The Glass Lake (2 page)

“What's annoying you?” Clio persisted as they walked down the lane toward the lake.

“I suppose someone will marry you eventually, Clio. But it'll have to be someone very patient, maybe stone-deaf even.” There was no way that Kit McMahon was going to let her best friend Clio worm out of her the fact that it had been very shocking to see her mother sitting crying like that.

Sister Madeleine was pleased to see them.

Her face was lined from walking in all weathers, her hair was hidden under a short dark veil. It was a cross between a veil and a head scarf really, you could see some gray hair at the front. Not like the nuns at school, who had no hair at all. It was all cut off and sold for wigs.

Sister Madeleine was very old. Kit and Clio didn't know exactly how old, but very old. She was older than their parents, they thought. Older than Mother Bernard. Fifty, or sixty or seventy, you wouldn't know. Clio had once asked her—they couldn't remember exactly what Sister Madeleine had said, but she certainly hadn't answered the question. She had a way of saying something else entirely, a little bit connected with what you had asked so that you didn't feel you had been rude, but it wasn't anywhere near telling you.

“A pot of jam,” said Sister Madeleine with excitement, as if she were a child getting a bicycle as a surprise. “Isn't that the nicest thing we could have…will we all have tea?”

It was exciting having tea here, not boring like at home. There was an open fire and a kettle hanging on a hook. People had given Sister Madeleine little stoves and cookers in the past, but she had always passed them on to someone less fortunate. She managed to insult nobody by this recycling of gifts, but you knew that if you gave her anything for her own comfort like a rug or some cushions it would end up in the caravan of a traveling family or someone who needed it more.

The people of Lough Glass had got used to giving the hermit only what she could use in her own daily life.

The place was so simple and spare it was almost as if nobody lived there. No possessions, no pictures on the walls, only a cross made out of some simply carved wood. There were mugs, and a jug of milk that someone must have brought her during the day. There was a loaf of bread that had been baked by another friend. She cut slices and spread the jam as if it were a feast that she was preparing.

Clio and Kit had never enjoyed bread and jam like it before. Little ducks walked in the door in the sunlight; Sister Madeleine put down her plate so that they could pick at her crumbs. It was always peaceful there; even restless Clio didn't need to be jumping up and moving about.

“Tell me something you learned at school today. I love facts for my mind,” Sister Madeleine said.

“We learned that Kit McMahon thought the Pope came to her mother and father's wedding,” Clio said. Sister Madeleine never corrected anyone or told them that they were being harsh or cruel, but often people seemed to realize it themselves. Clio felt she had said the wrong thing. “Of course, it's a mistake anyone could make,” she said grudgingly.

“Maybe one day the Pope will come to Ireland,” Sister Madeleine said.

They assured her this could never happen. It was all to do with a treaty; the Pope had to promise to stay inside the Vatican and not to go out conquering Italy like popes used to do years ago. Sister Madeleine listened with every sign of believing them.

They told Sister Madeleine news about Lough Glass, about old Mr. Sullivan up at the garage coming out in the middle of the night in his pajamas chasing angels; he said he had to catch as many as he could before the dawn, and he kept knocking on people's doors asking were there any angels hiding there.

Sister Madeleine was interested in that; she wondered what he could have dreamed that was so convincing.

“He's as mad as a hatter,” Clio explained.

“Well, we are all a bit mad, I expect. It's that stops us being too much alike, you know, like peas in a pod.”

They helped her wash and tidy away the remains of tea. As Kit opened the cupboard she saw another pot of jam exactly the same as the one she had brought. Perhaps her mother had been here today. If so, Sister Madeleine had not told them. Any more than she told anyone about the visits from Clio and Kit.

“You have some jam already,” Kit said.

Sister Madeleine just smiled.

         

Supper in the McMahon household had been at a quarter past six for as long as Kit could remember. Dad closed the pharmacy at six, but never on the dot. There was always someone who had come for a cough bottle, or a farmer in for marking fluids for cattle or sheep. It would never do to rush people out the door. A chemist's after all was a place you came when you were contemplating some of the greater mysteries of life, like your health or the welfare of someone in the family. It was not a visit that was taken lightly.

Kit had often heard her mother asking why she couldn't work in the chemist's shop. It would be sensible, she had pleaded, people would like to deal with a woman when they were buying sanitary napkins, or aids for breast-feeding, and then there was the cosmetics side of things…Travelers from the various cosmetic companies were paying more and more visits to country pharmacies to sell their wonders. There wasn't a week that a visit from Pond's, Coty Dawn, or Max Factor didn't happen.

Martin McMahon had very little interest in such things. “Give me what you think,” he'd say, and take an order of expensive bath soaps and assorted lipsticks.

They were badly displayed, often fading in the window and never sold. Kit's mother had said that the women of Lough Glass were like women everywhere, they would like to look their best. These cosmetics companies would give little training courses, tell the chemists' assistants how best to display the products, how the women customers should use them for best advantage. But Kit's father was adamant. They didn't want to be pushing paints and powders on people who couldn't afford them, selling magic potions promising eternal youth…

“I wouldn't do that,” Helen McMahon had argued often. “I'd only learn how to make the best of them and give them advice.”

“They don't want advice,” her husband said. “They don't want temptation either, don't they look fine the way they are. And anyway would I want people to think that I had to have my wife out working for me, that I can't earn a living for her and my children?” Father would always laugh when he said this and make a funny face.

He loved a joke and he could do card tricks and make coins disappear. Mother didn't laugh as much, but she smiled at Father and she usually agreed with him. She didn't complain like Clio's mother did when he worked late, or when he went with Dr. Kelly to Paddles' bar.

Kit thought that Mother would have liked to work in the pharmacy but she realized that for people such as they were it would have been unsuitable for Father to have let her work there. Only people like Mrs. Hanley who was a widow and ran the drapery, or Mona Fitz who was the postmistress because she wasn't married, or Mrs. Dillon whose husband was a drunk…worked in businesses. It was the way things were in Lough Glass, and everywhere.

Kit didn't usually think about it much, but she couldn't get the vision of her mother's tears out of her mind as they went home from Sister Madeleine's. She walked up the stairs slowly, almost unwilling to go in and discover what was wrong. Perhaps there was some very bad news. But what could it be?

Dad was fine, he was there closing up the chemist's. Emmet was home safely from rolling around in the dirt or whatever he did after school. So there couldn't be anything wrong with the family. With a sense of walking on eggshells Kit went into the kitchen where they all ate their meals. Everything was normal. Mother's eyes might have been a bit bright, but that's only if you were looking for something. She wore a different dress, she must have changed.

Mother always looked so gorgeous, like a Spanish person even. Someone had sent them a postcard from Spain of a dancer, where the dress was of real material, not just a photograph. Kit always thought it looked just like Mother, with her long hair swept up in a roll, and her big dark eyes.

Dad was in great form so there couldn't have been a row or anything. He was laughing and telling them about old Billy Sullivan coming in for some tonic wine. He had been barred from every other establishment that sold alcohol, and suddenly he had discovered his salvation in the shape of tonic wine. Dad did a great imitation of Mr. Sullivan trying to appear sober.

“I suppose that's why he saw the angels, due to the drink,” Kit said.

“God knows what he'll see after the Emu Burgundy,” her father said ruefully. “I've had to tell him that's the last of the stock, that you can't get it anymore.”

“That's a lie,” said Emmet.

“I know it is, son, but it's tell a lie or have the poor fellow lying on the road, roaring up to the skies.”

“Sister Madeleine says that we're all a bit mad; it's what makes us different to other people,” Kit said.

“Sister Madeleine is a saint,” Mother said. “Did you go to see her yet, Rita, about the other thing?”

“I will, Mrs. McMahon, I will,” Rita said, and put the big dish of macaroni cheese on the table.

Even though they ate in the kitchen Mother always insisted that everything was elegantly served. They had colored place mats instead of a tablecloth, and there was a big raffia mat for the casserole dish. It was decorated with sprigs of parsley, one of Mother's touches for making food look nice.

“Wouldn't it all taste the same no matter the way it looked, Mam?” Rita used to say at one time.

“Let's have it looking nice anyway,” Mother would say gently, and now it was second nature for Rita to cut tomatoes into triangles and slice hard-boiled eggs thinly. Even though the Kellys ate in a separate dining room Kit knew that their meals were not served as graciously as they were in
her
home. It was another thing that made her feel her mother was special.

Rita was made part of the family, unlike the Kellys' maid. Emmet loved Rita, he was always very curious about her comings and goings. “What other thing?” Emmet asked.

“Helping me with reading.” Rita spoke out clearly before Emmet could be asked not to be nosy. “I never learned it properly at school, you see. I wasn't there often enough.”

“Where were you?” Emmet was envious. It was so wonderful to be able to say casually that you skipped school.

“Usually looking after a baby, or saving the hay, or making the turf.” Rita spoke in a matter-of-fact way. She didn't sound bitter about the book learning missed, the years of child-minding, growing old before her time, culminating in going out to mind other people's children and clean their houses for them.

         

Not long after tea Mr. Sullivan saw devils everywhere. In the fading light he noticed them creeping with pitchforks into the houses along the street. Including the chemist's. Maybe they had gone in through the floorboards and through cracks in the wall. Kit and Emmet listened giggling from the top of the stairs to their father remonstrating with Mr. Sullivan, while issuing orders out of the corner of his mouth.

“You're all right, Billy, there isn't a devil here except yourself and myself.

“Helen, ring Peter will you.

“Now sit down, Billy, here, and we'll talk the thing out, man to man.

“Helen, let him know how bad it is.

“Billy, listen to me. Am I a man who'd let fellows with pitchforks into my house?

“As quick as he bloody well can, with any kind of tranquilizer he can get into a syringe.”

They sat on the stair top and waited until Clio's father arrived. The cries, and shouts of panic, and the hunt for devils stopped.

They heard Dr. Kelly saying to their father that it was the County Home now. Billy was a danger to himself and everyone else.

“What'll happen to the business?” Dad asked.

“One of those fine sons he threw out will come back and learn to run it for him. At least the uncle sent the boys to school. They may be able to turn it into something rather than the doss-house it is.”

Emmet was sitting with his chin in his hands. His stutter always came back when he was frightened. “Are they going to lock him up?” he said, his eyes big and round. It took him ten attempts to get his tongue around the word “lock.”

Kit thought suddenly that if she had been given a wish now at this very moment it would have been that Emmet's stutter would go. Sometimes it would be that she had long blond hair like Clio, or that her mother and father might be friends with each other like Dr. Kelly and Mrs. Kelly were. But tonight it would have been Emmet's speech.

When Mr. Sullivan had been taken away Dad and Clio's father went for a drink. Mother went back inside without a word. Kit saw her mother moving around the sitting room, picking up objects and putting them down, then she went to the bedroom and closed the door.

Kit knocked.

“Come in, sweetheart.” Mother was sitting at the dressing table, brushing her hair. She looked like a princess when her hair was down.

“Are you all right, Mam? You seem a bit sad.”

Mother put her arm around Kit and drew her toward her. “I am fine, just fine. What makes you think I'm sad?”

Kit didn't want to tell about the sighting through the kitchen window. “Your face.”

“Well, I suppose I am sad about some things, like that poor fool being tied up and taken off to a mental home for the rest of his life because he couldn't drink in moderation. And about Rita's selfish, greedy parents who had fourteen children and let the older ones rear the younger ones until they could send them out as skivvies and then take half their wages from them…otherwise I'm fine.” Kit looked at her mother's reflection in the mirror doubtfully. “And are you fine, my little Kit?”