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.
Five
* * *
1
Long after the funeral, when another year had begun, Lucy went through her father’s belongings and his clothes. Nothing she came across was a surprise. Folding away shirts and suits, she wondered if drama was finished with at last in the house that now was hers. He had drunk his whiskey to the end, she had not stopped him. He had known that death was creeping up on him; more than once he had remarked that nothing was more certain than that it should. He had smiled through this acceptance of nature’s strict economy and she had too, keeping company with him in his dismissal of morbid anticipation, remembering him as he had been while she made the slow journey of loving him again, forgiven for her unspoken reproaches.
Some of his belongings she kept: his sets of cufflinks; his watch; the stick he had taken to using when, once in a while, he accompanied her on her walks; the wedding ring he’d worn. She drove into Enniseala with his clothes, to give them to the women who collected for the charity of St Vincent de Paul. She put away the picture postcards he had kept. The bedroom that had been like a grave during its unoccupied years was a grave again, its door closed, never entered.
A certain formality passed from the house with the Captain’s death, a way of proceeding that belonged to his past, that he had valued and cherished, that had fallen into place as a matter of course on his return. ‘No. It is not necessary,’ Lucy laid down, not wishing either Bridget or Henry any longer to carry trays of dishes back and forth between the kitchen and the dining-room. It was she who now, more and more, looked after them rather than they who attended her. She took her place at the kitchen table again, as she had during her childhood and for years after it. In the adjustments that were made it was they whose convenience she saw to, not her own. Without complaint, the trays would have been carried to the dining-room and from it, had her father still been there: Lucy knew that nothing he or she could have said or done would have altered that.
Bridget continued to cook; Henry split logs in the yard, and milked, and did his best with the long grass in the orchard. On Sundays Lucy took them with her when she drove to Kilauran, arriving half an hour early for church so that they could go to Mass, all three of them remembering how years ago this, too, had been the other way around. Henry bought his cigarettes and then they waited for her outside the shop. Attending Mass, and seeing people afterwards, was an occasion Bridget had enjoyed since her girlhood, and she still did. That the gate-lodge was derelict now wasn’t mentioned when they passed it on their Sunday journeys. In the kitchen the talk was more about how Henry, when he’d married into Lahardane, had missed the sea and how, when he hadn’t settled for a while, Bridget had been unhappy, believing she had deprived him of his way of life. ‘But, sure, you get used to anything,’ Henry said, and he had, and it had been all right. A pedlar used to go about the roads at that time, with little floor rugs that came from Egypt, and buttons of all sizes and colours, and skewers for roasting that he made from the ash he cut, and sticks of chalk and brown jars of ink. You’d never see the like nowadays, you hadn’t for may be thirty years. Another man had called at Lahardane selling lamp mantles, and every year the Old Moore’s Almanac man had come. Tinkers mended the saucepans in the yard, the horses were taken four miles to be shod.
That was the talk now, and Lucy listened, hearing that on the day she was born it had been misty all morning, and that she might have been called Daisy or Alicia. The drawing-room chimney had gone on fire the first Christmas Eve she was alive. The wren-boys made up something about an infant for St Stephen’s Day. Going home once on the strand, Hannah heard a banshee.
‘No more than the wind,’ Henry said, ‘moaning down through the hollow in the cliffs.’
But Bridget said Hannah had seen a wispy form not a yard from where she stood.
*
The Captain’s wish was honoured. On a bright March morning in 1953, Lucy looked down at her mother’s grave.
Heloise Gault in her 66th year. Of Lahardane, Ireland.
The dark letters shone out from unpolished granite, and Lucy tried to see the face she remembered as it must have become with age. The cemetery in Bellinzona was small; no one else was there. She knelt and prayed.
Afterwards she ordered coffee in the café opposite the railway station. Everything was strange to her: never before had she left Ireland. The long train journeys in England and France and Switzerland had spread before her a foreignness she had encountered only in the novels she read. The language spoken by the waiter who brought her coffee was a language she had never heard spoken before, every word of it incomprehensible. Swiss walkers came in a bunch to fill the tables around her, their sticks and haversacks piled on to the unoccupied chairs. Somewhere in this town there was a kindly doctor.
Another journey took her across the Italian border. That evening in a small room in Montemarmoreo’s
one hotel she unpacked the blue suitcase she had once been assured was particularly her own, even though there hadn’t been an opportunity to have her initials pressed into the leather. She ordered food not knowing what would come.
In the early morning she found via Cittadella and the house of the shoemaker, whose wares were displayed in the downstairs windows. On the first-floor balcony that overlooked the street there was just enough room for a table and two chairs. She did not disturb the shoemaker, either then or later, only wondering if he was the son of the shoemaker of the past or if someone else had bought the business.
She walked about in cramped, congested streets. There was an altarpiece in the church that honoured St Cecilia. The public lighting was being improved, new lamp posts settled into the holes that had been excavated at the pavements’ edge, traffic diverted. She learnt her first Italian words: ingresso, chiuso, avanti. She found a restaurant her father had told her about, modest in a back street. Outside the town she found the finished marble quarries.
Her mother had belonged here. More than England, more than Lahardane, she had made this ordinary small town her own, and Italy her country. For Lucy there was still a shadow and the distant echo of a voice remembered, but in the bustle of the streets and on the road to the marble quarries she sensed a stranger. I shall remain a little longer, she wrote on a postcard to Bridget and Henry, and wondered if she too – through some new quirk of chance – would stay for ever.
She heard the story of St Cecilia. A woman in the church told her, a slight, gently spoken woman she had seen there before, who approached her from among the empty pews. The miraculous, the woman pointed out in English, was in the eyes of the altarpiece’s image. Together they looked at the pale-blue eyes and at the tresses of fair hair, the halo finished in gold leaf, the dress so light it seemed almost colourless, the lyre held delicately. As a child, the woman said, St Cecilia had heard all the world’s music that was yet to come.
The Story of Lucy Gault Page 19
