The Glass Lake Read Online Free

listen to one thing while saying another. And be taller.”
    â€œI don’t suppose you’d believe me if I told you that you were twenty times more beautiful than Clio, and much more intelligent.”
    â€œOh Mam, I’m not.”
    â€œYou are, Kit. I swear it. What Clio has is style. I don’t know where she got it, but she knows how to make the most of everything she has. Even at twelve she knows what looks well on her and how to smile. That’s all it is, it’s not beauty, not like you have, and you have my cheekbones, remember. Clio only has Lilian’s.”
    They laughed together, grown-ups in a conspiracy of mockery. Mrs. Kelly had a plump face and no cheekbones at all.

    R ITA went to Sister Madeleine on Thursdays, her half day. If anyone else called Sister Madeleine would say, “Rita and I are reading a bit of poetry, we often do that on a Thursday.” It was such a tactful way of telling them that this was Rita’s time, people began to recognize it as such.
    Rita would bake some scones, or bring half an apple tart. They would have tea together and bend over the books. As the weeks went on and the summer came, Rita began to have new confidence. She could read without putting her finger under the words, she could guess the harder words from the sense of the sentence. It was time for the writing lessons. Sister Madeleine gave Rita a fountain pen.
    â€œI couldn’t take that, Sister. It was given to you as a gift.”
    â€œWell, if it’s mine, can’t I do what I like with it?” Sister Madeleine rarely kept anything that she had been given for more than twenty-four hours.
    â€œWell, could I have a loan of it then, a long loan?”
    â€œI’ll lend it to you for the rest of your life,” Sister Madeleine said.
    There were no boring copy books, instead Rita and Sister Madeleine wrote about Lough Glass and the lake and changing seasons.
    â€œYou could write to your sister in America soon,” Sister Madeleine said.
    â€œNot a real letter, not to a person.”
    â€œWhy not? That’s as good as any letter she’ll get from these parts, I tell you.”
    â€œWould she want to hear all this about home?”
    â€œShe’d be so full of happiness to hear about home you’d nearly hear her thanking you across the Atlantic Ocean.”
    â€œI never got a letter. I wouldn’t want them to be thinking above in McMahon’s that I was in the class of having people writing to me.”
    â€œShe could write to you here.”
    â€œWould the postman bring letters to you, Sister Madeleine?”
    â€œAh, Tommy Bennet is the most decent man in the world. He delivers letters to me three times a week. Comes down here on his bicycle whatever the weather, and he has a cup of tea.”
    Sister Madeleine didn’t add that Tommy never came without some contribution to the store cupboard. Nor that she had been instrumental in getting his daughter quickly and quietly into a home for unmarried mothers and keeping the secret safe from the interested eyes and ears of Lough Glass.
    â€œAnd you’d get enough post for that?” Rita said in wonder.
    â€œPeople are very kind. They often write to me,” Sister Madeleine said with the same sense of wonder.

    C LIO and Kit had learned to swim when they were very young. Dr. Kelly had stood waist-deep in the water to teach them. As a young medical student he had once pulled three dead children from the Glass Lake, children who had drowned in a couple of feet of water because nobody had taught them how to swim. It had made him very angry. There was something accepting and dumb about people who lived on the edge of a hazard and yet did nothing to cope with it.
    Like those fishermen over in the West of Ireland who went out in frail boats to fish in the roaring Atlantic, and they all wore different kinds of jumpers so they would know whose family it was when a body was found. Each