The Story of Lucy Gault

In her room, she replaced from among the clothes that had been packed already the vest that had been lost. He never went any other way, Paddy Lindon used to say, when he’d be heading for the processions in Dungarvan or for the Sunday hurling. When his luck was in, a cart would go by on the road and he’d hail it.

*

‘This is specially yours,’ her papa said.

He had gone back to Domville’s to get it. It was blue, not like the other suitcases, and smaller because she was small herself. Leather, even though it was blue, he said, and showed her the keys that fitted its lock. ‘We mustn’t lose the keys,’ he said. ‘Shall I keep one?’

She couldn’t smile, she didn’t want to cry. All her things, he said, all her precious things would fit in it, the flintstones, the dagger stick.

‘One day we’ll have L.G. put on the lid.’

‘Thank you, Papa,’ she said.

‘You go and put your things in it.’

But in her room the blue suitcase remained empty on the window seat, its lid closed, one of the keys that opened its lock still tied to its handle.

*

‘I understand,’ Bridget said when it was explained to her that it might be a little time before some at least of the possessions left behind were sent for. The instruction was given that Henry and she should walk through the rooms occasionally, since things sometimes went wrong in an empty house. Lucy heard all that.

The sheets for draping the furniture were ready in the hall. Upstairs on the first landing there was a pile for the jumble sale, the clothes they didn’t want to take with them. Some of Lucy’s were there too, as if everything now was being taken for granted.

‘Oh now, you mustn’t, darling.’ Her mama was in the doorway of her bedroom but Lucy didn’t look up, her face pressed hard into her pillow. Then her mama came in and put her arms around her. She wiped away the tears and there was the same scent on her handkerchief, always the same it was. It would be all right, her mama said. She promised it would be.

‘We have to say good-bye to Mr Aylward,’ her papa said later, finding her in the apple orchard.

She shook her head, but then he took her hand and they walked through the fields and along the strand to Kilauran. The O’Reillys’ dog watched them from the top of the cliffs, knowing better than to follow them, because her papa was there.

‘Couldn’t I stay with Henry and Bridget?’ she asked.

‘Ah no, no,’ her papa said.

The fishermen were spreading out their nets. They saluted, and her papa saluted them back. He said something about the weather and one of them said it was grand altogether these days. Lucy looked about for the fisherman who talked with his fingers, but he wasn’t there. She asked her papa and he said that man was maybe still out with his boat.

‘I’d be all right with Henry and Bridget,’ she said.

‘Ah no, darling, no.’

She reached up for his hand, turning her head away so that he wouldn’t know she was trying not to cry. When they came to the schoolroom he lifted her up to see in at the window. Everything was tidy because it was the holidays, everything left as Mr Aylward said it must be, the four empty tables, the benches pulled in to them, the charts hanging up. Bayonets were first made in Bayonne.Cider is the juice of apples. The blackboard was clear, the duster folded by the chalk box. The shiny maps – rivers and mountains, the counties of England and Ireland – were rolled up on the shelf.

‘We need a bit of time,’ her papa said in Mr Aylward’s house, his head inclined in her direction, and she knew he didn’t mean all three of them when he said we.

‘Ah, well, of course,’ Mr Aylward said. ‘Of course.’

‘It breaks my heart,’ her papa said. ‘To tell you the truth.’

Yet what else could he have done, he asked Mr Aylward, when he’d looked down at the shadows standing there, knowing there would be petrol somewhere as well, knowing that whoever was there had poisoned the dogs? He’d been nervous, firing in the dark, he said. No wonder he’d never made a soldier.

‘There isn’t any man in a family wouldn’t have done the same,’ Mr Aylward said.

A sheepdog from Lahardane had gone on to poisoned land before, Henry had said; not that that dog had died, but even so. Henry wanted everything to be all right, pretending too.

‘You keep the poetry up, girl,’ Mr Aylward said. ‘She’s right good at learning her poetry, Captain.’

‘She’s a good little girl.’

Mr Aylward kissed her, saying good-bye. Her papa finished what was in the glass he’d been given. He shook hands with Mr Aylward, and Mr Aylward said that it should come to this. Then they went away.

‘Why’d they bring petrol with them?’ she asked.

‘One day I’ll tell you about all that.’