“Get out of here, Louis,” she said aloud.
“I’ve nothing to lose now,” Louis said. “I’ll bring you down with me, you’ll be sorry you didn’t listen to me. I’ve nothing to lose.”
There was a huge truck. The lights of a truck and a terrible shattering of glass and…
Then there was nothing.
Peggy Forbes expected a call as soon as Lena checked into the hotel. It would be eleven p.m. at the latest. By midnight she was worried.
The hotel was also annoyed. “We could have given her room away several times,” they said.
“I think the main thing is to find out whether Mrs. Gray has had an accident rather than concentrating on room occupancy,” Peggy Forbes said.
They were very apologetic.
It was Ivy who heard at two a.m.
A young policeman came to her door. “I wonder if I could come in,” he said.
“Ernest,” she called. “Ernest, come quickly. Lena’s dead.”
It was instantaneous, they told Ivy. She had crossed the road, into the oncoming traffic. She may have fallen asleep or lost concentration. The driver of the truck was not to be consoled. He was crying like a baby on the side of the road, said he’d never forget it to his dying day. He would like to tell her family how he couldn’t have avoided it in a million years. Her car was out of control. But that was probably no consolation to her family, he said then.
“She has no family,” Ivy told the policeman. “Her work and me, that’s all she has. We’re her family and I’ll tell her work in the morning.”
“These are the only addresses given in her diary and wallet apparently,” the policeman said. “Our people on the spot said that only you and Millars were there as contacts, so I suppose that’s in order, then.”
“That’s in order, then,” Ivy said. “Thank you, Officer, that’s in order.”
Ivy went to Millar’s at nine a.m. She dressed carefully in black. She had a list of things she would discuss with Jessie Millar. The police formalities and what they would involve, the undertakers, the funeral, the announcement in the papers.
Jessie Millar was grief-stricken in a way that Ivy would never have believed possible. This wasn’t a colleague, this was a true friend. When the weeping was over they settled everything.
“The question of Mr. Gray is a delicate one, perhaps I could handle that,” Ivy suggested.
“Please, please. Come in and sit at her desk. Make whatever calls you like. Use the place as your own.”
Ivy had never sat in a posh office like this. She would have loved to talk to Lena about it, but instead she was sitting there arranging Lena’s funeral with the undertaker. She would deal with Mr. Gray next. She remembered the name of the hotel where he worked. She was unprepared for the violence of his response.
“This is some cheap, dirty trick, Ivy,” he said.
“Would to God that it were.” Ivy’s voice was shaking.
“If she thinks she can get out of it by saying this, she has another think coming.”
“The funeral’s next Thursday, Louis. It would be best if you were here.”
“Funeral! Don’t make me laugh,” he said.
She gave him the name and phone number of the undertaker’s. She said she would confirm it in writing to him and mark the envelope personal. Again she said in a level voice, “It would be best if you were there.”
Then she rang Stevie Sullivan. She spoke to the woman who must be Martin McMahon’s second wife. “This is Ivy,” she said.
“Oh, we spoke before, you’re from the guesthouse.” Maura was pleasant.
Ivy remembered the ruse. Imagine, it was only a couple of days ago and Lena had been alive and well. “Can I speak to him?” she asked.
“Certainly.” Maura was puzzled. This woman Ivy sounded totally different this time around.
“I have to go to Dublin, Maura,” Stevie said, throwing some papers into a briefcase and taking the keys of a car. “It’s sudden and important and I’ll be gone a few days.”
“You have appointments, people to meet…”
“Cancel them if you would.”
“Any excuse?”
“No, not one I can give now. But you make one.”
“Can you tell me any more? Please, Stevie. I’m a little anxious, these calls from London…”
Stevie looked at her. “Yes, I’m going to London actually. I’m stopping to pick up Kit. A friend of ours died.”
“But what friend…?”
“Please, Maura…I know you’re worried but please. This is a bad time.”
“Her father will want to know what she’s doing dashing off…”
“No, it’s not dashing off. Now, I know you don’t think I’m the most reliable man in the world but I’d die rather than let any harm happen to Kit. I think you know that. I haven’t seduced her, I won’t try…eventually in years and years from now I hope she’ll marry me, but she may not. I can’t tell you straighter than this.”
“Go and pack your things, Stevie,” she said. “I’ll sort it out.”
He took Kit from class. He held out both his hands to her. “This is the second time someone has had to tell you this news, Kit,” he said. And she put her head on his shoulder and cried her eyes out.
Standing in the distance, Philip O’Brien saw them.
The body was released from the hospital and came to a funeral parlor in London. Stevie held Kit’s hand as they went in. They stood together beside the casket. Lena looked as if she were asleep. Whatever discoloring and wounding there was in her forehead was hidden by her hair. She looked completely at peace. Neither of them cried. They just stood there and looked for a long time.
Ivy asked them to stay in Lena’s flat. “That’s where she’d want you to be,” she said. “I’ve left it ready for you.” They went upstairs, limbs moving slowly as if in a dream.
“You’ve changed the wallpaper, she told me,” Kit said.
“After he left, to get the memory of him out of the place. I think it worked for a bit.”
“It sure did,” Stevie said.
“She had all her living ahead of her,” Ivy said, her face puckering. She turned away. “I’ll leave you here and come down if you need anything.”
“It’s got only one bed,” said Stevie.
“We can survive that,” Kit said. She took off her dress and laid it on a chair, and her open-toed shoes. She stood in her slip at the handbasin where Mother must have stood so often and washed her face and arms and neck. Then she lay down on one side of the bed. Stevie lay on the other side, their hands held. And eventually he realized that she had gone to sleep.
He got up and sat by the window. Had he done what he was asked to do, or was he somehow to blame for Lena’s death? Louis had shouted that they’d all be sorry for this as he left. Could he possibly have done the wrong thing and not what she’d asked?
“He won’t come to the funeral,” Ivy said.
“Yes, he will,” Kit said. She was pale but calm.
“Maybe we’re better without him. He caused all that upset,” Ernest said.
“I won’t have her laid to rest without that bastard standing there watching,” Kit said. “She deserves that much. She deserves him standing there with a black tie at her funeral.”
“But if he won’t come?”
“I’ll make him come to her funeral,” Kit said.
Louis Gray would not take a call from London from Kit McMahon. A secretary said she had instructions not to put Miss McMahon through. “Give him a message from me please.”
“Certainly.”
“There’s a certain gathering that he is expected at here in London, and I will need to know whether or not he plans to attend.”
“Hold on and I’ll inquire.” She came back. “I’m sorry the answer is regretfully no.”
“Then could you tell him that regretfully I shall have to come and collect him.” Kit hung up.
At the office she borrowed a hundred pounds from Jessie. She said it was
for funeral arrangements. It was given willingly. Then she left a note for Stevie and went straight to the airport. The flight took an hour, the taxi to Louis’s hotel another hour. She was calm when she asked to see him. He was in a meeting, they said, with Mr. O’Connor, Senior, and some of the board members.
“I have a taxi waiting,” Kit said, “so I’d better go in and speak to him.” Before the receptionist could stop her Kit was in the boardroom. “I do beg your pardon for this but it’s an emergency,” she said.
Fingers recognized his daughter-in-law’s friend, the girl who could and did cause so much trouble.
“Leave this minute,” Louis said.
“Louis, listen to her,” Fingers ordered.
Louis’s hand was at his throat.
“I’m afraid that a great friend of ours in London has died and we all need you at the funeral. I wouldn’t make such a drama out of it, but your presence is very much needed.”
“Who was this friend?” Fingers O’Connor asked, since Louis seemed to have lost his voice.
Very clearly Kit said: “His name was Leonard Williams, a brother of James Williams, your previous employer. The family are most insistent that you come.” She looked directly at Louis as she spoke. She was telling him that she’d keep the secret, she would drop him in a flash if he came.
“That James Williams we met at the Dryden the first time?” Fingers asked.
“Yes, that Mr. Williams. Can I say you’ll be with me? I have a taxi outside.”
“They can’t expect me to come now,” Louis gasped.
“It’s a matter of being there as soon as possible.” Their eyes were still locked.
Louis knew that Kit would go the distance. That he had no option. “I have to be back for the christening,” he said.
“In the midst of life we are in death,” Kit said. “Christenings mercifully can be delayed but sudden death and funerals can’t.”
“I’ll go later tonight,” he said.
“You know where to go, to the house in West London. All the details are there.”
“Yes, yes. I know.”
“What’s your involvement in this?” Fingers looked suspicious.
“The deceased was very, very good to me, and good to all of us. That’s why the people who were important in the deceased’s life must be at the funeral,” she said.
The others in the room who didn’t know what was happening looked at each other in mystification. First, Louis Gray the new hotshot manager was beaten up like someone after a barroom brawl, now there were all these heavily loaded signals from some youngster to whom Fingers was listening with an uncharacteristic respect.
Louis Gray and his father-in-law left the room together and watched Kit getting back into her taxi. “Better go, Louis,” Fingers said. “If she has you by the balls like the rest of us, then we’re all sunk.”
The day was too sunny for a funeral. London looked too well to be hosting something sad like this. Kit wore a plain black cotton dress and one of Lena’s own hats. She carried a small black bag she had found in Lena’s dressing table drawer.
Ivy, Jessie, Grace West, old Mrs. Park in her wheelchair, Peggy Forbes heartbroken from Manchester, came. The entire staff of Millar’s, James Williams, all the tenants in the house, clients of the agency, waiters from the local restaurants, clerks from the bank. There was a very large crowd in the Catholic church that Kit had found for the funeral Mass.
As the priest read out the prayer about this night being in heaven and may the angels come to meet her, Kit held Stevie’s hand very tight. They had both been in the parish church in Lough Glass when Father Baily had read this prayer for Lena before. But in those days the angels were being asked to meet Helen McMahon.
The priest had asked earlier if there was any particular hymn they would like. Kit couldn’t think of any hymn. Not one. Something she might have sung at school, the priest prompted.
“Hail Queen of Heaven,” Kit had said.
It had not been a good choice. The organist began twice but the congregation, most of them Church of England, did not know this hymn to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Kit was not going to let it falter. She would sing it if nobody else did.
Hail Queen of Heaven, she began, and Stevie joined in.
The ocean star,
Guide of the wanderer here below.
Thrown on life’s surge, we claim thy care
Save us from peril and from woe.
And then another voice joined in and they saw it was Louis Gray in his dark coat with his black tie, his face bruised and at an angle, his eye blackened. Most people thought he had been in the accident with her. He had a good strong voice and he helped Stevie and Kit along.
Mother of Christ, star of the sea,
Pray for the wanderer, pray for me.
The organist, pleased that someone had sung, struck up a second verse. They sang what had been sung already, all three of them. By the time it came to Pray for the wanderer, pray for me, everyone in the church had joined in. Kit and Stevie looked at each other. They had done Lena proud in London.
Only a few people went to the crematorium, that’s what Ivy and Kit suggested.
Louis looked pathetically at Kit. “Am I to go?”
“Yes,” she said.
It was so alien to anything that Kit had ever known; no coffin going into the earth, no sounds of spades and clay falling, just curtains parting and closing. It seemed totally unreal.
They stood outside the little chapel in the crematorium. “When did you find out?” he asked Kit.
“I always knew,” she said.
“That’s rubbish. The first Christmas she nearly died of grief because she couldn’t ring you.”
“She rang me soon after,” Kit said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Suit yourself. I was the secret you didn’t know about, you had many many that she didn’t know about. Let’s call it quits.”
“All right,” Louis said.
He looked old and tired. That was Kit’s revenge.
They had to talk to a solicitor. Lena’s entire estate had been left to Mary Katherine McMahon of Lough Glass. Apart from bequests to Ivy and Grace West, her quarter share of Millar’s Agency now belonged to Kit. In a codicil she had left the car in which she had been killed to Steven Sullivan, also of Lough Glass. His eyes were brimming with tears when he heard it.
“How will I arrange for it to be transferred to you after probate? We’re talking about forty or fifty thousand pounds,” the solicitor said.
“I’ll write to you about it later,” said Kit.
They hired a car, drove home through England. Through fields and woods and small towns, and then up through Wales. They would come back, they said, back to London to see friends like Ivy and Ernest and Grace and Jessie.
But now they wanted to go home.
“What’ll I do with the money? I can’t say I’ve been given fifty thousand pounds.”
“No.” Stevie was thoughtful.
“So what will I do? She wants me to have it…but I have to do it right. It would be terrible to blow the whole story at this stage.”
“You could give it to me,” Stevie said.
“What?”
“You could invest it in my business.”
“Are you mad?”
“No, I could transform the whole place, and when you marry me it’ll all be yours anyway. Meanwhile I’ll just look after it for you.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“Lena did.”
“That’s true. But this would be sheer madness.”
“No it wouldn’t. We could get a lawyer and do it legally. You could be a sleeping partner. Well, in that sense anyway.”
“I don’t know, Stevie.”
“Think of a better idea,” he said, and they drove along the roads of Wales.
They stayed the night in Anglesey.
It was a lovely little guesthouse with a woman who had a singsong accent. “I have a beautiful r
oom for you,” she said. “A four-poster bed and you can nearly see Ireland from there.”
They were too tired to talk to her about the situation, or they each thought the other would. And anyway, they had slept blamelessly side by side in Lena’s bed in London. They went upstairs and lay down. He looked so beautiful in the moonlight, with his long, dark hair on the pillow. Kit reached out to him. “If I’m going to be a sleeping partner,” she said, “I suppose I’d better practice it properly.”
They stayed three days in Anglesey. And three nights.
And then they went home.
There were a lot of explanations but they didn’t care. Kit agreed to work in the Central Hotel for the summer. Stevie told Maura that he might have an injection of money for the garage.
“I know where you got that money,” Maura said suddenly.
“Jesus, do you?” said Stevie.
“Yes, it was the greyhounds,” Maura said triumphantly. “Was it? Tell me.”
“It was something like that,” Stevie said, looking shamefaced.
“And you think I should regard you as reliable?”
“But you do, don’t you?”
“Yes. Oddly, that day before you went off on your jaunt I knew you were telling me the truth about not seducing Kit,” Maura said.
Stevie hoped she wouldn’t ask him again.
It was the shortest night of the year. They rowed out on the lake, Stevie and Kit.
Everyone was used to seeing them together now, wandering hand in hand by the lake. People didn’t bother to gossip anymore. Like Anna Kelly and Emmet, they had been together for as long as people could remember. And Philip O’Brien and the marvelous bossy girl who had come to work as a pharmacy student in McMahon’s. Her name was Barbara and she was exactly the kind of girl Philip O’Brien was looking for all his life, people said, and hadn’t known it. People had forgotten Sister Madeleine, and Orla Dillon rarely came to town. Paddles’ was full at night. Mona Fitz was in the sanatorium.
Life went on. And it was very usual to see young people taking a boat out over the quiet water of the lake in Lough Glass at night.