The Story of Lucy Gault

8

Henry and Bridget had not yet begun seriously to suffer from the elderly ailments that were later to incapacitate both of them. When their aches began – Henry’s knee, Bridget’s shoulder when it was damp – they trusted to Providence; when in his workshed one day Henry was aware of a tightening in his chest, he stood still and felt it go away. Bridget had become deaf in one ear, but maintained that the other would see her out.

A greater, and unexpected, calamity was the creamery’s declaration that the Lahardane milk was infected. It was discovered later that tuberculosis had spread in the herd: after the mandatory slaughter only eight cows would be left. Since the Captain’s return he had assisted Henry with the milking, in which he was not skilled. This and all it otherwise involved – driving the cattle in twice a day to the milking parlour, scalding the churns, hosing out the dairy – was already becoming too much for two old men, as it had been for Henry on his own. He had struggled on, managing better with the Captain’s assistance, but it was he who pointed out that the eight cows they were left with were too many if they ceased to send milk to the creamery and too few if they did not. The three with the best yield were kept, the others sold.

An end came with this. It would have been a similar finality, Bridget considered, when generations ago the greater part of the Lahardane acreage was lost playing cards with the O’Reillys. It grieved Henry that his work had been taken from him by misfortune, even though the work had begun to weary him, even though it was a comment of his that had brought about the reduction of what was left of the herd. As it was now, three cows would not manage, season after season, to consume the grass at their disposal. The fields would become ragged, thistles would seed themselves unchecked, nettles would spread. Helplessly, he would watch all that, without the heart or the strength to tackle matters with his scythe. ‘Leave it,’ Bridget’s orders were.

There was no sense in doing otherwise, no sense in catching his death out in the rain the way a young man never would. Drenched through his clothes, Henry had time and again returned from these fields to the kitchen, where Bridget had hung his sodden garments on the pulley rails. From five o’clock in the morning until dark he had worked on summer days with his sickle or his long-handled hook, trimming back the hedges. Every March when the grass of the hydrangea lawn began to grow, he had scraped away the lawnmower’s winter rust and oiled the axle. He did so still.

‘Ah no, sir, no.’ Bridget had refused the Captain’s suggestion that he could arrange for a woman to come over from Kilauran to help her in the house. As Hannah used to come over in the old days, he had urged, but Bridget said a strange woman about the place would be more trouble than she was worth. ‘Ah, sure, we’re getting on grand,’ she’d said.

The Captain knew they weren’t. They were obstinate in their ways, an obduracy nourished by pride. They were proud of Lahardane as they had maintained it, of the continuing part they had played in it, of managing it, of improvising, of making themselves more than the caretakers he had left behind. It was Henry who suggested how the pasture might be saved from neglect and deterioration in the future: for a small annual rent, and undertaking to maintain the fences, the O’Reillys agreed to have the grazing.

Of the visitor who had come again to the house one afternoon, more than a year ago now, it was only said that, being insane, strictly speaking he was not responsible for his intrusion. Henry said it reluctantly and Bridget, after prayer, reluctantly agreed; but in neither was resentment entirely dissipated. The Captain said it more wholeheartedly.

Lucy did not, again, write to Ralph, as she had known she wouldn’t, not even when a note came from him, as also she had known it would. The confusions of an afternoon, so strangely happening, calmed in retrospect, and yet for Lucy the afternoon had not dulled to greyness but had kept its colours as fresh as in a painting. Images of reality and of illusion still were there. The car stopped, and turned back. She lifted the tea-towels from the bushes. The man who’d come, whose presence was incidental and yet was not, knelt down to pray. Her father held her.

It is how things have happened, Ralph wrote. No one is to blame. What she had willed was not his way: that it was not was why first she’d loved him and still did. She had not known it then but only now: that all the letters in the world, all the longing, would not have made a difference. Until her life ended she would love a man who was married to someone else.

‘Tell me about Montemarmoreo,’ she asked at breakfast one morning, as if her father never had, and he repeated what he had told already. There were, again, the journeys to the races and to the Opera House, and Lucy was aware that her father hoped for what would never be: that out of a racecourse crowd or a theatre audience a man would step, as so long ago Ralph had stepped out of nowhere. Her father did not speak of this, but Lucy sensed such aspirations in his solicitude.

Their companionship – on Lucy’s side once edgy with resentment, on her father’s anxiously seeking too much – settled for what there was. She had rejected him was how it seemed to Lucy now, as it must have seemed to him at the time. She felt ashamed of that, and ashamed that she had not mourned her mother, that love’s selfishness had so unkindly got the upper hand. Circumstances had shaped an emptiness in her existence; and love’s ungainly passion belonged, with so much else, to the undemanding past. On her thirty-ninth birthday she and her father saw Nicholas Nickleby in the smart new cinema in Enniseala that had replaced the Picture House. They sat together far into the night when they returned to Lahardane, as sometimes now they did.

A few weeks later, on a fine November afternoon, they tended together the family graves at Kilauran, which Lucy in the past had always done on her own.

‘We are among our people,’ her father remarked, clipping away grass that had grown rank.

The stones were laid flat, as by tradition the Gault stones were, and the grass around them had grown high. Buttercup shoots sprawled in places over the lettering, clover softened the limestone edges.

Lucy rooted out herb Robert and ragwort and docks. In the time that had passed she had often reflected on the equanimity with which her father had listened to the ravings in their drawing-room. Simple man that he was, he might have gone that afternoon to find the rifle that had been fired from an upstairs window and with a soldier’s instinct might have threatened its use again. Instead, he had withdrawn from an occasion that was beyond him; and he had done so since.

‘One day, of course,’ he predicted now, ‘there’ll be no one here to do all this. Not that it’ll matter, since we do it for ourselves, don’t you think?’

She nodded, digging out another root. Their people would end when they did, all duty to them finished, all memory of them dead. Only the myths would linger, the stories that were told.

‘Oh, yes, all that,’ he agreed.

She swept away the grass cuttings that were scattered on the smooth grey surface of a gravestone. Sometimes she wondered if the races weren’t too much for him; it was ages since he had spent a morning with Aloysius Sullivan in the bar of the Central Hotel. ‘He’s slow, you’d notice,’ Lucy had heard Henry say. Slow on the stairs, less agile than he had been once, when he’d clambered through the trapdoor to the roof. Slow with his scythe in the apple orchard, with his spade when he dug the brambles. It was she who drove the car now, leaving him in it when she went away to shop, to pass from counter to counter in Enniseala with Bridget’s list, the steady handwriting unchanged since the days when Henry used to pass it over to Mrs McBride on the way back from the creamery. There had been a For Sale notice outside Mrs McBride’s shop for years, but recently it had been taken down. No one came to live there.

‘Well, it’s better anyway.’ Her father turned away to grimace when he ceased to kneel. ‘A bit better, lady?’

There was a place in a corner of the graveyard for depositing weeds and grass. She carried her debris, already withering, to it.

‘Much better,’ she said when she returned, and began to gather together the tools they’d used.

They drove into Enniseala then, since they were on the way there. She bought what she had to, known and greeted in all the shops. Often she wondered if she caused a nervousness in the people of Enniseala, since strange events must have left her strange: they could not be blamed for thinking that. But even so she always dawdled there now, for she had come to like a town she had been indifferent to in the past.

This afternoon she watched the swans swimming back and forth, or less gracefully parading on the banks they had made their own. She admired the reddish-pink valerian that hung from the high walls she passed on her way to the promenade. She noticed what her father had drawn her attention to when he first returned: the royal insignia still there beneath the green paint of the letter-boxes. She gazed down at the children playing on the rocks below the sea-wall; she watched the loads of seaweed drawn away. Sometimes she sat in the café of the bread shop next to the abandoned auction rooms, sometimes she sunned herself on the bandstand, but today she passed these places by, returning instead to the car, where her father was dozing over the Irish Times.

That same evening he talked about the Enniseala regattas and summer carnivals that were no more. And she remembered how Mr Sullivan had once brought news of the Blueshirts who had marched up the long main street, and of the racing cars that had roared through the town in the middle of the night, their circuit of Ireland half completed.

‘Remember how we went that evening to say good-bye to Mr Aylward?’ her father said. ‘How you looked for the deaf and dumb fisherman?’

On his way to bed he stood by the cluttered table in the hall, a scuffed leather-bound book he had picked up from it in his hand.

‘He taught me how to talk to him,’ she said. ‘Did I tell you that? He’d be waiting when I was going home from school.’

‘You can talk with your fingers, lady?’

‘Yes, I can.’

From where she stood, in the open doorway of the drawing-room, she showed him. The fisherman’s hands had been rough and scarred, freckles spreading on the backs of them when he was old, and yet the movements had made her want to make them herself. Their conversations were what infants might have said to one another, and often she had thought that no more should be demanded of an old man and a child who did not know one another well.

‘You were lonely then,’ her father said.

‘It doesn’t matter, being a little lonely.’

‘Well no, perhaps not.’

Vaguely, he put the book back on the table, the leather of its spine flapping where it had given way. Le Fanu’s Irish Life it was, his bookmark in it an electricity bill. For a moment his hand rested on the tattered leather, his thoughts not showing in his face, although often they did. He had been aware of her jealousy of a wife; he knew it was less painful than it had been. But none of that was ever said.

‘One day, lady, will you visit the cemetery in Switzerland? And Montemarmoreo too?’

‘Might we not go together to Montemarmoreo?’

‘You would like to?’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘During those years she was not always unhappy, you know.’

‘You’re tired, Papa.’

‘It’s difficult to explain. I only knew it.’

She watched him go, without the book he had picked up and then put down again. There had never been the convention of wishing one another good-night in this house and there was not now.

‘The bees have not left Lahardane,’ he said, looking down from halfway up the stairs. ‘I wonder if they ever will.’

In the drawing-room Lucy sat alone for a little longer, then drew the fire-guard in front of the embers that still glowed in the grate. She tidied the cushions and the chairs, closed the doors of the corner cupboard, easing them where they stuck and had to be pushed a little. Passing the bagatelle board, she set the marbles going among the pins. Two hundred and ten was her highest score, achieved when she was six, and she did not better it tonight.

For an instant when she looked back to see that everything was all right she saw the room as, once upon a time, fire might have ravaged it, and heard again the tormented voice. Often when she awoke from early-morning sleep she took with her from some unquiet dream the figure in bleak, black clothes crouched terrified in an armchair, the empty eyes. Once she’d seen the big old-fashioned bicycle propped against the wall near the lighthouse and, far away on the sands, the lanky form of the man who believed he was a murderer. She had watched him for a moment, not knowing why she did, not knowing why so easily she remembered and saw again the restless shuffle of the hands, the agitated fingers groping to touch each place of agony. On the sands he hadn’t moved from where he was but all the time stood staring at the sea.

*

Propped up on his pillows, the Captain listened for his daughter’s footsteps and heard them pass his door. For a moment in the night he was glad that they had tidied up the graves. Later he was aware of pain. It did not wake him.