The Glass Lake (53 page)

It was not news that gave her any pleasure to read but at least it provided an excuse to write again to Kit.

I read with concern about the events in the garage across the road from where you live. I just wanted you to know how sympathetic I feel and how I hope everyone has recovered from the shock. I do not wish you to feel that you always have to acknowledge every note I write to you. But when I feel such an urge to let you know how very
involved and concerned I am, I'm sure you will forgive me for writing
.

She signed it
Lena
.

“K
IT
, I was going to sort of say that you and I were going off together for a weekend,” Clio said on the phone.

“Why were you going to sort of say that?”

“Because I'm going off for a weekend.”

“And…”

“You know the way Aunt Maura's always poking her nose into things and asking am I all right…”

“Yes.” Kit didn't mind it, as it happened. Maura only asked enough to make sure that they had enough money, entertainment, sources of clean clothes. She didn't question them about their friends. But then, of course, Clio was probably up to no good and felt threatened by even the simplest request for information.

“So I thought I'd say you and I had gone to Cork. It's the kind of thing we might do.”

“It's nothing like the kind of thing we might do.”

“Well, will you go along with it?”

“When for? Where
are
you going, Clio?”

“I don't know exactly.”

“You do. You're going off to lose your virginity with that terrible Michael O'Connor, aren't you?”

“Kit, really!”

“Aren't you?”

“Well, possibly.”

“Oh, you're such an eejit.”

“Sorry, Sister Mary Katherine, I didn't realize I was talking to a fully professed nun.”

“I didn't mean it, I mean him.”

“Just because you don't like his brother…”

“I don't like him and neither do you, Clio. You only like that they're rich.”

“That's not true. I've met his family and I like them. I don't care whether they're wealthy or not.”

“I've met a bit of their family in that fellow Kevin and I don't like him at all. I especially don't like what he's been saying about me. I wish I could get back at him…I'll think of a way.”

“Oh, don't make such a drama out of it,” Clio complained. “They're very nice really. They have this elder sister, Mary Paula. You never saw anything like her clothes, you wouldn't believe it. And she's been everywhere…hotels in Switzerland, France…everywhere.”

“Did she train? As a hotel manager?”

“No, I think it was just experience. She was in this great skiing place.”

“Lots of opportunities for skiing jobs in Ireland,” Kit said sarcastically.

“Oh, stop condemning them all. Listen, what are you doing that weekend anyway?”

“As it happens I
am
going to Cork to stay with Frankie,” Kit said. “But you can't come, either of you.”

“That's all right, I'll just say I'm going there and that will provide some kind of smoke screen. What's her second name?”

“Who?”

“Frankie?”

“I don't know, I never asked.”

“Oh, don't be such a pain and a prig, Kit…I'll make up a name. God, you're so uncooperative. Sometimes I think you're getting as mad as your mother.” There was a silence.

Kit hung up.

Frankie and Kit laughed all the way down to Cork on the train.

A fat old man bought them fizzy orange drinks and chocolate biscuits. He said he loved to see young girls eat and drink and laugh.

“That's all he's going to see,” Frankie whispered to Kit.

“We can't take another one. Stop, Frankie, you're going too far.” Kit felt guilty as the man looked at them excitedly, hoping for something…possibly a squeeze…in return for his heavy investment.

“It's his choice,” Frankie said.

They got a bus to the town where she lived in County Cork. It was bigger than Lough Glass but not much. Frankie's father ran a pub…he said that when he had a daughter a hotel manager and a son a solicitor he was going to retire, sell the pub and that was his plan. Frankie's mother said he would never retire. He would be carried out of the pub with his arm still up in the position of pulling pints. He had done it since he was eighteen years old, he knew no other life.

They were happy, easygoing people. Much less full of nonsense and questions about her background than the Kellys would have been, but somehow less stylish and elegant than her mother would have made her house for a guest. Kit wondered why she thought of her mother suddenly. The house in Lough Glass had been run by Maura for a sizable time now. Why did she think of it as her mother's place still?

She wondered if she should write to Lena again but there wasn't a reason. She was not going to start a correspondence all over again. Not after all the lies. All the deception.

Frankie's brother Paddy came home from Dublin too. He had got a lift from a fellow who had a hopeless car; he wasn't in until nearly midnight.

“Oh good,” he said when he saw Kit. “A nice bird for the weekend.”

“Not really,” Kit said loftily.

“You know what I mean, it was a term of admiration,” he said.

“Oh well, thank you, then,” she said good-naturedly.

Paddy was a law student. He attended lectures in the Four Courts, he said. And that was the bit that had some freedom about it, the rest was being apprenticed to his mother's brother, which was like being a galley slave.

“He's not that bad, is he?” Frankie defended her uncle.

“Easy to say if you don't have to work for him…still, it's a good training.”

They sat companionably in Frankie's father's pub. Paddy was drinking half pints of stout, the girls were drinking bitter lemon. A few regulars who didn't feel it necessary to observe the licensing hours were sitting around with the air of people who had a perfect right to be there and wouldn't cause any trouble just as long as they were left in peace.

Paddy told the girls about some of the work he had to do.

Debt collecting was the side of it he hated most. It meant going into houses where women with children in their arms tried to explain why money hadn't been paid by a man who was not there to make the explanation himself.

You saw all of life in a solicitor's office, he said. They had people with no lights on bicycles, applications for publican's licenses, a woman who had choked eating a piece of poultry that had not been properly carved. Now they'd better watch out for that sort of thing when they were hotel managers, because she had got quite a lot of compensation, as it happened.

And there was a claim for damages for a woman who got a big scar on her face. It diminished her chances of marriage so she would get a lump sum.

“Is it only women who get that money for disfigurement, or is it men as well?”

“Only women, in terms of losing marriage prospects,” Paddy said cheerfully. “Men could get married if they had faces crisscrossed with scars, it wouldn't affect their chances at all.”

“That's very unfair, isn't it?” Kit said. “It sort of says that women can get married only if they look all right.”

“It's true,” Paddy said. “And this woman is entitled to big compensation. What does a woman have to offer anyway except her appearance and her reputation?”

Frankie laughed. “That's straight from the nuns,” she said.

“Well, it's case law, as it happens,” Paddy said. “If you take a woman's reputation away falsely you have to pay.”

“Tell me more about that,” said Kit, her eyes shining with excitement. “Tell me all about that, I'm fascinated.”

They had great fun during the weekend writing the letter. Paddy said that the more threatening you made it, the greater the chance of there being a craven response.

“We're looking for high compensation here,” he said. “That fellow is the son of Fingers O'Connor. He's very well known, he wouldn't want any scandal getting out. He'll pay all right.”

“I don't expect him to pay,” Kit said. “I just want to terrify him.”

“Anyway, you're not a real solicitor,” Frankie said.

“He won't know that if we use the office stationery,” Paddy said.

Kit sent a postcard to Lena. It was a picture of the Blarney Stone in Cork, the place you were meant to kiss and then you got the gift of the gab forever, or so they told the tourists.

Having a nice weekend here with friends. Thank you for your inquiry about the drama in Lough Glass. It's all passed over now, though nobody has a clue who did it or why
.

Look after yourself,
Kit
.

“Who do you know in London?” Frankie asked as Kit posted the letter.

“Oh, just a woman I got to know. She's been very good about writing. This seemed an interesting place to send her a card from.”

“Sure, and you don't have to say too much on a card,” Frankie agreed.

After Clio, Frankie was a very restful friend.

         

He lived very peaceably in the tree house. It was a quiet place, but he liked the sound of the lake lapping below, and the call of the birds. The nun was a very reasonable woman. She said she was an outcast herself in her way and she understood. He had tried to tell her that first night, but she wouldn't listen. Then the next day he knew she had heard because her face was different.

“Where is the other man?” she had asked him. “The people of the village had said there were at least two, maybe even a gang.”

He became very agitated when he heard this. Now they would be definitely after him and maybe with tracker dogs. He told her he had done it on his own. He had needed money and he had waited in the lane until that woman had left. How was he to know that the old one was going to creep in as soon as she was out of the place? And the screaming and roaring and…well, he had to hit her just to shut her up. He hadn't intended it to be so hard.

“What's your name?” Sister Madeleine had asked him.

This conversation was carried on the whole length of a tree. The man sat in the tree house, wrapped in the rug she had given him, Sister Madeleine sat on a tree trunk.

“You're asking me to give my name?” he said in disbelief.

“I have to call you something. I'm Madeleine,” she said.

“I'm Francis,” he said. “Francis Xavier Byrne.” There was a silence. She thought of the day he had been baptised and someone had considered this was a fine, fitting name.

“And where do you live…usually, that is, Francis?”

“I live…I live…” He stopped. She was still. “I used to live in a home, Sister Madeleine, but I got out of it. The trouble was I needed money. I hated the home…they should never call it that. This place is more of a home than that was.”

“Then stay here,” she said simply.

“You mean that? After what I did!”

“I'm not a judge and a jury, I'm just another person living on the same earth,” she said.

He spent most of the day sleeping in his tree house.

Sergeant O'Connor came later that day. He said they were searching the area. “You'd tell us if you saw or heard anything, wouldn't you?” He looked at the woman's unsettling eyes.

“Well, sure I never go up to the town at all, Sergeant. And who do I see but friends dropping in?”

“Well, if you saw something unusual you'd tell…your friends, wouldn't you?” He was in some doubt as she looked back at him directly.

“You see all there is to be seen here, Sean. Just a two-room cottage.” The door of her simple bedroom was open, with its white coverlet and its crucifix on the wall. Was it his imagination or had she always kept that door closed before. It was almost as if she was showing him that nobody was harbored here.