The Story of Lucy Gault

She thought she had misheard, so extraordinary did that politeness seem. Again there was the urge to speak of the destruction in their lives, of fear and chaos where there had been happiness once, of pain. But again her anger collapsed, unable to break out.

‘Well, now,’ her father said, and crossed the room to the door, opening it and standing there. ‘Go safely now,’ he said in the hall.

She went with him, as if he’d asked her to, but he hadn’t. Outside, the sun slanted over the gravel and the front-door steps. The sea in the distance was quiet. She might have wept but she had not and she did not now; she wondered if she ever would again. For a moment she looked into the features of the man who had returned after so long and saw there only madness. No meaning dignified his return; no order patterned, as perhaps it might have, past and present; no sense was made of anything.

‘Every day I light the candle,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ her father said. ‘Of course.’

Bicycle-clips were carefully put on and then the afternoon’s visitor rode off, a gangling figure on his big iron bicycle. They watched the bicycle disappear on the avenue, and when her father said he was sorry she knew from his tone that he realized why she had dressed herself up.

They walked a little way on the avenue, not saying anything before her anger broke, fiercely wrenched from her tiredness with an energy of its own. She cried out after the man who had gone, her anguish echoing in the trees of the avenue, her tears damp on her father’s clothes when he held her to him.

‘There now, there now,’ she heard his voice, the two words murmured, again and then again.

8

Henry and Bridget had not yet begun seriously to suffer from the elderly ailments that were later to incapacitate both of them. When their aches began – Henry’s knee, Bridget’s shoulder when it was damp – they trusted to Providence; when in his workshed one day Henry was aware of a tightening in his chest, he stood still and felt it go away. Bridget had become deaf in one ear, but maintained that the other would see her out.

A greater, and unexpected, calamity was the creamery’s declaration that the Lahardane milk was infected. It was discovered later that tuberculosis had spread in the herd: after the mandatory slaughter only eight cows would be left. Since the Captain’s return he had assisted Henry with the milking, in which he was not skilled. This and all it otherwise involved – driving the cattle in twice a day to the milking parlour, scalding the churns, hosing out the dairy – was already becoming too much for two old men, as it had been for Henry on his own. He had struggled on, managing better with the Captain’s assistance, but it was he who pointed out that the eight cows they were left with were too many if they ceased to send milk to the creamery and too few if they did not. The three with the best yield were kept, the others sold.

An end came with this. It would have been a similar finality, Bridget considered, when generations ago the greater part of the Lahardane acreage was lost playing cards with the O’Reillys. It grieved Henry that his work had been taken from him by misfortune, even though the work had begun to weary him, even though it was a comment of his that had brought about the reduction of what was left of the herd. As it was now, three cows would not manage, season after season, to consume the grass at their disposal. The fields would become ragged, thistles would seed themselves unchecked, nettles would spread. Helplessly, he would watch all that, without the heart or the strength to tackle matters with his scythe. ‘Leave it,’ Bridget’s orders were.

There was no sense in doing otherwise, no sense in catching his death out in the rain the way a young man never would. Drenched through his clothes, Henry had time and again returned from these fields to the kitchen, where Bridget had hung his sodden garments on the pulley rails. From five o’clock in the morning until dark he had worked on summer days with his sickle or his long-handled hook, trimming back the hedges. Every March when the grass of the hydrangea lawn began to grow, he had scraped away the lawnmower’s winter rust and oiled the axle. He did so still.

‘Ah no, sir, no.’ Bridget had refused the Captain’s suggestion that he could arrange for a woman to come over from Kilauran to help her in the house. As Hannah used to come over in the old days, he had urged, but Bridget said a strange woman about the place would be more trouble than she was worth. ‘Ah, sure, we’re getting on grand,’ she’d said.