Night after night the beautiful woman walked beside the serene waters of Lough Glass. Until the day she disappeared, leaving only a boat drifting upside down on the unfathomable lake that gave the town its name. Ravishing Helen McMahon, the Dubliner with film-star looks and unfulfilled dreams, never belonged in Lough Glass, not the way her genial pharmacist-husband Martin belonged, or their spirited daughter Kit. Suddenly, she is gone and Kit is haunted by the memory of her mother, seen through a window, alone at the kitchen table, tears streaming down her face. Now Kit, too, has secrets: of the night she discovered a letter on Martin’s pillow and burned it, unopened. The night her mother was lost. The night everything changed forever…
Review
"A grand storyteller in the finest Irish tradition....She writes from the heart"— Plain Dealer, Cleveland
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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, and The Glass Lakes. 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.
Kit always thought that the Pope had been at her mother and father's wedding. There was this picture of him in their house—a different pope, a dead one—and the writing underneath said that Martin McMahon and Mary Helena Healy had prostrated themselves at his feet. It had never occurred to her to look for him in the wedding picture. Anyway, it was such an awful photograph. All those people in embarrassing coats and hats standing in a line. If she'd thought about it at all Kit might have assumed that the Pope had left before the picture was taken, got on the mail boat in Dun Laoghaire and gone back to Rome.
That's why it was such a shock when Mother Bernard explained that the Pope could never ever leave the Holy See; not even a war would make him leave the Vatican.
"But he went to weddings, didn't he?" Kit said.
"Only if they were in Rome." Mother Bernard knew it all.
"He was at my parents' wedding," Kit insisted.
Mother Bernard looked at the little McMahon girl, a mop of black curly hair and bright blue eyes. A great wall-climber, an organizer of much of the devilment that went on in the schoolyard, but not until now a fantasist.
"I don't think so, Katherine," the nun said, hoping to stop it there.
"But he was. " Kit was stung. "They have a framed picture of him on the wall saying that he was there."
"That's the papal blessing, you eejit," said Clio. "Everyone has them . . . they're ten-a-penny."
"I'll thank you not to speak of the Holy Father in those terms, Cliona Kelly." Mother Bernard was most disapproving.
Neither Kit nor Clio listened to the details of the concordat that made the Pope an independent ruler of his own tiny state.
With her face down on the desk and hidden by the upright atlas Kit hissed abuse toward her best friend. "Don't you ever call me an eejit again, or you'll be sorry."
Clio was unrepentant. "Well, you are an eejit. The Pope coming to your parents' wedding, your parents of all people!"
"And why shouldn't he be at their wedding if he were let out?"
"Oh, I don't know."
Kit sensed something was not being said. "What would be wrong with their wedding, for example?"
Clio was avoiding the matter. "Shush, she's looking." She was right.
"What did I just say, Cliona Kelly?"
"You said that the Holy Father's name was Pacelli, Mother. That he was called that before he was called Pius the Twelfth."
Mother Bernard reluctantly agreed that this was what she had been saying.
"How did you know that?" Kit was full of admiration.
"Always listen with half your mind to something else," Clio said.
Clio was very blonde and tall. She was great at games, she was very quick in class. She had lovely long fair hair. Clio was Kit's best friend, and sometimes she hated her.
Clio's younger sister Anna often wanted to walk home with them but this was greatly discouraged.
"Go away, Anna. You're a pain in the bottom," Clio said.
"I'll tell Mam you said "bottom' out loud on the road," Anna said.
"Mam has better things to do than to listen to stupid tall tales. Go away. "
"You just want to be fooling around and laughing with Kit . . ." Anna was stung by the harshness of her dismissal. "That's all you do all the time. I heard Mam say . . . I don't know what Clio and Kit are always skitting and laughing about."
That made them laugh even more. Arm in arm they ran off and left Anna, who had the bad luck to be seven and have no friends of her own.
There were so many things they could do on the way home from school.
That was the great thing about living in a place like Lough Glass. A small town on the edge of a big lake. It wasn't the biggest lake in Ireland but it was a very large one by any standards. You couldn't see across to the other side except on a clear day and it was full of little creeks and inlets. Parts of it were clogged up with reeds and rushes. They called it the Glass Lake, which wasn't a real translation. Lough Glass really meant the green lake, of course, all the children knew that. But sometimes it did look like a mirror.
They said that if you went out on Saint Agnes' Eve and looked in the lake at sunset you could see your future. Kit and Clio didn't go in for that kind of thing. The future? The future was tomorrow or the next day, and anyway there were always too many half-cracked girls and fellows, old ones nearly twenty, pushing each other out of the way to try to see. As if they could see anything except reflections of themselves and each other!
Sometimes on the way home from school Clio and Kit would call to McMahon's pharmacy to see Kit's father, with the hope of being offered a barley sugar from the jar. Or they would go to the wooden pier that jutted out into the lake to see the fishermen coming in with their catch. They might go up to the golf course and see if they could find any lost balls which they could sell to golfers.
They rarely went to each other's house. There was a danger attached to going home; it was a danger of being asked to do their homework. In order to keep this option as far away as possible the girls dallied on their way back from school.
There was never much to look at in the post office . . . the same things had been in the window for years, pictures of stamps, notices about post office savings stamps and books, the rates on letters going to America. They wouldn't delay long there. Mrs. Hanley's, the drapery shop, sometimes had nice Fair Isle sweaters and the occasional pair of shoes you might like. But Mrs. Hanley didn't like schoolgirls gathering around the window in case it put other people off. She would come out and shoo them away like hens.
"That's right. Off with you. Off with you," she would say, sweeping them ahead of her.
Then they would creep past Foley's bar with the sour smell of porter coming out, and on past Sullivan's garage, where old Mr. Sullivan might be drunk and shout at them, calling attention to their presence. This would be dangerous because McMahon's pharmacy was right across the road and someone would surely be alerted by the shouting. They could look in Wall's hardware in case there was anything exciting like a new sharp shears, or across the road in the Central Hotel, where you might see visitors coming out. That was if you were lucky. Usually you just saw Philip O'Brien's awful father glowering at everyone. There was the meat shop, which made them feel a bit sick. They could go into Dillon's and look at birthday cards and pretend they were going to buy, but the Dillons never let them read the comics or magazines.
Kit's mother would have found them a million things to do if they went home to McMahon's. She could show them how to make shortbread, and Rita the maid would watch too. She might get them to plant a window box, or show them how to take cuttings that would grow. The McMahons didn't have a proper garden like the Kellys did, only a yard at the back. But it was full of plants climbing out of barrels and up walls. Kit's mother showed them how to do calligraphy and write happy feast day for Mother Bernard. It was in lovely writing that looked as if a monk had done it. Mother Bernard still kept it in her prayer book. Or sometimes she would show them her collection of cigarette cards and the gifts she was going to get when she had a book filled with them.
But Clio often asked things like "What does your mother do all day that she has so much time to spend with us?" It seemed like a criticism.
As if Mother should be doing something more important like going out to tea with people the way Mrs. Kelly did. Kit didn't want to give Clio the chance to find fault, so she didn't often invite her home.
Where they liked to go best was to see Sister Madeleine, the hermit who lived in a very small cottage by the lake. Sister Madeleine had great fun being a hermit, because everyone worried about her and brought her food and firewood. No one could remember when she came to live in the old abandoned cottage at the water's edge. People were vague about what community Sister Madeleine had belonged to at one time, and why she had left.
But nobody doubted her saintliness.
Sister Madeleine saw only good in people and animals. Her bent figure was to be seen scattering crumbs for the birds, or stroking the most snarling and bad-tempered dog. She had a tame fox which came to lap up a saucer of bread and milk in the evenings, and she was rarely without splints to mend the broken wing of a bird she had found on her travels.
Father Baily and Mother Bernard, together with Brother Healy from the boys' school, had decided to make Sister Madeleine welcome rather than regard her with suspicion. As far as could be worked out she believed in the one true God, and did not object to the way any of them interpreted his will. She attended Mass quietly at the back of the church on Sundays, setting herself up as no rival pulpit.
Even Dr. Kelly, Clio's father, said that Sister Madeleine knew as much as he did about some things: childbirth, and how to console the dying. Kit's father, who ran the chemist's, said that in olden days she might have been thought a wisewoman or even a witch. She certainly knew how to make poultices and use the roots and berries that grew in abundance around her little home. She never spoke about other people so everyone knew that their secrets were safe.
"What will we bring her?" Kit asked. Nobody ever went to Sister Madeleine empty-handed.
"She always says not to be bringing her things." Clio was practical.
"Yes, she says that." Kit still thought they should bring something.
Description:
Night after night the beautiful woman walked beside the serene waters of Lough Glass. Until the day she disappeared, leaving only a boat drifting upside down on the unfathomable lake that gave the town its name. Ravishing Helen McMahon, the Dubliner with film-star looks and unfulfilled dreams, never belonged in Lough Glass, not the way her genial pharmacist-husband Martin belonged, or their spirited daughter Kit. Suddenly, she is gone and Kit is haunted by the memory of her mother, seen through a window, alone at the kitchen table, tears streaming down her face. Now Kit, too, has secrets: of the night she discovered a letter on Martin’s pillow and burned it, unopened. The night her mother was lost. The night everything changed forever…
Review
"A grand storyteller in the finest Irish tradition....She writes from the heart"— Plain Dealer, Cleveland
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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, and The Glass Lakes. 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.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Kit always thought that the Pope had been at her mother and father's wedding. There was this picture of him in their house—a different pope, a dead one—and the writing underneath said that Martin McMahon and Mary Helena Healy had prostrated themselves at his feet. It had never occurred to her to look for him in the wedding picture. Anyway, it was such an awful photograph. All those people in embarrassing coats and hats standing in a line. If she'd thought about it at all Kit might have assumed that the Pope had left before the picture was taken, got on the mail boat in Dun Laoghaire and gone back to Rome.
That's why it was such a shock when Mother Bernard explained that the Pope could never ever leave the Holy See; not even a war would make him leave the Vatican.
"But he went to weddings, didn't he?" Kit said.
"Only if they were in Rome." Mother Bernard knew it all.
"He was at my parents' wedding," Kit insisted.
Mother Bernard looked at the little McMahon girl, a mop of black curly hair and bright blue eyes. A great wall-climber, an organizer of much of the devilment that went on in the schoolyard, but not until now a fantasist.
"I don't think so, Katherine," the nun said, hoping to stop it there.
"But he was. " Kit was stung. "They have a framed picture of him on the wall saying that he was there."
"That's the papal blessing, you eejit," said Clio. "Everyone has them . . . they're ten-a-penny."
"I'll thank you not to speak of the Holy Father in those terms, Cliona Kelly." Mother Bernard was most disapproving.
Neither Kit nor Clio listened to the details of the concordat that made the Pope an independent ruler of his own tiny state.
With her face down on the desk and hidden by the upright atlas Kit hissed abuse toward her best friend. "Don't you ever call me an eejit again, or you'll be sorry."
Clio was unrepentant. "Well, you are an eejit. The Pope coming to your parents' wedding, your parents of all people!"
"And why shouldn't he be at their wedding if he were let out?"
"Oh, I don't know."
Kit sensed something was not being said. "What would be wrong with their wedding, for example?"
Clio was avoiding the matter. "Shush, she's looking." She was right.
"What did I just say, Cliona Kelly?"
"You said that the Holy Father's name was Pacelli, Mother. That he was called that before he was called Pius the Twelfth."
Mother Bernard reluctantly agreed that this was what she had been saying.
"How did you know that?" Kit was full of admiration.
"Always listen with half your mind to something else," Clio said.
Clio was very blonde and tall. She was great at games, she was very quick in class. She had lovely long fair hair. Clio was Kit's best friend, and sometimes she hated her.
Clio's younger sister Anna often wanted to walk home with them but this was greatly discouraged.
"Go away, Anna. You're a pain in the bottom," Clio said.
"I'll tell Mam you said "bottom' out loud on the road," Anna said.
"Mam has better things to do than to listen to stupid tall tales. Go away. "
"You just want to be fooling around and laughing with Kit . . ." Anna was stung by the harshness of her dismissal. "That's all you do all the time. I heard Mam say . . . I don't know what Clio and Kit are always skitting and laughing about."
That made them laugh even more. Arm in arm they ran off and left Anna, who had the bad luck to be seven and have no friends of her own.
There were so many things they could do on the way home from school.
That was the great thing about living in a place like Lough Glass. A small town on the edge of a big lake. It wasn't the biggest lake in Ireland but it was a very large one by any standards. You couldn't see across to the other side except on a clear day and it was full of little creeks and inlets. Parts of it were clogged up with reeds and rushes. They called it the Glass Lake, which wasn't a real translation. Lough Glass really meant the green lake, of course, all the children knew that. But sometimes it did look like a mirror.
They said that if you went out on Saint Agnes' Eve and looked in the lake at sunset you could see your future. Kit and Clio didn't go in for that kind of thing. The future? The future was tomorrow or the next day, and anyway there were always too many half-cracked girls and fellows, old ones nearly twenty, pushing each other out of the way to try to see. As if they could see anything except reflections of themselves and each other!
Sometimes on the way home from school Clio and Kit would call to McMahon's pharmacy to see Kit's father, with the hope of being offered a barley sugar from the jar. Or they would go to the wooden pier that jutted out into the lake to see the fishermen coming in with their catch. They might go up to the golf course and see if they could find any lost balls which they could sell to golfers.
They rarely went to each other's house. There was a danger attached to going home; it was a danger of being asked to do their homework. In order to keep this option as far away as possible the girls dallied on their way back from school.
There was never much to look at in the post office . . . the same things had been in the window for years, pictures of stamps, notices about post office savings stamps and books, the rates on letters going to America. They wouldn't delay long there. Mrs. Hanley's, the drapery shop, sometimes had nice Fair Isle sweaters and the occasional pair of shoes you might like. But Mrs. Hanley didn't like schoolgirls gathering around the window in case it put other people off. She would come out and shoo them away like hens.
"That's right. Off with you. Off with you," she would say, sweeping them ahead of her.
Then they would creep past Foley's bar with the sour smell of porter coming out, and on past Sullivan's garage, where old Mr. Sullivan might be drunk and shout at them, calling attention to their presence. This would be dangerous because McMahon's pharmacy was right across the road and someone would surely be alerted by the shouting. They could look in Wall's hardware in case there was anything exciting like a new sharp shears, or across the road in the Central Hotel, where you might see visitors coming out. That was if you were lucky. Usually you just saw Philip O'Brien's awful father glowering at everyone. There was the meat shop, which made them feel a bit sick. They could go into Dillon's and look at birthday cards and pretend they were going to buy, but the Dillons never let them read the comics or magazines.
Kit's mother would have found them a million things to do if they went home to McMahon's. She could show them how to make shortbread, and Rita the maid would watch too. She might get them to plant a window box, or show them how to take cuttings that would grow. The McMahons didn't have a proper garden like the Kellys did, only a yard at the back. But it was full of plants climbing out of barrels and up walls. Kit's mother showed them how to do calligraphy and write happy feast day for Mother Bernard. It was in lovely writing that looked as if a monk had done it. Mother Bernard still kept it in her prayer book. Or sometimes she would show them her collection of cigarette cards and the gifts she was going to get when she had a book filled with them.
But Clio often asked things like "What does your mother do all day that she has so much time to spend with us?" It seemed like a criticism.
As if Mother should be doing something more important like going out to tea with people the way Mrs. Kelly did. Kit didn't want to give Clio the chance to find fault, so she didn't often invite her home.
Where they liked to go best was to see Sister Madeleine, the hermit who lived in a very small cottage by the lake. Sister Madeleine had great fun being a hermit, because everyone worried about her and brought her food and firewood. No one could remember when she came to live in the old abandoned cottage at the water's edge. People were vague about what community Sister Madeleine had belonged to at one time, and why she had left.
But nobody doubted her saintliness.
Sister Madeleine saw only good in people and animals. Her bent figure was to be seen scattering crumbs for the birds, or stroking the most snarling and bad-tempered dog. She had a tame fox which came to lap up a saucer of bread and milk in the evenings, and she was rarely without splints to mend the broken wing of a bird she had found on her travels.
Father Baily and Mother Bernard, together with Brother Healy from the boys' school, had decided to make Sister Madeleine welcome rather than regard her with suspicion. As far as could be worked out she believed in the one true God, and did not object to the way any of them interpreted his will. She attended Mass quietly at the back of the church on Sundays, setting herself up as no rival pulpit.
Even Dr. Kelly, Clio's father, said that Sister Madeleine knew as much as he did about some things: childbirth, and how to console the dying. Kit's father, who ran the chemist's, said that in olden days she might have been thought a wisewoman or even a witch. She certainly knew how to make poultices and use the roots and berries that grew in abundance around her little home. She never spoke about other people so everyone knew that their secrets were safe.
"What will we bring her?" Kit asked. Nobody ever went to Sister Madeleine empty-handed.
"She always says not to be bringing her things." Clio was practical.
"Yes, she says that." Kit still thought they should bring something.
"If we went to your dad'...