The Story of Lucy Gault

But conversation was still easier with Bridget or with Henry than with his daughter. For them he recalled how he had wandered so aimlessly in the early days of his mourning, drifting on to this train or that, his movements dictated only once in a while by some half-lost sentiment or predilection. He recalled, too, idling one day on a seat in a park and thinking of the caretakers he had left behind in Ireland. Smoking one of his slim cigarillos, he had found himself reflecting that they would have become as old as he was, had worried that the herd might not still support them, and about their circumstances if it did not. He had wondered – but did not say it now – if they were still alive.

‘We could fix the gate-lodge up,’ he offered Bridget. ‘If you would like to return there.’

‘Ah no, sir, no. Not unless you’d rather that yourself.’

‘It’s not I who should rather one thing or another, Bridget. My debt’s to you.’

‘Ah no, sir, no.’

‘You brought my daughter up.’

‘We did what any people would. We did the best we could. We’d rather stop on in the house, sir, if it’s the same. If it’s not a presumption, sir.’

‘Of course it’s not.’

It was Bridget who had told him how his daughter’s limp had lessened with the years and how a stoicism had developed in her as a child when those same years failed her, how faith had still been kept, love shattered. Cutting away the brambles in the orchard or sealing the perforations in the lead of his roof with dabs of Seccotine, the Captain reflected that it was humbling to hear in this way about his own child, to have light thrown on her disposition as it had become. Yet it would have been surprising had he and she not been strangers, and he accepted that. He tried to imagine her at fourteen, at seventeen, at twenty; but his memory of her as an infant in his arms, or when he had been concerned about her as a child too much on her own, more potently intervened. Now, there was her seclusion in this gaunt old house, and it concerned him that she never went in to Enniseala, that as an adult she had never walked in its long main street, that she hardly remembered the swans on the water of the estuary, or the promenade, or the bandstand, or the squat little lighthouse she had known in childhood. Did she not wish to shop in better shops than the general store in Kilauran? How did she manage for a dentist?

In the dining-room, when he asked, he learnt that a dentist came once in a while from Dungarvan; that Dr Birthistle kept up a weekly practice in Kilauran, as Dr Carney had before him; that on Sundays a bright-faced young curate came out from Enniseala to the corrugated Church of Ireland church. But it was Bridget who recalled for him the days in his long absence when something out of the ordinary had happened: the icy morning when the pump in the yard froze, a Sunday when her nieces came to show her their First Communion dresses, the sunny afternoon when Canon Crosbie reported that France had fallen. It had been sunny in Bellinzona too; without an effort he remembered that.

‘I still have these,’ he said in the dining-room, and when Bridget came to collect the plates and vegetable dishes the table was strewn with picture postcards of Italian towns and landscape. Politely, so Bridget reported in the kitchen, Lucy nodded over each in turn before making a little pile of them.

Electricity came to Lahardane because for his daughter’s sake the Captain felt there should be that convenience. He bought an Electrolux vacuum cleaner from a salesman who came to the door, and one day brought back to the house a pressure-cooker. Bridget took to the Electrolux but put aside the pressure-cooker as dangerous.

From Danny Condon of the garage at Kilauran the Captain bought a motor car. It was a pre-war Morris Twelve with the sloping back of the period, green and black. The car that had been left behind in 1921, with solid rubber tyres, had even then been something of an antique and hardly ever used. In a shed in the yard robins had since nested between the folds of its hood, their droppings darkly staining its brasswork, dust dulling its gloss. Danny Condon took it, reducing the price of the Morris by a little.

The buying of the car was another attempt on the Captain’s part to rescue his daughter from her isolation. On the avenue and on their journeys to the cinema in Enniseala he taught her how to drive. ‘Today, the races?’ he suggested and they would set out for Lismore or Clonmel. He took her to the Opera House in Cork, dinner first in the Victoria Hotel, where an old woman once stood up and in a quavering voice sang the last few lines of an aria from Tannhäuser. The diners applauded and the Captain was reminded of the afternoon in the Citta Alta, the tunes of Tosca before military music was commanded. He spoke of that afternoon and was listened to politely.

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