The Story of Lucy Gault Read online

  ‘Lucy –’

  ‘Oh, I shall dream of you, of all the times you came here, of these days that are passing now, of this very moment when bagatelle has bored us because we have played too long, of my saying in the moment that comes next, “Shall we play Twenty-one instead?”’

  ‘Why do you say I must not love you?’

  ‘Because loving me will make you unhappy.’

  ‘But it doesn’t. It makes me happy.’

  ‘Shall we play Twenty-one? It’s going to go on raining.’

  ‘We could walk in the rain. At least on the avenue.’

  The trees sheltered them a little. The air was fresh; delicious air, Lucy called it. They dawdled on the avenue, and dawdled again, standing in the porch of the gate-lodge.

  ‘Of course I love you too,’ Lucy said. ‘If you are wondering about that.’

  *

  Bridget lit a fire in the drawing-room, feeling that something cheerful must be done. The rain was heavier now, drops rolling down the windows, and then the first gusts of wind made its falling different. The wind was slight when it began, but within an hour had changed the character of the day. It brought the leaves down, swirling them about before they became sodden and still. It rattled the hall door and the windows. It drove sheets of rain against the panes, disrupting the drops that had earlier accumulated, before sliding monotonously down the glass. The sea would be a sight, Henry said.

  In the drawing-room they made toast at the fire, poking their slices of bread into the red ashes of the logs. They sat on the hearthrug, reading. ‘Who’s that?’ Ralph asked about the only portrait in the room, above the writing-desk, and Lucy said it was some Gault she didn’t know about. She wound up the gramophone, then put a record on. John Count McCormack sang ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’.

  They went to look at the sea, the wind so strong now that they could scarcely hear one another speak. The waves reared up like wild white horses, spectral forms exploding into foam, one chasing another as they broke. The thrash and crash of the sea sucked in the wind’s whine, a seashore sound that belonged nowhere else.

  When the two embraced at the sea’s edge, each tasted the salt on the other’s lips. Drenched, Lucy’s hair was straggly and matted, Ralph’s pressed tight on to his scalp. The excitement of the storm held them in thrall, as completely as their love did. Would there ever again in her life, Lucy wondered, be such happiness as this?

  ‘How can we forget today?’ she whispered and was not heard.

  ‘I could never not love you,’ Ralph said, and this was lost as well.

  They dried themselves in front of the drawing-room fire. Bridget brought in a tray, since it was warmer here than in the dining-room. Seeing them happy, she remembered that in a few days Ralph would be gone. She did not pray; it was not a subject for prayer. Instead, she willed a time in the future and saw them smiling in one room and then another, and heard them speaking of love, and saw them together always.

  ‘Look, it’s tinned salmon!’ Lucy cried.

  It would have been on Henry’s list for Mrs McBride, John West’s red salmon, a treat because it was expensive. And there were the tiny, sweet tomatoes that Henry cultivated in the cold frame he had resurrected a few years ago. They made a salad, with lettuce and little onions, and slices of hard-boiled egg.

  ‘Shall we have wine?’ Lucy suggested. ‘White wine? I think I’ve never tasted wine except the bitter red in church.’

  She went away and a moment later returned with a bottle and two glasses. There were many bottles left, she said, red and white, untouched on the pantry racks.

  ‘Look in all the drawers for a corkscrew. Somewhere there is one. Oh, now nice this is!’

  They pulled two chairs up to a table they moved closer to the fire. Ralph poured the wine and he wanted, then, not ever to leave this house he had come to. He wanted, then, not to take Lucy from it but to be here with her, since she belonged here and tonight he felt he did also. On the gramophone the needle scratched through the Londonderry Air.

  *

  Two fishermen from Kilauran were lost at sea that night, caught earlier by the sudden storm when they had pulled their nets in and were beginning to row home. There was mourning in the village, a melancholy that affected Lucy when she and Ralph walked there on the day before he was to leave. The sound of keening came from a cottage around which people had congregated. A fiddler had come, to play a dirge if one was called for.

  ‘How could I have run away from them?’ Lucy said on the strand as she and Ralph walked back to Lahardane, with wicks for the lamps and the newspaper they’d bought. ‘I made them suffer as those women are suffering now. I long for their forgiveness. That will not just go away.’

  These revelations came suddenly, and Ralph did not say anything as they walked on.

  ‘I was in love then, too – with trees and rock pools and footprints on the sand. Was I possessed, Ralph? I have always thought I was.’

  ‘Of course you weren’t.’

  ‘Like poor Mrs Rochester! Whom nobody had sympathy for!’

  ‘You were a child.’

  ‘A child can be possessed. Did I hate them when I made them suffer? Was that why so very soon I was ashamed?’

  ‘Please, will you marry me, Lucy?’

  Slowly, she shook her head. ‘My father shot a man and did not kill him. My mother was afraid. I did not understand. Shall I tell you, Ralph?’

  And he listened and was told what he knew already, and saw what so often he had seen: the figures on the shingle and the sands, the light brought from the house, darkness giving way to dawn.

  ‘I have found a little courage,’ Lucy said.

  ‘You are courageous, Lucy.’

  ‘Dear Ralph, how could I marry you?’

  Her lips reached up for his and lightly touched them. The sea was as calm as a pond, waves softly breaking. The sky was a deeper blue than it had been all this hot summer. White, bunched-up clouds hardly moved on it.

  ‘I don’t care about what you did. I swear I don’t, Lucy.’

  ‘I have to live with it until they return.’

  ‘No, no, of course you don’t.’

  ‘You must go back to your contented life. Not be a visitor in mine. For you could only be that, Ralph, although I love you. When we love one another we are stealing what does not belong to us, what is not our due. Darling Ralph, we must make do with memories.’

  ‘We need not and I cannot. I cannot make do with memories.’

  ‘Oh, memories aren’t bad, you know.’

  ‘They’re nothing.’ There was an edge of bitterness in his tone. They walked in silence then, until he said:

  ‘I wouldn’t take you from Lahardane if you don’t want to go.’

  She seemed not to hear. She drew with the point of her shoe on the sand. She looked up when their names were written. She said:

  ‘What do they think, Ralph, and do not say? Why do they not come back?’

  But when Ralph began to answer he felt that what he said was hardly heard, and so desisted. They walked on slowly, and Lucy said:

  ‘I did not hate them, yet how do they know it, any more than they know all they so easily might? One day – today, tomorrow, some day a year away – they’ll find the strength to make the journey, and it will never be too late for that.’

  ‘Oh, Lucy, long ago they have forgiven you and now would want your happiness. Of course they have forgiven you.’

  ‘Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn’t do that. That is for me, and I shall do it. I shall live a life that is all memory of our love. I shall close my eyes and feel again your lips on mine and see your smiling face as clearly as every day I see the waves. What friends we’ve been, Ralph! How we’ve longed for this summer not to end! Another summer would be different – we both know that.’

  ‘I don’t know it. I don’t believe it for a moment.’

  ‘I wish it could always be there, stopped in time, this su
mmer we have had. Don’t let’s be greedy now. I used to be afraid of their returning. Sometimes I used to think I didn’t want them to, for what good to them was my awful, sore regret? There was too much for them to forgive: how could I hope for forgiveness? Yet if they came now, if they were there when we climbed the cliff, if they were astonished while Bridget told them, how marvellous it would be! And you and I would not make do with memories.’

  Two days later Ralph left, taken by Henry in the trap to the railway station in Enniseala. Lucy might have accompanied them, might have stood waving on the railway platform as the train took Ralph away. But she said she didn’t want that, and waved instead from the hall door, and then from the avenue.

  Three

  * * *

  1

  Prayer continued to be the solace of the man who had become a soldier. But his expectation that the rigours and severity and the communal nature of military life would discipline his confusion had been denied. When his mother lay dying he had thought to share his trouble with her, for as things were she would have passed it on to no one. But each time he tried to he was seized by panic, fearful of eavesdroppers he knew could not be there.

  He was an old hand at the Camp now, his hollow countenance and the intensity of his averted gaze familiar to all who came and went around him. Some had carried to other Camps a description of his lanky, quiet presence, had spoken of his strangeness, his regular, lone attendance before the chapel statue. He had made no friends, but in his duties was conscientious and persevering and reliable, known for such qualities to the officers who commanded him. He had dug latrines, metalled roads, adequately performed cookhouse duties, followed instructions as to the upkeep of equipment, was the first to volunteer when volunteers were called for. That he bore his torment with fortitude was known to no one.

  In such a manner further years of Horahan’s life went by. When rumours of war in Europe began he was aware of anxiety and uncertainty at the Camp, but that mood did not concern him. There was talk of invasion. In preparation for what might occur in the years ahead, sandbags and other equipment of defence made their appearance. On occasion, the hours of training were longer.

  Horahan fell in with this hastily arranged regimen. Hardly knowing the reason for it, he was obedient to all that was required of him, and questioned nothing. By day, instead, a funeral that was repeated in his sleep possessed him. The hearse passed through the streets of the town he knew and, when he had himself dug the grave, the clay closed in on top of him. He lay beside the coffin, but when the child called out from within it he could not reach her.

  In the town he asked about the house that in his dreaming blazed and was destroyed. He was told, yet again, that it had never been set on fire, that the child who was dead in his dreams had been left solitary by her parents, the victim of an error. But still there was the funeral, the hearse drawn through familiar streets, the horse hooves echoing; still he awoke, his body wet with sweat. He rose often in the night from his narrow cot to creep through the darkness, his feet still bare. In the chapel, where he dared not light a candle, he knelt before the Virgin he could not see, begging for the gift of a sign, a whisper of assurance that he was not abandoned.

  2

  Captain Gault and his wife left Italy. Unreliable portents had kept them for longer than the Captain had anticipated: embracing his people with the warmth of his promises and his architecture, Benito Mussolini declared himself for peace. But when he had mulled that over he decided it would be more advantageous to declare himself for war.

  They crossed the frontier into Switzerland, going back the way they had come, seventeen years ago now. They went regretfully, taking with them as many of their possessions as they could manage. They settled in the modest town of Bellinzona, where the language they had become used to was spoken.

  3

  We often think of you, Mrs Ryall wrote, and wonder how you are. How many times have I said, ‘Today I shall write to Ralph’, and yet again do not do it! But then there is always something – when the boys are here the house is upside-down, when they are not there is jam to make and something for them to take with them when they go away again. They are growing up more sensible than you’ll remember them. Quite lanky now, Kildare is, quite the young man! Jack wants to be a horticulturist, though I believe myself it is just the word he likes! Both of them speak of you often, and we are grateful for the months you spent here. Lucy Gault, whom you’ll remember, I’m sure, is still at Lahardane. There has been no change there. All of us here are well.

  *

  It was nice of you to write, Ralph replied, and I am glad to hear the boys are settling down. I do not forget your kindness to me and often think about those long warm mornings in the garden. Do please remember me to Mr Ryall, and to the boys when next they’re home. Perhaps one day our paths will somehow cross again. It’s good to hear that all of you are well.

  He could not imagine the Ryalls otherwise. He could not imagine them unhappy or dispirited. They would have known, of course, that he had not been back to Lahardane.

  *

  I have found another book, Lucy wrote. ‘Florence Macarthy’ by Lady Morgan. I didn’t think it would be good. But it is far better than I could have guessed.

  Yesterday there were cormorants on the rocks. I thought of you particularly then because – do you remember? – we watched them one afternoon. How long ago it seems, our summer, and in another moment seems hardly any time at all!

  And often Lucy read, for yet another time, the first of all Ralph’s letters since he had gone.

  … I add up figures and lose my way in them. I look down through the paned glass of an office to the hubbub of activity below and in my melancholy feel its mockery. What does it matter if the machinery rattles on or stops? What does it matter if the elm is only fit for coffins or that the oak has warped while seasoning? The belts are tightened on their wheels, the cogs connect. I watch a tree trunk carried into place, planks lifted away when they are sawn. Sunlight catches the dust in the air, the men are silenced by the engines’ clatter. You stand in white in the wide doorway. You wave and I wave back. But how little comfort there is in the ghosts of daydreams!

  Always she touched that letter with her lips before she tied it away with the others that had come. It was not difficult to see the scene described, to hear the machinery’s noise, to smell the freshly sawn wood. I have been a nuisance to you, she read as well. I have disturbed the vigil you keep. I blame myself for hours on end and then do not blame myself at all. Do you know how much I love you, Lucy? Can you possibly guess?

  One day they would not write, Lucy supposed, for all of it was repetition now. Ralph, you must live your life, she wrote herself.

  *

  In wrenching off the worn sole of a boot, Henry found it did not come cleanly, held by a few remaining brads, which he loosened with pliers. Some time in the past, well before his own time at Lahardane, a Gault had gone in for shoe-making. All the tools, the knives and the last, were still in the outhouse that even then had been a workshop. Leathers still hung there, and on a shelf beside them were tins of brads, metal half-heels, cobbler’s thread.

  Twice before, Henry had repaired the boots he was repairing now. He had taught himself the knack of this work, guessing at first what each knife was for, eventually finding that the skill required came naturally, with patience. Cutting a new sole, he found himself reflecting, as he often did, on how it would be now if this remote house had been forgotten in the vengeance of 1921, if a threat in the night had not engendered such fear and such distress. Another man, different in nature and temperament from the Captain, might not have heeded the nervous premonitions of his wife, might have dismissed them as unwarranted and foolish, might not have considered it a wife’s place to be upset. That three callow youths, hardly knowing what they were doing in their excitement, had exercised such power still seemed to Henry to be extraordinary.

  He trimmed the edge of the leather until the sole perfectly fitted
the boot, then cut the second one. The time he’d made Lucy a pair of shoes they hadn’t been comfortable, but she hadn’t said. ‘Arrah, throw those old things away,’ he’d urged her when he noticed she was hobbling, but she wouldn’t. When he had been against her marrying that boy, when he had been against the friendship, he hadn’t understood what Bridget had, she being quicker than he was in ways like that. ‘It’s the lonesomeness would worry you,’ Bridget had said.

  It worried both of them now. The letters that were exchanged were what was left, but the postman’s bicycle, free-wheeling on the last few yards of the avenue, scattering the gravel pebbles in front of the house, came less frequently now, sometimes for months on end not at all. One day, when it had not been for almost the whole of one winter, Henry saw a distant figure on the strand and wondered who it was. He saw the same figure again, much later and at a different time of year. It might have been anyone, for Henry was not one to rush to conclusions, but when he told Bridget she said of course it wasn’t anyone. Henry watched, but the solitary visitor did not return, and a day came then which seemed – for Henry at least – to bring to an end all that had begun when, years ago now, Mr Ryall’s Renault had first tentatively appeared between the two stately lines of the avenue’s trees. ‘She says he’s after joining up,’ Bridget reported when the war in Europe began and, to Henry’s confusion and surprise, she added that it was an ill wind that blew no good. For couldn’t it happen, Bridget argued, that the separation, and the danger there’d be, would straighten things out? Wasn’t it often the case when a man came back safely from a war that there was a different way of looking at things?

  Henry tapped the second sole into place and filed down the leather instep. Not saying so, he had dismissed these prognostications at first as the wishful thinking to which Bridget was prone; but there was no doubt about it, this was an outcome that yet might come about. The young fellow would come back, and in the relief he brought with him the question would be asked: where was the sense of waiting any longer for what would not occur? It would be Lucy then who would say close the house up, as her father had before. Stored away were the window boards Henry had taken down, and none the worse for that. One of these days he’d fix the slates on the roof of the gate-lodge so that he and Bridget could go back to where they belonged. With the doors and windows open, he’d get rid of the damp that had begun there and slap on a bit of paint where it was needed. He’d dig over the patch at the back. When the time came he’d secure the packing-cases that had never been sent for, and Bridget would find new sheets to put over the furniture. No matter how things happened, Henry guessed this would be what Lucy would want when the marriage was fixed, before she was taken away to County Wexford. As Bridget herself said, something in you knew when a thing was meant.