The Story of Lucy Gault

From where he stood at the edge of the steeply sloping field he could see a rabbit, and then another one, scuttling into a clump of undergrowth. So often you have wanted to come back to Lahardane. So many times I was foolish. Already, perfectly, he could remember where each word fell, how the lines broke on the single page that had been his for only a day. How could it be wrong of us?

How could it be? To sit down at the slatted table on the lawn, to walk once more on the strand, to meet her father and then to drive away? The digger’s engine spluttered before it gathered strength again. Undisturbed, the rabbits ran about.

Another Wednesday afternoon; by chance it would be that and they would notice and would say it. There’d be the sunlight through the chestnut branches, the white hall door half open. There’d be the silence of the cobbled yard, the rooks as still as stone on the high chimneys. There’d be her laughter and her smile, there’d be her voice. He wouldn’t want to go away. In all his life remaining he wouldn’t want to.

The digger’s driver clambered down and crossed the slope to say he’d come back and shoot the rabbits. Catch them in his tractor’s headlights and then begin to pick them off, maybe a hundred you’d catch in a night. A lifetime otherwise it would take to rid the place of them.

Ralph nodded. ‘Thanks,’ he said, and the man lit a cigarette, wanting to talk about the rabbits, wanting to have a break. ‘Come over any time,’ Ralph said. Next week, the man promised, and ambled back to his machine.

Even for a few minutes, even just to look in. How could it be wrong? ‘Lemybrien,’ he could say. ‘There’s been a felling of old oaks at Lemybrien.’ Casually at breakfast over the last cup of tea, the dishes not yet gathered from the table, he could say he should maybe go over and take a look at what there was. ‘While we’re still slack. I wouldn’t want to miss that timber.’ And sandwiches would be made to see him through the journey, and he’d wait for them, a flask filled too. Clonroche, then Ballyanne, not in a hurry passing through Lemybrien, because it would feel wrong to be in a hurry. He’d have no appetite for the sandwiches when he stopped and he’d wonder what to do with them and would throw them down for the birds before he drove on. Her father’s hand would be held out when he drove up and she wouldn’t be there at first and then would come from the house. He closed his eyes, yet none of it went away, and when it did he didn’t want it to.

Still playfully, the rabbits scampered. Back and forth the digger went. Another rock was added to the pile.

‘Oh, God!’ Ralph crunched the invocation out and felt tears warm behind his eyes. ‘Oh God, where is your pity now?’

7

Henry saw the visitor and wondered who it was. From among the trees high above the hydrangea lawn, where he was breaking twigs for kindling and tying them into bundles, he saw the figure at the hall door as hardly more than a shadow. While Henry watched, it passed through the open door, into the house.

Later that afternoon when Lucy brought mushrooms to the kitchen, Bridget said:

‘There’s a man come.’

Lucy had gathered the mushrooms in the orchard. She emptied them from a battered punnet on to the draining-board. ‘Who is it?’

Kneading dough for the bread she baked, Bridget shook her head. The front-door bell hadn’t sounded, she said.

‘Your father called down from the hall for me to bring in tea when I’d be ready with it.’ Whoever it was, she said, had maybe just walked in. ‘Your father was asking were you around.’

‘Me?’

‘He asked were you about.’

Visitors weren’t frequent. More than a year ago Mr Sullivan had ceased to drive his car. The man who’d arrived one morning to demonstrate the vacuum cleaner the Captain later bought had been the first stranger for months. When O’Reilly’s man came, or Mrs O’Reilly with a bottle at Christmas, or the E.S.B, man to read the meter, it wasn’t to the front door. Sometimes, not often, the postman didn’t arrive until late in the day, but the postman wouldn’t have been invited into the drawing-room for tea.

‘I have the kettle on to boil,’ Bridget said, wiping her floury hands on her apron.

‘I’ll take in the tea.’

She didn’t trust herself to say more. Had Bridget heard a voice? Had any bit of conversation reached her from the drawing-room before the door was closed? Lucy didn’t ask. Shivers of excitement, cool and pleasurable, came and went all over her body, gently pricking her skin. Who else would just walk in?

*

Henry carried his bundles of twigs into the shed that had been the feed shed when hens and turkeys were kept in greater numbers. He loosened the string he’d used to bind them and slipped it off. He stacked them tidily with those he’d stacked already.

‘Who’s after coming?’ he asked in the kitchen, picking shreds of brushwood from the sleeves of his jersey.