‘Yes, perhaps we should go back.’
When she had hesitated about marriage he had pressed her. He had listened to her doubts, allaying them with laughter that was genuine and fond. It had not been humility that had held her back, not lack of confidence in her ability for what lay ahead – more like caution that, without quite knowing why, she felt wasn’t out of place. All this Ralph remembered now, as if time had waited to make sense of it.
‘A pity they’ve been let go.’ She looked back at the untended ruins. Among them the cows that grazed the field sought shade when the sun was hot, trampling the growth of nettles. It seemed odd to Ralph that that was what she said, and yet of course it was not.
‘Yes, it’s a pity.’
They climbed over the gate on to the road because that was easier than struggling with its rusty bolt. Bicycles were propped against the shiny pale-blue wall of Logan’s, its shop open in the evenings for as long as there was trade in the bar.
They talked about the day, what news had been passed on in the sawmills. When first they’d met he had confessed that once he couldn’t see himself a timber merchant for the rest of his life. Often she had brought that up and as if she had now, he said:
‘It’s what I am.’
Bewildered, she frowned, and smiled when he explained. They smiled together then.
‘I don’t want anything else,’ Ralph said.
It slipped out easily; he didn’t have to look away, could even take her hand. In her deep brown eyes was all the love that made their life together pleasurable.
‘How nice you are!’ she whispered.
They crossed the narrow bridge and then there was the bungalow where his parents lived, a smell of tobacco in the air. Bulky and grey-haired, his pipe gripped tightly in the centre of his mouth, Ralph’s father was unhurriedly watering his flowerbeds. He waved and they waved back. ‘It’s just you’d maybe be interested,’ the lorry driver had said.
What had never felt like deception had felt like it ever since. Keeping his own secret, obscuring it with vagueness when ages ago someone had asked too much about that summer in Enniseala, had been no more than protecting what was precious. It was more now. Past and present had somehow become one. What was Lucy thinking in this moment? What did she think when each morning she woke to another brightening half-light? That he had heard the news? That he would know what to do, that he would find some way?
The child lay undisturbed. No dream had frightened her, no sound shattered her empty peace. One cheek was a little reddened from where she’d rested it on her curled-up fingers.
*
When the Captain realized that since his wife’s death he had lost something of his military bearing – that with an old man’s carelessness he had let himself go, that he shambled when he was tired – he made up for these lapses in the care he took, for his daughter’s sake, with his dress and his appearance. He had his hair cut regularly in Enniseala. He clipped his fingernails close; he knotted his tie with care. Unfailingly every morning he polished his shoes, and had the heels replaced before it was entirely necessary.
But conversation was still easier with Bridget or with Henry than with his daughter. For them he recalled how he had wandered so aimlessly in the early days of his mourning, drifting on to this train or that, his movements dictated only once in a while by some half-lost sentiment or predilection. He recalled, too, idling one day on a seat in a park and thinking of the caretakers he had left behind in Ireland. Smoking one of his slim cigarillos, he had found himself reflecting that they would have become as old as he was, had worried that the herd might not still support them, and about their circumstances if it did not. He had wondered – but did not say it now – if they were still alive.
‘We could fix the gate-lodge up,’ he offered Bridget. ‘If you would like to return there.’
‘Ah no, sir, no. Not unless you’d rather that yourself.’
‘It’s not I who should rather one thing or another, Bridget. My debt’s to you.’
‘Ah no, sir, no.’
‘You brought my daughter up.’
‘We did what any people would. We did the best we could. We’d rather stop on in the house, sir, if it’s the same. If it’s not a presumption, sir.’
‘Of course it’s not.’
It was Bridget who had told him how his daughter’s limp had lessened with the years and how a stoicism had developed in her as a child when those same years failed her, how faith had still been kept, love shattered. Cutting away the brambles in the orchard or sealing the perforations in the lead of his roof with dabs of Seccotine, the Captain reflected that it was humbling to hear in this way about his own child, to have light thrown on her disposition as it had become. Yet it would have been surprising had he and she not been strangers, and he accepted that. He tried to imagine her at fourteen, at seventeen, at twenty; but his memory of her as an infant in his arms, or when he had been concerned about her as a child too much on her own, more potently intervened. Now, there was her seclusion in this gaunt old house, and it concerned him that she never went in to Enniseala, that as an adult she had never walked in its long main street, that she hardly remembered the swans on the water of the estuary, or the promenade, or the bandstand, or the squat little lighthouse she had known in childhood. Did she not wish to shop in better shops than the general store in Kilauran? How did she manage for a dentist?
In the dining-room, when he asked, he learnt that a dentist came once in a while from Dungarvan; that Dr Birthistle kept up a weekly practice in Kilauran, as Dr Carney had before him; that on Sundays a bright-faced young curate came out from Enniseala to the corrugated Church of Ireland church. But it was Bridget who recalled for him the days in his long absence when something out of the ordinary had happened: the icy morning when the pump in the yard froze, a Sunday when her nieces came to show her their First Communion dresses, the sunny afternoon when Canon Crosbie reported that France had fallen. It had been sunny in Bellinzona too; without an effort he remembered that.
‘I still have these,’ he said in the dining-room, and when Bridget came to collect the plates and vegetable dishes the table was strewn with picture postcards of Italian towns and landscape. Politely, so Bridget reported in the kitchen, Lucy nodded over each in turn before making a little pile of them.
*
Electricity came to Lahardane because for his daughter’s sake the Captain felt there should be that convenience. He bought an Electrolux vacuum cleaner from a salesman who came to the door, and one day brought back to the house a pressure-cooker. Bridget took to the Electrolux but put aside the pressure-cooker as dangerous.
From Danny Condon of the garage at Kilauran the Captain bought a motor car. It was a pre-war Morris Twelve with the sloping back of the period, green and black. The car that had been left behind in 1921, with solid rubber tyres, had even then been something of an antique and hardly ever used. In a shed in the yard robins had since nested between the folds of its hood, their droppings darkly staining its brasswork, dust dulling its gloss. Danny Condon took it, reducing the price of the Morris by a little.
The buying of the car was another attempt on the Captain’s part to rescue his daughter from her isolation. On the avenue and on their journeys to the cinema in Enniseala he taught her how to drive. ‘Today, the races?’ he suggested and they would set out for Lismore or Clonmel. He took her to the Opera House in Cork, dinner first in the Victoria Hotel, where an old woman once stood up and in a quavering voice sang the last few lines of an aria from Tannhäuser. The diners applauded and the Captain was reminded of the afternoon in the Città Alta, the tunes of Tosca before military music was commanded. He spoke of that afternoon and was listened to politely.
*
For Ralph, it was always easier in the sawmills. Practicality brought relief; emotion was belittled by the hum of the saws and the rasp of planes, the men intent and careful, the smell of sweat and resin and dust. He was in charge and had to be in charge. But too readily, w
hen he climbed the ladder-way to the office that looked down on the machinery and the men, when the noise fell away but still was there less loudly after he had closed the door, his thoughts escaped. Attention to orders and invoices and the columns in account books, concern about signs of wear in a driving belt or a saw gone blunt, the counting of the weekly wages, were tasks that suffered unintended interruption; and as from sleep, he would return minutes later to where he was, to stare in bewilderment at what he held in his hand or what was open before him.
Often his father came to the office, to share what had to be done that day. His father did not remark upon these moments of abstraction, the sudden crossing of the bare-boarded office floor in an attempt to disguise them, back turned for too long. Guile was not Ralph’s way: his father would say that. The men would say it when the saws went quiet at midday, when they sat with their sandwiches, outside in the sun if it was warm. People would say it in Logan’s bar, the evening drinkers, the women who came to shop in the grocery, people who had known Ralph all his life. Not for an instant was he doubted, as he was not in the house he had brought a wife to; not for an instant in the bungalow that had been built for his mother and his father.
Yet what became a habit began. ‘I’ll walk to Doonan,’ he would say when he returned to the house in the evenings, and would walk in this direction or that in order – so he knew it seemed – to ease away the rigours of the day, the worries left behind when things had not gone well, when a part for a machine was not yet available or there was failure again to deliver what had been promised. Lies that were not quite lies – slight deception, hardly there, the bluster of pretence – coloured every day. He had always despised all that.
‘Were Cassidy’s heifers out?’ his wife would ask when he returned from his evening walks. Or, ‘Have they begun the tarring at Rossmore?’
And he would say, although he hadn’t noticed. He could not bear to hurt her, yet her contentment seemed unnatural. Why did she feel no pain, since so much pain was there?
‘You used to tell me more.’ She would smile away what might have been mistaken for a complaint and he would say the tinkers were back at Healy’s Cross. Or say that Mrs Pierce had cut her fuchsia early. Or that the stream was running over at Doonan.
She was particular about the house, and he liked that quality in her, the care she took, not being slapdash. He liked the food she cooked; he liked the rooms kept clean, the way she so easily comforted their child. If ever he had told her what he had suppressed she would have listened in her careful, serious way, not interrupting. ‘In fact, I told nobody,’ he might have ended his confession. ‘It wasn’t only you.’ But it was too late for confessions now, too cruel that she should see a girl in a white dress, and Mr Ryall’s car, and tea laid out; too cruel that she should be there on the shore when the high waves splattered the rain with foam.
‘I’m thinking I should buy Malley’s slope,’ he said one evening.
‘The field?’
‘If you can call it that. Waste land more like.’
‘Why would you want waste land, though?’
‘I’d clear it to grow ash on. And maybe maple.’
An investment, he said. Something to take an interest in, he did not add; something to keep him where he belonged; a stake in the future that would give the future shape before it happened.
‘Is Malley wanting to sell?’
‘I doubt he ever thought anyone would want those few acres.’
It had become almost dark in the room where they sat and he sensed more treachery in not wanting to put on the lights. It was she who did so. Her happy face was there then, her dark hair loosening, as it sometimes did at this time of day. He watched her drawing down the blinds before she came to sit near him.
6
‘You should have better clothes, lady.’
Her mother had had a coat made in Mantua, pearls strung for her at a stall on the Ponte Vecchio. Her mother was never less than smart, and had acquired Italian ways and taken to Italian fashions. Her mother had delighted in the cherubs of Bellini, was kind to waiters and hotel maids, and spoke Italian with a natural ease. Her mother was recognized by beggars on the streets, her generosity famous in Montemarmoreo.
In the dining-room Lucy listened, and nodded now and again. ‘I used to wear her dresses,’ she said.
‘Well yes, of course.’
‘They’re all worn out now.’
‘Will we buy you a few new ones?’
She shook her head. Her clothes were what she chose to wear. She looked away, at the unlit fire in the grate, the black mantelpiece above it, the familiar blue stripes of the wallpaper. She pushed about on her plate food she didn’t want to eat. What terrible folly had possessed her? All these years to have so stubbornly waited for no more than an old man’s scattered words?
‘There was a balcony,’ he said, ‘and the people passing on the street below would call out “Buon appetito!” when the tablecloth was spread for lunch.’ The magician’s butterfly disappeared and then came back. There were processions on St Cecilia’s day. ‘All that,’ he said.
She drew her knife and fork together. The images she might herself have conjured up were too fragile to be talked away in dinner-time conversation over plates and dishes on a table, too precious to be offered as a triviality. She had come to terms with what was there to come to terms with; she had managed, but could not now. She could not grieve; no more than a fact it felt like that her mother was not alive.
‘The Mitchelstown Caves?’ her father said.
‘I’ve never been there.’
‘Shall we go?’
‘If you would like to.’
*
A few days later the Captain passed into his seventy-first year but did not say so, although he would have liked to. He wanted to share with his daughter what was sometimes considered to be a milestone in a life, but as that day advanced the inclination slipped away. He could not comfort her and it mattered more than the milestones of ageing that he could not.
He suffered for her. He understood the trait in her that had forbidden her to draw someone else into her disquiet: for that, she was remarkable but did not know it. Nor would there have been consolation if she had.
In the evenings after dinner they sat together in the drawing-room, her company dutifully there. She read. He smoked a single cigarillo and drank a little whiskey. Every evening it was the same.
But once, restless, Lucy put her book aside, sat for a moment doing nothing, and then lifted out her embroidery drawer from the sofa-table and placed it on the floor. She knelt beside it to sort out skeins of silk, needles, drawings on scraps of paper, stubs of pencil, linen pieces, pencil-sharpener, rubbers. As her father watched, she unfolded a wide rectangle of linen on which she had drawn one of her sketches. She spread it on the hearthrug, quite close to where he sat: seagulls were only just discernible as such, little more than specks on the sand; a curve of broken lines indicated the shingle beneath the cliffs. Two figures stood by the spit of rocks that poked out into the sea. The embroidery had been abandoned and her tears came while he watched her rearranging the drawer’s disorder; other sketches that had lain there were examined and bundled away, this one kept.
‘Lady,’ he murmured, but she did not hear.
The Captain lay awake that night, thinking that Heloise would have ordered all this better, would have been wise in what she said to their daughter and how she said it. Her practicality came into that. It was she who had wallpapered their bedroom when first she came to Lahardane, she who had insisted that the smoking of the breakfast-room fire could be cured and had been right, she who gave their summer parties and in December had a Christmas tree in the hall for the children of Kilauran.
He turned on his bedside lamp to look at the faded roses of the wallpaper, then turned it off again. In the darkness he got up and stretched out on the sofa beneath the windows, which he sometimes did when he couldn’t sleep. He might tiptoe across the landing, as once or
twice he had, to gaze down at the soft fair hair spread on the pillow, eyes gently closed. But tonight he didn’t.
He dozed, quite easily in the end, and then in some Italian church the woman sacristan read the evening lesson. In the shaded corner of the piazza men played cards. ‘Love is greedy when it is starved,’ Heloise reminded him when they walked across the difficult paving. ‘Don’t you remember, Everard? Love is beyond all reason when it is starved.’
*
She would rather be anywhere but here, Lucy thought, and wished she hadn’t agreed to explore the caves at Mitchelstown.
On a damp morning she and her father were the only visitors. The way lit by their guide, they clambered over slippery rock beneath the stalactites, while the different caves were named for them: the House of Commons, the House of Lords, Kingston Gallery, O’Leary’s. They waited for the spiders that were peculiar to the place to creep out from the crevices, and afterwards they walked about the town that gave the caves their name. Its great, wide square and the Georgian elegance of a refuge for impecunious Protestants were its main attractions. Nothing remained of the once stately Mitchelstown Castle, burnt and looted the summer after petrol cans had been brought to Lahardane.
‘Eccentric family,’ her father said, ‘those poor mad Kingstons.’
They drove away, through rain that turned to mist. Men clearing out a ditch saluted them as they went by. They met no one else until they stopped in Fermoy, a town familiar to her father since his army days. ‘D’you know Fermoy?’ she remembered Ralph asking and of course she didn’t. He had driven to it in Mr Ryal’s car on a Wednesday afternoon before he’d ever been to Lahardane. He had driven to half the towns in County Cork, he’d said, before he knew her, and she imagined being with him, being with him now.
‘Nice old town,’ her father said.
They walked together on an empty pavement, the mist still falling. Turf smoke was cloying in the air. Cattle were being driven on the street.
‘Would we try for coffee here?’ her father said.
The Story of Lucy Gault Page 16