The Glass Lake (57 page)

         

She had forgotten how unpredictable Louis was. Next day he telephoned the office. “James knows the perfect place. He's lending us the car, it will be a great weekend.”

“Where are you off to?” Grace asked.

“I don't know. Louis found a hotel. We're spending tonight there and tomorrow.”

“A real holiday,” Grace said admiringly.

“The nearest we get,” Lena said.

“Why don't you go abroad?” Grace wanted to know.

“Too many complications.”

“Still, Buckinghamshire is nice.”

“I hope so.” Lena sounded a little unsure of herself.

“And you look lovely as always.”

“Ah, Grace…” Lena caught her eye in the mirror.

“Look at yourself, woman.” Grace was impatient. “You're fantastic. Slim as a reed…gorgeous. But you're not if you don't believe it.”

“Sound advice, Miss West,” Lena said, laughing a real laugh and banishing all the strain from her eyes.

         

They had dinner at the elegant country hotel where James Williams had got them a fifty percent reduction for bed and breakfast. A wine bucket came to the table as soon as they sat down.

“We haven't ordered anything yet,” Louis said.

“It has been ordered for you,” said the waiter. James Williams had wanted them to have a good weekend.

There was a small dance floor, a pianist and a saxophone player made music for the diners. Sometimes there were only two or three couples dancing. Louis and Lena held each other and danced to the music. They were a handsome couple. Anyone looking at them would have thought it might be an anniversary or an illicit weekend. They didn't look like an ordinary married couple having a night out.

Lena was tired and aching next morning after a long night of love. She would have liked nothing better than to lie on in their hotel bedroom with a breakfast served in bed, but she had work to do.

She slipped out quietly so as not to wake Louis. He lay with his arm behind his head, his long lashes casting a shadow on his face. He was so handsome and she loved him so very much. Nothing he had done or might have done could ever change that.

When she got back to the hotel by taxi after two exhausting but hopefully profitable sessions he was waiting in the coffee lounge.

“You should have told me,” he said. “I'd have driven you. The car was for both of us, but I had no idea where your schools were.” Of course, if he had really wanted to know he could have phoned Millar's. “Come on,” he said. “We're off. I've planned a trip.”

They drove through the English countryside past farms and villages. Louis and Lena never compared the English countryside to the places they knew back home. It meant too much of a journey into what was over, what was best forgotten.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“You'll see,” he said, and he placed his hand on her knee. He looked so right driving James Williams's car. Louis Gray was a man born to style and gracious living no matter what his original circumstances had been.

She saw the name of the village of Stoke Poges.

“But isn't this where…?” she began.

“Yes…I wanted you to see the family's pride and joy.”

“What!”

“‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day'…er…Gray's ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard' by my ancestor Thomas Gray,” he said, and parked outside the gate of an absurdly picturesque churchyard.

“But you're not a relation of that Gray…” she laughed, half believing he might be.

“Of course I am.”

“You never said.”

“You never asked me.”

“But not seriously!”

“We are who we say. I'm upset you don't believe me,” he said.

“But Louis, you're not from these parts…you're from Wicklow…you're not from Buckinghamshire in England.”

She knew scant details of his background. His father had died when he was young…he had older brothers and sisters who had all left home, gone abroad to work. They had not stayed in touch, he had not sought them out.

Because Lena had no family herself she always thought that people would rate a family highly.

Not Louis. He spoke little of his childhood, he neither blamed it nor harked back to it. It was now that mattered, he said. Now, not the past.

They walked to the poet's tomb, they stroked the flat top of his grave. They read the poem to each other, remembering little bits of it from what they had learned by heart at school.

“‘…and leave the world to darkness and to me,'” read Lena.

“That's it, Uncle Thomas,” Louis said.

“He wasn't a relative really?”

“We are what we think we are,” Louis said.

         

“I love you, Lena,” Louis said later that night. He had woken up and found her sitting in her dressing gown by the window, smoking and looking out into the night.

“Why do you say that to me?” she asked.

“Because it's true. And sometimes you look sad as if you had forgotten that it's true.”

S
TEVIE
Sullivan's mother, Kathleen, was discharged from hospital and came back to Lough Glass.

“Don't end up getting her cups of tea, Maura,” Peter Kelly advised his sister-in-law. “They can well afford to get a woman in to do it.”

“Who knows better than I what they can afford?” Maura answered. She did the books and knew exactly how well the motor business was working for the Sullivans, thanks entirely to the flair and hard work of Stevie. If he gave his full mind to it she didn't dare to think how successful he would be.

He toured farms and explained to farmers who might be slow in making decisions the wisdom of improving their farm machinery and their pickup trucks before they had been run into the ground. Then he did up their original vehicles and sold them on to others. Nowhere did he break the law or indeed break faith in his clients. His success came from knowing how to suggest, rather than waiting for business to fall into his lap.

“Do you think we should arrange for someone to come in and look after your mother?” she asked Stevie.

“Oh I don't know, Maura. She mightn't want it. You know she'd say she's the class that should be serving people rather than having people serve her.”

“You've changed all that, you're in a different setup now.”

“Yes, I know that, you know it, my mother might not.”

“Let her benefit from it. I know a friend of Peggy's who could come in.”

“Set it up, Maura. That is, if you haven't already.”

She smiled at him. They liked each other. “No word yet on who did it?” Maura knew that Stevie had been talking to Sergeant O'Connor earlier on that day.

“No, they seemed to have gone off a flying saucer, whoever they were. Maybe it's for the best, Sean says. It might put my mother into a trauma. He says it might make her worse than she is already if she had to identify them…pretty relaxed attitude to detecting crime if you ask me.”

“Very human attitude as well,” Maura said. “He may be kind but he's not a fool, Sean O'Connor.”

“I know that, he gets inspired about lots of things. I know nobody gave him a hint.” Stevie looked hard at Maura, as if trying to get her to admit that she had ratted on his being with Orla Dillon.

“He knew chapter and verse, Stevie. I wouldn't have told him but he knew already, and where to find you.”

“He knew how to frighten the wits out of me too,” Stevie said ruefully.

“Yes, well.” Maura pursed her lips.

“But by amazing chance Orla's mother came up with the same argument at the same time. Beware the mountainy men. Orla's so afraid of the troop of brothers-in-law coming for her with scythes and hatchets she won't raise her eyes to greet me. So that little episode is over.” He looked for a moment like a small boy who has been told he can't play football that afternoon. His lower lip stuck out mutinously.

“I'm sure you'll find other distractions,” Maura said unsympathetically.

“I suppose so,” Stevie said. There was no reason to tell Maura McMahon that her sister's daughter, her own little niece Anna Kelly, had proved to be a very great distraction indeed.

         

“You can't stay here forever, Francis,” Sister Madeleine said.

He sat shivering by her fire. With damp sacking hung ineffectually around it, the tree house was no protection against the start of a wet winter in Lough Glass. “Where would I go, Sister?” he asked. His face was thin and white. He had a hacking cough.

She had asked young Emmet McMahon for a cough bottle from his father and to her irritation Martin McMahon had sent back a message saying that it was going to be a harsh winter and he would very much prefer if Sister Madeleine went to visit Dr. Kelly and had herself and her chest looked at and listened to. She had got lozenges, but still Francis coughed and barked and looked like a man who should really be in a hospital bed.

“Sleep in my bed, Francis,” she said.

“But you, Sister?”

“I'll sleep by the fire.”

“I can't, I'm too dirty and shabby and bad. Your bed is snow-white.” But he craved a night in the warmth and peace.

She knew that. “I'll give you some hot water to wash.”

“No, you often do that. But there's too much of me.”

“Suppose I put a kind of cloth on the bed, in it even, like that you could wrap yourself in.”

“And something for under my head, Sister.”

She found an old bedspread which she warmed by the fire, and put some tea towels on her immaculate pillow slips. He was asleep in minutes, breathing coarsely and with a gurgle, as would a man with a chest infection. She sat at the open door watching him for a long time. Francis Xavier Byrne, somebody's son. A man not right in the head, who should be allowed some freedom like the wild animals. He should not be chained up and fenced in. He couldn't do any harm here, and he was learning to trust again. Soon, when he was better, she would give him his bus fare and he would go far away.

Kathleen Sullivan was better now, they said. Back from the hospital with a woman going in and out to look after her. Surely a loving God wouldn't want to work out any revenge on poor Francis, that man sleeping there in his fitful turning sleep, shivering and coughing as he tossed in her bed.

Sister Madeleine knew that she would have to work something out about the bag of possessions, as he called it. Normally he never left it out of his hand. Tonight it was laid casually in her simple wooden chair. He was learning to trust, he couldn't be handed over now. She would make it clear that he would have to return whatever money he stole from Sullivan's garage. She would be responsible for doing it herself.

         

“What did you eat at the Indian restaurant?” Maura asked Emmet.

“I can't remember, Maura. I'm sorry.”

“Was it fish or meat…or what?”

“I don't know. Meat, I think.”

“Lord, and that girl saving her money to take you to a special meal.” Maura shook her head in mock despair.

“We had Knickerbocker Glory in Cafolla's,” he said, desperate to sound as if he had been appreciative.

“Good, at least we know what remains in the mind,” Maura laughed.

“It's just we were talking rather a lot and I ate without thinking.”

“I know, I know.” She was sympathetic. There was something bothering Emmet McMahon, but she wasn't going to find it out.

She thought it might be the absence of Anna Kelly, but Emmet went out as soon as meals were over so perhaps he was meeting her then. She hoped they weren't going to get too serious, and debated whether she should discuss it with her sister, Lilian. But Lilian had a poor track record as regards coping with either of her daughters' emotional adventures. Maura thought that, as so often in life, the best thing to say was nothing.

“Hello Emmet.”

Anna Kelly had never looked so lovely. She wore a green coat with a white angora scarf around her neck. She was flushed and excited-looking, her blond hair held up by a green clip in a ponytail. She looked like a film star. Yet here she was in Lough Glass. Anna Kelly, who only a few weeks ago had been happy to kiss him and let him stroke her. Now she said that this couldn't go on anymore, but that she wanted very much to be friends. She didn't know how very, very hard that was for him.

But it would gain him nothing if he were to sulk. “Hello, Anna, how are things?” he said cheerfully.

“Awful…it's like living in a German prisoner-of-war camp,” Anna grumbled.

“Oh, why's that?”

“Where am I going, what am I doing, where will I be, who am I meeting, what time will I be back?” Anna groaned. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it would make you want to throw yourself into the lake.” There was a silence. “Oh Emmet, I'm so sorry,” Anna said.