Lake of Shadows

by Jane Arbor

  In his study she opened her typewriter, then searched through his longhand scripts for the ones she meant to work on. The first was a piece of prose which she completed before turning to the rest—translations of four or five ancient Gaelic love poems, the last of which gave her pause when she came to it.

  Evidently the Professor had had difficulty with it and had meant to make a fresh draft before passing it to her for typing. For the Gaelic version was still pinned to the sheet of the English script, and of the latter, almost every third line or so was scored through and wholly re-written, or single words were ringed and corrected according to the Professor’s second thoughts on them.

  At first Kate thought she would be able to make nothing of it. Then she decided to copy in pencil as much as she could decipher, meaning to get her father to check her effort before she typed the fair draft.

  Slowly her reading of his corrections and hieroglyphics made reasonable sense of the first two stanzas of the poem and she was about to start on the third when her eye caught a word of the Gaelic original.

  A thaisge. There it was—Conor’s provoking epithet for her to which, when she had not found it in the phrase-book she had consulted, she had not given another thought until now. But—“woman dear” in the sense of “my good woman”—how had anything so belittling found its way into a passionate love-poem centuries old?

  But of course! Her father's translation of it would tell her ... Eagerly she sought the corresponding place in his version, found it. One of the few lines of that stanza without correction; a phrase repeated twice making the comparison easy and certain—“I love thee, love thee, love thee, my treasure?”—and in the margin her father’s scholarly note—“A somewhat literal translation of ‘a thaisge’ but musically good here, I think,” making assurance doubly sure.

  So—! Kate sat back in bewilderment, her throat gone suddenly dry. A thaisge—a tenderness, an endearment—“my treasure”! Now she guessed why she had not found it in a modern phrase-book; it was probably a form which was little used now, and if Conor believed it meant “woman dear” in that sense, then he knew less old Gaelic than he thought. Or her father did, which was unthinkable.

  But if only, if only Conor had used it, knowing its real meaning, where might they have gone from there? For that night of their rescue of Bridie had disarmed her hostility for good, and before it was over her secret heart, if not her mind, had ached with envy of Bridie’s blind turn into his arms to find comfort there and all compassion in his touch.

  That night she had first loved him. That night Basil had become part of her past, with no more power to hurt her. So supposing Conor had—? But there, cruelly, deliberately, she wrenched free of the ifs and supposings that were only dreams. That night she would have been his for the asking, but not he hers. He hadn’t called her by a sweet name, except by his own mistake. They had struck their truce; gone into alliance for Bridie’s sake, become friends and had stayed that way. But that was all, and all it would ever be now. Even if it wasn’t a little less already—though if it was, she was at a loss to know why.

  All she knew was that the rift—if rift there were, except in her imagination—was of Conor’s making, not hers, and that it dated from after the night of Rory Tierney’s dinner-party at the Lakestrand. Nor was it that she now rarely spent much time there, in order not to leave the Professor alone. For since the work on the golf-course had begun Conor was to be seen almost as frequently on their side of the lake as on his.

  He and Kate could meet there, and did. But it was always by chance, never now by his design or invitation. It seemed to her that he was always on his way here or there in a hurry; never reluctant to part from her; still on the surface his blunt, forthright self, yet somehow withdrawn from her, as if on an invisible thread.

  There had been a time, she thought, when she could have teased him about a thaisge—advised him not to quote Gaelic unless he was sure of his facts. But now she doubted if she could, The Conor who would have shared the joke wasn’t there for her any more...

  With an effort she returned to the manuscript, forcing herself to concentrate on it, and worked until she heard a car coming up the ride.

  Now who—? Not Bridie in the van, for it was too early for her to be back. More likely it was some neighbour who was giving the Professor a lift home, which would mean coffee or a drink to be offered, depending on who it was—Pushing aside her papers, she rose and went out into the hall.

  Conor, who had spent his morning with the contractor on the proposed site of the golf clubhouse, swung his car out on to the shore road at about the point where he had almost run down Kate on her first night at home. As he crossed the culvert bridge he glanced briefly up at its parapet, the steep curve of which hid the lake from view.

  On the far side of the bridge, however, there it was visible from shore to shore in all its angry splendour, troubled, grey; real waves nagging at any craft beached too near its edge, nothing attempting to ride its fury this morning.

  Or—was there nothing? Conor slowed, then braked and reached for the field-glasses he was never without. He trained them on the object midway between the Island and the north shore and brought into focus Dennis Regan’s dinghy, upturned, drifting and rocking like a toy boat on a bathtub, and Dennis’s head bobbing in the water nearby.

  “—!” Conor’s expletive came out as an explosion of breath, rather than the word he intended. Was the man crazy, to take to a dinghy at all on such water, and he, the handicapped fellow, without the power either to right the thing or to haul himself aboard again without help? Conor threw down the glasses and was out of the car, shouting and signalling. But the wind mocked his voice, carried it away, and when there was no response from the swimmer, he flung back into his seat.

  At the Lakestrand there was rescue gear and his own boat. But far nearer—only a few hundred yards behind him—was the Ruthvens’ landing-stage and their boat, and Dennis was nearer to that shore. The decision taken, Conor turned the car; used the glasses again, first on Dennis, then on the landing-stage; saw that the boat was beached, not housed as he feared it might have been, and thrust his accelerator pedal to floor-level.

  He rocketed the car along the shore-track as far as he could take it, then crashed on foot to the shingle beneath the staging.

  But someone was there before him; someone who was fumbling at the knot of the boat’s painter and who straightened, panting, as Conor approached.

  Enemy faced enemy. It was Conor who spoke first. “And what would you say you’re at? Thinking of taking a trip in the Skylark?” he demanded.

  Professor Ruthven drew himself up by a perceptible two inches. Pointing lakewards, “There’s a man out there,” he said. “In difficulties. Kate’s man, if you didn’t know. He has his craft upset, and he out of it, and what would I be at but going out to aid him?”

  Conor nodded, unmoved. “Kate’s man—in other words, Dennis Regan. But it’s not you going out to him. For I am. So will you let me at that mooring-rope, until I have the thing untied and the boat launched under me?”

  The Professor stooped again to the knot. “I’ll launch it myself—”

  “You’ll do nothing of the kind. For the love of Mike, man, will you cease wasting God’s good time and stand aside but of this?” barked Conor.

  The Professor stood aside. “I will so, and you may launch the craft. But there’s room in it for the two of us, and you’ll take me along or I’ll take it out myself. And if you think I’d not be able for it, I’d have you know I was handling craft on this water in worse storms than this, long before you were in petticoats and a power of times since.”

  Conor grunted, “You’re a couple of generations out of date—mine wore buster-rompers, not petticoats. However, there’s no time for argument, so come along if you must.”

  “I’ll take an oar—”

  “You will not,” said Conor. “You’ll fold your hands in the bows until we get out there, when it’s possible you could be useful, h
olding her steady if I have to go in after Regan.” As he spoke, the boat took the water and he got in, held her while the Professor joined him, then pushed off. Out on the lake Dennis was still swimming, though less strongly, and the distance between him and the capsized dinghy was lengthening by yards every minute.

  Before she left the study Kate had recognised the sound of the car as Dennis’s. But it was not Dennis whom she met in the hall. One of the men coming in at the front door was her father, the other was Conor, and to her infinite surprise they appeared to be together, amicably in each other’s company, in a way she had never thought to see.

  Dennis’s car? Conor driving her father in it? Where from—and why? Making no sense of the puzzle, she stared, greeting neither of them until the Professor said sharply,

  “Come, Norah—I mean Kate, haven’t you the word of welcome for Mr. Burke, the way he’s after rescuing Dennis Regan from the lake, and I with him, though little enough help I was at all, to be sure?”

  Kate breathed, “Dennis—in the lake? Is he—is he all right? His hip—!”

  “Easy, easy. He’s safe, and drying out under my mother’s eye.” It was Conor who answered her. “He was bound for here in his dinghy, but I thought it better to take him over yonder and call Kilian to him, which I’ve done. He was pretty nearly all in when we reached him, but according to Kilian, though he’s probably caught a king-sized chill, he’ll do now well enough.”

  “But”—Kate looked from one to the other—“how did you, both of you, come to rescue him?”

  “I spotted him in trouble from the Dunquin culvert and raced for your boat—”

  “And I’d seen him from the shore track and was going out to him in it—” put in the Professor.

  “Oh, Father, you shouldn’t have—!”

  His eyes widened. “Would you have me let him drown, then? And was I to know, daughter, that our friend here was on his way and could do as much for Dennis as I could myself?”

  “You still shouldn’t have tried to take the boat out yourself. What did Dr. Kilian say when he heard you’d gone out there to Dennis too?”

  Conor put in wryly, “He said enough. But as I wasn’t to be let to have the boat unless the Professor came along, what choice had I but to take him, and glad to have him too when I couldn’t haul Regan aboard without going in after him? Oh, it’s all right”—Conor intercepted Kate’s quick glance—“I’m dry-clad now. We both are. Anyway, the rest of the story is that we took Regan’s dinghy in tow; your boat is over at the Lakestrand, and as I’d left my car down by your staging, Dennis lent me his to bring the Professor home. All clear?”

  Kate nodded, momentarily at a loss for words in which to thank him for a feat he took so much in his stride. And her father had actually meant, had been reckless enough of self, to try to launch the boat alone to go to Dennis’s aid! She would have done the same; so would Bridie; so would anyone with a spark of ordinary courage. But fear of the consequences if Conor hadn’t been there choked her, kept her silent.

  And before she found her tongue, she suddenly heard her father addressing Conor in Gaelic, and Conor, his eyes roguish, replying in the same language. Then the Professor led the way towards the hospitality of the sideboard where he said to her in English, “Kate, Mr. Burke has just allowed he has a mouth on him—” and to Conor, “Name your choice, man, will you, and we’ll be drinking to the Lake in storm and calm, both?”

  Fleetingly sharing a secret triumph with her, Conor’s glance met Kate’s. Then he said, “The name is Conor, Professor. And whiskey, please—what else would I choose for toasting the Lake? And after, we’ll drink to the name of Ireland too, eh?”

  Nodding his agreement with so proper a sentiment, the Professor poured.

  When Conor had left to collect his own car, Kate rang Dennis at the hotel, passing on Conor’s suggestion that she should drive his car back there later, when the storm had blown itself out.

  Dennis agreed, “Do that, Kate dear, I’m dying to see you—What? No, not a thing wrong with me now, though Kilian has my promise I’ll stay here for the night. And Kate, though I realise it wasn’t far short of criminal idiocy to take out that cockleshell of mine this morning, it was simply that I felt all at once that I couldn’t stand the Island for another minute, d’you see?”

  Kate’s heart sank. “Oh, Dennis, why? I thought you’d begun to get over all that kind of depression!”

  “So I had, and so I am, mostly. But when it grips me again, as it does now and then, my whole future looks so vague and hopeless, and it’s then I need to run to you, as I tried to this morning.”

  In an effort to brace him, Kate said, “Your future is exactly what you care to make it, you know.”

  “Yeah—‘master of my fate, captain of my soul’—and all that,” quoted Dennis bitterly. “All right then—say I’ve money and a certain talent and can make whatever future I please, still what’s the use of any success, if I’ve no one to make if for or share it with? Listen Kate—for I meant to say this to you this morning—don’t you think it’s time we brought this thing we have with each other—this pact, out into the open now?”

  “You mean we haven’t talked about it since we made it, and you think it’s time we decided what value it is, if any?”

  There was silence on the line. Then Dennis said heavily, “No I didn’t mean that.”

  “Then what?”

  “That we bring it out before the world, make a real engagement of it, mean it.”

  Dismayed, playing for time, Kate said, “We’ve got to be very sure we mean more by it now than we did when we made it, Dennis.”

  He agreed. “We have. But I do. Now I know I want you for yourself, not as a kind of stand-in for Aileen.” He paused. “I’m asking you to marry me Kate—will you?”

  Dared she play for more time? Knowing she must, even at the peril of hurting him, she said, “Please, Dennis dear, not now. Not over the telephone. We need to talk.”

  “When you bring the car over, then?”

  “Yes, all right.”

  Grateful for the reprieve, however brief, she could not know, nor could Dennis, how cruelly fate was about to shelve the problem for her.

  It was at Bridie’s suggestion that the Professor went properly to bed that afternoon, and to the girls’ joint surprise he did so, sleeping until Kate took his tea to him and sat with him while he drank it. Sitting up in his pyjamas, somehow he looked both ‘little boy’ and frail at the same time, and as she tucked his napkin bibwise beneath his chin, Kate ached with tenderness for him.

  He said with pleasure, “Ah, buttered toast.” And then, “Has the storm given over yet?”

  “Just about,” Kate told him, though not that she had watched its abatement with dread. An hour earlier the rain squalls had lost their battle with the wind; then the wind itself had died down and the clearing sky, washed with pale sunlight, brought the ordeal of her rendezvous with Dennis nearer ... too near.

  The Professor said, “It’s always been like that with the Lake. There you have it—milk-mild one minute, the next, tearing into one of its tantrums as a child does. I’ve often thought the Almighty must know the value of a healthy spat of temper, the way he lets the Lake rage as it will while it will, and beat itself back to calm in its own good time. There’s Dennis now—shouldn’t he know well enough by this that we Lake folk need have few errands that won’t wait while it has one of its black moods on it? For they always pass. Loch na Scathan ... Lake of Shadows, and where are the shadows if there’s no sun to throw their length across it, as I reminded Dennis and that other one—the fellow who defied me for the use of my own boat—what’s this his name is now?”

  “Conor, Father. Conor Burke,” Kate prompted.

  “Ah, Conor Burke. Now there’s an enigma of a man, Kate. He has his plans for that place of his yonder and for his golf-course and for the Acre—changing the face of the Lake with every one of them, and yet you’d say from the way of his talk that his heart is with it and th
at he believes he is doing his best for it in his own fashion.”

  “Perhaps he is. I know Bridie has always thought so,” said Kate.

  “And you too? He has you persuaded, as he almost has me?”

  Kate smiled. “Yes.”

  “Well, he has the queer way of showing it, surely. But he seems to know so well where he’s going and that it’s for Ireland’s sake in the latter end, that he has every argument against him disarmed and beaten flat before it’s well uttered. And another thing—you heard him answer me in Gaelic when I asked him would he take something to warm him? Well, d’you know he was telling me that, not content with the little of it he learned at school, he went for two years running to a summer school in it, over Dungarvan way, and now has all of it he needs?”

  “Has he? ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing,’ ” murmured Kate.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing, Father.”

  “You said something, daughter, for I heard you. What was it?”

  But Kate changed the subject. “Talking of Gaelic, I began typing those poems while you were out this morning.”

  “Ah, the Love Songs of Munster? But didn’t you find them still in rough draft, not ready for typing?”

  “Some were, some weren’t, and I can always do them again if you’re not satisfied with them. There was one in particular that it was obvious you meant to work on again, or you’d have made a fairer copy for me. I didn’t finish that one—” Kate paused, then plunged. “By the way, Father, there was a phrase in it that intrigued me. You translated ‘a thaisge’ as ‘my treasure’ and then queried it to yourself in the margin. Has it any other meaning than ‘my treasure’, then? And if so, wh—?”

  But it was a question which was to have no answer. For in the very instant of its asking the teacup fell from the Professor’s hand, the miniature bed-table across his knees canted and slid sideways, and Kate was only just in time to support his head as it lolled back among his pillows.

  “Father!”

  But if he heard her he made no sign. As she watched him, supporting him with one arm while her other hand snatched at the buttons of his pyjama jacket, his throat and face suffused to red ... then to an ugly purple; his breathing thickened to a long-drawn tortured roar, and though she had never seen the effects of a heart attack, her instinct told her this was one.