The Story of Lucy Gault

‘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.’