The Story of Lucy Gault

Waking often in the night to find herself similarly affected, Bridget would lie sleepless, waiting to greet Henry when he opened his eyes with a plea to tell her all over again about the moment of discovering the bundle among the weeds and fallen stones. The dog that had been befriended had run off one day and hadn’t been seen again: to Bridget, and to Henry, that seemed of a piece with all that had happened otherwise, but in time this was dismissed by both of them as fancy.

While at Lahardane there was the rawness of disorder, the story of what had brought it so dramatically to a country house came to find a place among the stories of the Troubles that were told in the neighbourhood – in Kilauran and Clashmore and Ringville, on the streets of Enniseala. The tragedy called down upon herself by a child, and what had since become her life, made a talking point, and seemed to strangers to be the material of legend. Visitors to the beaches of this quiet coast listened and were astonished. Commercial men who took orders for their wares across the counters of shops related the story in distant towns. Conversation in back bars, at tea tables and card tables, was enlivened by reports of what had occurred.

As often with such travellers’ tales, exaggeration improved the telling. Borrowed facts, sewn in where there was a dearth, gathered authority with repetition. Stirred by what was told of the events at Lahardane, memories strayed into other houses, through other family archives: to have suffered so harsh a misfortune, the Gaults had surely once betrayed a servant to the gallows, had failed to stand by common justice, or too haughtily had taken for granted privileges that were theirs. In talk inspired by what was told, the subtleties that clogged the tidiness of narration were smudged away. The spare reality of what had happened was coloured and enriched, and altogether made better. The journey the stricken parents had set out upon became a pilgrimage, absolution sought for sins that varied in the telling.

*

‘The Grand Old Duke of York,’ sang the children at the Christmas party in Mr Aylward’s schoolroom, ‘he had ten thousand men

Balloons decorated the spelling charts and the blackboard, holly cheered the maps and Mr Aylward’s own portraits of kings and queens. There was tea for the children, all fifteen of them on benches around the four tables pushed together – sandwiches and barm brack, and cakes speckled with hundreds and thousands. The room was darkened. Borrowed curtains hung over the two windows and Mr Aylward made shadows with his fingers on a white sheet – a rabbit, a bird, an old man’s craggy profile.

Afterwards Lucy walked home along the strand, alone in the gathering darkness, the fierce winter sea unruly beside her. She kept hoping, as she always did on the strand, that the dog might have come back, that he’d rush stumbling down the cliffs, barking the way he used to. But nothing moved except what was driven by the wind, and the only sound was the wind’s ceaseless whine and the crash of the waves. ‘Don’t come near me,’ Edie Hosford had said again, not wanting to be touched by her when they were playing Oranges and Lemons.

TWO

1

On a February morning, a porter who was sweeping the railwaystation platform at Enniseala found himself recalling the occasion when he had been shot in the shoulder from an upstairs window. He was drawn back to that time because in the night he had dreamed about it – about showing his wound to people, and showing them the dark mark left behind on the jersey where the blood had soaked it, and telling of how the bullet had torn his flesh but had not lodged there. In his dream his arm had again been carried in a sling, attracting on the streets glances of approval from older men, who invited him to join any one of half a dozen pitch-and-toss schools, as in his real life such men had. They had honoured him as an insurrectionist, although he had never belonged to a revolutionary organization. ‘Well, isn’t it shocking that would happen to you!’ an old beggarwoman had exclaimed from the doorway of Phelan’s bar and grocery. ‘A man to take a gun to you!’ The same remark was made to him on the street by the Christian Brother who used to twist the flesh at the back of his neck when his long division was wrong or when he confused the counties of Ulster with those of Connacht. He was invited into Phelan’s so that he could display the wound, and the men in the bar said he was lucky to be alive. In his dream these men and the beggarwoman and the Christian Brother were there too, raising their glasses to him.