The Story of Lucy Gault

Henry passed by the windows with the milk churns on the cart and, not cheering up in the least, Lucy listened to the clomp of the horse’s hooves fading on the avenue. Two minutes that took: once at breakfast her papa had timed it with his pocket watch.

‘Think of a poor little tinker child,’ her mama said. ‘Never a roof over her head.’

‘You’ll always have a roof, Lucy,’ her papa promised. ‘We all have to get used to something new. We have to, lady.’

She loved it when he called her lady, but this morning she didn’t. She didn’t see why you had to get used to something new. She said she wasn’t hungry when they asked her, even though she was.

Afterwards on the strand the tide was coming in, washing over the sand the seagulls had marked, over the little piles the sand-worms made. She threw stems of seaweed for the O’Reillys’ dog, wondering how many days were left. No one had said; she hadn’t asked.

‘You go on home now,’ she ordered the dog, pointing at the cliffs, putting on her papa’s voice when she wasn’t obeyed.

She walked on alone, past the spit of rocks that stuck out like a finger into the sea, crossing the stream where the stepping stones were. When she had climbed a little way up through the woods of the glen she could no longer hear the sea or the sudden, curt shriek of the gulls. Slivers of bright light slipped through the dark of the trees. ‘I’ve never seen the half of the old glen,’ Paddy Lindon used to say. Every year, he’d once told her, he cultivated potatoes on the clearing he’d made beside his cottage, but this morning she didn’t have the heart to go looking for it again.

‘Who’s coming to Enniseala with me?’ her papa invited that afternoon, and of course she said yes. Her papa leaned back in the trap, hugged into its curve, the reins loose in his fingers. The first time he was in Enniseala, he said, was when he was five, brought in to have the fraenulum of his tongue cut.

‘What’s fraenulum?’

‘A little snag underneath your tongue. If it’s too tight you’re tongue-tied.’

‘What’s tongue-tied?’

‘It’s when you can’t speak clearly.’

‘And couldn’t you?’

‘They said I couldn’t. It didn’t hurt much. They gave me a set of marbles afterwards.’

‘I think it would hurt.’

‘You don’t need anything like that.’

The marbles were in a flat wooden box with a lid that slid on and off. It was still there, beside the bagatelle in the drawing-room. She had to stand on a footstool when they played bagatelle, but she knew these were the marbles he’d been given then because once he’d told her. He’d forgotten that. Sometimes he forgot things.

‘There’s a fisherman in Kilauran can’t speak at all,’ she said.

‘I know.’

‘He does it on his fingers.’

‘Yes, he does.’

‘You see him doing it. The other fishermen understand him.’

‘Well, there’s a thing! Would you like to hold the reins now?’

In Enniseala her papa bought new suitcases in Domville’s because they didn’t have enough. One of the shopmen came out from the office and said he was sorry. He wouldn’t have believed it, he said. He’d never have thought he’d live to see the day. ‘Please God, you’ll be back, Captain.’

Her papa kept nodding, not saying anything until he held his hand out and called the shopman Mr Bothwell. The new suitcases hardly fitted into the trap, but they did in the end. ‘Now,’ her papa said, not getting into the trap himself but taking her hand in a way that made her guess where they were going.

He could move the door of Allen’s without the bell ringing. He opened it a little and reached up for the catch at the top, then pushed the door so that they could walk in. He reached over the counter and lifted the glass jar down from the shelf and tipped the sweets into the scoop of the scales. He slipped them into a white paper bag and put the bag back on the scales again and put the glass stopper back on the jar. Liquorice toffee and nougat were what he liked and so did she. Lemon’s Pure Sweets it said on the silver-coloured wrappers of the liquorice toffees.

While he was weighing them she wanted to giggle, as she always did, but she didn’t because it would have spoilt everything. He pulled the door in and the bell rang. ‘Four pence ha’penny,’ he said when the girl with the plaits came out from the back. ‘You’re a holy terror!’ the girl said.

He always held the reins himself when they were on a street. He held them tight, sitting straight up, jerking one and then the other, now and again releasing one of his hands in order to wave at someone. ‘What’s it mean “and County”?’ she asked when they had passed all the shops.

‘And County?’

‘Driscoll and County, Broderick and County.’

‘The Co. is not for County, it’s for Company. “And Company Limited.” The Ltd means Limited.’

‘It’s for County at school. County Cork, County Waterford.’

‘It’s just the same abbreviation. Shortening a word so there won’t be too much written on a map or above a shop.’

‘Funny they’re the same.’

‘You like to have the reins now?’