The Story of Lucy Gault

7

Henry saw the visitor and wondered who it was. From among the trees high above the hydrangea lawn, where he was breaking twigs for kindling and tying them into bundles, he saw the figure at the hall door as hardly more than a shadow. While Henry watched, it passed through the open door, into the house.

Later that afternoon when Lucy brought mushrooms to the kitchen, Bridget said:

‘There’s a man come.’

Lucy had gathered the mushrooms in the orchard. She emptied them from a battered punnet on to the draining-board. ‘Who is it?’

Kneading dough for the bread she baked, Bridget shook her head. The front-door bell hadn’t sounded, she said.

‘Your father called down from the hall for me to bring in tea when I’d be ready with it.’ Whoever it was, she said, had maybe just walked in. ‘Your father was asking were you around.’

‘Me?’

‘He asked were you about.’

Visitors weren’t frequent. More than a year ago Mr Sullivan had ceased to drive his car. The man who’d arrived one morning to demonstrate the vacuum cleaner the Captain later bought had been the first stranger for months. When O’Reilly’s man came, or Mrs O’Reilly with a bottle at Christmas, or the E.S.B, man to read the meter, it wasn’t to the front door. Sometimes, not often, the postman didn’t arrive until late in the day, but the postman wouldn’t have been invited into the drawing-room for tea.

‘I have the kettle on to boil,’ Bridget said, wiping her floury hands on her apron.

‘I’ll take in the tea.’

She didn’t trust herself to say more. Had Bridget heard a voice? Had any bit of conversation reached her from the drawing-room before the door was closed? Lucy didn’t ask. Shivers of excitement, cool and pleasurable, came and went all over her body, gently pricking her skin. Who else would just walk in?

*

Henry carried his bundles of twigs into the shed that had been the feed shed when hens and turkeys were kept in greater numbers. He loosened the string he’d used to bind them and slipped it off. He stacked them tidily with those he’d stacked already.

‘Who’s after coming?’ he asked in the kitchen, picking shreds of brushwood from the sleeves of his jersey.

Bridget said she didn’t know. She didn’t pause in her task of filling two tins with the mixture she had prepared.

She opened the oven door. The tray of tea things for the drawing-room was ready, the kettle beginning to sing on the range.

‘Good mushrooms, those,’ Henry said, picking one up from beside the sink.

*

Brushing her hair in her bedroom, Lucy didn’t hurry. From her dressing-table looking-glass her eyes stared back at her, so bright and so intent they seemed almost to belong to someone else. Her lips were parted in the beginning of a smile; her hair hung loosely, the ivory-backed brush still raised to it. Both heads would turn at once when she carried in the tray. ‘Well, we have met at last.’ The words were what she heard, not which voice said them; but it would be her father’s.

It could not spoil everything to look from the window, to see the car that had come, not that the sight of it would tell her anything; and not of course that it could be the old car with the dickey. But when she looked there was no car.

She changed her skirt and jumper for a dress. Would he have come by train to Enniseala? Or to Dungarvan, which would be a shorter journey? She tried to remember if there was a railway station at Dungarvan. More likely, he would have come by bus to Waterford and then on to Creally’s Crossroads. He would have walked the rest; more than an hour that would have taken, but quicker in the end than taking a train even if there was one.

She tied the belt of her dress and found a necklace. Again at her looking-glass, she smeared away the lipstick she had applied and changed it for a different shade. Would he be shy of her father? Would her father take to him? No one could not take to him; in spite of the trouble his presence brought, her father would want her happiness. Her father would want everything to be all right again.

She touched her cheeks with powder. She had been flushed but that was gone now. She wondered if Bridget guessed what had come into her thoughts, if she had noticed those moments of confusion. She wondered how he’d have changed.

She closed the door softly behind her and went downstairs. They looked at her, surprised, when she walked into the kitchen. Bridget had just replaced on its shelf the big brown bowl she used for mixing her bread ingredients, Henry was standing with his back to the range.

‘Did you wet the tea yet?’ she asked Bridget and Bridget said she hadn’t.

‘I’ll do it so.’

It would shock them, his coming to the house. And dressing up for him, for a married man, was more shocking still. She hadn’t thought of that, of how in their simple, uncomplicated lives they would feel.

She made the tea. Bridget had buttered bread and put more jam into the filling of a cake that had been bought in Kilauran, only half of it left. There was a bicycle outside the front door, Henry said, and Lucy imagined the conductor handing it down from the roof of the bus at Creally’s Crossroads, and Ralph’s hands reaching up for it. Of course he would have come with a bicycle. Knowing how long the journey from the crossroads was, of course he would have.

‘That’s lovely, Bridget,’ she said, picking up the tray. She carried it from the kitchen, along the passage to the hall. The front door was still open; her father had a way of leaving it like that, even when the weather was cold. She caught sight of the back wheel of the bicycle as she put the tray down on the long hall table that had become cluttered since her father’s return. It was his place for the white hat he wore when it was sunny; he threw his tie down there when he took it off on his way to work in the orchard. Bills had accumulated there, their torn brown envelopes beside them. Loose change and keys were scattered.

In the mirror that hung in the alcove at the bottom of the stairs she straightened the collar of her dress and pushed a strand of hair into place. Then she opened the drawing-room door, the tea-tray balanced on her free arm.

*

‘I saw the bicycle there and I coming down out of the woods,’ Henry said in the kitchen. ‘Sergeant Foley’s, I said to myself

‘What’s Foley want?’

‘It wasn’t his at all. When I examined it, it wasn’t.’

Henry described the bicycle: its dull black ironwork, mudguards peaked, the springs of the saddle a heavy coil, jutting out in front. Bridget didn’t listen. He’d thought it was the sergeant’s, Henry said, because it had the look of a Guard’s bicycle.

‘The next thing I thought it was maybe young O’Reilly’s. Until I looked in the window.’

Bridget paused in the washing of her baking board. ‘It’s never who she thinks?’

Slowly Henry shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you who it is,’ he said.

*

‘Come in, come in, lady,’ her father said.

The man in the armchair by the bagatelle table didn’t look in her direction. His manner was nervous, the fingers of one hand rubbing the knuckles of the other, his head held at a slant. His suit was of black serge, the badge of the Pioneer temperance movement in one of the lapels. A tie was knotted tightly into a shabby collar. Bicycle-clips still gripped the turn-ups of the dark serge trousers.

‘Tea.’ She dragged the word out of herself, and was aware that the man had raised his head to look at her. His eyes were empty of expression; a hollowness in his features gave him a distinctive look. His hands reached down to pull his bicycle-clips off.

‘Ah, tea,’ her father said, and there was the rattle of the cups as they were settled on their saucers. ‘Or would you prefer a glass of whiskey, Mr Horahan?’

He couldn’t take whiskey, the man said, and seemed not to notice that tea had been brought in. Her father was saying that the man’s shoulder was all right, telling her that he had asked about it, that he’d been told it had never been a hindrance. He hadn’t recognized their visitor when he’d found him in the hall, her father said, but he remembered the name as soon as he heard it. ‘Mr Horahan,’ he said, and added that he’d just been telling Mr Horahan that bygones were bygones.

She didn’t understand. She didn’t know who the man was. She didn’t understand what was being said. She’d never seen the man before.

‘A mineral if you’d have it,’ he said, touching the badge on his lapel.

She turned and went away then. She heard her father calling after her. He opened the door she had closed. He called out again in the hall, saying it was all right. But she was outside by then, running over the gravel.

*

‘But in the name of God,’ Bridget distractedly repeated, ‘what’s he want? Why’s he come here?’

She reached up to the mantel-shelf for the rosary beads she kept there. She closed her eyes, leaning against the wall where she stood, her face as white as the flour that still powdered the black material of her dress.

From a chair drawn out from the table Henry watched her fingers working the beads, her lips silently beseeching. Then the drawing-room bell shook on its coiled spring, summoning attention. Bridget opened her eyes. She couldn’t enter that room, she said, and Henry went instead. It was the first time any bell except the hall-door bell had sounded in the house since the Captain and his wife had left it twenty-nine years ago. That registered in Bridget’s consciousness, slipping through her perplexity and her outraged sensibilities.

‘He’s t.t.,’ Henry said when he returned. ‘He wants lemonade.’ He rooted in one of the wall cupboards for lemonade crystals.

‘They’re old,’ Bridget said when he found a bottle in which there were some left.

‘They’ll do.’ Henry tipped what there was into a glass, which he filled up with cold water from the tap. It should be hot, Bridget said, in order to dissolve the crystals.

‘But Mother of God,’ she suddenly cried out, ‘what are we thinking of to be giving the man lemonade?’

*

‘I’m afraid you’ve upset my daughter,’ the Captain said in the drawing-room. ‘To tell you the truth I still didn’t know who you were when I brought you in from the hall.’

‘These times I’ve no employment, sir. The day you were out on the promenade with Mr Sullivan, sir, I was after finishing at the Camp.’

‘You were a soldier?’

‘I had no employment the day I seen you, sir. I got employment with Ned Whelan since. He took me on with him on account I would have experience with laying roads up at the Camp.’

Henry came with the lemonade, but it seemed to the Captain that it was not required after all. The loquaciousness of the man who’d been wandering about in the hall ceased abruptly. He shrank back into his chair when Henry approached him. Not knowing what to do, Henry put the glass of lemonade on the floor.

‘We’re in the kitchen, if you’d pull the bell again,’ he said before he went. He had taken his hat off. He glanced back apprehensively before he closed the door.

‘Who’s that man, sir?’

‘Henry works for us.’

‘I’m careful with a stranger, sir.’

‘Mr Horahan, why have you come out here?’

‘Ned Whelan let me go two days back, sir. What I’m telling you is in case you wouldn’t know it, sir. How it is with me, sir.’

The Captain drank the cup of tea he had poured for himself. Then he said he was at a loss.

His visitor was welcome, he added; bygones were bygones, he repeated; in no way did he wish to be inhospitable. All the same he was at a loss.

‘Time has settled our hash for us, Mr Horahan. But for all that it might have been better if you hadn’t come out here again.’

It occurred to him as he spoke that the man had come looking for work, since he had said he was unemployed. It was extraordinary that he might have, that having once attempted to burn the house down he should now return with such an end in mind. It seemed impossible, but even so the Captain said:

‘I’m afraid we’ve nothing to offer you here. If you were thinking of work.’

There was no response to this, neither a denial nor otherwise. Nothing was said for several minutes, and then the visitor said:

‘The three of us was smoking butts down at the bandstand and I said why wouldn’t we fix them? It was myself says it and the next thing is aren’t we asking Mr Fehilly would he give us advice.’

‘All that’s a long time ago.’

‘“Dose the dogs,” he says. “The first thing you’ll do is dose the dogs.” Mr Fehilly has the dose put by. He’ll have the bicycles got for us, is what he says. “Get the lie of the land,” he says. “Don’t set a foot in till it’s dark.” Mr Fehilly was a cripple for Ireland, sir. He had broken bones in his back. He had two fingers gone off of his hand. “Wait till we see what have we in the petrol line,” he says, and the tins were out the back, down a drain that’d gone dry. “Cover anything you’d have over,” he gives us the instruction again. He has an old waterproof to obscure the tins when they’d be secured to the cross-bars. “Don’t call in anywhere, take care if you’ll stop for a smoke.” You’d repeat the whole thing back until you’d say it right. Smash a pane, reach in for the catch. Raise up the sash, pitch in the juice. Pitch it in on the curtains. Pitch it in on any cushions would be lying around so’s you’d get the feathers to go up. Pull the bell chain, rouse up the house. Wait for a lamp to be lit upstairs before you’d strike the match. Bring back the matchbox. Don’t leave the matchbox lying around.’

‘Drink up your lemonade, Mr Horahan, like a good man. All this is better left.’

The Captain stood up.

‘There’s things wouldn’t be known to you, sir,’ his visitor said.

‘Well, yes, there would be, but all the same maybe they’re better left.’

‘There was a Brother used say to us the big house is the enemy. Did you hear tell of the Whiteboys, sir?’

‘Oh, indeed.’

‘Then again, the Ribbonboys. Then again, the hedge schools. That Brother would lay it out for us. How the Whiteboy would take a name for himself – Slasher or Cropper, Fearnot, Burnstack, anything he’d like. How the name would pass on when one boy’d be finished with it. I was a good few years at the Camp, sir.’

‘I see.’

‘I signed up in the army on account of the way I was with the dreams I’d have.’

‘Ah.’

‘I was never settled at the Camp. I was never settled since, sir, although it was quiet with me one time. The only commotion there’d be at the railway station was when the Cork train would be late with the August outing on it. Mr Hoyne would have his pictures made on the sand and the colours would get washed off by the sea before the August children would see them. The same month of the year, the Pierrots had a wicker basket with a lid hinged on to it and I’d wheel it on the trolley up the platform for them and they’d give me a few coppers. Another time again it was the Boys’ Brigade parading down the platform and I’d stand there watching and nobody’d mind. Only a half-dozen of the boys there’d be, with their little drummer caps on. I never saw a cap the like of it since, sir. Is it gone altogether?’

‘Maybe it is.’

‘I was grand at the railway station the first while, sir. I was going out with a girl and we used walk down to where the swans would be. There was a little white dog would come running out of the hut where you’d buy cigarettes and he’d be snapping at her heels and she’d scold him like he was an infant. “Wait till you’ll see this,” I says to her and I showed her the shoulder. Doing the big fellow, the way you would with a girl you’d be gone on. Oh, I was gone on her all right. “Where’d you get that?” she says, and when I told her she says she didn’t know I was one of the lads going out on that game. To tell the truth of it, you could hardly see the old scar, but however it was the next thing is I was never walking by the swans with her after. I’d look out for her and she wouldn’t be around. If I’d locate her at Mass she’d scuttle off from me.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

‘I didn’t get the truth of it until the dreams. I knew the truth of it then, sir. I was never easy since. I’d be frightened of the dreams, sir.’

The Captain wondered if this man had come to the house before, if during the years of his own absence he had ever been a visitor. If this was so, it had never been mentioned, and for a moment he wondered if it had been kept from him, or not spoken of, as sometimes the activities of the disturbed were not. But neither his daughter’s manner while she had been in the room, nor Henry’s, suggested that any of this was likely.

The ex-soldier’s awkward occupation of the armchair he had hunched himself into was confirmation of the unease he referred to. From time to time, while silences gathered or his fragmentary talk continued, his hands touched his clothes in different places, appearing to search for something. Abruptly, they would become still and then the knuckles of one were again rubbed by the fingers and palm of the other. His eyes squinted perpetually to the floor, to the rugs that covered most of the wide floorboards, to the corners of the wainscoting.

‘You mightn’t have known it, sir. That the two lads moved away altogether.’

‘Which lads are these, Mr Horahan?’

‘They’re gone this long time, sir.’

‘The boys who came out that night, is this? They’d have emigrated, would they?’

The Captain remembered the gasp of regret and fear that had caught in him somewhere when he realized he had wounded one of the youths who were standing on the grass, the relief there’d been when the boy hadn’t fallen down. The boy had stumbled forward a few paces before his companions reached for him.

‘It was an accidental thing,’ he said. ‘There was no intention to wound. I’m sorry it occurred.’

He lit one of his small cigars and, feeling in need of it, crossed the room to pour himself some whiskey. On the way, he caught a glimpse of the bicycle that was propped near one of the windows and he wondered if it was the one that had been ridden to the house twice before. He wondered how Horahan’s two companions had got him back to Enniseala on the night he had been injured. Three bicycles between them could not have been easy to manage. He poured more whiskey than he’d intended. Slowly he went back to his chair.

‘There’s no one would say it, sir. The girl you were going with wouldn’t say it to you on account it was too terrible to say to any man. The same as there’s people in Enniseala wouldn’t say it yet. In a shop they wouldn’t. Nor my mother herself in her lifetime, God rest her. Nor the lads above at the Camp. There isn’t a man working for Ned Whelan would say it out, sir.’

‘And would you tell me what they won’t say, Mr Horahan?’

The Captain spoke softly, estimating that he might do better in this conversation if he did. He remembered the mother who’d been referred to – stony-faced when he visited the house, drably dressed, with carpet slippers. She’d been as hostile as her husband, although she hadn’t spoken.

‘The lights would go up in the Picture House, sir, before you’d hear the Soldiers’ Song. In the crowd going out nothing’d be said, sir. Not by a man or by a woman. You’d be done drilling in the barrack yard and it’d be the same the whole time. You’d be taking your grub and not a word said. It was Our Lady brought you back, sir.’

With a pity that came so suddenly it startled him, the Captain imagined this afflicted man at the army Camp, strange and solitary in a drill yard, the butt of whispers behind his back, struggling in his sleep against dreams that frightened him. He glimpsed him standing properly to attention in Enniseala’s picture house while the national anthem was played. Did the empty screen he stared at fill with whatever were the figments of his torment? Were they there again on the streets, by the sea, on the banks of the estuary where the swans were?

‘The day I seen you out walking on the promenade I was addressed by ‘Our Lady, sir.’

*

A few bees hovered about the hives, most of them at work inside. The bees never stung her, but once a wasp had been in her shoe when she put it on and her mother had rubbed something cold on the place and read to her for the whole morning from the green Grimms’ book. And a long time later, when her mother wasn’t there any more, Henry had found a hornets’ nest in a crack on the pear-tree wall. ‘Sometimes I think the strand, or where the crossing stones are,’ she’d said when Ralph asked her which her favourite place was. ‘Sometimes I think the orchard.’ They’d picked the Beauty of Bath, and they were ripe again now, streaked pink and red like Hannah’s cheeks when last she’d seen her. In the sunny corner Bridget’s tea-towels were thrown over the blackcurrant bushes to dry. Stiff as card they had become. She picked them up in case it would rain later.

One of the sheepdogs ambled over to her in the yard. She stroked the smooth, dark head and felt it pressed against her thigh. When a fire was kept going in the feed shed she used to sit by it in winter, as Bridget once told her she had too when she was a child. Lucy went there now, into its shadowy dark. There hadn’t been a fire there since, years ago, its purpose had changed. ‘Will we store the wood here?’ Henry had asked her, pretending that her opinion was valuable. Eleven she’d been.

She sat there, on a chair that had been in the kitchen until its back fell off. The sheepdog had not come in with her, turning away at the doorway from the cold air. She heard Henry’s footsteps in the yard and he said it was Horahan who had come. She didn’t know who Horahan was, only that it was the same name her father had said. She asked Henry and he told her. He took the tea-towels from her, saying he was on his way to the kitchen.

‘Those days Horahan’s not the full shilling,’ he said.

She stood in the doorway of the feed shed, watching Henry cross the yard to the house. It seemed neither here nor there that the man who was to blame for everything had come back to Lahardane, neither here nor there that he wasn’t the full shilling. Would Ralph have set out? Would he have driven just a little way? Today, this afternoon? Would that have accounted for the intensity of her intuition? Was, even now, a car backed into a gateway on an empty road, then turned around to go away?

‘Oh yes,’ she whispered, certain about what was left of a reality that hadn’t lasted. ‘It was today.’

She walked again in the orchard and in the garden that was overgrown. She felt a weariness in her body, as if suddenly she had become old. He would know. He would know that she suffered for her foolishness. One day a sorrowful reply to her letter would come, and she would want to write again herself, and would try and perhaps not be able to.

She wondered if the man who’d come in his place had gone by now, but when she passed from the garden into the yard and through the archway to the front of the house, the bicycle was still there. In the hall she could hear the voices. She might have turned away; she might have gone upstairs. But something seemed unfinished and she didn’t.

‘A drink?’ her father offered in the drawingroom. ‘Or the tea’s still warm, I’d say.’

She shook her head. She could tell from his glance that he guessed she’d been told who the man he’d found in the house was. She wondered when he had realized himself. She wondered why he hadn’t told him to go away.

‘Mr Horahan has been a soldier,’ her father said.

The unfinished embroidery of the figures on the strand was on the arm of the sofa, a pale-blue thread trailing from the eye of a needle. Colours she was waiting for were missing, blank patches here and there. She rolled the linen up, securing it with the needle, and returned it to her embroidery drawer.

‘Stay with us, lady,’ her father said.

She watched him pouring himself another drink. He poured her one even though she had declined a drink a moment ago. He carried it to her and she thanked him. A bird flapped against a window-pane, its wings beating in agitation before it recovered itself and flew off.

The man was muttering.

*

The time he was painting the windows at the asylum an inmate would suddenly be there, maybe two or three of them and they’d shake your hand through the bars, asking was there putty to spare and he’d roll them a few balls and put them on the inside window-sill. ‘Oh, I know who you are,’ one of them said one time and the others made a clamour, wanting to be told. ‘Don’t I know who you are?’ the sergeant in the drill yard said, and a man coming out of Phelan’s said it, bleary after drink. ‘Another cripple for Ireland,’ one of the lads said and the curtains blew out, blazing against the sky.

‘Every day I light the candle for the child.’

He raised his eyes to look around the room that hadn’t been repaired in any way, not even to put new panes in the windows, not even to clean the blackened walls. Charred nearly to nothing, the furniture was there, and splinters of glass all over the floor, the rags of the curtains hanging down. ‘Jeez, hurry on,’ the lads said. ‘Jeez, don’t look back.’

The splinters savaged him when he knelt. Droplets of blood were warm on his legs when he stood up again, and he said he was sorry for bringing more blood into the room.

‘No more than shadows,’ he said, and explained because it wouldn’t be known. No more than shadows in the smoke when he looked back and people were carrying the body.

*

‘This is my daughter, Mr Horahan. My daughter is the child who was here then.’

Upstairs a door softly banged, the way doors sometimes did when a breeze blew in from the sea, its handle rattling because that handle was loose. In the quietness of the room Lucy tried to say that she might have married the man she loved, that her father and her mother had been driven from their house, that her mother had never recovered from her distress. It was the truth; she had come to the drawing-room to say it because it was all that was left to say, but the words would not come. The flowers she had earlier arranged, white campanulas, were pale against the sun-browned wallpaper. Smoke curled lazily from her father’s cigarillo.

‘That’s a lovely evening for your journey back,’ her father said.

She thought she had misheard, so extraordinary did that politeness seem. Again there was the urge to speak of the destruction in their lives, of fear and chaos where there had been happiness once, of pain. But again her anger collapsed, unable to break out.

‘Well, now,’ her father said, and crossed the room to the door, opening it and standing there. ‘Go safely now,’ he said in the hall.

She went with him, as if he’d asked her to, but he hadn’t. Outside, the sun slanted over the gravel and the front-door steps. The sea in the distance was quiet. She might have wept but she had not and she did not now; she wondered if she ever would again. For a moment she looked into the features of the man who had returned after so long and saw there only madness. No meaning dignified his return; no order patterned, as perhaps it might have, past and present; no sense was made of anything.

‘Every day I light the candle,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ her father said. ‘Of course.’

Bicycle-clips were carefully put on and then the afternoon’s visitor rode off, a gangling figure on his big iron bicycle. They watched the bicycle disappear on the avenue, and when her father said he was sorry she knew from his tone that he realized why she had dressed herself up.

They walked a little way on the avenue, not saying anything before her anger broke, fiercely wrenched from her tiredness with an energy of its own. She cried out after the man who had gone, her anguish echoing in the trees of the avenue, her tears damp on her father’s clothes when he held her to him.

‘There now, there now,’ she heard his voice, the two words murmured, again and then again.