The Story of Lucy Gault

She swept away the grass cuttings that were scattered on the smooth grey surface of a gravestone. Sometimes she wondered if the races weren’t too much for him; it was ages since he had spent a morning with Aloysius Sullivan in the bar of the Central Hotel. ‘He’s slow, you’d notice,’ Lucy had heard Henry say. Slow on the stairs, less agile than he had been once, when he’d clambered through the trapdoor to the roof. Slow with his scythe in the apple orchard, with his spade when he dug the brambles. It was she who drove the car now, leaving him in it when she went away to shop, to pass from counter to counter in Enniseala with Bridget’s list, the steady handwriting unchanged since the days when Henry used to pass it over to Mrs McBride on the way back from the creamery. There had been a For Sale notice outside Mrs McBride’s shop for years, but recently it had been taken down. No one came to live there.

‘Well, it’s better anyway.’ Her father turned away to grimace when he ceased to kneel. ‘A bit better, lady?’

There was a place in a corner of the graveyard for depositing weeds and grass. She carried her debris, already withering, to it.

‘Much better,’ she said when she returned, and began to gather together the tools they’d used.

They drove into Enniseala then, since they were on the way there. She bought what she had to, known and greeted in all the shops. Often she wondered if she caused a nervousness in the people of Enniseala, since strange events must have left her strange: they could not be blamed for thinking that. But even so she always dawdled there now, for she had come to like a town she had been indifferent to in the past.

This afternoon she watched the swans swimming back and forth, or less gracefully parading on the banks they had made their own. She admired the reddish-pink valerian that hung from the high walls she passed on her way to the promenade. She noticed what her father had drawn her attention to when he first returned: the royal insignia still there beneath the green paint of the letter-boxes. She gazed down at the children playing on the rocks below the sea-wall; she watched the loads of seaweed drawn away. Sometimes she sat in the café of the bread shop next to the abandoned auction rooms, sometimes she sunned herself on the bandstand, but today she passed these places by, returning instead to the car, where her father was dozing over the Irish Times.

That same evening he talked about the Enniseala regattas and summer carnivals that were no more. And she remembered how Mr Sullivan had once brought news of the Blueshirts who had marched up the long main street, and of the racing cars that had roared through the town in the middle of the night, their circuit of Ireland half completed.

‘Remember how we went that evening to say good-bye to Mr Aylward?’ her father said. ‘How you looked for the deaf and dumb fisherman?’

On his way to bed he stood by the cluttered table in the hall, a scuffed leather-bound book he had picked up from it in his hand.

‘He taught me how to talk to him,’ she said. ‘Did I tell you that? He’d be waiting when I was going home from school.’

‘You can talk with your fingers, lady?’

‘Yes, I can.’

From where she stood, in the open doorway of the drawing-room, she showed him. The fisherman’s hands had been rough and scarred, freckles spreading on the backs of them when he was old, and yet the movements had made her want to make them herself. Their conversations were what infants might have said to one another, and often she had thought that no more should be demanded of an old man and a child who did not know one another well.

‘You were lonely then,’ her father said.

‘It doesn’t matter, being a little lonely.’

‘Well no, perhaps not.’

Vaguely, he put the book back on the table, the leather of its spine flapping where it had given way. Le Fanu’s Irish Life it was, his bookmark in it an electricity bill. For a moment his hand rested on the tattered leather, his thoughts not showing in his face, although often they did. He had been aware of her jealousy of a wife; he knew it was less painful than it had been. But none of that was ever said.

‘One day, lady, will you visit the cemetery in Switzerland? And Montemarmoreo too?’

‘Might we not go together to Montemarmoreo?’

‘You would like to?’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘During those years she was not always unhappy, you know.’

‘You’re tired, Papa.’

‘It’s difficult to explain. I only knew it.’

She watched him go, without the book he had picked up and then put down again. There had never been the convention of wishing one another good-night in this house and there was not now.

‘The bees have not left Lahardane,’ he said, looking down from halfway up the stairs. ‘I wonder if they ever will.’