The Glass Lake (93 page)

         

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 room 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.

Stevie and Kit took the little box of ashes and sprinkled them in the lake. The moon was high in the sky and they didn't feel sad. It wasn't really a funeral. All that was over, in London and years ago…the first time. This wasn't a sad thing, it was just the right thing to do.

As having a honeymoon in Wales had seemed the right thing to do. In years to come when people would look back on the history of the place and talk about the people who lived here they might mention Helen McMahon who died in the lake. This way it would be true, her body was in the lake now, like so many who had gone before, but it had gone there peacefully.

It was strange this shorthand which meant that you didn't have to say things like that to each other. Stevie knew and Kit knew it. As they knew they would live on the lakeshore someday.

Someday when they were old enough to settle down.

About the Author

Maeve Binchy was born and educated in Dublin. She is the bestselling author of
The Return Journey, Evening Class, This Year It Will Be Different, The Glass Lake, The Copper Beech, The Lilac Bus, Circle of Friends, Silver Wedding, Firefly Summer, Echoes, Light a Penny Candle, London Transports, Scarlet Feather, Quentins, Nights of Rain and Stars
, and
Whitethorn Woods
. She has written two plays and a teleplay that won three awards at the Prague Film Festival. She has been writing for
The Irish Times
since 1969 and lives with her husband, writer and broadcaster Gordon Snell, in Dublin.

Books by Maeve Binchy

WHITETHORN WOODS

NIGHTS OF RAIN AND STARS

QUENTINS

SCARLET FEATHER

TARA ROAD

THE RETURN JOURNEY

EVENING CLASS

THIS YEAR IT WILL BE DIFFERENT

ECHOES

THE GLASS LAKE

LONDON TRANSPORTS

THE COPPER BEECH

THE LILAC BUS

CIRCLE OF FRIENDS

SILVER WEDDING

FIREFLY SUMMER

LIGHT A PENNY CANDLE

THE GLASS LAKE

A Delta Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Delacorte Press hardcover edition published February 1995

Dell mass market edition published April 1996

Delta Trade Paperback edition / June 2007

Published by Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 1995 by Maeve Binchy

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94036104

Delta is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-440-33764-5

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