The clock was ticking and there was a little whir between each tick. Kit had never noticed that before. But then she had never sat at the foot of the grandfather clock before, leaning against it, holding her brother in her arms, while Philip O’Brien sat on the bit of stairs that went up farther still, up to the attic where Rita slept.
Rita sat on a chair in the doorway of the kitchen. Once or twice or maybe more often she got up and said, “I’ll throw another log on the fire, they’ll need that when they get back.”
Someone had sent for Clio. She came through the door and up the stairs. They had left the key in the door. She saw the little tableau. “My mother said I should come down to you straight away,” she said. They waited for Kit to reply. Kit said nothing. “She said this was where I should be.”
Something exploded in Kit’s mind.
How dare Clio talk about herself, it was always I, I, I. It was the place she should be, she came straight down. She knew she must not speak, not until this huge wave of rage passed over. If she opened her mouth now she would hurl abuse at Clio Kelly, order her out of the house.
“Kit, say something.” Clio stood awkward on the stairs.
“Thanks, Clio,” she gulped. Please may she not say something terrible, something for which she would be apologizing for the rest of her life.
Emmet sensed the odd silence. “Mummy…” he began, but he couldn’t get beyond the first “M.”
Clio looked at him sympathetically. “Oh Emmet, your stammer has come back,” she said.
Philip stood up. “There’s probably enough people here, Clio. Could you go home now,” he said.
Clio snapped at him.
“He’s right, Clio.” Kit found her voice very calm and clear. “Thank you very, very much for coming, but Philip was asked to keep the place sort of clear, for when everyone’s coming back.”
“I want to be here when everyone comes back.” Clio seemed like a spoiled child.
There was the “I” again, Kit noticed. “You’re a wonderful friend. I knew you’d understand,” Kit said. And Clio went down the stairs.
The clock ticked on with its new whir, and none of them said anything at all.
“There’s not going to be anything until the light of day,” said Sergeant O’Connor, shaking his head.
“We can’t just leave it and go home.” Peter Kelly’s face ran with sweat, or tears or rain, it was impossible to tell.
“Be sensible, man. You’ll have half the people here as your patients and the other half up in the graveyard if they go on. There’s nothing to be found, I tell you. Go on, tell the tinkers to go home, will you.”
“Don’t call them tinkers, Sean.” But Peter Kelly knew it was neither the time nor the place to try and impose some sensitivity onto Sergeant Sean O’Connor.
“What’ll I call them, Household Cavalry? Apache Indians?”
“Come on, they’ve been a great help…they’ve no reason to be friends to any of us…they’re doing their best.”
“They look like savages with those torches. They make my flesh creep.”
“If it helped to find her…” Peter began.
“Oh she’ll be found all right, but it won’t make any difference to anyone whether it’s tonight or next Tuesday week.”
“You’re very sure?” Peter said.
Sean O’Connor had a simple direct way of getting to the truth of things, and tonight it left no area for doubt or hope. “Sure wasn’t the poor woman out of her wits?” the sergeant said. “Didn’t you see her night and day, wandering around here, half talking to herself. It’s only a mystery that she didn’t do it sooner.”
A tall dark woman brought Martin McMahon a cup from her caravan.
“Drink this,” she said. It was like an order.
He sipped it and made a face. “What is it? I thought it was tea,” he said.
“I wouldn’t give you anything to harm you,” she said. Her voice was low; he barely heard it above the wind, and the calling all around the lake’s edge.
“Thank you indeed,” he said, and drank what tasted like Bovril with something sharp in it. It could have been anything; he didn’t care.
“Be calm,” the woman said to him. “Try not to shake and tremble, it may well be all right.”
“They think my wife…” he said.
“I know, but she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t go anywhere without telling you,” said the woman in her low voice that he had to strain to hear.
He turned to thank her, to tell her that he knew this was true, but she had slipped back into the shadows.
He heard Sergeant O’Connor calling off the search for the night. He saw his friend Peter coming to take him home. Martin McMahon knew he must be strong for their children.
Helen would have wanted that.
RITA heard them coming.
She knew by the shufflings and low voices down at the hall door there was no good news to tell. She ran into the kitchen to put on the kettle.
Philip O’Brien stood up. It wasn’t often he was in charge, but he knew he was in charge now. “Your father will be all wet from the rain,” he said. Kit was wordless. “Is there an electric fire in their bedroom? He might want to change.”
“In whose bedroom?” She spoke from far away.
“In your parents’ room.”
“They have different rooms.”
“Well, in his room then.”
She flashed Philip a grateful look. Clio would always use an opportunity like this to comment on how strange it was that Kit’s mother and father did not sleep in the same bed. Philip was being a great help. “I’ll go and plug it in,” she said. It took her away from the top of the stairs, she didn’t have to see her father’s face when he came up. She didn’t want to have to look at it.
Emmet wouldn’t know how bad things were. He wouldn’t know that Mother and Father were unhappy, and that Mother might not be coming back. Might be gone.
She wanted the moment on her own.
The room was cold as she found the one-bar electric fire and plugged it in the socket in the wall just above the yellow skirting boards. Everything seemed very clear somehow. She could see the pattern on the carpet and the way the fringe of the bedspread hung unevenly, more to one side than the other.
Maybe if Daddy was very wet he might put on his dressing gown. He wouldn’t if there were other people there, and Kit had heard Clio’s father’s voice, and people like Father Baily and Philip’s father were outside. No, he would wear a jacket. She walked past the top of the bed toward the big chair, where her father’s tweed sport coat hung as it always had.
It was then she saw the letter on the pillow. A big white envelope with the word Martin on it.
Over Daddy’s bed hung the picture of the Pope, the Pope that Kit had always believed was a guest at their wedding. Time seemed to stand still as she looked at it. The Pope had small round glasses, they looked like a little boy’s spectacles that were much too small for him. He had a white fur trim around his garment, a bit like the frill Santa Claus wore when they went up to Clery’s in Dublin for a Christmas treat. He had his hand raised as if to give a blessing.
She read the words very slowly: Martin McMahon and Mary Helena Healy humbly prostrate at the feet of Your Holiness, beg the apostolic blessing on the occasion of their marriage, 20th June 1939. And there was a kind of raised seal beneath.
She looked at it as if she had never seen it before. It was as if by memorizing every single detail she could somehow control what was about to happen now.
And for some reason she never understood, she bent down and unplugged the electric fire. It was as if she wanted it to be thought she had never entered the room.
Kit stood with the letter in her hand. Her mother had left a message. She had explained why she had done what she did. The words of the priest who had come to give their retreat came back. She could almost hear his voice speaking as he had that day in the chapel. Life wasn’t yours to take, it was a gift from God and thos
e who threw it back in God’s face had no place being mourned by the faithful. And had no place in the burial grounds of God’s family on earth. She could see his face. And she acted as an automaton. She slipped the envelope deep in the pocket of her blue tunic and went to the stairs to greet the party that was coming up and to face her father’s terrible smile.
“Now, there’s no sign of an accident. We’re not to worry about a thing. Your mother could walk in that door as right as rain. Any minute now.” Nobody spoke. “Any minute at all,” said Kit’s father, hope written all over his face.
Rita built up the fire in the sitting room and hunted Farouk from his important-looking place in front of the grate. People stood about, awkward, embarrassed, not sure what to say next.
Except Clio’s father. Dr. Kelly always knew what to say. Kit looked at him with gratitude; he was being the host. “Do you know everyone’s frozen solid from standing in the coldest spot in Ireland. Now, I hear that Rita has the kettle on. Philip, will you run round to your father’s hotel like a good lad, and ask the barman for a bottle of Paddy and we’ll have a hot whiskey for ourselves, everyone.”
“There’s going to be no money changing hands at a time like this.” Philip’s father, Mr. O’Brien, had a funeral face on him.
Dr. Kelly hastened to make things more cheerful. “Well, that’s very good of you, Dan. And we have a lemon and some cloves, and that’ll put the heat into all of us. I’m prescribing it as a doctor now, mind you, so you all have to take heed.” Sergeant O’Connor kept saying he wouldn’t have a drink, but he waited as they were poured out. “Sean, it’s for your own good. Drink it,” Dr. Kelly said.
“I don’t want to drink this man’s whiskey, I have to ask was there a note…?”
“What?” Dr. Kelly looked at the sergeant in horror.
“You know what I mean. I have to ask it sometime, this is the time.”
“This is not the time,” Clio’s father whispered.
But not quietly enough for Kit. She turned away as if she hadn’t been listening.
She heard the sergeant speak in a lower tone. “Jesus God, Peter. If there is a note, isn’t it as well we know?”
“Don’t you ask him, I’ll do it.”
“It’s important. Don’t let him…”
“Don’t tell me what’s important or not, don’t tell me what I’m to do or not do…”
“We’re all on edge…don’t take offense.”
“I’ll take as much offense as will suit me. Drink that whiskey, for God’s sake, and try not to open your mouth until you’ve something to say.”
Kit saw Sergeant O’Connor redden, and she felt sorry for him. It was like getting a telling-off at school. Then she saw Clio’s father move through the people to get to her father. Surreptitiously she moved nearer to them.
“Martin…Martin, my old friend…”
“What is it, Peter? What is it? You don’t know anything you’re not saying?”
“I don’t know anything I wouldn’t say.” Peter Kelly looked wretched. “But listen to me, would there be a question at all that Helen went off somewhere on her own? Like…Dublin, to see anyone…you know…”
“She’d tell me, she’s never gone anywhere without telling me. That’s the way it is between us.”
“Where would she leave a note if you weren’t here to tell?”
“A note…a message…” Martin McMahon finally understood what his friend was struggling to say. “No, no,” he said.
“I know. Jesus Christ, don’t I know. But that ignorant bosthoon Sean O’Connor says he can’t go on looking until he’s made sure.”
“How dare he even suggest…”
“Where, Martin? Let’s just rule it out for him.”
“I suppose in the bedroom…” Kit saw them walk into her father’s bedroom, the cold room with the picture of the Pope over the bed. She stood with her hand at her throat, and realized that they were both watching her. “Kit love, will you go back inside out of the cold, and sit by the fire with Emmet.”
“Yes,” she said. She watched as they went into her father’s bedroom, and then she slipped into the kitchen.
Rita was busy pouring the whiskey into glasses that had cloves and lemon juice and sugar. “It’s too like a party for my taste,” she grumbled.
“Yes.” Kit stood beside the range. “I know.”
“Should we put Emmet to bed, do you think? Would your mother like that if she come home?”
“I think she would.” Neither of them noticed the “if.”
“Will you get him or will I?”
“Could you go, Rita, then I’ll go and sit with him?”
Rita carried the tray of whiskies out of the kitchen, and with a quick move Kit lifted the handle and opened the mouth of the range. The flames inside licked up at her as she threw in the envelope that said Martin, the letter that would mean her mother could not be buried in consecrated ground.
FOR a whole week every day was like the day before. Peter Kelly got a friend to come and work in the pharmacy, with instructions to bother Mr. McMahon only when really necessary. It seemed that Lough Glass put off having problems that only the chemist could cure.
Clio’s mother and her aunt were in and out of the McMahon house all the time. They were very polite to Rita. They kept saying that they didn’t want to interfere but they happened to have a pound of ham, or an apple tart, or an excuse to take the children up to their house. And the days seemed to fit into a sort of mad pattern.
They all slept with their doors open. Only Mother’s door was closed. Every night Kit dreamed that her mother had come back and said, “I was in my room all the time, you never looked.”
But they did look. Everyone had looked in Mother’s room. Including Sergeant O’Connor in case there were any clues that she had gone away.
There had been all kinds of questions. How many suitcases were there? Were any of them missing? What had Mother been wearing? Only a jacket, not an overcoat, not a raincoat. And the drawers were opened as well as the wardrobe. Were any clothes missing?
Kit felt very proud that everything was so tidy, so neat.
She felt that maybe Sergeant O’Connor would tell his wife that Mrs. McMahon had beautiful sprigs of lavender in the drawers of nightdresses and slips. That her shoes were all polished and neat in a line under her dresses in the old wardrobe. That the brushes on the dressing table had silver handles matching the mirror. And most of all she was pleased that she had done what her mother would have wanted.
Yes, surely it was what Mother would have wanted.
There was hardly any time to think, but from time to time Kit stole into her own room to try and work it out. Was it possible that Mother, who always knew what she was doing, wanted that letter found? Should she have read it? Suppose there had been a last wish in it. But then it had not been addressed to her and if there was something for Daddy…
Kit felt young and frightened. But she knew she must have done the right thing. She had burned the note. Now when they found Mother’s body it could be buried in the right place, and they could all go and put flowers on the grave.
There were divers in the lake, men who wore suits of rubber. Kit had not been allowed to go down and watch, but Clio told her. Clio was being very nice. Kit couldn’t remember why she ever got annoyed with her.
“They want you to come up and stay with me,” Clio said over and over.
“I know and it’s nice of you all, but…Daddy, you know. I don’t like to leave Daddy alone.”
Clio understood. “Would it help or be worse if I were to stay here?” she asked.
“It would be different, and we’re trying to make things feel a bit the same, I think.”
Clio nodded in agreement. “Can I do anything? I’d do anything to help.”
“I know you would.” And Kit did know.
“Well, think then.”
“Tell me what people say, tell me if there are things they wouldn’t say in front of us.”
> “Anything, even if it’s not what you want to hear?”
“Yes.”
So Clio brought her all the gossip of Lough Glass, and Kit got a picture of the investigation. People had been asked if they had seen Mrs. McMahon on the bus or at the train station, in the nearby town, out in the road looking for a lift, or in anyone else’s car. The guards were ruling out the possibility of her having left town alive and well.
“Wouldn’t it be great if she had just lost her memory?” Clio said. “If she were found in Dublin and didn’t know who she was.”
“Yes,” Kit said flatly. She knew that this would not happen. She knew that Mother had not left Lough Glass that night. Because Mother had written a note to say why she was taking her own life.
“It could have been an accident,” Clio said, trying to put the minority view.
All Lough Glass was saying it had been coming for a long time. The poor woman was unbalanced, there was no way she would have taken the boat out on a night like that except to end her life.
“Of course it was an accident,” Kit said, eyes blazing.
When Mother’s body was found it would be buried properly, thanks to the good work Kit had done in thinking so fast. It must always be considered an accident. Mother must never become a name like Bridie Daly, a ghost to frighten children, a voice calling in the reeds.
“If she’s in heaven she could see us now,” Clio said, looking at the ceiling.
“Of course she’s in heaven,” Kit said, putting aside the fear that sometimes bubbled up to the surface that Mother might be in hell suffering the tortures of the damned for all eternity.
The callers to the house were legion.
Everyone in Lough Glass had something to offer, a word of comfort or hope, a special prayer or a story of someone who was missing for three weeks and had been found.
Sister Madeleine didn’t call. But she never went visiting people. After a week Kit went down the lane to the hermit’s cottage. For the first time she went with no gift.
“You knew her, Sister Madeleine…why did she do it?”