Lake of Shadows

by Jane Arbor

  “I’m dreadfully sorry about walking out on you. I tried to do the arrangements specially well this morning for the last time. But I have to go. You may not understand and Father won’t. But Kate should—she’s been in love too, and it’s for love that I’m going. Guy—the man I lunched with when I stayed in Cork that day—is going to be in London indefinitely, and to go over myself is my only chance of seeing him as often as I want to ... as I must. He is still in Cork himself, but I’ve written to tell him the time and the number of my flight, and I’m hoping he will see me off or even, if he can, go over on the same plane. That would be heaven—

  “This is an awful thing to do to Kate and Father. But they’ll see that it’s my life and that I have to live it my way—won’t they?

  “Dear Conor, thank you and Mrs. Burke for everything. Your loving Bridie.”

  Kate dropped the paper into her lap and stared ahead without speaking until she was prompted by Conor’s “Well?”

  Then, on a long incredulous sigh, she said, “Her ‘life’! And she’s not yet eighteen! The—the sheer arrogance of it! And when she had promised me she wouldn’t! She had promised—”

  “Promised you what?”

  “Why, that she would content herself at home at least for this summer, for Father’s sake. It was on that condition that I begged him to let her take the job with you. I’ve kept faith with her and he has. So what possible right has she to break hers with us?”

  Conor turned a brief look which Kate found oddly shaming. “What right? D’you ask that—you that the child believes she can trust to understand that it’s love driving her to this?” he demanded.

  Kate’s hands made a little despairing gesture. “Oh, I know she thinks she is in love. But she’s too young to know. And running away like this without any proper notice to you, and with only the merest lip-service to what it could do to Father—!” At a sudden suspicion and a need to shift the load, Kate broke off to add, “This may be unjust of me, but I’m hoping you haven’t encouraged her to think she could flout everything like this and get away with it?”

  “I? Encourage her? And if I had, would I be troubling myself to snap and bay at her poor heels, as I’m doing now? So just one more snipe, about ‘encourage’, and you could well find yourself out of this and on the roadside, thumbing your way to Cork,” observed Conor, his choice of words considerably milder than his tone.

  Kate took warning from it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It was simply that you seemed to think Bridie had a right to leave home, and it was Mrs. Burke who took me to task about it.”

  “And rightly enough. If a word to the Professor could have sent the child away with his blessing, who better than you to put it?”

  Kate said wretchedly, “I did what I could. Bridie knew that, and it was enough then. She was happy until she met this man, this Guy Davenport—”

  “And what share had you in bringing her into his orbit, the way his charm has her so hypnotised by now that she can delude herself she’ll be welcome when she has run to him with her, ‘Look, I’m here’?” Conor challenged. But as Kate winced under that, he took a hand from the wheel to touch her knee in brief reassurance.

  “All right,” he said. “Easy now. That was below the belt. It was circumstance that had you in its grip, as it has Bridie this minute. Only we’ll have no more of this righteous ‘How could she—?’, d’you see? For if you can’t understand that it’s her foolish, trusting heart that’s making piecrust of her promises and her sober senses, then experience hasn’t taught you all it should. Meanwhile, we need to come up with her before this wolf of hens joins her, and that’s what we’re at now—trying to beat both him and Aer Lingus to it.”

  “But she says here”—Kate referred to Bridie’s note—“that she would already have flown out by the time you got this! How did you get it, anyway?”

  “By Phelan’s hand and by the good chance that he forgot, until I had it, that she had bound him to a promise that he would hold it back until the stroke of six. Quoting Phelan—‘Fiery important, she says. Give it to Himself and no other, she says.’ And then—‘Ah, but by the hokey-poke, didn’t she bid me too to keep the thing hid until six by the clock—?’ But it was too late then. I had it and had read it, and the time only about half-four. And you’ll see the significance of ‘six’ if you look at that Aer Lingus timetable there under the dash,” Conor concluded.

  Kate reached for the timetable, her eye caught at once by the Cork to London flight time—Cork ... 18 hrs.—which he had underscored in red.

  She looked up at him. “You believe Bridie told Phelan six because she had booked out by this flight at six?”

  “I do. If she took the van when he says she did, it’s the only one she could catch.”

  Kate looked at her watch. “Then we—could be in time?” she breathed. “And if we are—”

  Conor nodded. “If we are and can bring her back with us, you’re thinking that, with the Professor away for the night, there’d be little enough need to trouble him to hear she ever left home?” he put in.

  Kate looked at him gratefully, aware of a curious melting towards him which she had never felt before.

  Since the first sparking of their hostility he had occasionally disarmed her, though only to thrust and parry again, and not for worlds would she have allowed that Bridie’s judgment of him was surer than her own. But now—suddenly—she had doubts...

  She thought of some of the labels she had for him. Infuriating ... cocksure ... brash ... roughshod, and for the first time could make none of them stick. It could be, she supposed, that she had been touched by a charity for Bridie which outmatched her own, and now by his concern to save her father pain. But somehow she knew her change of heart towards him went deeper and, for other reasons than gratitude to him, might outlast the crisis they were sharing, on the same side for the first time.

  She agreed with him. “If we can save Father from having to know, it’ll be our one stroke of luck in the whole wretched affair.”

  “Not the only one,” Conor reminded her. “Phelan’s poor timing put us in the way of another and, keep your fingers crossed, we’ll be there by six or sooner.”

  But it was to seem they had spent their ration of luck. Their first major check was the result of its being market day in Coonclara, their halfway mark, where the main business of the day was over, but beyond which Conor chafed and girded for miles behind droves of ambling cattle and horseboxes taking the whole of the narrow roads. Then, that hazard passed, he gambled between a longer detour and a short cut which crossed a railway line, decided on the latter—and lost. The crossing gates were closed against them and the goods train which blocked the line had an air of having settled there for the night.

  “Oh, no—!” Kate breathed. Since Coonclara she had not dared to look at her watch and dared not still.

  Conor’s glance wait briefly her way. “Easy now,” he said again, and then was out of the car and over at the crossing keeper’s shack, pointing and haranguing.

  Kate watched money pass and he came back to report:

  “Our friend says the shunting crew are at their tea but that he’ll hunt them for me if I’m in such a lick of a hurry that I can’t wait till they’re done. I said I was and he’d better, since I was related to the Freight Traffic Manager and had friends in the Dail.”

  Kate managed a thin smile. “And are you related to the Traffic Manager really?”

  “Here and there, I daresay. For that matter, aren’t we all cousins if you go far enough back?” As Conor took his seat again he produced cigarette and his huge hand steadied her nervous fingers as she bent to his lighter. “On the chance of a bit of delay in take-off we, can still make it, you know,” he said. And a minute or two later, when the goods train shuddered, jerked deafeningly at its couplings and slowly backed, he added,

  “In your place, I’d get a blow-lamp on that old paint. It’ll be the master of you, else.”

  “A—a blow-lamp?” The sudden sw
itch to casual inconsequence took Kate’s breath away until suddenly she saw it for what it was—his bid to slacken the strain for her, a kindness that she doubted she deserved at his hands, as soothing as a narcotic to her quivering nerves. She experienced then a moment of truth which did something irrevocable to her feelings towards him. Now she knew she had been wrong about him and Bridie was right...

  She took her cue. “We haven’t got a blow-lamp and I doubt if I could use one if we had,” she told him.

  He dismissed that as a quibble. “Ah, nothing to it at all. Anyway, Bridie can handle one, for I’ve taught her myself. What’s more, I have one lying by, if maybe you’d care for the loan of the thing one day or another?”

  Her quick glance at him met his and they both smiled together. Kate said, “Thanks. I’d like to borrow it if I may,” and knew from his small, satisfied chuckle that he understood they had called Pax to their feud, had signed their private truce.

  After the level crossing they had no more setbacks, but their watches were showing six as they drove into the airport and parked. Conor’s van was parked too; Kate noticed it as he dashed ahead of her to the reception hall and made for the appropriate desk.

  She came up with him in time to see the clerk shake her head in answer to his question. They were too late, the girl told him. The last call for the London flight passengers had gone out at seventeen-fifty, and the flight had left on the instant of eighteen hours with, so far as she knew, its full complement of passengers aboard.

  “If that’s so, it carried a minor who hadn’t her parent’s authority to leave the country. So what do we do about that?” Conor asked.

  The clerk looked her sympathetic concern. “I’m sorry, sir. The only thing we can do from this end now is to ring London and ask them to hold the child after touchdown. Was she travelling alone or with someone else?”

  “Alone—I hope,” said Conor grimly. “And she’s not a child, she’s seventeen; name of Ruthven, Bridget Ruthven.”

  “Ruthven?” The clerk’s forefinger checked on its way down a passenger list. “Ruthven? Now that passenger’s name was being called on the tannoy a while back. Would that have been you with a message for her, sir?”

  “It would not. Did she answer the call?”

  “She must have done. The call only went out once—a message awaiting her at the Central Desk, as far as I remember. Anyway, you’ll need to go there for the authority to hold Miss Ruthven in London, so you’ll be able to confirm it. This way, sir, if you will—?”

  But they were destined not to reach the Central Desk. For halfway across the reception hall Conor halted and gripped Kate by the elbow. “Bridie,” he said. “There—”

  Kate followed his glance to where Bridie sat, her slight figure spiritless, her stare unfocused; Bridie, pitifully alone for all the coming and going about her, but—Bridie!

  “Then she didn’t go! Oh, thank God!” Kate breathed. At Conor’s word to their guide the girl smiled and left them, but as Kate made to run to Bridie, Conor’s hand came down on her shoulder, turning her to face him.

  “I’ll wait in the car, for this is between the two of you,” he said. “But remember now—I’m trusting you to bring to it all the understanding you have in you. No carping at her, no curtain lectures, d’you hear?”

  “As if I should reproach her!” exclaimed Kate, stung.

  “I don’t know. You were at it earlier,” he reminded her. “So just be thankful for whatever it is that’s kept her here, and be kind.”

  Kate looked from him to Bridie’s drooping figure. “Do you think Guy Davenport has let her down and that’s why she hasn’t gone?”

  Conor said, “I do, though by the bewildered despair there’s on her, her heart is still fighting her head’s contempt for the fellow, and maybe you, Kate, know there’s no canker much worse than that? So go to her now and love her, will you, and afterwards we’ll take her home.”

  He was drawing a parallel with her own jilting, yet for the first time a reminder of Basil brought no familiar stab of pain. Later she was to wonder whether that meant she was already cured of him and if she was, what... who ... had worked the miracle for her. But for now there was Bridie to be comforted, cherished, shielded, and as Kate went to her the only question in her mind was how Conor, that—that case-hardened dynamo!—came to know so much about the staunching, healing power of love.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When they rejoined Conor, Kate hoped he would override Bridie’s plea to be allowed to drive the van home. She had played truant with it and it was up to her to take it back, she claimed stonily. But in spite of Kate’s whispered aside to Conor, “Don’t let her, please!” he came down on Bridie’s side.

  “Cut along, then, and collect it and we’ll trail you,” he said, and to Kate’s further protest as they watched her into the van, “Leave her. While she’s concentrating on her driving she can’t be worrying at her bitter thoughts. Besides, I’ve the hint of a notion she’d rather I heard her story from you than from herself.”

  On their own way home Kate told it to him.

  Bridie had seen Guy Davenport several times in Cork since that first chance meeting on the quay; he had taunted her with being tied to Kate’s apron strings and had told her that if she broke free and want to London or even only to Dublin, he could see her almost as frequently in either place as in Cork, and that in both he had plenty of influential friends who could do a lot for her career.

  “But he couldn’t ever have meant her to take him seriously,” said Kate. “For when she did, and wrote to him that she was leaving home—you know, the letter she mentioned in hers to you—he slapped her down, poor babe, in a way even she understood.”

  Conor’s jaw set ominously. “As we thought. How did he do it?”

  “In a letter sent by hand to the airport. That was her tannoy call—to collect it from the desk about half an hour before you and I arrived. I doubt if she took in the sense of it at first, and I’m still not clear whether she deliberately let the flight go without her or whether she was so numbed that she didn’t hear the boarding-calls. She still had the thing crushed in her hand when I went to her, and she let me read it.”

  “And it said—?”

  Kate’s nostrils widened in distaste. “It was a—a poisonous production. Among worse things he told her not to be a little idiot; what did she think he was—a cradle-snatcher? Let her get it straight, he had better things to do in London than run kindergartens, so why couldn’t she be her age and play it cool as he did, for any other way he didn’t find her a fun person at all—All that, and more that she couldn’t possibly mistake,” finished Kate.

  Conor said darkly, “Let me come up with him and we’ll be seeing just how cool he can play it himself. Meanwhile she came away with you willingly enough?”

  “Oh yes, though she has hardly questioned yet how we came to be there. She knew already that the only thing she could do was to come home again, and she was sitting where she was, screwing her courage to it.”

  “And you showed her it needed no courage?” It was a confident statement, not a question.

  “I hope so, though of course it will later. At the moment she’s on the crest of the wave of her misery, and there’s a kind of high drama to that. But it’s the trough down below—getting used to the dreariness of everyday and there being nothing to look forward to—that takes a lot more fighting through, I’m afraid.”

  Conor’s brief glance was shrewd. “The way you’re going through such a time yourself, Kate a thaisge?”

  She drew a long breath. “I have been, though I’m getting through, I hope. Hard work helps, for one thing, and when I’m inclined to wallow I make myself remember there are people worse off than I am. There’s Dennis Regan, for one.”

  “Ah, Dennis—You find the two of you taking comfort from consoling the other?”

  Kate nodded. “It helps me and I hope it helps him.”

  “Even though the rest of his friends would like to see him gro
w the will to help himself more than he does? And hasn’t he pity enough on his own account without needing to batten on yours?”

  “He doesn’t ‘batten’ and I don’t merely pity him. And it isn’t only that we are in much the same boat just now. We’ve known each other since before I went to England, and there’s a lot more to our friendship than that.”

  “So he says when he speaks of you,” said Conor dryly.

  Kate said, “I’m glad. Glad that he’s glad to have me around, I mean. Because sometimes, when he’s at his lowest, I feel I’m getting nowhere with him.” She paused, then on a sudden thought added, “By the way, what was that bit of Gaelic you used just now—a thaisge? What does it mean?”

  There was a pause. Then Conor asked, “Don’t you know? Have you none of the Gaelic left that was fed to you at school?”

  “I didn’t learn any. I went to school in England, so I haven’t much. Just the public notice and signpost kind and a few other phrases I’ve picked up from Father,” said Kate, recalling with a pang the sweetness of “a chroi” with which she believed Basil had plighted his troth to her.

  Conor said, “Ah—Well now, I suppose you won’t be caring to hear that when I used ‘a thaisge’ to you, I was calling you ‘woman dear’?”

  “Is that what it means? Then I certainly don’t care for it!”

  Conor’s grin came and went. “I thought you mightn’t, the way I’ve seen your high pride in yourself flinch from the other! And yet will you tell me what’s wrong with ‘woman dear’ itself when it’s kindly meant?”

  “It’s so—so patronising, that’s what. And it’s practically never ‘kindly meant’,” retorted Kate with spirit.