The Story of Lucy Gault

by William Trevor

  ‘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. N
ot 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 drawing-room. ‘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 bicycl
e 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.

  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.