The Story of Lucy Gault

Bridget said she didn’t know. She didn’t pause in her task of filling two tins with the mixture she had prepared.

She opened the oven door. The tray of tea things for the drawing-room was ready, the kettle beginning to sing on the range.

‘Good mushrooms, those,’ Henry said, picking one up from beside the sink.

*

Brushing her hair in her bedroom, Lucy didn’t hurry. From her dressing-table looking-glass her eyes stared back at her, so bright and so intent they seemed almost to belong to someone else. Her lips were parted in the beginning of a smile; her hair hung loosely, the ivory-backed brush still raised to it. Both heads would turn at once when she carried in the tray. ‘Well, we have met at last.’ The words were what she heard, not which voice said them; but it would be her father’s.

It could not spoil everything to look from the window, to see the car that had come, not that the sight of it would tell her anything; and not of course that it could be the old car with the dickey. But when she looked there was no car.

She changed her skirt and jumper for a dress. Would he have come by train to Enniseala? Or to Dungarvan, which would be a shorter journey? She tried to remember if there was a railway station at Dungarvan. More likely, he would have come by bus to Waterford and then on to Creally’s Crossroads. He would have walked the rest; more than an hour that would have taken, but quicker in the end than taking a train even if there was one.

She tied the belt of her dress and found a necklace. Again at her looking-glass, she smeared away the lipstick she had applied and changed it for a different shade. Would he be shy of her father? Would her father take to him? No one could not take to him; in spite of the trouble his presence brought, her father would want her happiness. Her father would want everything to be all right again.

She touched her cheeks with powder. She had been flushed but that was gone now. She wondered if Bridget guessed what had come into her thoughts, if she had noticed those moments of confusion. She wondered how he’d have changed.

She closed the door softly behind her and went downstairs. They looked at her, surprised, when she walked into the kitchen. Bridget had just replaced on its shelf the big brown bowl she used for mixing her bread ingredients, Henry was standing with his back to the range.

‘Did you wet the tea yet?’ she asked Bridget and Bridget said she hadn’t.

‘I’ll do it so.’

It would shock them, his coming to the house. And dressing up for him, for a married man, was more shocking still. She hadn’t thought of that, of how in their simple, uncomplicated lives they would feel.

She made the tea. Bridget had buttered bread and put more jam into the filling of a cake that had been bought in Kilauran, only half of it left. There was a bicycle outside the front door, Henry said, and Lucy imagined the conductor handing it down from the roof of the bus at Creally’s Crossroads, and Ralph’s hands reaching up for it. Of course he would have come with a bicycle. Knowing how long the journey from the crossroads was, of course he would have.

‘That’s lovely, Bridget,’ she said, picking up the tray. She carried it from the kitchen, along the passage to the hall. The front door was still open; her father had a way of leaving it like that, even when the weather was cold. She caught sight of the back wheel of the bicycle as she put the tray down on the long hall table that had become cluttered since her father’s return. It was his place for the white hat he wore when it was sunny; he threw his tie down there when he took it off on his way to work in the orchard. Bills had accumulated there, their torn brown envelopes beside them. Loose change and keys were scattered.

In the mirror that hung in the alcove at the bottom of the stairs she straightened the collar of her dress and pushed a strand of hair into place. Then she opened the drawing-room door, the tea-tray balanced on her free arm.

*

‘I saw the bicycle there and I coming down out of the woods,’ Henry said in the kitchen. ‘Sergeant Foley’s, I said to myself

‘What’s Foley want?’

‘It wasn’t his at all. When I examined it, it wasn’t.’

Henry described the bicycle: its dull black ironwork, mudguards peaked, the springs of the saddle a heavy coil, jutting out in front. Bridget didn’t listen. He’d thought it was the sergeant’s, Henry said, because it had the look of a Guard’s bicycle.

‘The next thing I thought it was maybe young O’Reilly’s. Until I looked in the window.’

Bridget paused in the washing of her baking board. ‘It’s never who she thinks?’

Slowly Henry shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you who it is,’ he said.

*

‘Come in, come in, lady,’ her father said.