“Will we help them, Philip, Kit, and Clio?” Emmet asked Anna.
“I don’t want to do anything to help Clio. I’ll take part in anything at all that might lead to her downfall,” Anna said.
“You don’t mean that.”
“Oh but I do. Just because you get on with Kit doesn’t mean it’s the normal thing to do.”
“I know.” Emmet did know. Very few people had a sister as marvelous as Kit. Someone who promised to help him and did. She had been very successful indeed at distracting Stevie Sullivan’s attention away from Anna Kelly.
Emmet thought that Kit was reasonably good-looking. Of course, being her brother it was hard to look at things objectively, but he couldn’t understand why Stevie would feel drawn to her instead of the beautiful Anna.
But whatever Kit was doing it was working. “I hope it’s not an awful bore for you,” he had said to Kit.
“No,” Kit had assured him. “I’m quite enjoying it actually. But don’t assume it’s working totally. I wouldn’t rush in there to Anna, you know.”
“You’re right,” he said sagely. And he had been cautious.
He could see that Anna was still hanging around hoping that Stevie would be available, but he always seemed to be in Dublin these days, she grumbled.
“Never mind, I’m sure he’ll be around at Christmas.” Emmet was encouraging.
“Yes? Well, I hope so.”
“So you’ll help in the dance…it’s a place you could go with him.”
Anna hadn’t thought of that. It was indeed a heaven-sent opportunity, a glittering dance on their doorstep. She began to think of what she would wear. “You’re very kind, Emmet. I really appreciate it, what with you fancying me and all that.”
“That’s all right.” Emmet was courteous. “After all, you fancied me too for a while, maybe we might get back to the way we were, but I understand that’s not the situation at present.”
“You deserve someone terrific,” Anna said. “Someone much more worthy of you than Patsy Hanley.”
“Patsy’s quite nice to talk to when you know her,” Emmet lied.
Clio knew just how to play it. She wouldn’t plead with her parents to support the Central’s bid to get into the big time in terms of entertainment. Instead, she put on the look of an early Christian martyr.
“Clio, sweetheart, please cheer up. We were looking forward to your coming home, now you just sit there as if the world were coming to an end.”
“It is as far as I’m concerned, Daddy.”
“We can’t leave you off there to England with people we don’t know.”
“So you said. I gave in, you’ve won. But I’m not expected to be happy about it.”
“We all have a life to live, Clio. Your mother is very upset by you.”
“And I’m very upset by her and by you. These are facts, Daddy.”
“You’ll have a good Christmas here.”
“Sure.”
“And perhaps your friend Michael would come here and see you, see us all.”
“I can’t invite him here; nothing ever happens in Lough Glass. You’d have to give a person a reason for driving from Dublin.”
That night in Paddles’, Peter Kelly heard about the plans that were afoot.
“I suppose we should support them,” Martin McMahon said.
“God, this might be the direct answer from God that we were looking for.” Dr. Kelly seemed very pleased. “Count us in, Martin, and if this doesn’t put a smile on Clio’s face nothing will.”
Clio didn’t sound enthusiastic.
“I thought you’d be pleased,” her father said, disappointed.
“Yes, but it probably won’t happen. You know all the old Golf Club fuddy-duddies won’t think the Central is good enough for their precious party on New Year’s Eve.”
“It’s not, it’s a terrible hotel…you and Kit have always been to the forefront of saying what a desperate place it is.” He was bewildered now.
“Things will always be desperate while old people don’t make any move to change them,” Clio said.
“Yes, I know that’s your view. We’ve ruined everything for you, but what are your lot doing? Tell me that, except sitting around complaining and sulking.”
“I’d help Philip get the hotel into good shape if his awful old parents and everyone else’s awful old parents didn’t go round shaking their shaggy locks and saying that things should just stay as they were.”
Peter Kelly ran his hand over his rapidly balding head. “It’s very nice of you to refer to my shaggy locks,” he said, hoping to coax a smile out of her.
Clio gave a watery smile. “You’re not the worst, Daddy.”
“And you all would like us to have the dinner dance there…even though we’re crumbling old geriatrics…”
“Yes. The rest of us would be normal,” she said.
“I hope you have a daughter yourself one day and you’ll know how much you’d love her to praise you instead of always finding fault,” he said in a rare mood of admitting his affection for her. Normally they had a joky sparring relationship.
“I’m sure I’ll be a terrific mother when the time comes,” Clio said.
But she spoke with a slightly hollow note. She was five days late with her period, she fervently hoped the time to be a mother hadn’t come yet.
“They won’t come here,” Philip’s father said, sniffing.
“They’ve had many a year when they could come, but they preferred their great ugly concrete barn of a Golf Club,” Mildred said.
Philip gritted his teeth. He would not lose his temper. Part of a hotelier’s training was to remain outwardly calm when inwardly seething. They had been told that often enough. He had to practice it often enough in the various establishments where he had done his practical work.
“They have nowhere else to go,” he said.
“And we’d put ourselves out for one year, then they’d go back next year to their old shed out there.” His mother felt very keenly the fact that she was not part of the Lough Glass golfing set. The fact that she didn’t play the game seemed to her irrelevant.
“It could be such a success that they’d want it here next time, and so would other people.”
“How would they know?” Dan O’Brien asked. “That it had been a success, if it was a success?”
“We’d take photographs. Send them to the papers, magazines even.”
“You’d be off back to Dublin and we’d be left with the work of it.”
“No. I’d come back, every weekend, and I’ll be home for the Christmas holidays.”
“And what would you know…” his father began.
Philip sounded weary, but he knew that Kit and Clio were having similar arguments in their families. “I don’t know everything, but we’re hoteliers, Father. All three of us, isn’t that right, Mother? And if we’re ever going to get a chance to do something different, a bit exciting…isn’t this one being handed to us on a plate?” He didn’t know why or what words he had used but it worked.
They looked at each other, a flicker of life and enthusiasm in their eyes. You would have to be quick to see it, but it was there. “How will we heat the place?” his father asked, and Philip knew the battle had been won.
They had a little committee, and they met in the hotel. Kit took the minutes of the meeting in a big notebook, then she would type the notes up afterward and give everyone a copy so that they would all know what they had agreed to do. They sat in the freezing cold breakfast room, a square, unattractive place only marginally touched by the small, smoky fire that sent all its heat up the chimney.
They were very businesslike, even though dressed in their outdoor clothes to keep warm, Kit in her navy duffel coat and white angora scarf, Clio in her gray flannel coat with its peach-colored blouse showing at the neck. She had read that peach gave a good glow to the face. Anna in her tartan jacket, Patsy Hanley belted into her navy gabardine coat that was too small for her and also not smart
enough. She made a resolve to tell her mother that there was no point in being the daughter of the drapery if you ended up the least well-dressed girl in Lough Glass. Emmet in his thick wool polo-neck sweater and belted brown jacket. Michael Sullivan with his long dark hair below the collar of his gray overcoat. Not as good-looking as his elder brother, but one day, when the pimples were gone and his face and shoulders filled out, he might well turn into the same kind of heartbreaker.
The young people of Lough Glass determined that their New Year’s Eve would be the kind of success they saw when they went to the pictures. The kind of happening that other people had and that they would have to create themselves if it was to come to Lough Glass.
Philip decided that he had to wear indoor clothes as some kind of act of faith in his hotel. It might be seen to be letting the side down if he too was dressed in a kind of lifeboatman’s outfit that would make the place tolerable.
He was doing quite well as chairman…he seemed to know at the outset that he should never think of it as his hotel or his dinner dance, but as theirs.
“Have any of us ever been to anything up in the Golf Club?” he asked.
Nobody had. That was the first priority; they were to find out what aspects of the place had been good, and what had needed improvements. Everyone had a specific job to do. Even Patsy Hanley, whose mother wouldn’t have been there, Philip was able to find her a responsibility.
Patsy was to discover what kinds of facilities they had in a ladies’ cloakroom; were there mirrors, how many lavatories, did they hang their coats on a rail or did they have a lady who gave them cloakroom tickets? Would it be better to use one of the hotel bedrooms for this purpose? Patsy was to come back with her report on Sunday afternoon.
“How will I find it all out?” she asked.
“Research,” Philip said.
“You’d be in the way of asking people things. You’re good at chatting to people,” Emmet said.
He noticed Anna Kelly jerk up her head as he said this. Then Emmet himself would be in charge of what the gentlemen would require. He would ask his father and Dr. Kelly and Father Baily and anyone who went to the Golf Club.
Clio was going to come back with her ideas on decoration. It was very important, the first look of a place. Her ideas would be put to the group and they would vote on what they could do and what might be beyond them. Clio was flattered that people thought her ideas might be beyond them. She made up her mind to look at magazines and study the thing properly.
Michael Sullivan and Kevin Wall were deputed to find out how the front of the hotel could be altered so that it looked more splendid. Michael, because his garage had improved its appearance and secured troughs of plants and flowers to smarten it up, Kevin, because his brother was a jobbing builder, and the materials would naturally be bought from Wall’s. They were to come back with an estimate.
Anna Kelly was to concentrate on curtains and lighting. Hers were to be practical suggestions, the matter of image was left to Clio. “How will I know what we should do with curtains until I know what the artistic designer has dreamed up for the whole hotel?” Anna was being heavily sarcastic.
Philip didn’t appear to see it. “Ah but that’s the hard part, Anna. Whatever you come up with will have to be sheer genius, there’s no question of there being any money to coordinate anything with anything else…you’re on your own.” Anna seemed pleased by this.
Kit looked at Philip with admiration. He did seem to have the thing under control, and he was far more diplomatic than she would ever have believed. “What will I do?” she heard herself asking almost too eagerly. After all, she had been the moving force behind it. “Will I just keep the notes?”
“Kit and I will do the food,” Philip said. “We are the trained folk after all, and we want them to have a meal they’ll never forget.”
“They’ll never forget the night anyway,” Kevin Wall said. “Most of them will be taken to the County Hospital with frostbite.”
“My father’s going to tell us by Sunday just how much he can afford to spend on storage heaters and radiators.” Philip was unperturbed. “Will we meet here at three o’clock?”
And they went their ways, each with a dream. Clio, with great relief that motherhood did not seem to be imminent, was in high good humor. She thought about the New Year’s Eve Dance. She would see that at least one of the Central’s terrifyingly plain rooms would be properly done up, one that would be away from prying eyes.
Patsy Hanley left happy. Emmet McMahon had made much of her in front of that stuck-up Anna Kelly.
Kevin Wall and Michael Sullivan wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone but they were flattered to be part of something new. It hadn’t been long ago since they were regarded as the young thugs who would have to be kept away from any function rather than invited in to help run it.
Philip was pleased with how it had gone. They were all offering to help. If it failed it would be a group failure, and Kit in particular would be at his side, win or lose.
Emmet McMahon knew that this dance would be the great opportunity to let Anna Kelly come back to him on his terms in his own town.
Kit McMahon and Anna Kelly looked over at the garage where Stevie was talking to a client. Neither of them would interrupt him during working hours. Both of them had huge hopes of him when the dance came to town on New Year’s Eve.
Lena did not know how she had managed to survive the days after Ivy’s wedding. How she had gone on acting normal to everyone? Someone had told her that chickens did this; if you cut off their heads they still ran around for a while, just as if they still had heads. Nobody said what happened then. They probably just fell over and died.
There had been so many discoveries in the past week. Things she had not set out to discover. And did not want to know. She knew that Louis must be about to leave the Dryden. That he was going to leave her and go far away. Sometimes she suspected that he was going to Ireland. He came in so rarely, often to pick up mail which had suddenly started arriving at the flat rather than at the hotel. She never remembered him getting any letters at home before. There were references to Ireland in the conversation. Not the Ireland of long ago that they had known…but today’s Ireland. He never stayed the night. She never asked for details of functions or late shifts. It was as if they were both waiting. Waiting for the day when he would tell her.
Lena felt very frail, the thread that was holding her together was so fragile, it could easily break. When she saw the envelope from Kit so soon after she had written her heart turned over with fear. Please, may her daughter not say anything scathing to her. Not just now, not at this point.
Please, God…Lena said as she opened the envelope.
She realized it was a long time since she had asked God for something. Why should it work now?
Dear Lena,
That sounds a great wedding. It was like seeing a film, I could imagine everyone, especially the terrible Best Man.
I realize how much I have missed your letters from the time when you were just Lena, my mother’s friend. And I missed writing to you too, though these days there’s hardly time to breathe let alone write. You’ll never believe what we’re going to do, sit down before you read this…we’re going to try to have a glittering fabulous New Year’s Gala at O’Brien’s Hotel…
Hardly daring to believe her luck, Lena read with shining eyes the tale of the hotel’s transformation and the committee hard at work.
Even Clio is taking part, Kit wrote. It’s only because these terrible O’Connors that she is so taken with are going to be there. She thought they were going to be in London and miss it but once the almightly Michael said he was going to be present, then it all had Clio’s blessing.
Lena hugged herself and laughed aloud to read this. She could hear Kit’s voice…just as she had been at nine, ten, eleven, twelve…always complaining about Clio’s airs and graces, and yet always involved with her as well. The letter sparkled with life and enthusiasm. In the last paragr
aph it changed its tone.
You didn’t mention that Louis was at the wedding. Don’t feel that he can’t be mentioned or anything. I wouldn’t want you to think that he has to be cut out of what you tell me.
Warmest wishes always, Kit.
She couldn’t tell Kit about Louis. All she had left in the world was Kit, and Lena was going to be some kind of person in the girl’s eyes, not a worn-out, thrown-aside fool, which is actually what she was.
She read over and over and over her daughter’s plans for the hotel. Some of them ludicrous, some of them well within anyone’s power. She wondered how much money she had, she would love to have invested it there and then in a refurbishment program for the Central Hotel, Lough Glass. After all, hotels were doing very well in Ireland. Their time was coming.
Lena had reason to know this very well.
“WE’LL have to come home again next weekend,” Kit told Philip.
“I can’t ask you all to do that.”
“It’s only Clio and myself. The others are there already.” They sat companionably in the summerhouse, which they had agreed to paint and surround with fairy lights for the occasion.
“Well, it’s taking you away from whatever keeps you both in Dublin.” He was a bit diffident. He was so much nicer than when he had acted as if they were foreign prince and princess, promised to each other from birth.
“Oh, better for Clio to come home, let me tell you. That eejit she is stuck on values her much more when she makes a move out of Dublin instead of waiting on his every move.”
“And what about you?”
“I told you. I have no romances. Hand on heart, there’s nothing to keep me in Dublin.”
And she spoke the truth. Stevie Sullivan was home running his business every weekend. She made no move to contact him, but she was there like a sentinel in case he might make any step in the direction of Anna Kelly.
The O’Connor hotels all had a Christmas program. It was becoming quite a smart thing for a family to go and stay in one of their hotels. Everything done for you, wonderful atmosphere, people said. Those who said it didn’t have the real spirit of Christmas were almost always those who didn’t have the money to afford it.