The Glass Lake (17 page)

Lena sat there biting her lip. Nothing in her life as wife of the pharmacist in Lough Glass had prepared her for the action she was about to take.

She must forget that she was an insignificant housewife from a small Irish village. She must remember that she was a career woman in a huge capital city. She watched the other woman speaking ineffectually and breathlessly on the telephone.

It had given Lena time to think. When Jessica Park was free again she decided to speak her thoughts. “For example, here in this office,” she said, hoping the shake in her voice was not obvious. “I can see you're very busy. Perhaps this is just the kind of place I might be useful.”

Jessica Park was not a decision maker; she seemed alarmed. “Oh no, I don't think so…” she began.

“Well, why not? You seem very overworked. I could do some of the more routine stuff, you know, keep the files…”

“But I don't know anything about you…”

“You know everything about me.” She indicated the form.

“I don't run the place…Mr. Millar will need…”

“Why don't I start now…. You can see whether I'm any good or not, and then you can ask Mr. Millar.”

“I don't know, I'm sure…”

Lena paused. It was hard to tell what age Jessica Park was. She might have been forty or forty-five. But she could equally have been thirty-five, a woman who had taken no care of herself and aged beyond her years.

Lena decided to choose this option. “Well, Jessica. I'll call you that because I can see you're younger than I am…why don't we give it a try? Nothing to lose, nothing to pay if it doesn't work out.”

“Jessie, actually, and I'm a little older than you,” Jessie admitted. “But all right. Just so long as we don't get into any trouble.”

“What trouble can we get into? Look, I'll find a chair and sit beside you.”

Before Jessie could change her mind Lena was installed. She sharpened pencils, tidied up the desk, and rearranged the enrollment forms so that there was a carbon paper attached to each one and a second sheet below.

“I never thought of that,” Jessie said in wonder.

“Of course you did,” said Lena. “It's just you're too busy to have time for it.” Lena answered the phone with a cheerful “Millar's Employment Agency, how can we help you?” which was a vast improvement on Jessie's tentative “Hello.”

She said that she would really like to become familiar with the filing system, that way she could be of the greatest assistance. Jessie gave her vague outlines and left her to it. Lena's eyes raked through the lists until she found what she wanted. It wasn't long before she tracked down the section that she was really interested in.

The situations vacant in sales and marketing.

The kinds of jobs that Louis Gray might be able to apply for, once they knew what was wanted and where to go.

         

“You mean you just walked in and said they needed you?” Louis was amazed.

“More or less,” Lena laughed, hardly daring to believe it had worked. There was no need to tell him how frightened she had been.

Mr. Millar had said that Miss Park was intelligent to have picked a mature woman from the many people she saw, and to suggest her. Jessie had been delighted with the unexpected praise. Lena would start on Monday.

She said nothing to Louis about her real reason for taking the job. And the possible gold mine it might turn out to be for them. She wanted to call these firms herself in her role as employment agency and arm herself with the information.

Then Louis could apply on his own behalf.

It was all working out for the best. Lena thought she would be able to talk to God without bitterness at Mass next day.

Ivy was so sorry but she didn't know where there were Roman Catholic churches. She was always seeing them. She'd ask. She said there was a great big one in Kilburn, Quex Road it was. Always huge crowds going in and out of it on a Sunday. That might be the place.

“Kilburn…would it be a bit Irish for us? Would people know us?” she asked Louis.

“No,” he said. “There's hardly anyone from Lough Glass emigrated since you've left.”

“No, no of course not. But you…would people know
you
?”

“It doesn't matter if they know me, love. It's you who's on the run. Anyway, am I coming?”

“I'd like you to, if you wouldn't hate it. Just to give thanks.”

“Well, I've a lot to give thanks for. Of course I'll come.”

         

It was such an adventure going to Mass in London.

Finding the right bus, remembering which direction to take it. Crossing Kilburn High Road and following the crowd with head scarves and collars turned up against the cold. There were a few Polish people, and Italians too.

They knew nobody.

Lena compared it to the Sunday journey to Mass in Lough Glass. Good morning Mrs. Hanley, Mr. Foley, Dan, Mildred, Mr. Hickey, Mother Bernard, Mrs. Dillon, Hallo Lilian, Hallo Peter. How nice to see you again, Maura. How are you, Kathleen? Stevie? You were exhausted before you got up to the church. And then when you got there you recognized everyone's cough and splutter. And you knew what Father Baily would say before he said it.

The familiar Latin words washed over her. It must be terrible being a Protestant. You couldn't have the same service all over the world. You wouldn't understand Protestants in Africa or Germany. Being a Catholic was so safe. And indeed if you were like Louis, so simple. It was a God of Love up there looking down.

Lena felt peaceful and happy as they came out into the cold wind. Just by the church was a kiosk that sold newspapers.

“They're all the Irish provincial ones, or religious ones,” Louis said. “I'll get a real paper from the man over here and we'll go and have a Sunday drink…. Okay?”

Lena nodded her encouragement, but she looked at the headlines all the same. There were all the papers from home,
The Kerryman
, the
Cork Examiner
, the
Wexford Echo
, the
Connaught Tribune
. And among them the paper that was delivered to the pharmacy each Friday. They looked at it for the times of the cinema, the property for sale, for news of fellow county men and women who had done well in civil service examinations, postings overseas, who had married or celebrated a golden wedding.

She was about to look away when she saw there on the front page a picture of the lake in Lough Glass and some of the boats. Underneath it was the heading
SEARCH CALLED OFF FOR MISSING LOUGH GLASS WOMAN
.

With her eyes widening in disbelief she read that Helen McMahon, wife of noted Lough Glass pharmacist Martin McMahon, had last been seen walking by the treacherous lake waters on Wednesday, October 29th. Divers and volunteers had searched the reed-infested water of the lake that gave Lough Glass its name, but nothing had been found. A boat had been seen upside down and it was assumed that Mrs. McMahon must have taken it out and failed to cope with the sudden squalls that blow up in that region.

“Are you going to buy it?” asked the man who sold the papers. Helen handed him half a crown and began to walk away, still clutching the paper. “Hey, they're dear, but not that dear…” he called after her with her change.

But she didn't hear. “Louis…” she called, her voice roaring in her own ears. “Louis, oh my God…”

They lifted her to her feet, everyone suggesting something different, air, brandy, whiskey, water, tea, walk her around, sit her down.

The man trying to give her change kept insisting that it be put into her handbag.

Eventually his arms supported her along the road. Half walking, half being carried, she knew they were hastening to somewhere they could be alone. He kept saying that they should get a doctor.

“Believe me, there is nothing more to lose. Just get me somewhere away from people.”

“Please, darling, please.” There were mainly Irish accents in the bar, but they were far away. They were all concentrated on their own business. They had no interest in the man and woman who sat with the untouched brandy between them while they read unbelievingly the account of the search for Helen McMahon.

“He can't have got the whole town out, guards, detectives from Dublin Castle.” Louis was shaking his head.

“He mustn't have got the note,” Helen said. “He must have thought I was really in the lake…. Oh my God. Oh my God, what have I done?”

“But we've been over this a hundred times already. Where did you put the note?”

“In his room.”

“And how could he not see it? How, tell me?”

“Suppose he didn't go in there?”

“Lena, have sense. He must have gone in there. They got the guards, for God's sake. The guards would have gone in there even if he didn't.”

“He couldn't do all this, bring all this horror on the children, let them think I was lying dead in the bottom of the lake like poor Bridie Daly.”

“Who was she?”

“It doesn't matter. Martin wouldn't have done this, not to the children.”

“Well then, how could he not have got the note?” Louis's face was anguished and he kept looking back at the account in case the article might go away.

“The maid, you say she wouldn't have kept it…?”

“No, not a chance.”

“To blackmail you, or anything?”

“We're talking about Rita. No, that's not possible.”

“The children, then. Suppose one of them opened it…suppose they didn't want to believe you'd gone. You know how strange children can be. Hid the note and pretended none of it was true.”

“No.” She spoke simply.

“How can you be so sure?”

“I know them, Louis. They're my children. First…they wouldn't open it if it was addressed to Martin…but if they did…if they did…”

“Suppose they did. Just suppose it.”

“If Emmet opened it he would show it to his father. If Kit opened it she would have phoned me at Ivy's. She would have telephoned the moment we arrived. She would have demanded that I come home.”

There was a silence.

A silence that seemed to have gone on forever when Louis spoke. “Will you accept that he read it?”

“I find it very hard to think he could have unleashed all this…” She waved at the newspaper.

“It might have been his only way of coping, you know.”

There was another silence.

“I'll have to know, Louis.”

“What do you mean?”

“I must telephone him.” She almost went as if to stand up now. He looked at her in alarm.

“And say what? What would you say…?”

“Tell them to stop looking in the lake, tell my children I'm alive…”

“But you're not going back to them. You're not, are you?”

The longing in his eyes was almost too much to bear. “You know I'm not going back, Louis.”

“Then think. Think for a moment.”

“What is there to think about? You read it yourself, all that stuff about what I was wearing when I left. I'm a missing person…like you hear about on the news. They think I'm in the lake…” Her voice became almost hysterical. “They might even have a funeral, for God's sake.”

“Not without a body, they can't.”

“But they'll have me presumed dead. I can't be presumed dead. Not for my children. They must know their mother is alive and well and happy…not in the mud and reeds at the bottom of the lake in Lough Glass.”

“It's not your fault they think that.”

“What do you mean, it's not my fault? I left them.”

“It's his fault,” Louis said slowly.

“How do you say that?”

“That's what he told them. You gave him a choice of what he could say. This is what he said.”

“But he can't say that. It's preposterous. He can't tell them their mother is dead. I want to see them. I want to meet them, watch them grow up.”

Louis looked at her sadly. “Did you ever think he would let you do that?”

“Of course I did.”

“That he would forgive you and say ‘There there, you have a nice life with Louis in London, and from time to time come home to Lough Glass and we'll all kill the fatted calf.'”

“No, not like that.”

“But like what, then? Think, Lena. Think. This is Martin's way. It might be the best way.”

She leaped to her feet. “To tell two innocent children that I'm dead because he can't face telling them I left him!”

“Maybe he thinks that it'd be better for them. You're always saying it's a mass of whispers in that place, maybe the sympathy over a dead mother is better than the gossip over one that ran away.”

“I don't believe any of this. I'm going to ring him, Louis. I have to.”

“That's so unfair of you. You told the poor bastard that the one thing you'd do for him was let him sort it out whatever way he wanted. You'd give him that dignity, wasn't that what you wrote…”

“I don't know the exact words.”

“Was it or wasn't it?”

“I didn't have a carbon paper,” she snapped.

“But we went over it often enough.”

“That's what I told him,” she agreed. “But I must know. I must know do they really…” All the fight had gone out of her.

“Suppose they do think you're dead, Lena. Think, I beg you. Might not that be the best for the little girl and the little boy. If you phone now you'll have to go home and explain everything. Martin will be in deep trouble. You'll make it so much worse for him…think all the harm you might do.”

“I must know,” she said, tears falling down her face.

“Right. We'll ring them.”

“What?”

“I'll ring,” he said. “I'll say I want to speak to you, find out what I'm told.”

“You can't.”