Even her mother had been unsympathetic. And Clio had a horrible smirk of superiority, as if she were saying to her family “Now, wasn’t I right about how awful Anna is.”
Kit McMahon was pleased to be going back to school. She had made a promise that this year she would work very hard. It had been a promise made during the only good conversation she had had with her mother for as long as she could remember.
It was the day she got her first period. Mother had been marvelous, and said all the right things, like wasn’t it great she was a woman now, and that this was a fine time to be a woman in Ireland. There was so much freedom and so many choices.
Kit expressed some doubt about this. Lough Glass wasn’t a place that inspired you with a notion of wild and free, and she wondered how very unlimited were the options that lay ahead of her. But Mother had been serious. When the next decade came, when they got to the 1960s, there’d be nothing a woman couldn’t do. Even this year people were beginning to accept that a woman could run things.
Look at poor Kathleen Sullivan over there across the road, filling tractors with fuel, supervising the man from the oil company when he came to restock. A few years ago they wouldn’t have taken an order from a woman, preferring to deal with any man, even one as obviously incapable as Billy Sullivan.
“But it all depends on being ready for it, Kit. Will you promise me, whatever happens, that you’ll work hard at school?”
“Yes, yes of course.” Kit was impatient. Why did it always have to come back to this in the end. But there was something in Mother’s face that made this sound different.
“Sit here beside me and hold my hand, and promise me that you’ll remember this day. It’s an important day for you, let’s mark it by something else. Let’s make it the day you promised your mother that you’d prepare yourself for the world properly.” Kit had looked at her blankly. “I know it sounds like the old refrain…but if only I were your age again…if only…I would work so hard. Oh Kit, if I’d known…” Her mother’s face was anguished.
Kit was very alarmed. “Known what? What is it, Mam? What didn’t you know?”
“That being educated makes you free. Having a career, a place, a position, you can do what you want.”
“But you did what you wanted, didn’t you? You married Dad, and you had us?” Kit knew her own face must be white, because she saw her mother’s expression change.
Her mother stroked her cheek. “Yes, yes of course I did.” She was soothing, like she was when she told Emmet there were no demons in the dark, when she encouraged Farouk the cat to come out from a hidey place behind the sofa.
“So why did you wish…?”
“I don’t wish it for myself, I wish it for you…so that you’ll always be able to choose, you won’t have to do things because there’s nothing else to do.”
Mother was holding her hand. “Will you tell me something truly?” Kit had asked.
“Of course I will.”
“Are you happy? I often see you looking sad. Is this where you want to be?”
“I love you, Kit, I love Emmet, and I love your father with all my heart. He is the kindest and best man in the whole world. That is the truth. I would never lie to him and I don’t lie to you either.” Mother was looking at her, she wasn’t half looking out the window with her mind abstracted as she often did.
Kit felt a wave of relief flood over her. “So you’re not sad and worried, then?”
“I said I wouldn’t lie to you and I won’t. Sometimes I do get sad and a bit lonely in this little town. I don’t love it as much as your father does; he was brought up here and knows every stone of it. I sometimes feel I might go mad if I have to see Lilian Kelly every day, and listen to Kathleen Sullivan whinging about how hard life is in the garage, or Mildred O’Brien saying that the dust in the air is making her feel sick…but then, you know that…you get annoyed with Clio and with school.” Mother had treated her as an equal. Mother had told her the truth. “So do you believe me now, Kit?”
“Yes, I do,” Kit said. And she did.
“And will you remember, whatever happens, that your passport to the world is to have your own career and that’s the only way you are free to choose what you want to do.”
It had been a great conversation, she felt much better about everything now. At the back of her mind she had one nagging worry. Why had Mother said twice, not once, “whatever happens”? It was as if Mother could see the future. Like Sister Madeleine seemed to do. Like the gypsy woman down by the lake.
But Kit had put it out of her mind. There was too much to think of, and wasn’t it great that she had got her periods before Clio. That was a real triumph.
DR. Kelly called as Martin was closing the shop. “I am the living embodiment of temptation. Will you come down to Paddles’ with me and have a pint?”
In another town the local doctor and chemist might be expected to drink at the hotel, which would have a better-class bar, but O’Brien’s was so dismal and gloomy that Martin and Peter much preferred to bypass it in favor of Paddles’ earthier but more cheerful atmosphere. They settled into a snug.
“My advice?” Martin held his head on one side quizzically. He didn’t think there was any real excuse other than a need for a companion.
“It’s young Anna, she has me worried. She keeps saying that everyone has a down on her, and that she really did see a woman down at the lake crying…”
“At that age they’re so full of drama.” Martin was consoling.
“I know, God don’t I know. But you know the way you sense when someone’s telling the truth.”
“Well, you don’t think she saw a ghost?”
“No, but I think she saw something.” Martin was nonplussed. He didn’t know what he was expected to say. “Do you remember her?”
“Remember who?”
“Bridie Daly, or Brigid Daly, or whatever her name was? The one who drowned.”
“How would I remember her, weren’t we only kids?”
“What did she look like?”
“I haven’t a clue, when was it? It was way back.”
“It was in 1920.”
“Peter, we were only eight.”
“Was she dark with long hair? It’s just that Anna is so positive.”
“And what are you thinking?”
“I was wondering was there someone dressing up to frighten the kids.”
“Well, if there was, they’ve succeeded, and the kid’s father, it seems too.”
Peter laughed. “Yes, you’re right. I suppose it’s nonsense. I just didn’t like to think of someone deliberately setting out to upset them. Anna has many faults, God knows, but I think she did see something that worried her.”
“And what did she say the woman looked like?”
“You know children…they have to relate it to someone they know. She said she looked like your Helen.”
THE senior girls in the convent were going to have a special session of their own with Father John. That meant that the twelve- to fifteen-year-olds would hear something the younger ones would not.
Anna Kelly was very curious. “Is it about babies?” she asked.
“Probably,” Clio said loftily.
“I know about babies,” Anna said defiantly.
“I wish I’d known enough about them to suffocate you while you still were one.” Clio spoke from the heart.
“You and Kit think you’re terrific. You’re just stupid,” Anna said.
“Yeah, I know, we can’t see ghosts and we don’t get nightmares…it’s desperate.”
They shook her off eventually and went to sit on the low wall of Sullivan’s Motor Works. It was a good vantage point to survey Lough Glass and no one could say they were causing trouble if they just sat still.
“Isn’t it a wonder that Emmet is so normal, I mean for a boy and everything,” Clio said in admiration. Privately Kit thought that Anna Kelly might not be so irritating if Clio had ever spoken to her younger sister with anything other t
han disdain.
“Emmet’s just born that way,” Kit said. “I never remember him getting into trouble or anything. I suppose they didn’t roar at him much because of his stammer. That must have been it.”
“They didn’t roar at Anna enough,” Clio said darkly. “Listen, what do you think he’ll really talk to us about, do you think it might be about doing it?”
“I’d die if he did.”
“I’ll die if he doesn’t,” Clio said, and they pealed with enough laughter to bring Philip O’Brien’s father to his usual position at the door of his hotel to view them with disapproval.
Whatever Father John, the Missioner, had intended to talk about to the senior girls in Lough Glass convent was never known, because it happened that his visit coincided with a huge argument that raged through the senior school, about whether Judas was or was not in hell. Mother Bernard was not considered a satisfactory arbiter on the matter. The girls were persistent that the visiting Missioner give a ruling.
There was a very strong view that Judas must be in hell. “Hadn’t Our Lord said that it were better for that man if he hadn’t ever been born.”
“Now, that must mean he was in hell.”
“It could mean that for thousands of years his name would be connected with ‘traitor’ and ‘betrayer’ and that was his punishment for betraying Our Lord. Couldn’t it?”
“No, it couldn’t, because that would only be name-calling. Sticks and stones could break your bones but words would never hurt you.”
Father John looked at their young faces, heated and red with excitement. He hadn’t come across such fervor in a long time. “But Our Lord couldn’t have chosen him as a friend, knowing that he was going to betray him and that he’d be sent to hell. That would mean Our Lord was setting a trap for Judas.”
“He didn’t have to betray him, he just did it for the money.”
“But what would they want with money, they just went around as a gang.”
“But it was over. Judas knew it was coming to an end, that’s why he did it.”
Father John was used to girls shuffling with embarrassment and asking was French-kissing a venial or a mortal sin, and accepting whichever he said it was. He was not normally faced with such cosmic questions and debates on the nature of free will and predestination.
He tried to answer as best he could, with what was, after all, fairly inconclusive evidence. He said he thought that, as in all things, the benefit of the doubt must be extended, and that perhaps in his infinite mercy Our Lord had seen fit…and to remember that one never knew the heart of a sinner, and the words that passed between man and his maker at the moment of death.
Loosening his collar a little, he asked Mother Bernard afterward about their extraordinary preoccupation. “Was there any case of anyone local who perhaps ended their own life?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. You know the way girls get something into their heads.” Mother Bernard sounded wise and certain.
“Yes, but this is very intense. Are you sure…?”
“Years and years ago, long before any of them were born, there was an unfortunate woman who found herself in a certain condition, Father, and is believed to have taken her own life. I think the ignorant people had a story about her ghost or some such nonsense. Maybe they are thinking of that.” Mother Bernard’s lips were pursed with disapproval for having to mention a suicide and an out-of-wedlock pregnancy to a visiting priest.
“That could be it all right. There are two little girls, two of the younger ones in the front row, a very fair girl and a very dark one, who seem most het up about it, and whether or not people who take their own lives should be buried in Holy Ground.”
Mother Bernard sighed. “That will be Cliona Kelly and Katherine McMahon. Those two would argue with you that blackbirds were white, I’m afraid.”
“Well, it’s good to be forewarned,” said Father John, as he went back into the convent chapel and told the girls very firmly that since taking your own life was taking away a gift that God had given you, it was a sin against Hope—one of the two great sins against Hope—despair. And that anyone who did so was not fit to be buried in a Christian burial ground.
“Not even if her poor mind…” began the blond girl in the front pew.
“Not even if her poor mind,” Father John said firmly.
He was worn out from it, and he had the boys’ school to do still. Serious warnings on the evils of drink and self-abuse.
Father John sometimes wondered did any of it do any good at all. But he reminded himself that thinking along those lines was almost a sin against Hope. He must be careful of it.
Chapter Two
“YOU don’t have proper cousins,” Clio said to Kit as they lay on the two divan beds in Clio’s room.
“Oh God, what are you picking on me for now?” Kit groaned. She was reading a magazine article telling you how to soften your hands.
“You never have families of cousins coming to stay.”
“Why would they come to stay? Don’t all the other McMahons live just a few miles away?” Kit sighed. Clio could be very tiresome sometimes.
“We have cousins coming from Dublin always, and aunts and things.”
“And you’re always saying you hate it.”
“I like Aunt Maura.”
“That’s only because she gives you a shilling every time she comes to stay.”
“You’ve no aunts.” Clio was persistent.
“Oh Clio, will you shut up. Of course I’ve aunts, what is Aunty Mary and what’s Aunty Margaret…?
“They’re just married to your father’s brothers.”
“Well, there’s Daddy’s sister in the convent in Australia. She’s an aunt. You can’t expect her to be coming and staying and giving us a shilling, can you?”
“Your mother has no people.” Clio lowered her voice. “She’s a person with no people of her own at all.” There was something in the way she said it which made it obvious that she was repeating it like a parrot from something she had heard.
“What do you mean?” Kit was angry now.
“Just what I said.”
“Of course she has people, she has us, a family, here.”
“It’s peculiar, that’s all.”
“It’s not peculiar, it’s just you are always picking on my mother for some reason. I thought you said you were giving that up.”
“Keep your shirt on.”
“No, I won’t. And I’m going home.” Kit flounced off the bed.
Clio was alarmed. “I didn’t mean it.”
“Then why did you say it? What kind of booby goes round saying things she doesn’t mean?”
“I was only saying…”
“What were you saying?” Kit’s eyes flashed.
“I don’t know what I was saying.”
“Neither do I.” Kit ran lightly out of the room and down the stairs.
“Are you off so soon?” Clio’s mother was in the hall. Mrs. Kelly always knew when there had been a row. “I was going to offer you some shortbread,” she said. Many a skirmish had been avoided by the timely appearance of food.
But not today.
“I’m sure Clio would love it, but I have to go back home,” Kit said.
“Surely not yet!”
“My mother might be a bit lonely. You see, she is a person who has no people of her own.” Kit was as near to insolent as she could get away with. A dark red flush around Mrs. Kelly’s cheeks and neck showed her she had been right. She left, pulling the door gently behind her. With a smile she realized that there would be little shortbread for Clio. Good, Kit thought in satisfaction. I hope her mother eats the face off her.
Mother wasn’t at home. She had gone to Dublin on the day excursion, Rita said.
“What did she want to do that for?” Kit grumbled.
“Wouldn’t we all love to go to Dublin on a day excursion,” Rita said.
“I wouldn’t…we have no people there,” Kit said.
“Th
ere’s millions of people in Dublin,” Emmet said.
“Thousands,” Kit corrected him absently.
“Well then?” Emmet said.
“Right.” Kit let it go. “What did you read with Sister Madeleine?”
“It’s all William Blake now. Somebody gave her a book of his poems and she loves them.”
“I don’t know anything he wrote except ‘Tyger, Tyger.’”
“Oh he wrote lots. That’s the only one in the schoolbook, but he wrote thousands and thousands.”
“Maybe dozens and dozens,” Kit corrected him, “maybe. Say me one.”
“I don’t remember them.”
“Oh go on. You say them over and over.”
“I know the one about the piper…” Emmet went to the window and stood, as he had stood in Sister Madeleine’s cottage, looking out the window.
“Pipe a song about a lamb
As piped with merry cheer
Piper, pipe that song again,
So I piped, he wept to hear.”
He looked so proud of himself. It was a difficult word to say, “piper,” at the best of times, and coming so often in the one sentence. Sister Madeleine must be a genius to have cured his stutter like that.
Kit didn’t notice that her father had come in as Emmet was speaking, but the boy hadn’t faltered; his confidence was extraordinary. And as they sat there in the September evening, she felt a shiver come over her. It was as if Mother didn’t belong to this family at all. As if all there was was Emmet, and Dad, and Rita, and herself.
And that Mother wouldn’t come back.
Mother came back, cold and tired; the heating had broken down on the train; the train itself had broken down twice.
“How was Dublin?”
“It was noisy, and crowded and everyone seemed to be rushing.”
“That’s why we all live here.” Father was delighted.
“That’s why we all live here,” Mother said flatly.