The Glass Lake Page 4

  It was a Wednesday, and Martin McMahon closed his shop with a sigh of relief. The flypaper was thick with dead bluebottles. He must remove it quickly before Kit or Emmet came in with a lecture about their being God’s creatures and how unfair of him to lure them to their death.

  He was relieved that Kit and Clio Kelly seemed to have gotten over whatever childish squabble it had been that kept them apart for a few weeks. Girls were so intense at that age, it was impossible to know their minds. He had asked Helen if they should interfere, try to bring the children together, but Helen had said to let it run its course. And she had been right about everything.

  When Helen said something it was always likely to happen. She had said that Emmet would be able to cope with his stutter, that he would laugh away the mimicry and criticism. That had come to pass. She had said Rita was a bright girl when everyone else had thought the child mentally deficient. Helen had known that Billy Sullivan was drinking behind his garage doors when no one else knew. And Helen had told him all those years ago that she could never love him totally but she would love him as much as she was able to.

  Which wasn’t nearly enough. But he knew it was that or nothing.

  He had first met her when she was pining for someone else, and she had been open with him. It would not be fair to encourage his attentions, she had said, when her mind was so committed elsewhere. He had agreed to wait around. He had made more and more excuses to be in Dublin, to invite her out. Gradually they became close. She never spoke of the man who had left her to marry some girl with money.

  And little by little the color returned to her cheeks. He invited her down here to see his place—his lake, his people—and she came and walked with him around the shores.

  “It might not be the greatest love the world has ever known for you…but it will be for me,” he said.

  She said it was the most beautiful proposal that a man could make. She would accept, she said. She sighed as she said it.

  Helen had told him that she would stay with him, and if she ever left she would tell him why, and it would have to be for a very good reason. She said that it was dangerous to try to know somebody too well. People should have their own reserves, she said, the places they went in their minds, where no one else should follow.

  He had agreed with her, of course. It was the price he paid for getting her as his wife. But he wished she didn’t go off so often and so far in her mind and he dearly wished she wouldn’t wander around the lake in all kinds of weather. She assured him that she loved to do this, it brought her peace to see the lake in its changing seasons. She knew all kinds of things about its nesting creatures. She felt at home there, at peace, she knew all the people around.

  Once she had told him that it would be lovely to have a little cottage like Sister Madeleine’s and have the lake water lap up to your door.

  He had laughed at that. “Isn’t it hard enough to squash the whole family into this place…how would we fit in the hermit’s cottage?” he had asked.

  “I didn’t mean the whole family, I was thinking of going there by myself.” Her eyes had been far away that day. He hadn’t followed her train of thought; it had been too unsettling.

  Martin let himself in his own front door beside the chemist’s shop. It led straight upstairs to what they called their house. Even though Kit had complained that they were the only people she knew who had a house without a downstairs.

  Rita was setting the table. “The mistress won’t be here, sir. She said to say she’ll see you after your game of golf.”

  He was disappointed and it showed.

  “Women have to have their time off, too,” Kit said defensively.

  “Of course they do,” he said over-jovially. “And it’s a Wednesday so everyone except Rita has an afternoon off. I’m going to play a round of golf with Clio’s father. I’m feeling in powerful form, I’m going to beat him into the ground today. I can see a few pars coming up, and a birdie and an eagle and…maybe an albatross.”

  “Why are they all called after birds?” Emmet wanted to know.

  “I suppose because the ball soars like a bird, or it should anyway…. Come on, I’ll be Mother,” he said, and began to ladle out the lamb stew.

  He realized that he had been saying this more and more recently. He wondered why on earth had Helen not said she was going out. Where on earth could she be?

  From the golf course you got fine views of the lake. People said it was one of the most attractive courses in Ireland. Not as rugged as the great championship courses on the coast, but very varied with rolling parkland and many clusters of trees. And always the lake, dark blue today with hardly any shadows on it.

  Peter Kelly and Martin McMahon stopped to rest and look down from the eighth green upon the high ground. Unlike at busier golf courses, they were holding nobody up. There was always time to stand and look down on Lough Glass and its lake.

  “The tinkers are back, I see.” Peter pointed out the colored roofs of caravans on the far shore of the lake.

  “They’re like the seasons, aren’t they? Always coming back the same way and at the same time.”

  “Desperate life to inflict on the children, though. Some of them come up to get bits of machinery out of them or with dog bites…you’d pity them,” said the doctor.

  “They come in to me, too, only the very odd time. Often I tell them they know more than I do,” Martin laughed. He had indeed said that between the travelers and old Madeleine there was a very good second line of defense as regards medicine in Lough Glass.

  “Some of them are very fine-looking people.” Peter peered into the distance, where two women walked by the water’s edge. Martin looked too, and then they both moved at the same time to go back to line up their shots. It was as if they both thought one of the women looked very like Helen McMahon but neither of them wanted to say it.

  Clio told Kit that there was a woman among the travelers who told fortunes. And that she knew everything that was going to happen. But that Mother Bernard would kill you stone-dead if you went anywhere near her.

  “What would Sister Madeleine say?” Kit wondered.

  This was a good idea. Sister Madeleine wasn’t black and white about things. Happily they scampered off down the lane to consult her. She thought it might well be possible, some people did have a gift.

  “How much silver do you think she’d need to cross her palm, would a threepence do?” Kit wondered.

  “I’d say she’d want more, what would you say, Sister Madeleine?” Clio was excited. It was her birthday next week, maybe they might get enough money before the caravans left. How marvelous to know the future.

  But to their disappointment Sister Madeleine didn’t seem at all in favor of it. She never told anyone not to do anything, she didn’t use words like “foolish” or “unwise,” Sister Madeleine never spoke of sin or things being wrong. She just looked at them with her eyes burning from her brown lined face and her look said everything. “It’s not safe to know the future,” she said.

  And in the silence that followed both Clio and Kit felt themselves shiver. They were glad when Whiskers stood up and gave a long, unexplained yowl at nothing in particular.

  Rita made her quiet way down the narrow road to Sister Madeleine’s cottage. She carried her poetry book and the warm shortbread that was just out of the oven. To her surprise she heard voices. Usually the hermit was alone when she called for her lessons.

  She was about to move away but Sister Madeleine called out. “Come on in, Rita. We’ll have a cup of tea together.”

  It was the tinker woman who told fortunes. Rita knew her immediately, because she had been to her last year. She had given her half a crown and had heard that her life would change, she would have seven times by seven times the land that her father had owned. That would mean she was to have nearly fifty acres. The woman had seen that she would have a life with book learning, and she would marry a man who was at this moment across the sea. She also saw that the children of the
marriage would be difficult, it wasn’t clear whether in their health or their disposition. She said that Rita would be buried when she died in a big cemetery, not in the churchyard in Lough Glass.

  It had been very exciting to go to the woman, who told fortunes only by the lakeshore. She had said she didn’t like doing it near the camps, near her own people. They didn’t approve of her doing it. She said it was because she was too good. Listening to her, Rita had believed that this might be true. Everything had been said with a great, calm certainty. And the bits about the book learning had begun to come true.

  Rita had been struck then and now how like the mistress she was. If you saw them in a poor light you’d swear that the tinker woman and Mrs. McMahon were sisters. She wondered what she was doing here with Sister Madeleine, but she would never know.

  “Rita and I read poetry together.” Sister Madeleine made the only gesture she would ever make toward an introduction. The woman nodded as if she only expected as much; she was sure that everything else she had seen in the future was true also.

  And suddenly, with a slight sense of alarm, so was Rita. There was a man across the sea who would marry her, she would have fifty acres of land, and money in her own right. She would have children and they would not be easy. She thought about her tombstone, far away in a city with lots of other crosses nearby.

  The woman slipped silently away.

  “‘My dark Rosaleen,’” said Sister Madeleine. “Read it nice and slowly to me. I’ll close my eyes and make pictures of it all.”

  Rita stood in the sunlight by the little window where people had brought pots of geraniums for the hermit, and with the bantam chicks around her feet she read…

  “My dark Rosaleen,

  My own Rosaleen,

  Shall glad your heart and give you hope

  Shall give you health and help and hope

  My dark Rosaleen.”

  “Wasn’t that beautiful!” Sister Madeleine spoke of the poem. Rita laughed aloud with pleasure, sheer pleasure that she had read without stumbling. “That was beautiful, Rita. Don’t ever tell me you couldn’t read a poem,” she said.

  “Do you know what I was thinking, Sister?”

  “No. What were you thinking? Your mind was far away; poetry does that to you.”

  “I was just thinking that if young Emmet were to come to you…?”

  “Emmet McMahon?”

  “Yes. Maybe you could cure his stutter, getting him to read sonnets and everything.”

  “I can’t cure a stutter.”

  “You could make him read, he’s too shy to read at school. He’s fine with his friends but he hates when Brother Healy comes to him in class. He was the same when he was in Babies, he got red in the face with fright.”

  “He’d have to want to come. Otherwise, it’d only be a torture to him.”

  “I’ll tell him the kind of magic you do.”

  “I think we should talk less about magic, you know people might take you seriously.”

  Rita understood at once. There were people in Lough Glass who were suspicious of Sister Madeleine, the hermit. And thought she might not come in a direct line from God. It had been whispered that people who believed in herbs and cures from the olden times might be getting their power from the very opposite of God.

  The Devil hadn’t been mentioned, but the word had stood hovering in the air over such conversations.

  DAN O’Brien stood at his door looking up and down the street. Business in the Central Hotel was never so pressing that he couldn’t find several opportunities during the day to come out and survey the main thoroughfare. Like many towns in Ireland, Lough Glass consisted of one long street, the church in the middle, the Brothers at one end and the convent strategically placed far at the other, giving the children as little chance of accidental meetings as possible. In between, there were the shops, houses, and businesses of his neighbors, fronting onto the same street as he did himself.

  You could learn a lot by standing at your own door. Dan O’Brien knew that Billy Sullivan’s two boys had come back from their uncle’s once their father had been locked away. The fiction was that they had been visiting, helping the uncle out with the farm. Everyone knew, of course, that Kathleen had sent them there to avoid the drunken rages and the unsettled atmosphere in the family home.

  It was hard on children like that.

  The lads were not to blame for the life they were born into. Handsome little fellows too, the very image of Billy himself before his face had turned fleshy from the drink and he had coarsened beyond recognition. They would be company for poor Kathleen anyway. Stevie must be about sixteen, and Michael was the same age as his own lad, Philip.

  Philip didn’t like him, he said that Michael Sullivan was tough, and he was always ready for a fight.

  “So would you if you had been brought up with an old man like his,” Dan O’Brien said. “Not everyone is as lucky as you are, Philip.” Philip had looked at him doubtfully. But then, the young were never satisfied with what they got.

  Dan watched as the summer afternoon took its leisurely course. There was never much of a sense of urgency in Lough Glass, even a Fair Day had a relaxed air about it. But when the weather was warm like this, people seemed to move at half speed.

  He saw young Clio Kelly and Kit McMahon arm in arm practicing the steps of some dance along the footpath, oblivious to anyone else. It seemed only a few months since those two had been skipping ropes, and here they were getting ready for the ballroom. They were the same age as his Philip, twelve, an unsettled age.

  And as he watched he saw Mother Bernard from the convent walking in a stately manner accompanied by one of the younger nuns. Her face was one line of disapproval. Even in the holidays her charges should not behave like that. Treating the public road as a place for silly dancing.

  They sensed her coming, and changed their antics rapidly.

  Dan smiled to himself at the contrite appearance of the two rascals. He would like to have had a daughter. But his wife was not well enough to face another pregnancy after Philip was born.

  “Haven’t we the son? Isn’t that enough for you?” Mildred had said. As there were going to be no more children, there was no more lovemaking. That was obvious, Mildred had said.

  Dan O’Brien sighed, as he often did. Imagine being a man with a normal married life, like…well, like anyone really. His eye fell on Martin McMahon crossing the road to Sullivan Motors. A man with a spring in his step and a very attractive wife. Imagine being able to take a woman like Helen McMahon upstairs and draw the curtains and…

  Dan decided not to think about it anymore. It was too frustrating.

  Mother Bernard and Brother Healy were discussing the autumn retreat. Sometimes the priests who came to do the Mission weren’t at all suitable to face the children in a school. But this year they heard that there was a very famous priest coming to Lough Glass, a Father John who gave sermons that were attended by hundreds of people at a time. They traveled to hear him, or that’s what Father Baily had told them.

  “I wonder can he keep order with a crowd of hooligans.” Brother Healy had his doubts. Famous preachers could be a bit ethereal for his liking.

  “Or realize when those girls are making a fool of him.” Mother Bernard had an eagle eye for mischief makers.

  “I don’t know why we’re even debating it, Mother Bernard. These decisions are never left to us, the people who know about how things should be done.”

  They often asked each other why they bothered discussing things, but in their hearts they knew that they loved discussing things. As educators of Lough Glass’s young they were united in facing the problems of the uncaring world.

  Secretly Mother Bernard thought that Brother Healy had life easy. Boys were so simple and straightforward. They weren’t devious like girls. Brother Healy thought that it must be a very easy number just to have little girls in uniform. They didn’t write terrible words in the bicycle shed and beat each other black and blue in the
yard. But neither of them had much faith that Father John, preacher extraordinary, would keep the minds and attention of the children of this lakeland town.

  THE day before schools reopened, the children were all down by the lake, enjoying the last hours of freedom, and even though they groaned about the awfulness of going back to the dreaded classroom the next day, quite a few of them were relieved that the long summer was over.

  Philip O’Brien from the hotel was particularly pleased. It had been very hard to fill the hours. If he stayed in the hotel his father was inclined to say that he should wash the glasses or empty the ashtrays.

  Emmet McMahon was looking forward to showing off his new confidence. A few weeks with Sister Madeleine had done wonders. He had even asked her if she could do the poems in his schoolbook, in case they might make sense like the ones in her book. As if you read them with your heart.

  “Why doesn’t Brother Healy teach them like that?” he asked Sister Madeleine.

  But she had no explanation. She seemed insistent that Brother Healy did teach them like that. It was very unsatisfactory.

  Clio Kelly didn’t want to go back to school. She was fed up with school. She knew enough now, she wanted to go to a stage school in London and learn to dance and sing, and be discovered by a kind old man who owned a theatre.

  Anna, her younger sister, would be quite happy when lessons started. Anna was in disgrace at home. She claimed she had seen the ghost. She said she saw the woman crying, she couldn’t exactly hear what the words were but she thought it was “Look in the reeds, look in the reeds.” Her father had been unexpectedly cross with her and accused her of looking for notice.

  “But I did see her,” Anna had wept.

  “No, you did not see her. And you are not to go around saying you did. This is a hysterical enough place already without you adding to it. It’s dangerous and foolish to let simple people think that an educated girl like you should give in to such foolishness.”