The Story of Lucy Gault

The man in the armchair by the bagatelle table didn’t look in her direction. His manner was nervous, the fingers of one hand rubbing the knuckles of the other, his head held at a slant. His suit was of black serge, the badge of the Pioneer temperance movement in one of the lapels. A tie was knotted tightly into a shabby collar. Bicycle-clips still gripped the turn-ups of the dark serge trousers.

‘Tea.’ She dragged the word out of herself, and was aware that the man had raised his head to look at her. His eyes were empty of expression; a hollowness in his features gave him a distinctive look. His hands reached down to pull his bicycle-clips off.

‘Ah, tea,’ her father said, and there was the rattle of the cups as they were settled on their saucers. ‘Or would you prefer a glass of whiskey, Mr Horahan?’

He couldn’t take whiskey, the man said, and seemed not to notice that tea had been brought in. Her father was saying that the man’s shoulder was all right, telling her that he had asked about it, that he’d been told it had never been a hindrance. He hadn’t recognized their visitor when he’d found him in the hall, her father said, but he remembered the name as soon as he heard it. ‘Mr Horahan,’ he said, and added that he’d just been telling Mr Horahan that bygones were bygones.

She didn’t understand. She didn’t know who the man was. She didn’t understand what was being said. She’d never seen the man before.

‘A mineral if you’d have it,’ he said, touching the badge on his lapel.

She turned and went away then. She heard her father calling after her. He opened the door she had closed. He called out again in the hall, saying it was all right. But she was outside by then, running over the gravel.

*

‘But in the name of God,’ Bridget distractedly repeated, ‘what’s he want? Why’s he come here?’

She reached up to the mantel-shelf for the rosary beads she kept there. She closed her eyes, leaning against the wall where she stood, her face as white as the flour that still powdered the black material of her dress.

From a chair drawn out from the table Henry watched her fingers working the beads, her lips silently beseeching. Then the drawing-room bell shook on its coiled spring, summoning attention. Bridget opened her eyes. She couldn’t enter that room, she said, and Henry went instead. It was the first time any bell except the hall-door bell had sounded in the house since the Captain and his wife had left it twenty-nine years ago. That registered in Bridget’s consciousness, slipping through her perplexity and her outraged sensibilities.

‘He’s t.t.,’ Henry said when he returned. ‘He wants lemonade.’ He rooted in one of the wall cupboards for lemonade crystals.

‘They’re old,’ Bridget said when he found a bottle in which there were some left.

‘They’ll do.’ Henry tipped what there was into a glass, which he filled up with cold water from the tap. It should be hot, Bridget said, in order to dissolve the crystals.

‘But Mother of God,’ she suddenly cried out, ‘what are we thinking of to be giving the man lemonade?’

*

‘I’m afraid you’ve upset my daughter,’ the Captain said in the drawing-room. ‘To tell you the truth I still didn’t know who you were when I brought you in from the hall.’

‘These times I’ve no employment, sir. The day you were out on the promenade with Mr Sullivan, sir, I was after finishing at the Camp.’

‘You were a soldier?’

‘I had no employment the day I seen you, sir. I got employment with Ned Whelan since. He took me on with him on account I would have experience with laying roads up at the Camp.’

Henry came with the lemonade, but it seemed to the Captain that it was not required after all. The loquaciousness of the man who’d been wandering about in the hall ceased abruptly. He shrank back into his chair when Henry approached him. Not knowing what to do, Henry put the glass of lemonade on the floor.

‘We’re in the kitchen, if you’d pull the bell again,’ he said before he went. He had taken his hat off. He glanced back apprehensively before he closed the door.

‘Who’s that man, sir?’

‘Henry works for us.’

‘I’m careful with a stranger, sir.’

‘Mr Horahan, why have you come out here?’

‘Ned Whelan let me go two days back, sir. What I’m telling you is in case you wouldn’t know it, sir. How it is with me, sir.’

The Captain drank the cup of tea he had poured for himself. Then he said he was at a loss.

His visitor was welcome, he added; bygones were bygones, he repeated; in no way did he wish to be inhospitable. All the same he was at a loss.

‘Time has settled our hash for us, Mr Horahan. But for all that it might have been better if you hadn’t come out here again.’

It occurred to him as he spoke that the man had come looking for work, since he had said he was unemployed. It was extraordinary that he might have, that having once attempted to burn the house down he should now return with such an end in mind. It seemed impossible, but even so the Captain said:

‘I’m afraid we’ve nothing to offer you here. If you were thinking of work.’