The Story of Lucy Gault

  She gave up looking for where he’d lived, as so often she had before. Becoming hungry, she made her way down through the woods again, to the stream and then out on to the track that led back to Lahardane. On the track the only sound was her footsteps or when she kicked a fir-cone. She liked it on the track almost better than anywhere, even though it was all uphill, going back to the house.

  ‘Will you look at the cut of you!’ Bridget shrilly reprimanded her in the kitchen. ‘Child, child, haven’t we trouble enough!’

  ‘I’m not going away from Lahardane.’

  ‘Oh now, now.’

  ‘I’m never going.’

  ‘You go upstairs this minute and wash your knees, Lucy. You wash yourself before they’ll see you. There’s nothing arranged yet.’

  Upstairs, Kitty Teresa said it would surely be all right: she had a way of looking on the bright side. She found it in the romances Lucy’s mother bought for her for a few pence in Enniseala and she often passed on to Lucy tales of disaster or thwarted love that turned out happily in the end. Cinderellas arrived at the ball, sword fights were won by the more handsome contender, modesty was rewarded with riches. But on this occasion the bright side let Kitty Teresa down. As make-believe fell apart, she could only repeat that it would surely be all right.

  *

  ‘I belong nowhere else,’ Everard Gault said, and Heloise said that by now she belonged nowhere else either. She had been happier at Lahardane than anywhere, but there would be revenge for the shooting, how could there not be?

  ‘Even if they wait until the fighting’s over, that night won’t be forgotten.’

  ‘I’ll write to the boy’s family. Father Morrissey said to try that.’

  ‘We can live on what I have, you know.’

  ‘Let me write to the family.’

  She did not protest. Nor later, when the weeks that went by drew no response to the letter; nor later still when her husband took the pony and trap into Enniseala and found the family he had offended. They offered him tea, which he accepted, thinking this to be a sign of reconciliation: he was ready to pay whatever was asked of him in settlement of the affair. They listened to this suggestion, barefoot children coming and going in the kitchen, one of them occasionally turning the wheel of the bellows, sparks rising from the turf. But no response came, apart from the immediate civilities. The son who had been wounded sat at the table, disdainful of the visit, not speaking either, his arm in a sling. In the end, Captain Gault said – and was embarrassed and felt awkward saying it – that Daniel O’Connell in his day had stayed at Lahardane. The name was legendary, the man the beloved champion of the oppressed; but time, in this small dwelling at least, had robbed the past of magic. Those three lads had been out snaring rabbits and had lost their way. They shouldn’t have been trespassing; no doubt about that, it was admitted. Captain Gault didn’t mention the petrol tins. He returned to Lahardane, to another night-time vigil.

  ‘You’re right,’ he admitted to his wife a few days later. ‘You have always had a way of being right, Heloise.’

  ‘This time I hate being right.’

  Everard Gault had been missing in 1915; and waiting, not knowing, had been the loneliest time of Heloise’s life, her two-year-old baby her greatest comfort. Then a telegram had come, and soon afterwards she had closed her eyes in selfish relief when there was the news that her husband had been invalided out of the army. As long as they lived, she vowed to herself, she would never again be parted from him, her resolve an expression of her gratitude for this kind misfortune.

  ‘All the time I was there I could feel them thinking I had intended to kill their son. Not a word I said was believed.’

  ‘Everard, we have one another and we have Lucy. We can begin again, somewhere else. Anywhere we choose.’

  His wife had always brought Everard Gault strength, her comforting a balm that took away the weary pain of small defeats. Now, in this greater plight, they would manage. They would live, as she had said, on what she had herself inherited; they were not poor, though they would never be as well-to-do as the Gaults had been before the land was lost. Somewhere other than Lahardane, their circumstances would not be much different from their circumstances now. The truce that had come at last in the war was hardly noticed, so little was it trusted.

  In the drawing-room and in the kitchen the conversations continued, the same subject touched upon from two different points of interest. Rendered disconsolate by all she heard, the upstairs maid asked questions and was told. Lahardane was Kitty Teresa’s home too, had been for more than twenty years.

  ‘Oh, ma’am!’ she whispered, red in the face, her fingers twisting the hem of her apron. ‘Oh, ma’am!’

  But if it was the end of things for Kitty Teresa, it was not, as they had imagined it would be, entirely so for Henry and Bridget. When plans were made, it was put to them that they might continue their occupancy of the gate-lodge as caretakers of the larger house, that for the time being at least the herd would be made over to them to give them a continuing livelihood.

  ‘You’ll do better with the creamery cheque,’ Heloise estimated, ‘than with what wages we could afford. We think that fair.’ Only passing time, the Captain added, could settle all this confusion.

  They would be going to England, Heloise said at last to her child, after she’d promised Kitty Teresa to look out for another position for her and had given old Hannah notice.

  ‘For long, is it?’ Lucy asked, knowing the answer.

  ‘Yes, for a long time.’

  ‘For ever?’

  ‘We don’t want it to be.’

  But Lucy knew it would be. It was for ever for the Morells and the Gouvernets. The Boyces had gone up to the North, Henry said, the house was under auction. She guessed what that meant from his voice, but he told her anyway.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ her papa said. ‘I’m sorry, Lucy.’

  It was her mother’s fault, but it was his fault too. They shared the blame for old Hannah’s miserable silence and Kitty Teresa’s eyes gone red and her apron soaking with the tears that streamed on her cheeks and her neck, causing Bridget twenty times a day to tell her to give over. Henry slouched glumly about the yard.

  ‘Oh, who’s a fashion plate!’ her papa exclaimed, pretending in the dining-room when one morning she wore her red dress.

  At the sideboard her mama poured out tea and carried the cups and saucers to the table. ‘Cheer up, darling,’ her mama said, her head on one side. ‘Cheer up,’ she begged again.

  Henry passed by the windows with the milk churns on the cart and, not cheering up in the least, Lucy listened to the clomp of the horse’s hooves fading on the avenue. Two minutes that took: once at breakfast her papa had timed it with his pocket watch.

  ‘Think of a poor little tinker child,’ her mama said. ‘Never a roof over her head.’

  ‘You’ll always have a roof, Lucy,’ her papa promised. ‘We all have to get used to something new. We have to, lady.’

  She loved it when he called her lady, but this morning she didn’t. She didn’t see why you had to get used to something new. She said she wasn’t hungry when they asked her, even though she was.

  Afterwards on the strand the tide was coming in, washing over the sand the seagulls had marked, over the little piles the sandworms made. She threw stems of seaweed for the O’Reillys’ dog, wondering how many days were left. No one had said; she hadn’t asked.

  ‘You go on home now,’ she ordered the dog, pointing at the cliffs, putting on her papa’s voice when she wasn’t obeyed.

  She walked on alone, past the spit of rocks that stuck out like a finger into the sea, crossing the stream where the stepping stones were. When she had climbed a little way up through the woods of the glen she could no longer hear the sea or the sudden, curt shriek of the gulls. Slivers of bright light slipped through the dark of the trees. ‘I’ve never seen the half of the old glen,’ Paddy Lindon used to say. Every year, he’d once told her, he cultivated potatoes o
n the clearing he’d made beside his cottage, but this morning she didn’t have the heart to go looking for it again.

  ‘Who’s coming to Enniseala with me?’ her papa invited that afternoon, and of course she said yes. Her papa leaned back in the trap, hugged into its curve, the reins loose in his fingers. The first time he was in Enniseala, he said, was when he was five, brought in to have the fraenulum of his tongue cut.

  ‘What’s fraenulum?’

  ‘A little snag underneath your tongue. If it’s too tight you’re tongue-tied.’

  ‘What’s tongue-tied?’

  ‘It’s when you can’t speak clearly.’

  ‘And couldn’t you?’

  ‘They said I couldn’t. It didn’t hurt much. They gave me a set of marbles afterwards.’

  ‘I think it would hurt.’

  ‘You don’t need anything like that.’

  The marbles were in a flat wooden box with a lid that slid on and off. It was still there, beside the bagatelle in the drawing-room. She had to stand on a footstool when they played bagatelle, but she knew these were the marbles he’d been given then because once he’d told her. He’d forgotten that. Sometimes he forgot things.

  ‘There’s a fisherman in Kilauran can’t speak at all,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He does it on his fingers.’

  ‘Yes, he does.’

  ‘You see him doing it. The other fishermen understand him.’

  ‘Well, there’s a thing! Would you like to hold the reins now?’

  In Enniseala her papa bought new suitcases in Domville’s because they didn’t have enough. One of the shopmen came out from the office and said he was sorry. He wouldn’t have believed it, he said. He’d never have thought he’d live to see the day. ‘Please God, you’ll be back, Captain.’

  Her papa kept nodding, not saying anything until he held his hand out and called the shopman Mr Bothwell. The new suitcases hardly fitted into the trap, but they did in the end. ‘Now,’ her papa said, not getting into the trap himself but taking her hand in a way that made her guess where they were going.

  He could move the door of Allen’s without the bell ringing. He opened it a little and reached up for the catch at the top, then pushed the door so that they could walk in. He reached over the counter and lifted the glass jar down from the shelf and tipped the sweets into the scoop of the scales. He slipped them into a white paper bag and put the bag back on the scales again and put the glass stopper back on the jar. Liquorice toffee and nougat were what he liked and so did she. Lemon’s Pure Sweets it said on the silver-coloured wrappers of the liquorice toffees.

  While he was weighing them she wanted to giggle, as she always did, but she didn’t because it would have spoilt everything. He pulled the door in and the bell rang. ‘Four pence ha’penny,’ he said when the girl with the plaits came out from the back. ‘You’re a holy terror!’ the girl said.

  He always held the reins himself when they were on a street. He held them tight, sitting straight up, jerking one and then the other, now and again releasing one of his hands in order to wave at someone. ‘What’s it mean “and County”?’ she asked when they had passed all the shops.

  ‘And County?’

  ‘Driscoll and County, Broderick and County.’

  ‘The Co. is not for County, it’s for Company. “And Company Limited.” The Ltd means Limited.’

  ‘It’s for County at school. County Cork, County Waterford.’

  ‘It’s just the same abbreviation. Shortening a word so there won’t be too much written on a map or above a shop.’

  ‘Funny they’re the same.’

  ‘You like to have the reins now?’

  There was a smell of leather in the trap, but it was stronger when the new suitcases were opened in the house. The trunks were half full already, their lids held upright by straps that folded away when they were closed. Henry measured the windows for boarding.

  ‘Who’s never been on a train before?’ her papa said, the way he did, as if she were still only three or four. He used to go away by train himself, away to school three times a year. He still had his trunk and his box, his initials painted on them in black. She asked him to tell her about the school and he said he would later, on the train. Everyone was busy now, he said.

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ she said, finding her mama in their bedroom.

  ‘Papa and I don’t want to go either.’

  ‘Why are we then?’

  ‘Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to.’

  ‘Papa wasn’t trying to kill those men.’

  ‘Did Henry tell you that?’

  ‘Henry didn’t. And Bridget didn’t.’

  ‘You’re not nice when you’re cross, Lucy.’

  ‘I don’t want to be nice. I don’t want to go with you.’

  ‘Lucy –’

  ‘I won’t go.’

  She ran from the room and ran down to her crossing stones. They came to find her, calling out in the woods, but everything she said to them on the way back they didn’t hear. They didn’t want to hear, they didn’t want to listen.

  ‘Will you come to the creamery with me?’ Henry said the next day, and she shook her head dolefully. ‘Shall we have tea outside?’ her mama said, smiling at her. And her papa said the cat had her tongue when the tablecloth was spread on the grass and there was lemon cake, her favourite. She wished she hadn’t gone to Enniseala with him, she wished she hadn’t asked him about his fraenulum and what was written over the shops. All the time they were pretending.

  ‘Look,’ her papa said. ‘The hawk.’

  And she looked up although she hadn’t meant to. The hawk wasn’t more than a dot against the sky, circling round and round. She watched it and her papa said don’t cry.

  *

  The weeping of Kitty Teresa was no longer heard in the bedrooms because Kitty Teresa had gone already, gone home to Dungarvan when another position couldn’t be found for her. She would come back the day they came back themselves, she promised before she left. No matter where she was she’d come back.

  ‘They’ve rented a place,’ Bridget said in the kitchen, and Henry took from the shelf above the range the piece of paper with the address on it. He didn’t say anything at first and then he said so that’s that. ‘Only till they’re fixed permanent,’ Bridget said. They’ll buy a place, I’d say.’

  In the yard Henry sawed the wood for boarding the windows. Lucy watched him, sitting on the ledge beneath the pear tree that was spread out against the yard’s long east wall. It was on her way back from school that she’d begun to bathe on her own, weighing her clothes down with her satchel and running quickly into the sea and out again, drying herself any old how. Henry knew; she didn’t know how but he did. When she slouched off now he probably guessed where she was going. She didn’t care. She didn’t care if he went away to tell on her. It wasn’t like him to do that, but the way things were he might.

  In the field above the cliffs she heard the chiming of the Angelus bell in Kilauran. Sometimes you heard it, sometimes you didn’t. The sound still carried to her while she was pulling off her clothes on the strand. It was lost when she ran into the sea and waded out. This was always the best part – walking slowly through the waves, the coldness rising, invigorating on her skin, the pull of the undertow at her feet. She spread out her arms to swim beyond her depth, then floated with the tide.

  The strand had been empty in both directions when she’d left it. Without being able to see clearly as she swam back to it, she knew that what seemed to be moving there now was the O’Reillys’ dog chasing its own shadow on the sand. It often did that; while she watched, it stood still for a moment, gazing out to where she was, before beginning its play again.

  She turned on her back to float. If she ran away she’d take the short cut Paddy Lindon used to talk about. ‘Take to the high woods the steep side,’ he used to say. ‘Go long enough on and there’s the road for you.’

  She swam
towards the shore again and when the water became shallow she walked through the last of the waves. The dog was nosing about on the shingle and she knew that her clothes had been pilfered, that whatever had been taken would already be buried in the shingle or the seaweed. When she began to dress she found that her summer vest had gone but when she looked in the ragged line of seaweed and in the shingle she couldn’t find it.

  Helpless in its disgrace, scolded all the way up the cliff, the nameless dog cringed piteously, until there had been punishment enough. The matted, untidy head was pressed against Lucy’s legs then, to be stroked and patted and embraced. ‘Home now,’ she ordered and, fierce again, watched while disobedience was considered and thought better of.

  In her room, she replaced from among the clothes that had been packed already the vest that had been lost. He never went any other way, Paddy Lindon used to say, when he’d be heading for the processions in Dungarvan or for the Sunday hurling. When his luck was in, a cart would go by on the road and he’d hail it.

  *

  ‘This is specially yours,’ her papa said.

  He had gone back to Domville’s to get it. It was blue, not like the other suitcases, and smaller because she was small herself. Leather, even though it was blue, he said, and showed her the keys that fitted its lock. ‘We mustn’t lose the keys,’ he said. ‘Shall I keep one?’