The Story of Lucy Gault Read online

  She couldn’t smile, she didn’t want to cry. All her things, he said, all her precious things would fit in it, the flintstones, the dagger stick.

  ‘One day we’ll have L.G. put on the lid.’

  ‘Thank you, Papa,’ she said.

  ‘You go and put your things in it.’

  But in her room the blue suitcase remained empty on the window seat, its lid closed, one of the keys that opened its lock still tied to its handle.

  *

  ‘I understand,’ Bridget said when it was explained to her that it might be a little time before some at least of the possessions left behind were sent for. The instruction was given that Henry and she should walk through the rooms occasionally, since things sometimes went wrong in an empty house. Lucy heard all that.

  The sheets for draping the furniture were ready in the hall. Upstairs on the first landing there was a pile for the jumble sale, the clothes they didn’t want to take with them. Some of Lucy’s were there too, as if everything now was being taken for granted.

  ‘Oh now, you mustn’t, darling.’ Her mama was in the doorway of her bedroom but Lucy didn’t look up, her face pressed hard into her pillow. Then her mama came in and put her arms around her. She wiped away the tears and there was the same scent on her handkerchief, always the same it was. It would be all right, her mama said. She promised it would be.

  ‘We have to say good-bye to Mr Aylward,’ her papa said later, finding her in the apple orchard.

  She shook her head, but then he took her hand and they walked through the fields and along the strand to Kilauran. The O’Reillys’ dog watched them from the top of the cliffs, knowing better than to follow them, because her papa was there.

  ‘Couldn’t I stay with Henry and Bridget?’ she asked.

  ‘Ah no, no,’ her papa said.

  The fishermen were spreading out their nets. They saluted, and her papa saluted them back. He said something about the weather and one of them said it was grand altogether these days. Lucy looked about for the fisherman who talked with his fingers, but he wasn’t there. She asked her papa and he said that man was maybe still out with his boat.

  ‘I’d be all right with Henry and Bridget,’ she said.

  ‘Ah no, darling, no.’

  She reached up for his hand, turning her head away so that he wouldn’t know she was trying not to cry. When they came to the schoolroom he lifted her up to see in at the window. Everything was tidy because it was the holidays, everything left as Mr Aylward said it must be, the four empty tables, the benches pulled in to them, the charts hanging up. Bayonets were first made in Bayonne. Cider is the juice of apples. The blackboard was clear, the duster folded by the chalk box. The shiny maps – rivers and mountains, the counties of England and Ireland – were rolled up on the shelf.

  ‘We need a bit of time,’ her papa said in Mr Aylward’s house, his head inclined in her direction, and she knew he didn’t mean all three of them when he said we.

  ‘Ah, well, of course,’ Mr Aylward said. ‘Of course.’

  ‘It breaks my heart,’ her papa said. ‘To tell you the truth.’

  Yet what else could he have done, he asked Mr Aylward, when he’d looked down at the shadows standing there, knowing there would be petrol somewhere as well, knowing that whoever was there had poisoned the dogs? He’d been nervous, firing in the dark, he said. No wonder he’d never made a soldier.

  ‘There isn’t any man in a family wouldn’t have done the same,’ Mr Aylward said.

  A sheepdog from Lahardane had gone on to poisoned land before, Henry had said; not that that dog had died, but even so. Henry wanted everything to be all right, pretending too.

  ‘You keep the poetry up, girl,’ Mr Aylward said. ‘She’s right good at learning her poetry, Captain.’

  ‘She’s a good little girl.’

  Mr Aylward kissed her, saying good-bye. Her papa finished what was in the glass he’d been given. He shook hands with Mr Aylward, and Mr Aylward said that it should come to this. Then they went away.

  ‘Why’d they bring petrol with them?’ she asked.

  ‘One day I’ll tell you about all that.’

  They passed the fishermen, who were now repairing the nets they’d laid out. It was the place where the women had stood, gazing out at the sea when the Mary Nell had not returned. The women had been there when she passed on her way to school, and again on her way back, their black shawls pulled tight, nearly hiding their faces. The storm that had wrecked the Mary Nell was over then, the sun was even shining. ‘Bestow thy blessing,’ they had prayed with Mr Aylward, ‘that they may be kept safe in every peril of the deep.’ But that same day there was the sound of the women’s keening. No fisherman came back, none was rescued, because the Ballycotton lifeboat had been beaten back by the gales. No drowned body was washed up with the smashed planks and ragged strips of canvas, with the splinters of mast and boom. ‘A man’s not given back from that sea,’ Henry said. ‘In living memory and before.’ From miles out, the sharks hurried in when there were wrecks.

  As she passed by the fishermen with her father, the sound of the keening, the mournful wail that carried over the half doors of the cottages, seemed to Lucy to be there again, a forlorn echo of a terrible time returning in a time that was terrible also. The cheerfulness that came now and again to Lahardane wasn’t real and only lasted for as long as they remembered to pretend.

  ‘I don’t want to leave Lahardane,’ she said on the strand.

  ‘None of us wants to, lady.’

  He bent down and lifted her up, the way he used to when she was little. He held her in his arms and made her look out over the calm sea, looking for the man who spoke with his fingers, but she couldn’t see a fishing boat, nor could he. He put her down again and wrote with a pebble on the sand. Lucy Gault, he wrote. ‘Now, that’s a lovely name.’

  They climbed the cliff at the place where it was easy, up to the field next to the O’Reillys’ turnip field, where there’d been barley last year. When Mr O’Reilly was weeding whatever crop was there he’d wave to her.

  ‘Why must we go?’ she cried.

  ‘Because they don’t want us here,’ her papa said.

  *

  Heloise wrote to her bank, in England, to explain what was about to happen and to seek advice about her holdings, all of which were in different areas of enterprise within the Rio Verde Railway Company. For generations there had been a family connection with the renowned railway, but in the present circumstances – since for a time at least her inheritance would play a greater part in her life and that of her husband and their child – her tentative query did not seem out of place and the bank’s response confirmed its wisdom. Steadfast and prosperous for almost eighty years, the Rio Verde Railway was at last beginning to display signs of what might possibly be the onset of commercial fatigue: Heloise was recommended to consider disposing of all, or the greater part, of an investment that for so long had served her family well.

  In Enniseala the Captain sought confirmation or otherwise of this advice from his solicitor and friend of many years, Aloysius Sullivan, who was as knowledgeable about financial matters as he was about the law. He shared the bank’s opinion: with plenty of trading acumen left, and its accumulated funds to draw on, the Rio Verde Railway would certainly not collapse overnight, but even so a more diversified portfolio was his suggestion also.

  ‘No need to think about it before we leave,’ Captain Gault reported when he returned to Lahardane. Echoing again the view of the bank, the solicitor had confirmed as well that this wasn’t something to decide about in a hurry.

  They talked about being in England then, of the many other practicalities they would have to see to when they were less distracted by emotion. How different their lives would be! each thought but neither said.

  *

  The straw fish-baskets hung in a row in the long scullery beside the cold room. They were flat and they didn’t hold much so Lucy took two, one at a time, on different days. She t
ook bread from the bin in the pantry, a heel of white the first time, then heels of brown or soda, whatever would not be noticed. She wrapped them in the shop paper that was kept in the drawers of the kitchen dresser. She filled one basket and then the other with the packages, with apples and scallions and food she took from her plate in the dining-room when no one was noticing. She kept the baskets in a shed in the yard which no one went into, hidden behind a wheelbarrow that had fallen apart.

  She rooted among the jumble on the landing for a skirt and jumper. She made a bundle of them in an old black coat of her mother’s: at night it would be cold. On the landing there was no sound except the rustling she made herself, and when she took the clothes to her hiding place she met no one on the back stairs, no one in the dog passage.

  *

  On the afternoon of the day before the day of the departure Captain Gault went through his papers, feeling that it was something he should do. But the occupation was tedious and, abandoning it, he dismantled instead the rifle he had fired in the night. He cleaned its parts purposefully, as if anticipating their use in the future, although he did not intend to take the rifle with him.

  ‘Oh, all this will fall into place,’ he murmured more than once, confident in his reassurance to himself. Leaving, arriving, the furniture one day settled around them again: time and circumstance would arrange their lives, as in exile so many other lives had been arranged.

  He returned to leafing through his papers, conscientiously doing his best with them.

  *

  Heloise secured the leather straps on the trunks that were ready to go, then attached the labels she had written. Wondering if she would ever see again all that had to be left behind, she distributed camphor balls in drawers and wardrobes, in sleeves and pockets.

  This was the empty time of day. No matter what excitements there might earlier have been, or in what way the day so far had been different from other days, the house was quiet now. No rattle of pans disturbed the hours before evening came, no music on the gramophone in the drawing-room, no chatter of voices. Betraying nothing of the chagrin the task induced, Henry carried downstairs the trunks and suitcases that had been packed. On the kitchen table Bridget spread out on her ironing blanket the shirt collars the Captain would require on his travels. In the depths of the range the heaters for her iron had just begun to glow.

  *

  When Lucy passed the open door of the kitchen, Bridget did not look up. Henry was not in the yard. Only the orchard was noisy, the rooks scattering from among the apple branches when her presence disturbed them.

  She went the steep way, as Paddy Lindon had advised, avoiding the easier track through the glen in case Henry was out on it. She didn’t know how long her journey to Dungarvan would take; Paddy Lindon had never been precise about that. She wouldn’t know where to look for Kitty Teresa’s house when she got there, but whoever gave her a lift would. Kitty Teresa would say she’d have to take her back, but it wouldn’t matter because everything would be different by then: all the time she’d thought about running away Lucy had known it would be. As soon as they discovered she wasn’t there, as soon as they realized what had happened, it would be different. ‘It breaks my heart, too,’ her mama had said. ‘And papa’s. Papa’s most of all.’ When Kitty Teresa brought her back they’d say they’d always known they couldn’t leave.

  She passed a moss-encrusted rock that she remembered from some other time when she was here, then a fallen tree that wasn’t familiar at all, with spikes where it had cracked off that could catch you if it was dark. It wasn’t dark now, no more than gloomy, like it always was in the high woods. But darkness would come in an hour or so and she’d have to get to the road before it did, although there wouldn’t be any chance of a cart going by until the morning. She hurried and almost at once she stumbled, thrown forward, her foot caught in a hole. Pain spread from her ankle when she tried to move it. She couldn’t stand up.

  *

  ‘Lucy!’ Captain Gault called out in the yard. ‘Lucy!’

  There was no answer and in the milking parlour he shouted down the length of it to Henry.

  ‘Tell Lucy if you see her I’ve gone to say good-bye to the fisherman we missed the last time,’ By the avenue and the road, he said, back by the strand. ‘Say I could do with a bit of company.’

  He called her name again at the front of the house before he set off on his own.

  *

  ‘She was here earlier,’ Bridget said. ‘I saw her about.’

  It wasn’t unusual; Lucy often wasn’t there. Meeting Bridget on the stairs, Heloise had made her enquiry without anxiety. It could be, Bridget supposed, that there was the dog over at the O’Reillys’ to say good-bye to.

  ‘You’ve been a strength to me, Bridget,’ In that quiet, untroubled moment Heloise paused before returning to the suitcases in her bedroom. ‘All these years you’ve been a strength to me.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t be going, ma’am. I wish it was different.’

  ‘I know. I know.’

  *

  On the avenue Captain Gault wondered in what circumstances he would again move through its shadows, beneath the long arch of branches that stole most of the light. On either side of him the grass, deprived, was a modest summer growth, yellow here and there with dandelions, foxgloves withering where they had thrived in the shade. He paused for a moment when he came to the gate-lodge, where life would continue when the house was abandoned. Now that an end had come, he doubted this evening that he would ever bring his family back to live at Lahardane. The prediction came from nowhere, an unwelcome repetition of what, these last few days, he had privately denied.

  On the pale clay road beyond the gates he turned to the left, the berried honeysuckle scentless now, September fuchsia in the hedges. They would not for long have to rely on Heloise’s legacy. Vaguely, he saw himself in a shipping office, even though he hardly knew what the work undertaken in such places involved. It didn’t much matter; any decent occupation would do. Now and again they would return, a visit to see how everything was, to keep a connection going. ‘It isn’t for ever,’ Heloise had said last night, and had spoken of the windows opened again, the dust sheets lifted, fires lit, flowerbeds weeded. And he’d said no, of course not.

  In Kilauran he conversed with the deaf and dumb fisherman, as he had learnt to in his childhood: gestures made, words mouthed. They said good-bye. ‘Not for too long,’ he left his silent promise behind, and felt a falsehood compounded here too. He stood for a while on the rocks where sea-pinks grew in clumps. The surface of the sea was a dappled sheen, streaked with the last faint afterglow of sunset. Its waves came softly, hardly touched with foam. There was no other movement on it anywhere.

  Had he been right not to reveal to Heloise, or to his child, the finality he had begun to sense in this departure? Should he have gone back to that family in Enniseala to plead a little longer? Should he have offered more than he had, whatever was felt might settle the misdemeanour he had committed, accepting that the outrage of that night was his and not the trespassers’ who had come? Climbing down the rocks on to the shingle, shuffling over it to the sand, he didn’t know. He didn’t know when he walked on, lingering now and again to gaze out at the empty sea. He might have said to himself on this last night that he had too carelessly betrayed the past and then betrayed, with easy comforting, a daughter and a wife. He was the one who was closest to place and people, whose love of leftover land, of house and orchard and garden, of sea and seashore, fostered instinct and premonition. Yet when he searched his feelings there was nothing there to guide him, only confusion and contradiction.

  He turned towards the cliffs, crunching over the shingle again. Lost for a while in the trees, his house re-appeared, a light coming on in an upstairs window. His foot caught on something among the stones and he bent to pick it up.

  *

  ‘Lucy!’ Heloise called and Henry said she might have gone after her father. He hadn’t seen her to pass on the Capt
ain’s message but, contrary as she was these times, she’d maybe been hiding about in the yard somewhere and had heard it for herself. She hadn’t spoken a word to him for three days, nor to Bridget either. The way things were, it wasn’t surprising she hadn’t come in for her tea.

  Heloise heard him shouting Lucy’s name in the yard sheds. ‘Lucy!’ she shouted herself in the apple orchard and in the field where the cattle were, which was the way back from the O’Reillys’. She passed through the gate in the white railing that separated the fields from the turn-around in front of the house. She crossed the gravel to the hydrangea lawn.

  It was she who had first called it that, just as it was she who had discovered that the Lahardane fields had once been known as Long Meadow and Cloverhill and John Joe’s and the river field. She’d always wanted to hear those names used again, but nobody had bothered when she suggested it. The hydrangeas were heavily in bloom, their blue still distinctive in the darkening twilight, bunching out around the semi-circle they formed along a grey stone wall. They were the loveliest of all Lahardane’s features, she had always thought.

  ‘Lucy!’ she called through the trees. She stood still, listening in the silence. She went further into the woods, coming out twenty minutes later on the track that ran down to the stream and the crossing stones. ‘Lucy!’ she shouted. ‘Lucy!’

  She called out her child’s name in the house when she returned to it, opening the doors of rooms that weren’t used, climbing up to attics. She went downstairs again. She stood by the open hall door, and in a moment heard her husband returning. She knew he was alone because there were no voices. She heard the gate she had passed through earlier creaking as he opened it and closed it, the latch falling into place.

  ‘Is Lucy with you?’ she raised her voice again to ask.

  His footsteps on the gravel halted. He was hardly more than a shadow.

  ‘Lucy?’ she said.

  ‘Isn’t Lucy here?’

  He still stood where he had stopped. There was something white in his hand, a shaft of lamplight from the open hall door spilling over it.