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?’
There was a smell of leather in the trap, but it was stronger when the new suitcases were opened in the house. The trunks were half full already, their lids held upright by straps that folded away when they were closed. Henry measured the windows for boarding.
‘Who’s never been on a train before?’ her papa said, the way he did, as if she were still only three or four. He used to go away by train himself, away to school three times a year. He still had his trunk and his box, his initials painted on them in black. She asked him to tell her about the school and he said he would later, on the train. Everyone was busy now, he said.
‘I don’t want to go,’ she said, finding her mama in their bedroom.
‘Papa and I don’t want to go either.’
‘Why are we then?’
‘Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to.’
‘Papa wasn’t trying to kill those men.’
‘Did Henry tell you that?’
‘Henry didn’t. And Bridget didn’t.’
‘You’re not nice when you’re cross, Lucy.’
‘I don’t want to be nice. I don’t want to go with you.’
‘Lucy-’
‘I won’t go.’
She ran from the room and ran down to her crossing stones. They came to find her, calling out in the woods, but everything she said to them on the way back they didn’t hear. They didn’t want to hear, they didn’t want to listen.
‘Will you come to the creamery with me?’ Henry said the next day, and she shook her head dolefully. ‘Shall we have tea outside?’ her mama said, smiling at her. And her papa said the cat had her tongue when the tablecloth was spread on the grass and there was lemon cake, her favourite. She wished she hadn’t gone to Enniseala with him, she wished she hadn’t asked him about his fraenulum and what was written over the shops. All the time they were pretending.
‘Look,’ her papa said. ‘The hawk.’
And she looked up although she hadn’t meant to. The hawk wasn’t more than a dot against the sky, circling round and round. She watched it and her papa said don’t cry.
*
The weeping of Kitty Teresa was no longer heard in the bedrooms because Kitty Teresa had gone already, gone home to Dungarvan when another position couldn’t be found for her. She would come back the day they came back themselves, she promised before she left. No matter where she was she’d come back.
‘They’ve rented a place,’ Bridget said in the kitchen, and Henry took from the shelf above the range the piece of paper with the address on it. He didn’t say anything at first and then he said so that’s that. ‘Only till they’re fixed permanent,’ Bridget said. ‘They’ll buy a place, I’d say.’
In the yard Henry sawed the wood for boarding the windows. Lucy watched him, sitting on the ledge beneath the pear tree that was spread out against the yard’s long east wall. It was on her way back from school that she’d begun to bathe on her own, weighing her clothes down with her satchel and running quickly into the sea and out again, drying herself any old how. Henry knew; she didn’t know how but he did. When she slouched off now he probably guessed where she was going. She didn’t care. She didn’t care if he went away to tell on her. It wasn’t like him to do that, but the way things were he might.
In the field above the cliffs she heard the chiming of the Angelus bell in Kilauran. Sometimes you heard it, sometimes you didn’t. The sound still carried to her while she was pulling off her clothes on the strand. It was lost when she ran into the sea and waded out. This was always the best part – walking slowly through the waves, the coldness rising, invigorating on her skin, the pull of the undertow at her feet. She spread out her arms to swim beyond her depth, then floated with the tide.
The strand had been empty in both directions when she’d left it. Without being able to see clearly as she swam back to it, she knew that what seemed to be moving there now was the O’Reillys’ dog chasing its own shadow on the sand. It often did that; while she watched, it stood still for a moment, gazing out to where she was, before beginning its play again.
She turned on her back to float. If she ran away she’d take the short cut Paddy Lindon used to talk about. ‘Take to the high woods the steep side,’ he used to say. ‘Go long enough on and there’s the road for you.’
She swam towards the shore again and when the water became shallow she walked through the last of the waves. The dog was nosing about on the shingle and she knew that her clothes had been pilfered, that whatever had been taken would already be buried in the shingle or the seaweed. When she began to dress she found that her summer vest had gone but when she looked in the ragged line of seaweed and in the shingle she couldn’t find it.
Helpless in its disgrace, scolded all the way up the cliff, the nameless dog cringed piteously, until there had been punishment enough. The matted, untidy head was pressed against Lucy’s legs then, to be stroked and patted and embraced. ‘Home now,’ she ordered and, fierce again, watched while disobedience was considered and thought better of.
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.