The Story of Lucy Gault

The ex-soldier’s awkward occupation of the armchair he had hunched himself into was confirmation of the unease he referred to. From time to time, while silences gathered or his fragmentary talk continued, his hands touched his clothes in different places, appearing to search for something. Abruptly, they would become still and then the knuckles of one were again rubbed by the fingers and palm of the other. His eyes squinted perpetually to the floor, to the rugs that covered most of the wide floorboards, to the corners of the wainscoting.

‘You mightn’t have known it, sir. That the two lads moved away altogether.’

‘Which lads are these, Mr Horahan?’

‘They’re gone this long time, sir.’

‘The boys who came out that night, is this? They’d have emigrated, would they?’

The Captain remembered the gasp of regret and fear that had caught in him somewhere when he realized he had wounded one of the youths who were standing on the grass, the relief there’d been when the boy hadn’t fallen down. The boy had stumbled forward a few paces before his companions reached for him.

‘It was an accidental thing,’ he said. ‘There was no intention to wound. I’m sorry it occurred.’

He lit one of his small cigars and, feeling in need of it, crossed the room to pour himself some whiskey. On the way, he caught a glimpse of the bicycle that was propped near one of the windows and he wondered if it was the one that had been ridden to the house twice before. He wondered how Horahan’s two companions had got him back to Enniseala on the night he had been injured. Three bicycles between them could not have been easy to manage. He poured more whiskey than he’d intended. Slowly he went back to his chair.

‘There’s no one would say it, sir. The girl you were going with wouldn’t say it to you on account it was too terrible to say to any man. The same as there’s people in Enniseala wouldn’t say it yet. In a shop they wouldn’t. Nor my mother herself in her lifetime, God rest her. Nor the lads above at the Camp. There isn’t a man working for Ned Whelan would say it out, sir.’

‘And would you tell me what they won’t say, Mr Horahan?’

The Captain spoke softly, estimating that he might do better in this conversation if he did. He remembered the mother who’d been referred to – stony-faced when he visited the house, drably dressed, with carpet slippers. She’d been as hostile as her husband, although she hadn’t spoken.

‘The lights would go up in the Picture House, sir, before you’d hear the Soldiers’ Song. In the crowd going out nothing’d be said, sir. Not by a man or by a woman. You’d be done drilling in the barrack yard and it’d be the same the whole time. You’d be taking your grub and not a word said. It was Our Lady brought you back, sir.’

With a pity that came so suddenly it startled him, the Captain imagined this afflicted man at the army Camp, strange and solitary in a drill yard, the butt of whispers behind his back, struggling in his sleep against dreams that frightened him. He glimpsed him standing properly to attention in Enniseala’s picture house while the national anthem was played. Did the empty screen he stared at fill with whatever were the figments of his torment? Were they there again on the streets, by the sea, on the banks of the estuary where the swans were?

‘The day I seen you out walking on the promenade I was addressed by ‘Our Lady, sir.’

*

A few bees hovered about the hives, most of them at work inside. The bees never stung her, but once a wasp had been in her shoe when she put it on and her mother had rubbed something cold on the place and read to her for the whole morning from the green Grimms’ book. And a long time later, when her mother wasn’t there any more, Henry had found a hornets’ nest in a crack on the pear-tree wall. ‘Sometimes I think the strand, or where the crossing stones are,’ she’d said when Ralph asked her which her favourite place was. ‘Sometimes I think the orchard.’ They’d picked the Beauty of Bath, and they were ripe again now, streaked pink and red like Hannah’s cheeks when last she’d seen her. In the sunny corner Bridget’s tea-towels were thrown over the blackcurrant bushes to dry. Stiff as card they had become. She picked them up in case it would rain later.

One of the sheepdogs ambled over to her in the yard. She stroked the smooth, dark head and felt it pressed against her thigh. When a fire was kept going in the feed shed she used to sit by it in winter, as Bridget once told her she had too when she was a child. Lucy went there now, into its shadowy dark. There hadn’t been a fire there since, years ago, its purpose had changed. ‘Will we store the wood here?’ Henry had asked her, pretending that her opinion was valuable. Eleven she’d been.