.
“Great. Well, I’ll be off, then. The two young lads are okay on the forecourt, and take the phone off the hook if you look back in on Emmet…” He stood at the door swinging his car keys, a tall handsome young man. Far too intelligent and full of promise to get into a messy situation with that little Dillon girl, and all her in-laws from the back of the mountains.
“I know I’m not your mother…” she began.
“Thank God you’re not, Maura. A younger, classier, smarter person entirely…”
She looked after him in despair.
His mother indeed was unlikely to give him any constructive advice. She was a sour woman, hardened by the life she had led, but unable to realize that its quality had improved. She passed her time by making jibes at Maura. She would have thought the pharmacist would be able to support a wife himself. And she managed to mention many a time that the first Mrs. McMahon never saw any need to burden herself with a job outside the home. Maura took no notice. Kathleen Sullivan was a pity. That’s what people said about her, she was a poor pity.
She couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes across the road. Long enough to change her stepson’s pajama jacket, to give him a wet flannel to wipe his forehead, neck, and hands, and a bar of Kit Kat as a treat. He was well on the road to recovery. She let herself out quietly and didn’t even pause to go into Martin in the chemist’s.
As soon as she went into the office she saw the safe door open…things were knocked from every shelf, and the desk drawers were upside down on the floor. Maura had often heard of people saying they were rooted to the ground by a shock, and she realized it was a good description. Her feet were not able to move. Not until she heard the sounds of groaning…a faint sound coming from beyond the door into the Sullivans’ house. It was then that her feet began to move and she ran to find Kathleen Sullivan lying on the floor, her two hands raised for help. She had been savagely beaten, her face and hair were covered in blood. Somebody had attacked her in a frenzy, and had very nearly killed her.
They all praised Maura for being so levelheaded, but she pushed away the praise. It was easy, she had her husband in the chemist’s shop a few yards away, her brother-in-law at the other end of a telephone. If anything, she blamed herself for having left the office. Had she been there, Kathleen might not have been attacked.
“Don’t say that,” Martin whispered. “It might have been you. God, Maura. Suppose it had been you…”
She had been tactful too about Stevie’s absence. He had told her that he had a meeting. It was with financial advisers, she assumed. No, not the bank, not the accountants. He would be back.
She insisted on staying on the premises until he returned. Kathleen had been taken by ambulance to the hospital in the town. She had lost a great deal of blood and needed to be examined for broken bones. Her wounds were too deep to be stitched without anesthetic.
Peter’s face had been grim. “You don’t look all that well yourself, Maura. Go back across the road home,” he suggested.
“That’s what I keep telling her.”
She knew she must keep the shrill note out of her voice, lest it sound like a tinge of hysteria. “Let me stay, please. I was minding the place for Stevie Sullivan. I want to be here when he gets back.”
Sergeant O’Connor said he’d stay too.
“Ah, Sean, can’t you go back to the station, for God’s sake. I’ll tell Stevie to call when he gets back.”
“No, I’ll wait too.” Sean’s face was set.
“I can tell you what’s missing…”
“I’m waiting too, Maura.”
“We’ll have a bit of a wait.”
“Is it young Dillon?”
“I’ve no idea who Stevie’s meeting…he said…”
“Okay, Maura, leave it.” The sergeant sounded weary. “Only, if it’s Orla Dillon, I hear they usually go to an empty house up behind the churchyard.”
“How would you hear things like that?”
“It’s my job.”
“It’s not, it’s a gossip’s job, a scandalmonger’s job.”
“Would I be wasting my time going up there, would you say?”
“You’re not going to get me to say…”
“No, it was shortcuts I was thinking of really. Like, it would mean we’d all get home hours earlier.”
“Well then…”
Sean stood up and took out the keys of the Garda car.
Nobody knew where they could have come from. There hadn’t been any other burglaries in the area. There were no fingerprints.
Could it have been a professional gang? Sean O’Connor didn’t think so. Professionals might have left the place in such a mess but wouldn’t have missed so many car documents that could have easily translated into money—registration certificates, endorsed checks, and even number plates. It hadn’t the hallmark of an organized gang.
Kathleen Sullivan, recovering in hospital, couldn’t remember how many there had been among her assailants. Sometimes she thought it had been only one, a big fellow with coarse black eyebrows and a smell of sweat off him. Other times she thought it must have been two, because something hit her from around the back and the dark-faced fellow was in front of her.
“It could have been the desk,” the sergeant suggested. She had hit her head on that.
“Yes, but it hadn’t risen up to hit her.”
She felt there were two. Whoever it was hadn’t come in a car, the lads who filled up with petrol knew that. They could account for who had been in and out. None of them had left to go into the house. It must have been someone who came in the back, someone watching who had seen Maura cross the road to the pharmacy. Someone who hadn’t expected to find Kathleen in the office.
What had she been doing in the office anyway? There was no need to ask. Everyone from Maura to Stevie to Sergeant O’Connor knew that she had pounced on the opportunity of Maura’s going back across the road to come and have a rummage around, probably in Maura’s handbag too. Not to take anything, mind, but to get information…find out how much there was in a post office book, see the age on a driving license, know what kind of letters she carried.
They didn’t even bother to ask Kathleen why she was in there. Which was a relief to the older woman as she lay in the hospital recovering from her injuries and accepting the sympathy of Lough Glass.
“I shouldn’t have gone across the road,” Maura said to Stevie.
“I shouldn’t have been where I was.” He grinned.
“They mightn’t have gone for me, fine strong woman that I am,” she said. Her voice was still shaky.
“My life is bad enough, Maura. If they did have a go at you I’d have to be looking at Martin McMahon for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t have liked that. Just as the man has got a bit of a life for himself at last.”
Maura smiled with pleasure at that remark. “Did you know Helen?”
“Not really. Who knew her? She was, as they say, a looker, but even with my enthusiasm for ladies I think I probably felt a bit young for her.”
“I pity the woman you marry, Stevie Sullivan.”
“No you don’t. People who say that have an insane urge to be part of the excitement.”
“Aren’t you full of yourself! Will we start the cleanup tonight? Sean is finished with everything.”
“Oh God, no. Let’s not go within a mile of it. Will you come down to Paddles’ and I’ll buy you a drink to help us recover?”
“No, Paddles doesn’t like females. They upset the even tenor of his ways.”
Stevie laughed. “The Central, then?”
“No, honestly, I’ll go back across the road. Poor Em
met doesn’t know what’s happening. Come with me there, Martin would be delighted.”
“I will. My legs are a bit shaky.” A lot of Stevie’s shakes had to do with the fright he got when the love nest was so suddenly interrupted by the sergeant. He thought he was going to have to deal with all Orla Dillon’s in-laws, and it would not have been an engagement he would have come out of alive.
He needed a drink. Anywhere.
Anna Kelly was sitting beside Emmet’s bed. She wore a white cardigan over a pale blue dress, her blond hair, like Clio’s, was shiny and the color of corn.
Stevie hadn’t realized that she was such an attractive little thing. “Well, well. Lucky Emmet. His own little Florence Nightingale,” he said admiringly.
“We’re playing Old Maid,” Anna explained.
“Never a fear that you’ll be that, Anna,” Stevie smiled.
“Oh, I don’t know, it could be worse. Imagine marrying anyone from round here.”
“You don’t only have to choose from round here,” her aunt Maura said.
“You did,” Anna said.
“Yes, but that was when I was mature, shall we say, and knew that this is where I wanted to be. Now, Emmet, I was coming in, in case you were lonely…but you’re not.”
“Have they caught them?” Emmet’s eyes were eager and bright.
“Not yet,” Stevie said. “But don’t worry, they’re not hanging around. The guards think they have gone off out the back again, the way they got in. Up the lane and out by the church. They’re halfway between here and Dublin now.”
“Why did they choose your place?” Anna asked.
“Fastest growing car business in the land,” Stevie said.
Anna looked at her aunt to confirm this.
“You don’t think I’d be working there otherwise,” Maura said. “Come on, Stevie. I’ll get you that drink I promised you.”
They went into the sitting room. Martin was on the phone to Kit. The robbery had been reported on the news. She had heard Lough Glass mentioned and wanted to know was everyone all right.