The Story of Lucy Gault

7

I respond regretfully,

Aloysius Sullivan was informed from the southernmost part of Bengal,

being greatly affected by what you report. Everard and I have corresponded but infrequently over the years. I last visited Lahardane a year or so after the birth of his daughter, when my brother had written to inform me of that fact. Ireland, in my own poor view, has always been the distressful country of its renown. That my brother and others have been obliged to leave it, as once the Wild Geese did, is the saddest news I have heard for many a long day. Should I hear from Everard, I will most certainly inform him of what has come about. But I believe it more likely that you, or those remaining at Lahardane, will hear sooner than I.

The firm of Goodbody and Tallis, solicitors of Warminster, Wiltshire, requested Mr Sullivan to clarify his letter of the fourteenth inst. addressed to their client, now an invalid, the aunt of the aforesaid Heloise Gault referred to. Replying, Mr Sullivan revealed the circumstances in which two servants and a child found themselves, and explained how these circumstances had come about. The reply he received – from a Miss Chambré, companion to the lady who was an invalid – expressed horror, and distaste for what had occurred. There had been no recent communication from Heloise Gault, Miss Chambré stated, nor could any of what was presently communicated be retailed to her employer, whose delicate heart might easily not sustain the strain of learning of such appalling thoughtlessness in a child.

Since my employer has never been offered the courtesy of acquaintanceship with this child,

Miss Chambré continued,

and has herself been long neglected by her niece – for many years receiving no more than a card at

Christmas –

I

believe the withholding of this most shocking news from an invalid is doubly justified. I would suggest the child be placed in a home of correction until such time as the parents return from their travels. Not that they themselves, from what you have imparted, are without blame in this unfortunate matter.

*

The remaining boards had been taken down from the windows at Lahardane in order to dispel the gloom they induced and to bring air into the house again. Repeatedly, Mr Sullivan had tea in the drawing-room, repeatingly bringing with him no news. But only when that autumn had passed, and most of the winter that followed, while the nervous pause in Ireland’s troubles was constantly threatened, did he suggest that the future at Lahardane must be considered.

‘Respecting the law,’ he stated suddenly one afternoon, ‘I have no position in what should next be done, Bridget. My part was to end when you closed the house. “The acreage and the cattle should keep things going,” Captain Gault reiterated when last he came in to see me a day or two before their departure. Even in his great distress he did not forget that Henry and yourself should be decently provided for. But the sum he lodged with me – to cover the final expenses as regards the house – I have been obliged, with the change of circumstances, to make use of otherwise and have in fact exhausted it. So respecting the law, Bridget, that is the end of it. It is as your employers’ friend – and yours, I trust – that I may in future be of assistance. I am arranging, from my own resources, to meet the expenses of the child’s upkeep. On his return there is no doubt that Captain Gault will settle the debt.’

‘You’re good to think of us, sir.’

‘You manage, Bridget?’

‘Ah, we do, we do.’

Mr Sullivan shook Bridget’s hand, something he had never done before and, in fact, never did again. He wouldn’t desert them, he promised. He would continue to visit the house until a day of great rejoicing made that no longer necessary. He was as certain as ever he had been, he vigorously reiterated, that such a day would come.

In all this, Mr Sullivan did not touch upon his own frustrations: since he spoke no foreign languages, his enquiries in likely countries had had to be channelled through official sources in Dublin, but the confused political hiatus before, and following, an unsatisfactory Treaty made communication far from easy. A transference of power, of order and responsibility, took place at its own slow progression; chaos prevailed while it did so. Receiving no reply to his letters, Mr Sullivan had twice forwarded copies to offices that subsequently appeared to be unstaffed. And when, much later, he supposed it was understandable that a small local crisis should fail to be of import in the greater crisis of a country in upheaval, he blamed himself as much as the circumstances of which he was a victim; for the urgency he sought to convey in what he had written had clearly not registered. Nor did he trust the assurances he eventually received, but instead read into them an empty promise that was designed to soothe. Some garbled version of his pleas might one day be disseminated, stale by then and carelessly strung together, the poignancy of a family’s agony reduced to nothing much. He imagined such a document filed away, in irritation or bewilderment, by foreign officials who had better things to do.

He would not cease to nag, but his helplessness, he knew, would continue to infect his solicitor’s authority. His shame in this respect drew him closer to what had happened, as guilt had drawn Bridget and Henry closer when they had suspected Lucy of bathing but hadn’t said.

‘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.