The Story of Lucy Gault Read online

  ‘We must hope,’ he urged again that afternoon, although he did not now believe in hope. He wished Bridget good-bye and walked to his car beneath a rain-filled sky.

  *

  In the kitchen, where the range was always lit first thing, the ceiling and walls were white, the woodwork green. A heavy deal table, so scrubbed that ridges stood up in the grain, had drawers with brass handles. Between the windows there was a green dresser crowded with plates and saucers and cups. Cupboards were let into the wall on either side of the doorway.

  At one end of the table Lucy watched the yolk spreading out of Henry’s fried egg. She liked the yellow herself but not the white, unless it was mashed up. She watched Henry putting salt on the yolk, which he smeared into his fried bread.

  ‘Henry gets lonely,’ Bridget said. ‘You go with Henry, dotey.’

  Every morning when it was fine Bridget said Henry would be lonely, going by himself with the creamery churns. Lucy knew he wouldn’t be. She knew it was only a pretence to get her to go with him, since there wasn’t much for her to do when there were holidays from school. ‘Ah, Lucy! Come in, come in,’ Mr Aylward had exclaimed the morning she walked into school again, and she’d thought he would put his arms around her, but Mr Aylward didn’t do things like that. “They’ll get used to it,’ he promised her when the handful of other children didn’t want to play with her, when they eyed her and stared at her, or glanced and nudged one another, not giggling because what she had done was too bad for giggling. The nameless dog who had once run away also was her companion on the strand.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, watching Henry soaking up the last of the egg yolk with his bread. ‘Yes. All right,’ she said.

  It was April now, early in the month. The morning was bright, clouds of fluff blowing in the sky – chasing the sun, Henry said. ‘No rain today,’ he said. ‘Not a chance of it.’ Heaven was up there, her mama used to say, beyond the clouds, beyond the blue. You made up heaven for yourself, her mama said, you made up what you wanted it to be.

  The big wooden wheels of the cart rattled on the avenue, the horse ambling, the reins slack in Henry’s hands. When the branches met above their heads both sun and sky disappeared. Light was filtered through the chestnut leaves and then the gate-lodge came into view. Thrown open wide, immovable by now because they’d remained like that for so long, the avenue’s gates were almost lost in undergrowth. On the dusty clay road that twisted off to the right it was warmer in the sunshine.

  Once she used to talk on this journey, asking Henry to tell her about Paddy Lindon, how he would appear in Kilauran once a year at the time of Corpus Christi, a wild figure with mushrooms in a red handkerchief. The priest before Father Morrissey had preached a warning from the pulpit, laying down the law: that for the sake of tranquillity in Kilauran no one should buy Paddy Lindon’s mushrooms; because if Paddy Lindon sold them he got drunk, and turned wilder. ‘Crowing like a fowl,’ Henry said, ‘up and down the pier.’

  Henry had been a Kilauran boy, one of seven in a fishing family, but after he married Bridget he didn’t fish again. ‘I never swam in the sea,’ he had often told Lucy on the way to the creamery, taking pride in that for reasons of his own. And Lucy, in the past, had told him the stories she’d been read by her mother, from the Grimms’ book; or Kitty Teresa’s stories.

  ‘Where’d we be without the drop of milk?’ Henry said, making conversation when they went to the creamery together for the first time since what had happened. ‘Doesn’t it keep us going?’

  It was the best he could do. The mood there was between them wasn’t right for the usual remembrances of his boyhood – the time the thatch was lifted from the Kilauran cottages in a November storm, the summer there was the horse-racing on the strand, the evocation of Paddy Lindon when he’d sold his mushrooms.

  ‘Sure, you meant no harm, girl,’ he tried when the quiet between them remained unbroken. ‘Sure, don’t we all know that?’

  ‘I did mean harm.’

  Lucy took the reins because they were handed to her, the rope rough on her palms and her fingers, different from the reins of the trap.

  ‘Will they ever come back, Henry?’

  ‘Ah, they will of course, why wouldn’t they?’

  The silence began again. It continued when the horse and cart turned out on to the main road, and all the way to the creamery yard, where Henry backed the cart up to the delivery platform. He lifted off the churns, smoking a cigarette while he talked to the foreman, then clambered on to the cart again. He took the reins himself, since it was sometimes difficult to steer a way through the other carts. At the gate he picked up two empty churns.

  ‘They’ll never come back,’ Lucy said.

  ‘The minute they know you’re here they will. I could promise you that.’

  ‘How’ll they know, Henry?’

  ‘A letter’ll come from them and Bridget’ll write back. Or Mr Sullivan will reach them. There’s not a man as clever in the whole extent of County Cork as Aloysius Sullivan. Many’s the time I heard that said, many’s the time. Would we call in for a lemonade?’

  They had to call in anyway at Mrs McBride’s roadside shop for the groceries that were written in a list on Bridget’s scrap of paper. But Henry made the lemonade seem like an invitation that had just occurred to him.

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  Mrs McBride would try not to stare at her. Everyone tried not to. Mr Aylward had stared at first. Just once but she saw him. They stared at her for what she’d done; they stared at her limp. In the play-yard Edie Hosford still didn’t want to come near to her.

  ‘Have you a biscuit for the missy?’ Henry said in the shop and Mrs McBride’s big face suddenly jutted out at her. Like the wedge Henry split the logs with it was, heavy and pointed. ‘A Kerry Cream is it?’ Mrs McBride said, her teeth jutting out too. ‘A Kerry Cream fit the bill, Lucy?’

  She said it would, although she didn’t understand fit the bill. The letter could be there when they went back. Bridget could be out waiting for them, waving it at them, and when they got nearer she’d tell them, and she’d be laughing and excited. She’d be red in the face, and crying as well as laughing.

  ‘Isn’t that grand weather, Henry?’ Mrs McBride said, pouring Henry’s stout before she did anything else. ‘When all’s said and done isn’t it great for April?’

  ‘It is, right enough.’

  ‘Thanks be to God.’

  Bridget would say she’d need help to get their room ready for them. They’d put flowers in it and open the windows. They’d put hot-water jars in the bed. ‘We’ll get the trap out,’ Henry would say and he’d clean it down, ready for them too. They’d be cross with her and it wouldn’t matter. All the time they were cross with her it wouldn’t matter.

  ‘Oh, I remember Kerry Creams is the favourite,’ Mrs McBride said. She came round to the front of the counter, where the glass-topped biscuit tins were arranged along the counter’s edge. She swung up the glass cover of the Kerry Creams and Lucy took one.

  The first time she went with Henry to the creamery he lifted her up on to the counter and she sat there with her lemonade, the first time she’d seen the stout foaming when it was poured. Six she was then.

  ‘Give me ten,’ Henry said, and Mrs McBride said she had only fives and Henry said two fives then. Woodbines he always smoked. The only other cigarette he’d ever tried was a Kerry Blue. He told Lucy that once. He showed her the Kerry Blue packet, with the dog on it. Sweet Afton her papa smoked.

  ‘How’s herself, Henry?’

  ‘Arrah, not bad.’

  ‘Have you the list handy?’

  He found Bridget’s grocery list and handed it across the counter and Mrs McBride collected the items. Mrs McBride didn’t like her any more even though she’d given her the biscuit. Mrs McBride was the same as everyone else, except Henry and Bridget.

  ‘I’ve no strawberry jam, Henry. Only raspberry in a pound pot.’

  ‘Will raspberry do, Lucy? Would we
say it would?’

  She nodded, bent over her glass, not wanting to speak because Mrs McBride was there. Mr Sullivan still didn’t like her either.

  ‘Keiller’s is a good jam,’ Mrs McBride said.

  ‘None better,’ Henry agreed, although Lucy had never seen him putting jam on his bread. He smeared on lots of butter and sometimes he sprinkled salt on it. He often said he didn’t have a sweet tooth.

  ‘The greengage is good,’ Mrs McBride said, and then she talked about the meat sandwiches she made for the army lads when they called in, a bunch of them going by at night. They came out from the Camp in Enniseala to go dancing at Old Fort Crossroads. They got hungry on the way, she said. ‘Mike makes the sandwiches too big,’ she said, referring to her husband. ‘Thick as two doorsteps he has them. Sure, no young soldier could get his teeth at them.’

  Not listening any more, Lucy read the advertisements: for Ryan’s Towel Soap, and corned beef and whiskey and Guinness’s stout. She’d asked her papa what Guinness was when they saw it written up and he said it was the stuff Henry drank. There was a bottle of whiskey they’d left behind, only a little gone from it. Power’s it was.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said when they were on the cart again, when Henry had lit another cigarette. The grey paper bags that held the groceries were at their feet. Far ahead of them two other carts were bringing back their empty churns too.

  ‘Get on there,’ Henry urged the horse, shaking the reins. He pushed his hat back a bit in order to catch the sun on his forehead. Already the first of his summer freckles had come.

  8

  She watched the butterfly disappear and then come back, the magician’s wizened fingers splayed in triumph, the butterfly’s wings slowly folding away their bright pink and gold. The magician’s expression never changed. There was always his pursed smile, his stare, his parchment cheeks. Only his arms ever moved.

  On the stairs there were Everard’s footsteps and then his key in the lock. He brought the shopping in. He’d been to the railway station as well, he said.

  ‘How good you are to me!’ Heloise murmured. For months, while she had rested, he’d read to her from books in English he’d found in a bookseller’s two streets away. He had cooked her meals and washed her nightdresses, had brushed her hair and brought her make-up to her. He had listened again while she remembered moments from her childhood. From the Saturday markets he brought back cups and saucers and plates, and china ornaments that would make their rooms more their own, storing away what had been supplied.

  She watched while he wound up the clockwork of the magician. He had bought it to divert her while she rested, until early one morning her baby was lost and the doctor who’d been sent for struggled to find words when he learnt about miscarriages in the past. Commiserating but firm, he instructed that what had been attempted should not be again.

  ‘If it is what you would like,’ she said when the toy was still. ‘Yes, of course it would be nice.’

  Fearing that her present lassitude would cling to her, the Captain had suggested that they should visit the great Italian cities. ‘Just once in a while,’ he had persuaded, ‘to be somewhere else for a week or so.’ He had read to her from the guide-book he’d bought, drawn her attention to photographs of buildings and sculpture, of frescoes and mosaics.

  ‘Of course,’ Heloise answered his further coaxing now. ‘Somewhere different would be nice.’

  Yet Montemarmoreo was all the difference that mattered: she might have said that too. Their small appartamento above the shoemaker’s shop, their own possessions increasing, the walks that would begin again now: there was a kind of peace. That cucchiaio meant spoon, that seggiola was chair and finestra window, that every morning across the street the porter at the Credito Italiano unlocked the doors for the waiting clerks to pass into the bank, that the woman at the Fiori e Frutta had begun to say more than a few words to her, that she woke to the chiming of the bells at the church of Santa Cecilia, the saint whose courage in her tribulations had for centuries given heart to this town: all that was peace, as much as there could be.

  The pale hands of the magician were raised again, the butterfly appeared, was banished and then returned. The details copied from the timetables at the railway station – convenient trains, a choice of cities – were perused.

  ‘Shall we open the wine,’ Heloise suggested then, ‘a little early tonight?’

  9

  The visits of Mr Sullivan continued, as he had promised they would. And Canon Crosbie came out from Enniseala, to satisfy himself that Lucy was being brought up in the Protestant faith. On Sundays when they went to Mass, Bridget and Henry took her with them to Kilauran, where she waited for half an hour for the service to begin in the green-painted corrugated-iron hut where the small Church of Ireland congregation worshipped. Although he knew she attended the Sunday services in Kilauran, since they were conducted by his curate, Canon Crosbie felt he should see how things were at Lahardane for himself.

  ‘And you always say your prayers, Lucy?’ As genial in old age as his innocent smile and pure white hair suggested, Canon Crosbie twinkled at her over the tea things Bridget had set out for them on the dining-room table. ‘Can you say Our Lord’s Prayer for me, Lucy?’

  ‘Our Father, which art in heaven,’ Lucy began, and went on until the end.

  ‘Well, that’s grand.’ Before he left, Canon Crosbie gave her a book called The Girls of St Monica’s, reflecting privately that had things been different she would by now have been sent away to a boarding-school herself. There was no doubt in the clergyman’s mind that that would have been the intention of the family, but when later he raised the subject with Aloysius Sullivan it was pointed out to him that, as things were, the funds for anything of the kind were lacking. Until her parents’ eventual return, Lucy Gault would continue to receive her education in Mr Aylward’s small schoolroom.

  By now, the lull that had followed insurrection in Ireland had given way to civil war. The new Irish Free State was bloodily torn apart by it, as towns and villages and families were. The terrible beauty of a destiny fulfilled trailed a terrible bitterness, which haunted memories long after the conflict ended in May 1923. Towards the end of that same month, Mr Sullivan received a letter from Miss Chambré to the effect that Heloise Gault’s aunt – informed, when her health was a little improved, of her niece’s departure from Ireland – had been affected by a desire for reconciliation. Learning then that Heloise’s present whereabouts were not known, she had confidently instructed Miss Chambré to place an advertisement in several English newspapers. That this had elicited no response was the cause of considerable disappointment. I myself did not expect otherwise, Miss Chambré wrote, but for the sake of an old lady’s peace of mind I feel it to be my duty to request you to inform me when you receive news of Heloise Gault. Naturally the conduct of her child is still concealed from my employer.

  Mr Sullivan sighed over that. He might have pointed out, but did not do so, that Lucy Gault’s conduct had spawned its own punishment, a fact confirmed in his conversations with Bridget and in his own continuing observation. It was apparent to him also that bewilderment possessed the household at Lahardane as unproductively as did the agitation that disturbed his thoughts when he dwelt for too long on what had come about. The solicitor, who lived alone but for a housekeeper, for the most part kept the depth of his concern private, occasionally and to no avail touching upon it in the presence of his clerk.

  Waking often in the night to find herself similarly affected, Bridget would lie sleepless, waiting to greet Henry when he opened his eyes with a plea to tell her all over again about the moment of discovering the bundle among the weeds and fallen stones. The dog that had been befriended had run off one day and hadn’t been seen again: to Bridget, and to Henry, that seemed of a piece with all that had happened otherwise, but in time this was dismissed by both of them as fancy.

  While at Lahardane there was the rawness of disorder, the story of what had brought it so d
ramatically to a country house came to find a place among the stories of the Troubles that were told in the neighbourhood – in Kilauran and Clashmore and Ringville, on the streets of Enniseala. The tragedy called down upon herself by a child, and what had since become her life, made a talking point, and seemed to strangers to be the material of legend. Visitors to the beaches of this quiet coast listened and were astonished. Commercial men who took orders for their wares across the counters of shops related the story in distant towns. Conversation in back bars, at tea tables and card tables, was enlivened by reports of what had occurred.

  As often with such travellers’ tales, exaggeration improved the telling. Borrowed facts, sewn in where there was a dearth, gathered authority with repetition. Stirred by what was told of the events at Lahardane, memories strayed into other houses, through other family archives: to have suffered so harsh a misfortune, the Gaults had surely once betrayed a servant to the gallows, had failed to stand by common justice, or too haughtily had taken for granted privileges that were theirs. In talk inspired by what was told, the subtleties that clogged the tidiness of narration were smudged away. The spare reality of what had happened was coloured and enriched, and altogether made better. The journey the stricken parents had set out upon became a pilgrimage, absolution sought for sins that varied in the telling.

  *

  ‘The Grand Old Duke of York,’ sang the children at the Christmas party in Mr Aylward’s schoolroom, ‘he had ten thousand men …’

  Balloons decorated the spelling charts and the blackboard, holly cheered the maps and Mr Aylward’s own portraits of kings and queens. There was tea for the children, all fifteen of them on benches around the four tables pushed together – sandwiches and barm brack, and cakes speckled with hundreds and thousands. The room was darkened. Borrowed curtains hung over the two windows and Mr Aylward made shadows with his fingers on a white sheet – a rabbit, a bird, an old man’s craggy profile.