The Story of Lucy Gault Read online

  2

  ‘Holy Mother of God!’ Bridget whispered, her face gone pallid.

  ‘I’m telling you,’ Henry nodded slowly. They were down on the strand, he said. The Captain had come up through the fields and then they’d both gone back to the strand.

  ‘He found her clothes. The tide was going out and he walking over from Kilauran. That’s all was said.’

  It couldn’t be that, Bridget whispered. It couldn’t be what he was saying. ‘Holy Mother, it couldn’t!’

  ‘The tide would take anything with it. Except what was caught up in the stones. He had clothing in his hand.’ Henry paused. ‘A while back I wondered was she going bathing on her own. If I’d have seen her at it I’d have said.’

  ‘Would she be over on the rocks? She was low in herself all this time. Would she be over where she’d get the shrimps?’

  Henry didn’t say anything, and then Bridget shook her head. Why would any child take off her clothes on a strand unless it was to bathe in the sea, the last bathe she’d have in it before they left?

  ‘I wondered it too,’ she said. ‘Her hair a bit damp a few times.’

  ‘I’ll go down. I’ll bring them a light.’

  When Bridget was left alone she prayed. Her hands felt cold when she pressed them together. She prayed aloud, stifling her tears. A few minutes later she followed her husband, through the yard and the apple orchard, out into the grazing field and down to the strand.

  *

  They stared through the dark at the empty sea. They did not speak, but stood close to one another as if fearful of being alone. Softly, the waves lapped, the sea advancing, each time a little more with the turn of the tide.

  ‘Oh, ma’am, ma’am!’ Bridget’s exclamation was shrill, her footsteps noisy on the stones before she reached the sand. A while ago she’d thought it, she cried, the words tumbling over one another, her features scarcely seeming to be her own in the flickers of Henry’s lamp.

  At a loss, Captain Gault and his wife turned from the sea. Could there be hope, somehow, in this agitation, some grain of hope where there had been none before? In their bewilderment, for a moment, there was all that, the same for both of them.

  ‘I’m not saying she ever said a word, ma’am. It’s only Henry and myself thought it. We should have said it to you, sir.’

  ‘Said what, Bridget?’ There was a weary politeness in the Captain’s tone, and patience while he waited for an irrelevancy: already expectation had shrunk away to nothing.

  ‘All I’d notice was her hair was a bit wet when she’d come in.’

  ‘From bathing?’

  ‘If we’d known it for sure we’d have told.’

  There was a silence, then Captain Gault said:

  ‘You’re not to blame, Bridget. No one will ever think that.’

  ‘Her forget-me-not dress she was wearing, sir.’

  ‘It wasn’t her dress.’

  Her summer vest, Heloise said, and in silence again they walked towards where it had been found.

  ‘We told her lies,’ the Captain said before they reached the place.

  Heloise didn’t understand. Then she remembered the reassurances and the half promises, and remembered knowing that the promises might not be kept. Disobedience had been a child’s defiance, deception the coinage they had offered her themselves.

  ‘She knew I’d always bathe with her,’ the Captain said.

  The splinter of driftwood that had snagged what the Captain had picked up was still there, its pale, smooth surface just visible in the dark. Henry moved the lamp, looking for something else, but there was nothing.

  As if somehow it had acquired a potency of its own in feeding on circumstances and events, the falsity that beguiled the Captain, and his wife and their servants, was neither questioned nor denied. The house had been searched, the sheds in the yard, the garden, the orchard. Even though nothing had suggested that so late in the evening the missing child might have been in the woods, her name had been called out there; the O’Reillys’ kitchen had been visited. The sea was what remained. It seemed no more than the mockery of wishful thinking that its claims, so insistently pressed by what facts there were, should not be accepted.

  ‘Will you come over to Kilauran, Henry, and we’ll take a boat out?’

  ‘I will, sir.’

  ‘Leave the lamp with them here.’

  The two men went. Hours later, on the spit of rocks that broke the long expanse of sand and shingle, the women they left behind found a sandal among the shrimp pools.

  *

  The fishermen at Kilauran learnt of the loss when they rowed in at dawn from their fishing. They reported that all night they’d seen nothing from their boats, but the superstition that long ago had enriched their fishermen’s talk was muttered again among them. Only the debris of wreckage, and not much of that, was left behind by the sharks who fed on tragedy: the fishermen, too, mourned the death of a living child.

  *

  As the surface of the seashore rocks was pitted by the waves and gathered limpets that further disguised what lay beneath, so time made truth of what appeared to be. The days that passed, in becoming weeks, still did not disturb the surface an assumption had created. The weather of a beautiful summer continued with neither sign nor hint that credence had been misplaced. The single sandal found among the rocks became a sodden image of death; and as the keening on the pier at Kilauran traditionally marked distress brought by the sea, so silence did at Lahardane.

  Captain Gault no longer spent his nights at an upstairs window but stood alone on the cliffs, staring out at the dark, calm sea, cursing himself, cursing the ancestors who in their prosperity had built a house in this place. Sometimes the O’Reillys’ nameless dog plucked up courage and came to stand beside him, its head hunched down as if it sensed a melancholy and offered a sympathy of its own. The Captain did not turn it away.

  Here and in the house, all memory was regret, all thought empty of consolation. There hadn’t been time to have the initials inscribed on the blue suitcase, yet how could there not have been time since time so endlessly stretched now, since the days that came, with their long, slow nights, carried with them a century’s weight?

  ‘Oh, my darling!’ Captain Gault murmured, watching yet another dawn. ‘Oh, my darling, forgive me.’

  *

  For Heloise, the torment had a variation. Clawed out of the past, spread rawly through her suffering, the happy years of her marriage felt like selfishness. In all the rooms of the house she had come to as a bride there were memories of what had been so greedily hers – of gramophone music danced to with Everard’s arms lightly about her, and the sluggish tick of the drawing-room clock while they read by the fire, the high-backed sofa drawn up, the crackle of logs in the grate. Disappointed but safe at least, he had come back from war. The child who had been born was growing up; Lahardane offered a living as well as a way of life. Yet if Everard had married differently, the unforgiving end of this chain of circumstances would not have come about; there was always that.

  ‘No, no,’ he protested now, attributing blame elsewhere. ‘If ever they come back I’ll shoot them dead.’

  Again, for both of them, the sheepdogs lay poisoned in the yard, their bodies cold on the cobbles. Again Henry raked the sea-gravel where blood stained the pebbles.

  ‘We could not explain more,’ Heloise whispered, but her guilt did not lessen: to their child she had not explained enough.

  *

  ‘I wonder, though, will they go now?’ Bridget speculated when the preparations for leaving did not begin again. ‘I doubt they care what happens to them.’

  ‘Isn’t it fixed, all the same?’

  ‘What was fixed is different now.’

  ‘You’d say Kitty Teresa’ll be fetched back? And Hannah with her?’

  ‘I’m not saying what I don’t know. Only that I wouldn’t be surprised how things would be.’

  Bridget’s belief had always been that affection for the place
would bring Captain Gault and his wife back when the country was quiet again and some settlement could be reached about the wounding. In hopeful speculation, she had found particular significance in the fact that the herd was not to be sold.

  ‘I’d say they’d go,’ Henry said. ‘I’d say they’d want to go now.’

  *

  The relevant formalities were completed as fully as possible, all that the circumstances allowed. Captain Gault’s declaration was starkly empty of sentiment, but the Registrar’s clerk who came to Lahardane to transcribe it was moved and sympathetic.

  ‘Why should we wait longer now?’ Heloise asked when the man had gone. ‘If the Kilauran fishermen are right in what they believe, there’s nothing more. If they are wrong, there is, for me, a horror I do not want to know. If I am different from all the mothers in the world, if they would creep about the shingle and the pools for ever seeking a thread of ribbon they may remember, then I am different. If I am unnatural, and weak and full of a fear I do not understand, then I am unnatural. But I can only say that in my merciless regret I could not bear to look down and see my child’s fleshless bones and know too much.’

  Their sorrowing was their common ground, yet separated them. One spoke, the other hardly heard. Each turned away from useless pity. No premonition helped them now, no voice in a dream, no sudden instinct. Heloise packed the last of their luggage.

  During the bleak time that had passed she had requested, in a telegram to her bank, that the Rio Verde share certificates should be forwarded to her husband’s bank in Enniseala. She revealed this to him as he was setting out to make what new last arrangements were necessary with Aloysius Sullivan.

  ‘But why on earth should they be sent to us now?’ He stared at her in bewilderment. ‘All the way to us over here when we’re about to leave?’

  Heloise didn’t answer. She wrote a note instead, empowering him to receive the certificates on her behalf.

  ‘It’s how I want it,’ she said then.

  This eccentricity lingered with Captain Gault while he did as his wife requested. Could it be that the shock of a summer’s events, and being so distraught, had left behind an aftermath as terrible as any of the events themselves? Valuable documents had been unnecessarily entrusted to the post and were next to be exposed to the hazards of a journey back to the island they had come from. The disposal of the shares could have been arranged without the forwarding of any documents at all; only Heloise’s instructions were necessary. In the letter that outlined the bank’s reservations about the future of the railway company, this had been stated.

  In Enniseala he was tempted to hand back the bulky envelope he collected, to ask that it be safely returned to where it had come from, to say there had been an error, perhaps understandable in the circumstances. But he did not do so, did not arrive back at Lahardane with some tacked-together excuse. Instead he handed over what he had been given, and passed on, too, the good wishes of Aloysius Sullivan. The envelope’s contents were scrutinized, the solicitor’s good wishes nodded away as if they were of no possible interest, although Heloise had always been particularly fond of Aloysius Sullivan.

  That evening they might have walked together, in the house, in the orchard and the garden, through the fields. But Captain Gault did not suggest it and did not go on his own, as he had before. The apple trees, the bees of his hives, the cattle that had been his pride still drew him, but it was his wife who mattered more. It was a cruel last straw if what appeared to be was so.

  Sombre and silent, drinking in solitude, he tried not to wonder if there was punishment in this. For had not, after all, the people risen up, and was not that the beginning of the hell which had so swiftly been completed in this small corner? He could not know that, as certainly as the truth had no place in an erroneous assumption, so it had none in such fearful conjectures of damnation. Chance, not wrath, had this summer ordered the fate of the Gaults.

  *

  On the train to Dublin, Heloise was silent. She hated, as much as she hated the seashore they had left behind, the fields and hills they passed among, the woods and copses, the quiet ruins. She asked no more than to be separated for ever from landscape that had once delighted her, from faces that had kindly smiled, and voices that had spoken gently. A rented villa in a Sussex suburb was not far enough away: for days she’d known that, but had not said it. She did so now.

  The Captain listened. It was not beyond his understanding or his sympathy that the wife he had brought to Lahardane thirteen years ago should wish, in leaving it, to travel on and on, further and further, until some other train deposited them where strangers did not excite comment or curiosity. Their future in pleasant, easy England, once imagined, could not be imagined now.

  ‘The Sussex address is the one we’ve left behind,’ he said, needing to say something. But neither Sussex nor its suburbs nor its villas, nor England’s tranquillity, concerned him. What did was his wife’s face gone thin and white, her staring so at the landscape with deadened eyes, her voice without its timbre, her folded hands seeming like a statue’s. But even so he felt relief as well. She had not acted in confusion when she’d sent a telegram to her bank, only with determination that she might more firmly close down the past. The documents he had collected for her went with them in their luggage, to become their livelihood wherever the end of their journey was to be.

  ‘Anywhere,’ she said. ‘Anywhere will do.’

  In Dublin, at King’s Bridge Station, Captain Gault sent the telegram that cancelled their tenancy of the house in England. They stood, an island with their luggage, when he had done that. ‘We are at one’ he said, for although Heloise’s fragility still alarmed him, they shared the mood reflected in the nature of their departure, and the desire to lose themselves, to rid themselves of memory. Offering comfort, he said all that.

  Heloise did not reply, but said as they travelled across the city to the docks:

  ‘It’s strange that going away doesn’t sadden us in the slightest way. When once it seemed unbearable.’

  ‘Yes, it’s strange.’

  In this manner, on Thursday the twenty-second of September 1921, Captain Gault and his wife abandoned their house and unknowingly their child. In England, unnoticed, the rush of town and country went by. Church spires and village houses, the last of the sweet-peas in small back gardens, the sprawl of runner beans on careful wires, geraniums in their final flush, might have been something else. France when it came was just another country, although nights were spent there. We have travelled on, Captain Gault wrote to the solicitor in Enniseala, one of three sentences on a sheet of hotel writing-paper.

  3

  Bridget polished the furniture before she covered it with old bed sheets that had never been thrown away. She cleaned the windows before the boards were nailed in place. She scrubbed the steps of the uncarpeted back stairs and the dog-passage flagstones. She packed away eiderdowns and blankets.

  In the darkened house on the morning when there was nothing left to do except in the kitchen and the sculleries, where daylight still prevailed, Henry walked about the upstairs rooms with a lamp. The air there was already stale. That evening they would lock up.

  The two were melancholy. On each of the few days that had passed since the Gaults’ departure there had been the expectation that one of the fishermen would arrive with news that something had caught in their nets or on an oar. But no one had come. Would the Gaults want to know if anyone had? Bridget wondered, and Henry had shaken his head, unable to answer that.

  In the hall he lifted the globe from the lamp and quenched the wick. In the dairy he washed out the churns he had earlier brought back from the creamery. ‘I’ve a wall to see to’ he called out to Bridget when she appeared at the back door of the house, and he saw her nod across the distance that separated them. He wondered what it would feel like, sitting down for the last time at the kitchen table when he returned. A bit of bacon she was cooking.

  The sheepdogs hurried in the yard when
Henry whistled, and Bridget watched them pushing at one another behind him when he set off. ‘It’ll keep fine’ she raised her voice to comment.

  ‘I’d say it would all right,’ he said.

  Bridget did not feel that her prayers had let her down. It was enough to have prayed, God’s will that He had not heard her. They would settle into the way things were to be; they would accept it, since that was how it had to be. Old Hannah would come to the gate-lodge the odd time and one day even Kitty Teresa might, although she was a fair enough distance away. More likely, though, Kitty Teresa wouldn’t want to come visiting. After the carry-on there’d been with her when she had to leave, that would maybe be too much for her.

  Most of all you’d miss this big old kitchen, Bridget thought when she entered it again. She would still come down to the yard to feed the hens for as long as hens were there; she’d find new tasks outside. When first she had come to the kitchen with her mother she used to play in the yard, and when it was raining she’d sit by the fire in the meal shed, blowing at the turf with the wheel-bellows, watching the sparks.

  At the sink she scrubbed the surface of a pan, its enamel chipped in a way that had been familiar to her for years. She rinsed it and dried it, returning it to its place, wondering if the day would come when she’d use it again, and in a sudden wave of optimism believing that she would, that with time’s healing they’d come back. She brought the piece of bacon to the boil on the range.

  *

  Henry didn’t remember the black coat when he saw it. He had often seen it worn, years ago, but he didn’t recognize it now. It hadn’t been there before was what he thought. The last time he came up here after stones for a gap in O’Reilly’s sheep wall there had only been high weeds in that corner. He stood looking at the coat, not moving further in to the ruins, telling the sheepdogs to stand back. Slowly he lit a cigarette.

  The stones he was after were there, as they’d been before, fallen out of the walls, lying among the nettles. He remembered Paddy Lindon sitting at the table of which only the legs and a single board were left. The nettles around it were beaten down, a path made to the corner where the coat was. Two straw fish-baskets were lying there, and he could see flies on brown apple-cores.