The Story of Lucy Gault

She sat there, on a chair that had been in the kitchen until its back fell off. The sheepdog had not come in with her, turning away at the doorway from the cold air. She heard Henry’s footsteps in the yard and he said it was Horahan who had come. She didn’t know who Horahan was, only that it was the same name her father had said. She asked Henry and he told her. He took the tea-towels from her, saying he was on his way to the kitchen.

‘Those days Horahan’s not the full shilling,’ he said.

She stood in the doorway of the feed shed, watching Henry cross the yard to the house. It seemed neither here nor there that the man who was to blame for everything had come back to Lahardane, neither here nor there that he wasn’t the full shilling. Would Ralph have set out? Would he have driven just a little way? Today, this afternoon? Would that have accounted for the intensity of her intuition? Was, even now, a car backed into a gateway on an empty road, then turned around to go away?

‘Oh yes,’ she whispered, certain about what was left of a reality that hadn’t lasted. ‘It was today.’

She walked again in the orchard and in the garden that was overgrown. She felt a weariness in her body, as if suddenly she had become old. He would know. He would know that she suffered for her foolishness. One day a sorrowful reply to her letter would come, and she would want to write again herself, and would try and perhaps not be able to.

She wondered if the man who’d come in his place had gone by now, but when she passed from the garden into the yard and through the archway to the front of the house, the bicycle was still there. In the hall she could hear the voices. She might have turned away; she might have gone upstairs. But something seemed unfinished and she didn’t.

‘A drink?’ her father offered in the drawingroom. ‘Or the tea’s still warm, I’d say.’

She shook her head. She could tell from his glance that he guessed she’d been told who the man he’d found in the house was. She wondered when he had realized himself. She wondered why he hadn’t told him to go away.

‘Mr Horahan has been a soldier,’ her father said.

The unfinished embroidery of the figures on the strand was on the arm of the sofa, a pale-blue thread trailing from the eye of a needle. Colours she was waiting for were missing, blank patches here and there. She rolled the linen up, securing it with the needle, and returned it to her embroidery drawer.

‘Stay with us, lady,’ her father said.

She watched him pouring himself another drink. He poured her one even though she had declined a drink a moment ago. He carried it to her and she thanked him. A bird flapped against a window-pane, its wings beating in agitation before it recovered itself and flew off.

The man was muttering.

*

The time he was painting the windows at the asylum an inmate would suddenly be there, maybe two or three of them and they’d shake your hand through the bars, asking was there putty to spare and he’d roll them a few balls and put them on the inside window-sill. ‘Oh, I know who you are,’ one of them said one time and the others made a clamour, wanting to be told. ‘Don’t I know who you are?’ the sergeant in the drill yard said, and a man coming out of Phelan’s said it, bleary after drink. ‘Another cripple for Ireland,’ one of the lads said and the curtains blew out, blazing against the sky.

‘Every day I light the candle for the child.’

He raised his eyes to look around the room that hadn’t been repaired in any way, not even to put new panes in the windows, not even to clean the blackened walls. Charred nearly to nothing, the furniture was there, and splinters of glass all over the floor, the rags of the curtains hanging down. ‘Jeez, hurry on,’ the lads said. ‘Jeez, don’t look back.’

The splinters savaged him when he knelt. Droplets of blood were warm on his legs when he stood up again, and he said he was sorry for bringing more blood into the room.

‘No more than shadows,’ he said, and explained because it wouldn’t be known. No more than shadows in the smoke when he looked back and people were carrying the body.

*

‘This is my daughter, Mr Horahan. My daughter is the child who was here then.’

Upstairs a door softly banged, the way doors sometimes did when a breeze blew in from the sea, its handle rattling because that handle was loose. In the quietness of the room Lucy tried to say that she might have married the man she loved, that her father and her mother had been driven from their house, that her mother had never recovered from her distress. It was the truth; she had come to the drawing-room to say it because it was all that was left to say, but the words would not come. The flowers she had earlier arranged, white campanulas, were pale against the sun-browned wallpaper. Smoke curled lazily from her father’s cigarillo.

‘That’s a lovely evening for your journey back,’ her father said.