Chapter 1: Holy See
Kit had always thought that the Pope had been at her mother and father`s wedding. There was a picture of him in their house - a different Pope, a dead one - and the writing underneath said that Martin McMahon and Helen 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, with all those people in embarrassing coats and hats standing in a line. If she did thought about it at all, Kit might have assumed that Pope had left before the picture was taken, got on the mail boat in Dun Laoghaire and gone back to Rome.
That was why it was such a shock when Mother Bernard explained that 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 organiser of much of the devilment that went on in the school yard, 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 aying that he was there.'
'That's the Papal Blessing, you eejit.' said Clio. 'Everyone has them... they are ten-a-penny-'
'I will 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 towards her best friend. 'Don't you ever call me an eejit again, or you will 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 theit 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. 'Sush, she is 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 relucantly 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 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 are a pain in the bottom.' Clio said.
'I will tell Mam you said bottom out loud on the road.' Anna said.
'Mam has better thing to do than to listen to stupid tall tales. Go away.'
'You just want to be skitting 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 freinds 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. 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, all the children knew that. But sometimes it did look like a mirror.
They said that if you went out on St. 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!
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 theit catch. They might go up to the gold course and see could they find any lost balls, which they could sell to golfers.
They rarely went to each other's houses.
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