“I suppose she thought she knew how to manage a boat.” To the hermit it was simple.
“But we never take the boat out alone, she never did before…”
“She must have wanted to that night. It was a very beautiful night, the clouds kept racing across the moon like smoke from a fire. I stood at the window and watched it for a long time…”
“You didn’t see Mother?”
“No, child, I saw nobody.”
“She wouldn’t be in hell, Sister Madeleine, would she?”
The nun put down the toasting fork and looked at Kit in amazement. “You can’t mean that you seriously think that for a moment?” she said.
“Well, it’s a sin against Hope, isn’t it? It’s despair, the one sin that can’t be forgiven.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“At school, I suppose. And at Mass, and at the retreat.” Kit was trying to draw up some kind of reinforcement.
“You heard nothing of the sort. But what makes you think that your poor mother took her own life?”
“She must have, Sister, she must have. She was so unhappy.”
“We’re all unhappy, everyone’s a bit unhappy.”
“No, but she really was, you don’t know….”
Now Sister Madeleine was firm. “I do know. I know a lot. Your mother would not have done such a thing.”
“But…”
“No buts, Kit. Please believe me, I know people. And suppose, just suppose, your mother did feel that there was no point in going on, I know as sure as we are both sitting here that she would have left a note to tell your father and you and your brother what had happened to make her feel this way, and to ask your forgiveness…” There was a silence. “And there was no note,” Sister Madeleine said.
The silence between them was stifling. Kit was tempted to speak. Sister Madeleine would not tell, she would advise what to do. But it would be the end of everything if she told.
Kit said nothing. Sister Madeleine said it again. “Since there was no note then there was no way that your mother took her own life. Believe me, Kit, and sleep peacefully in your bed tonight.”
“Yes, Sister Madeleine,” said Kit with a pain in her chest that she felt would be there forever.
The sergeant was at their house that evening. He was talking to Rita in the kitchen. The conversation ended when Kit came in.
She looked from one to the other. “Is there any news?”
“Nothing. Nothing new.” Rita spoke.
“I was just asking Rita here if she was sure that you had all looked everywhere…”
“I assure you that if the mistress had left any account of her plans, whatever they might have been…it would have been a great relief to this family, and there is no way anyone would have kept it to themselves.”
The child looked pale to the point of fainting.
His voice softened. “I’m sure that’s right, Rita. We’ve all got our job to do, you have to swill out the pots, I have to ask hard questions in places where there’s grief.” His tread was heavy as he went down the stairs to the street.
“Swilling pots, huh,” Rita said.
Her indignation made Kit smile. “He has a great way of putting things,” she said.
“As if we didn’t hunt the house high and low for a letter from the poor mistress.”
“And suppose we had found one…?”
“Wouldn’t it have stopped them all asking bosthoons at the bus office and the railway station did they see the mistress all dolled up in a head scarf…? If there had been a letter wouldn’t the poor master be at rest instead of wandering like a lost soul?”
Kit sat very still. Rita didn’t know everything. Rita was wrong. If the letter had been shown, Mother would be buried outside the walls of the cemetery. Like Bridie Daly.
Now when they found Mother’s body it could be buried with honor. When they found it.
Brother Healy told the boys that young Emmet was coming back to class. “If there’s one mention or murmur out of any one of you about Mem Mem Memmet, or the lad’s stutter I’ll knock your heads sideways off of your necks in a way that no one will ever fix them straight again.” He had a ferocious look about him.
“Would you think it’s definite, Brother, that she’s drowned?” asked Philip O’Brien, the young lad from the hotel.
“I think we can assume that, O’Brien, and we’ll go on saying the three Hail Marys that her body will be found.”
“It’s nine days now, Brother,” Philip said.
“Yes, but bodies have been found after a longer time than that…. It’s a deep lake, our lake, that’s why you’re all being warned about it night and day.”
“Brother, what would happen if…?” said Michael Sullivan, son of the garage man. The boy was about to ask what condition the body would be in. Would it have begun to deteriorate? The kind of thing boys of that age would love to discuss.
“Kindly open your Carty’s Irish History, page fourteen,” he roared. Not for the first time he wished he taught the gentle girls up in Mother Bernard’s school. The nun had told him they were organizing a daily rosary in the school chapel for Kit McMahon’s mother. Girls were a pleasure to teach, he had said it over and over. There was no comparison with what he had in front of him day in and day out.
Martin McMahon ate hardly anything. He said he got a scalding feeling once the food was swallowed. It was like a lump in his chest all day. But he was adamant that the children had their proper meals.
“I don’t feel like a whole dinner,” Emmet had said.
“You need to keep your strength up, boy. Eat it up. Rita’s made a grand spread for us.”
“And don’t you need your strength, Daddy?” Emmet asked.
There was no answer.
Kit brought a cup of Bovril into the sitting room later on, and two fingers of soft buttered toast. She and Rita had decided that he might be able to manage this.
“Please, Father,” she urged. “Please, what’ll I do if you get sick, then we’ll have no one at all to be able to tell us what to do.” Her father obediently tried to swallow the spoonfuls. “Would it be better…” she began. His eyes lifted slowly to know what she was going to say. Her father was moving like a man with a heavy weight attached to him. “Would it have been better if Mother had left a note, do you think…?”
“Oh, a million times better,” he said. “Then we’d know why…and what…she did.”
“It could have been an accident, something she didn’t know was going to happen?”
“Yes, yes it could…”
“But even if it wasn’t…it would be better to know?”
“Anything on earth would be better than this, Kit. Than wondering and worrying and wishing I had done something different. Even if they found Mother’s body and we could bury her in a grave and go and pray there…then surely that would be better than this?”
She knelt beside him, her small hand on his. “They’ll have to find her body, won’t they, if she is in the lake?”
“It’s a deep lake, it’s a treacherous lake. They might not find it for a very long time.”
“But the people who are looking every day…”
“They’ll be looking no more. The sergeant told me that they’re going to have to call off the search.” His face was desolate.
“Father, you couldn’t do any more. I know there was nothing you should have done. Mother told me, she told me she loved you and that she’d never hurt you.”
“Your mother was a saint, she was an angel. You’ll always remember that, won’t you, Kit?”
“I’ll always remember it,” Kit promised him.
She went through another night of broken sleep, of waking with a start to hear her mother say, “It wasn’t your letter…you should have left it the way it was….” Then she would see as clearly as if it were really in the room a picture of a grave with a simple wooden cross outside the churchyard walls. And the goats and sheep would walk over the grave of the woman
who had not been allowed to have a Christian burial.
“They’ve called off the dragging of the lake.” Philip O’Brien’s mother rarely left the hotel but she knew all the business of the town.
“Does that mean that Kit’s mother mightn’t be drowned?” he asked with some hope. Kit had been white-faced for so long and there were big black lines under her eyes.
“No, it just means that she’s very deep,” Mildred O’Brien spoke with no great emotion. She had not been close to Helen McMahon, she had found the woman a bit distant and hard to fathom.
“What will they do for a funeral, then?” Philip asked. He didn’t like the way his parents looked at each other.
“There might not be a funeral anyway,” his father said.
“Why not, if they found her body?”
“Ah, well. It doesn’t do to be speaking ill of the dead,” said Dan O’Brien in his most pious voice. “But of course, if there was a sort of shadow over how she got into the lake, then the Church has to be very careful…” He could sense that Philip was about to speak again, so he headed him off. “No need at all to be talking along those lines to the unfortunate McMahon children. It was none of their doing.”
The matter was closed.
Clio was being a good friend. She wasn’t asking questions that couldn’t be answered as she so often had in the past. She was coming up with no far-fetched solutions. She was just there. And sometimes didn’t talk at all. It was very comforting. In the old days it had often been Clio who came up with ideas of what they might do, or where their outings might take them. But nowadays she waited until Kit gave her the lead.
“I’d like to go for a walk down by the lake,” Kit said.
“Would you like me to come with you?” Clio was gentle. A while back she’d have tossed her head and given all the reasons why it might be a bad idea.
“If you’ve got the time.”
“I have the time,” Clio said.
They walked the main street together. Kit wanted to drop off her schoolbag and tell Rita that she would be late. Since the day of the disappearance neither she nor Emmet had ever been half a minute later than their expected time of arrival. They knew too well the agony of waiting.
“Where will I say you are?” Rita asked.
“Say I’m with Clio, that’s all.”
“Above in her house, is it?”
“Yes, with Clio.” Kit was impatient to be gone.
At the garage they saw Michael Sullivan with his friend Kevin Wall. They were two of the tougher pupils at the Brothers’. Normally they would have shouted and jeered at Clio and Kit, but these weren’t normal times. Kit saw Michael begin to form some comment and then choke it back; the McMahons were not fair game for shouts and taunts. Not after what had happened to them.
“Hallo,” he said lamely.
His elder brother, Stevie, looked up from under the hood of a car. “Get into the house and leave those girls alone,” he shouted.
He was good-looking in a way, hard to see because he had such filthy overalls on, and his hair was all grease from either the car or Brylcreem. Clio had once said that if somebody dressed Stevie Sullivan up properly, he could pass as anybody.
He had a nice smile.
“It’s okay,” Kit called. “He only said hello.”
“That must be the first civil word he said to anybody.” Stevie was back into the car again.
Kit and Clio looked at each other and shrugged. It was nice to be defended and protected by a great grown-up sixteen-year-old, but not when there wasn’t any need. Michael Sullivan could be such a pain, and very rude, like asking what color their knickers were. But to be honest, all he had said was a simple hello.
They walked past the hotel, nodding to Philip’s father, who stood at his doorway.
“It’s dark for you girls to be heading down to the lake,” he said as he saw them turn down the small road.
“It’s just for some fresh air, everyone knows where we are,” Clio called back to him.
They walked companionably along the road that Kit’s mother must have walked every day or night of her life.
“Going round the block” was what she called the walk. She either turned down at the hotel and came back up by the Garda station, or else she did it the other way around. On finer days and on longer evenings she walked all the way around to the woods and the travelers’ camp at one end of the lake or else she might go in the other direction to Sister Madeleine’s cottage and farther beyond. It was as if she had been looking for something. Something she couldn’t find in the house over the pharmacy or in Lough Glass.
And it wasn’t as if it was trying to get away from work. Helen McMahon had worked with Rita at the sewing machine, putting new linings on the curtains, turning the sheets so that the same bits didn’t get all the wear. Rita and Helen McMahon made jam and marmalade, they bottled fruit and they made pickles. The McMahons’ kitchen shelves looked as if people were working at them day and night.
When she walked by the lake it was not to escape work, it must have been so that she never had to sit down and think. What had she seen in those dark waters that was better to look at than touring the length of the street like other women did?
Clio’s mother would know every item to wear in the one clothes shop, P. Hanley, Drapery. Mrs. Kelly often called in even if she wasn’t buying anything to admire new soft cardigans, or blouses with embroidery on the collar. Other mothers would go into Joseph Wall and Son Hardware Merchants and look at new kitchen beaters, and baking tins.
But Kit’s mother had no interest in these things. The paths and lanes and woods of the lake were the only places that seemed to gladden her heart.
“I wonder what took her down here all the time,” Kit said eventually as they came to the wooden pier where the boats were moored.
“She was happy here, you said that yourself,” Clio replied. Kit gave her a grateful glance. Clio was being so unexpectedly nice, saying the right thing always instead of the wrong thing. It was as if somebody had told her how to behave. Clio began to speak hesitantly. “Kit, you know my aunt Maura…?”
“Yes?” Kit was watchful again. Was this some of Clio’s old style coming to the surface again? Was she going to boast of her nice settled normal family, her plump cheerful aunt who had wanted them all to play golf, something Kit had been going to discuss with her mother four long weeks ago?
“Well, she’s gone back to Dublin, you know…”
“Yes, I know.”
“And before she went she gave me some money. She said I was to get you a treat, that I’d know what treat to get.”
“Yes, well…” Kit was at a loss.
“But I don’t know, Kit. I don’t know.”
“It was kind of her…”
“She said it wouldn’t cure anything but it might distract us. Sweets, new socks, or a record…whatever I thought you’d like.”
“I’d like a record,” Kit said suddenly.
“Well, that’s great…we could go to the town on Saturday and get one.”
“Is there enough money for that?” Kit was taking the bus fare into account, and the lemonade and biscuits they would have afterward.
“Yes, there’s plenty…she gave me three pounds.”
“Three pounds!” They both stood in the wind, awed by the huge amount of money. Kit’s eyes filled with tears. Clio’s aunt Maura must have thought that things were very bad indeed if she gave that much money to distract them.
“Stevie?”
“What is it?”
“Stevie, I want you to tell me something.”
“I’m busy.”
“You’re always busy, you never have time for anything except the cars.”
“Well, isn’t that what I have to give my time to, not let everyone go on thinking that if you give your money into Sullivan’s it’ll be spent on drink instead of on spare parts, like the way it used to be.”
“Promise not to bite the head off of me.”
; “No, I won’t promise that. It might well be a thing that your head has to be bitten off for.”
“Then I won’t tell you.” Michael was definite now.
“Thanks be to God,” said Stevie Sullivan. He had enough on his mind. He had to get cleaned up and dressed; he had a date to meet a girl for the first time. Deirdre Hanley had agreed to go to the pictures with him. She was seventeen, a whole year older, and she would expect him to make advances. Stevie Sullivan was anxious to do it right. It was a relief not to have to waste time biting his brother’s head off over some misdemeanor that would undoubtedly come to light with a stormy visit from Brother Healy to his mam.
“What time will you be home?” Mrs. Hanley, the draper, felt there was something that didn’t sit right on this outing.
“Aw, Mam. How many times do I have to tell you? Won’t I be back on the bus.”
“Yes, and I’ll be looking out to see you getting off it,” her mother said in a heavy warning tone.
Deirdre nodded meekly. There would be no problem about that. Stevie would drive her in his car for a bit of a court, she imagined, and then pick up the bus a mile out of Lough Glass. Her mother could be as suspicious as she liked, there was no way she could be caught. Deirdre wiped off the lipstick she had been rehearsing; she wouldn’t let them see her leave the house too dolled up. That would definitely make them think she was on a different kind of outing than the one she had said.
Meeting a group of girls in the cinema in the town.
“Come with me to Paddles’.”
“No, Peter.”
“Martin, she’s not going to come back, she’s not going to come in that door, you know. I know it.”
“No, I must stay here.”
“Forever, Martin? Forever and ever? Is that what Helen would have wanted for you?”
“You didn’t know her.” Martin was flustered.
“I knew her well enough to know that she would want you to try and behave as normal, not turn yourself into a hermit.” There was a silence. “We have one hermit in the place already. Lough Glass wouldn’t be able to afford two.” Peter Kelly was rewarded with a watery smile.