‘Anywhere,’ she said. ‘Anywhere will do.’
In Dublin, at King’s Bridge Station, Captain Gault sent the telegram that cancelled their tenancy of the house in England. They stood, an island with their luggage, when he had done that. ‘We are at one,’ he said, for although Heloise’s fragility still alarmed him, they shared the mood reflected in the nature of their departure, and the desire to lose themselves, to rid themselves of memory. Offering comfort, he said all that.
Heloise did not reply, but said as they travelled across the city to the docks:
‘It’s strange that going away doesn’t sadden us in the slightest way. When once it seemed unbearable.’
‘Yes, it’s strange.’
In this manner, on Thursday the twenty-second of September 1921, Captain Gault and his wife abandoned their house and unknowingly their child. In England, unnoticed, the rush of town and country went by. Church spires and village houses, the last of the sweet-peas in small back gardens, the sprawl of runner beans on careful wires, geraniums in their final flush, might have been something else. France when it came was just another country, although nights were spent there. We have travelled on, Captain Gault wrote to the solicitor in Enniseala, one of three sentences on a sheet of hotel writing-paper.
3
Bridget polished the furniture before she covered it with old bed sheets that had never been thrown away. She cleaned the windows before the boards were nailed in place. She scrubbed the steps of the uncarpeted back stairs and the dog-passage flagstones. She packed away eiderdowns and blankets.
In the darkened house on the morning when there was nothing left to do except in the kitchen and the sculleries, where daylight still prevailed, Henry walked about the upstairs rooms with a lamp. The air there was already stale. That evening they would lock up.
The two were melancholy. On each of the few days that had passed since the Gaults’ departure there had been the expectation that one of the fishermen would arrive with news that something had caught in their nets or on an oar. But no one had come. Would the Gaults want to know if anyone had? Bridget wondered, and Henry had shaken his head, unable to answer that.
In the hall he lifted the globe from the lamp and quenched the wick. In the dairy he washed out the churns he had earlier brought back from the creamery. I’ve a wall to see to,’ he called out to Bridget when she appeared at the back door of the house, and he saw her nod across the distance that separated them. He wondered what it would feel like, sitting down for the last time at the kitchen table when he returned. A bit of bacon she was cooking.
The sheepdogs hurried in the yard when Henry whistled, and Bridget watched them pushing at one another behind him when he set off. ‘It’ll keep fine,’ she raised her voice to comment.
‘I’d say it would all right,’ he said.
Bridget did not feel that her prayers had let her down. It was enough to have prayed, God’s will that He had not heard her. They would settle into the way things were to be; they would accept it, since that was how it had to be. Old Hannah would come to the gate-lodge the odd time and one day even Kitty Teresa might, although she was a fair enough distance away. More likely, though, Kitty Teresa wouldn’t want to come visiting. After the carry-on there’d been with her when she had to leave, that would maybe be too much for her.
Most of all you’d miss this big old kitchen, Bridget thought when she entered it again. She would still come down to the yard to feed the hens for as long as hens were there; she’d find new tasks outside. When first she had come to the kitchen with her mother she used to play in the yard, and when it was raining she’d sit by the fire in the meal shed, blowing at the turf with the wheel-bellows, watching the sparks.
At the sink she scrubbed the surface of a pan, its enamel chipped in a way that had been familiar to her for years. She rinsed it and dried it, returning it to its place, wondering if the day would come when she’d use it again, and in a sudden wave of optimism believing that she would, that with time’s healing they’d come back. She brought the piece of bacon to the boil on the range.
*
Henry didn’t remember the black coat when he saw it. He had often seen it worn, years ago, but he didn’t recognize it now. It hadn’t been there before was what he thought. The last time he came up here after stones for a gap in O’Reilly’s sheep wall there had only been high weeds in that corner. He stood looking at the coat, not moving further in to the ruins, telling the sheepdogs to stand back. Slowly he lit a cigarette.
The stones he was after were there, as they’d been before, fallen out of the walls, lying among the nettles. He remembered Paddy Lindon sitting at the table of which only the legs and a single board were left. The nettles around it were beaten down, a path made to the corner where the coat was. Two straw fish-baskets were lying there, and he could see flies on brown apple-cores.
He tried to make sense of it, and when a kind of sense came he didn’t want to go closer. One of the sheepdogs whined and he told it to shut up. He didn’t want to lift the coat to look, but in the end he did.
*
In the yard one of the dogs gave a single bark, and Bridget knew that Henry had returned. That dog always barked once when it came back to the yard, a habit Henry was trying to break it of. At the range she pushed the saucepan of potatoes on to the heat and poured boiling water over the cabbage she had cut up. She laid out knives and forks on the table and then heard Henry’s footsteps in the passage. When she looked round from the range he was standing in the doorway. He had a bundle in his arms.
‘What’s that?’ she said, and he didn’t make any kind of reply, only came on into the kitchen.
*
All the way down through the woods he had hurried, anxious to relinquish the effort of understanding, on his own, what still didn’t make sense enough. Surely the stillness in what he carried was the stillness of the dead? Again and again he laid it down to see, and even reached out to close the eyes that stared at him, for how in that dank place after so long could there still be life?
In the kitchen the smell of bacon boiling crept through his confusion, as reality settles the fragments of a dream. The clock ticked brightly on the dresser, steam rattled a saucepan lid.
‘Mother of God!’ Bridget cried. ‘Oh, Mother of God!’
*
The child’s lips were stained with blackberry juice. There was a sick look about her, her cheeks fallen in, dark hollows beneath her eyes, her hair as ragged as a tinker’s. In Henry’s arms she was covered with an old coat of her mother’s. Filthy it was.
Henry spoke at last. He said he’d gone for the stones to Paddy Lindon’s cottage. As often it was, his face was empty of expression even while he spoke. ‘More happens in a ham,’ Bridget’s father had once said about Henry’s face.
‘Sweet Mother!’ Bridget whispered, crossing herself. ‘Sweet Lady of Mercy!’
Henry slowly made his way to a chair. The child was starved, so weak you’d say she couldn’t live: unspoken, these comments tumbled about in Bridget’s thoughts, as earlier they had in Henry’s, bringing with them the same confusion. How could she have come in from the sea? How could she be here at all? Bridget sat down, to steady the weakness in her knees. She tried to count the days, but they kept slipping about. Ages it felt like since the night on the strand, ages before the Gaults had gone.
‘There’s food she took from the house,’ Henry said. ‘Sugar sandwiches she maybe lived on. And thank God for it, there’s water in that place.’