The Story of Lucy Gault Read online

  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 railway-station 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.

  Sweeping up the railway-station litter on the day after he had this dream for the first time, the porter found it difficult to separate it from the experience that so long ago had inspired it. Unable to verify on his own what he remembered, he was aware, that morning, of a sense of solitude. His companions of the night in the past had since emigrated, one of them a while back, the other only recently. His father, who had so severely refused to accept either compensation for the injury or the apology that was offered, had died a month ago. During his lifetime his father had always taken pride in what had occurred, since it had been swiftly followed by the departure – apparently for ever – of a one-time officer of the British army and his English wife. That this couple had mistakenly believed their child to be dead amounted to no more than just deserts: often the railway porter’s father had put forward this view, but when he did so in the dream it had caused the porter distress, as it never had in reality.

  The February day was cold. ‘There’s coal wanted on the waiting-room fire,’ a voice called out, and while the litter-pan and sweeping brush were deposited in the station shed, while the waiting-room fire was riddled and coal piled generously on, the porter’s unease did not lessen. In his dream the curtains of the house had blown out from the windows, blazing in the dark. There was the lifeless body of a child.

  That day passed. And as other days came and went it was noticed among people who knew him that the railway porter had become a quieter man, less given to casual conversation with passengers on the platforms, often lost in an abstracted mood. The same dream – unchanging and vivid in his sleep – continued to disturb his nights. Waking from it, he was invariably seized by a compulsion to calculate the age of the child who had become separated from her parents, and when he made enquiries was informed that she and they had not since been reunited. In his dream it was he who laid down the poison for the dogs; he who, before he was wounded, broke the window-glass and trickled in the petrol; he who struck the single match. One afternoon, when he was whitewashing the stones around the station flowerbeds he saw, as clearly as in his dream, the curtains blazing.

  Before that year had passed he ceased to be a railway porter and learnt the trade of a house-painter. Afterwards he wondered why he had made this change and at first did not know. Then some instinct suggested to him that he imagined a house-painter’s day would be busier, that graining doors and skirting-boards, fixing putty and mixing colours, would allow him less opportunity for brooding. In this, unfortunately, he was wrong.

  As he worked his blow-lamp, scraped away old paint and brushed on new, it became a struggle, even more than it had been for him as a railway porter, to establish reality. After the shot was fired he had been assisted. His companions had found their bicycles where they’d hidden them and had helped him when he could not manage his. The petrol tins, still full, had been left behind, abandoned in the haste of hurrying away. All this he insisted to himself, knowing it to be the truth, but still the contradiction was there. As familiar a sight in his white overalls as he had been in his railway porter’s uniform, the quiet disposition he had acquired earning him respect, he told no one of the disturbance that afflicted him, not his mother, not his employer, nor anyone who stopped to speak to him as he worked. He lived in this surreptitious way, reassuring himself that nothing more terrible had occurred in the reality that haunted him than the poisoning of three dogs. But then, again, and yet again, there was the body of a child.

  2

  With more time than ever on her hands when she’d left Mr Aylward’s school, Lucy began to read the books in the drawing-room bookcases. All of them were old, their spines familiar for as long as she could remember. But when she opened them she was drawn into a world of novelty, into other centuries and other places, into romance and complicated relationships, into the lives of people as different as Rosa Dartle and Giles Winterborne, into bleak London fog and the sun of Madagascar. And when she had read almost all there was to read in the drawing-room she turned to the bookcases on the first-floor landing and those of the unused breakfast-room.

  In the house the window boards that had briefly been in place were hardly remembered now; the sheets that had been lifted from the furniture had long ago been put to other use. When school had been finished with, Henry and Bridget were still Lucy’s daily companions, offering the same friendship they had when she was a child. If Mr O’Reilly happened to be working nearby when she walked through the pasture fields he waved at her, as he always had.

  Nor did the interest Mr Sullivan and Canon Crosbie had taken in a solitary child’s welfare wane when childhood passed. There were still their visits, still the birthday presents and the Christmas presents they had always brought to her. And in return there was their choice of the Christmas turkeys Henry reared.

  ‘It’s only that I wonder,’ Canon Crosbie confessed, ‘if it’s right for a young girl to find herself so much alone, so many miles from anywhere?’

  Each time the clergyman wondered, he elicited the same response: this was how things were, Bridget pointed out.

  ‘Does she ever mention making something of her life?’ Canon Crosbie persisted. ‘Does she ever show a preference?’

  ‘A preference, Canon?’

  ‘For one vocation or another? To – well, I suppose, to go out into the world?’

  ‘This is what she knows, sir. There isn’t a shell on the strand she doesn’t have affection for. It is how she is, Canon. Always was.’

  ‘But that’s not the thing at all! A girl should not lavish affection on shells. It is not right that shells should be her companions.’

  ‘There is Henry. There is myself.’

  ‘Oh, indeed. Indeed, of course. A blessing, Bridget, that doesn’t go unremarked. You’re very good.’

  ‘I’m not saying it’s short of unusual, sir, the way things are. All I’m saying is, Henry and myself do our best.’

  ‘Of course you do. Of course, of course. You’ve done wonders. There’s no one saying you haven’t done wonders.’ Canon Crosbie was emphatic, then paused a moment. ‘And tell me, Bridget, does she continue to believe in their return?’

&nb
sp; ‘She has never stopped believing that. It’s what she waits for.’

  ‘I knew her father when he was her age,’ the old clergyman continued after a pause. The vagueness in his voice sounded like defeat now, as if no matter how long they talked the conversation wouldn’t advance. ‘ “Everard Gault has married a beauty,” Mrs Crosbie said, having seen Mrs Gault before I did myself. “Well, that makes up for it,” Mrs Crosbie said – because Everard Gault’s family had been taken from him, we all knew that. She has had a soft spot since for Heloise Gault. Well, for both of them, you have to say. And so have I, of course.’

  ‘Henry and myself –’

  ‘I know, Bridget, I know. It’s just that sometimes in the evenings when we sit there in the rectory we think of a young girl on her own – or, not quite, of course, but still a little on her own. And we hope, Bridget, we hope.’

  ‘She has taken on the bees.’

  ‘Bees?’

  ‘The Captain used have beehives in the orchard. We didn’t bother with the honey the time he left. Henry can’t be doing with bees, but she’s started up the hives again.’

  Canon Crosbie nodded. Well, that was something, he said. Bees were better than nothing.

  *

  That something had befallen Captain Gault and his wife came to be believed: that they had found themselves unexpectedly destitute, a particular plight of this time; that they had been the victims of disaster. This newspaper tragedy or that easily became another fragment of their story, which increasingly gathered interest the more often it was told. Absence made truth of conjecture, Mr Sullivan often reflected, and yet had conjectured himself, for it was impossible not to. ‘It is our tragedy in Ireland,’ he was heard to remark more than once, ‘that for one reason or another we are repeatedly obliged to flee from what we hold dear. Our defeated patriots have gone, our great earls, our Famine emigrants, and now the poor to search for work. Exile is part of us.’

  He did not himself believe that further misfortune, natural or otherwise, had befallen Captain Gault and his wife. Exiles settled in their exiled state, often acquiring a stature they had not possessed before. He had observed this often in those who came back to Enniseala only to find themselves restless in a town that was too small, feeling they belonged nowhere now, yet seeming wiser than they had been. And who could blame Everard Gault and his wife, lowered by their sadness, for wishing to begin again, where everything was different? He regretted, with the benefit of retrospect, that he had engaged an incompetent private detective to conduct a search of a Swiss city, especially when he considered that the tally of the man’s expenses could not now be put to better use. It annoyed him, too, that the woman Chambré had chosen English newspapers in which to place advertisements when he had assured her that England had been specifically rejected as a country to settle in by the couple who were sought. His own professional tidiness resented the muddle he had contributed to himself by withholding his convictions: Lahardane as it was today was less awkward to live with than the memory of his saying that everything would be all right.

  *

  For her part, Lucy did not wonder much about the nature of exile, accepting, with time, what had come about, as she did her lameness and the features that were reflected in her looking-glass. Had Canon Crosbie raised with her the question of going out into the world, she would have replied that the nature and the tenets of her life had already been laid down for her. She waited, she would have said, and in doing so kept faith. Each room was dusted clean; each chair, each table, each ornament was as they were remembered. Her full summer vases, her bees, her footsteps on the stairs and on the landings, and crossing rooms and in the cobbled yard and on the gravel, were what she offered. She was not lonely; sometimes she could hardly remember loneliness. ‘Oh, but I’m happy,’ she would have reassured the clergyman had he asked her. ‘Happy enough, you know.’

  Presents from him, from his wife, from Mr Sullivan, came again on her twenty-first birthday. Afterwards, in warm evening sunshine, she lay reading in the apple orchard another of the novels left behind by other generations. Enough of the world it was for Lucy Gault, at twenty-one, to visit Netherfield.

  3

  The images of the Sacra Conversazione did not entirely obliterate those of an English afternoon, and English twilight gathering in December. Through the detail of Bellini’s composition – marble columns and trees in leaf, blue and green and scarlet robes – there were teacups on a rosewood table, and misty window-panes, coal blazing in a fireplace: the recollections which an hour ago Heloise had lit in her husband’s imagination lingered still.

  He had never met the woman who was informed during that teatime that she’d been widowed, but he glimpsed her now, a shadow among the saints who surrounded the Virgin and her infant and the demure musician. These figures were a crowd yet seemed, each one of them, to be alone. Less complicated, the telegram that had come lay on the rosewood surface, the hall clock struck. ‘Ladysmith,’ Heloise’s mother said.

  The church was cool in the heat of the day, a smell of polish coming from where the sacristan worked. The holy water stoup was almost empty; on the steps outside a cripple begged. ‘No, please let me,’ Heloise pleaded, searching her handbag, then dropping the coin she found on to the palm that was held out.

  They passed along a sunless alley, went slowly, reluctant to emerge into the afternoon’s glare. She would have been sixteen that teatime, he calculated.

  ‘Why are you so good to me, Everard? Why do you listen so well?’

  ‘Perhaps because I love you.’

  ‘I wish I had more strength.’

  He did not say that she’d had strength enough once, nor reassure her as to its return. He did not know about that. Unable, when the distant past of her childhood was evoked, to contribute, himself, from that same time, he told instead about being a soldier, going over in greater detail what he had told already, speaking of the men he had briefly led in his modest fields of battle.

  On the Riva they ordered coffee. He heard, before it came, of the household of the guardian aunt, the orphan’s refuge it had been in later childhood years. ‘No more than boys they were,’ he said himself, and told the names of the men in his care. ‘I often see their faces.’

  He watched her slender fingers dipping a lump of sugar into her coffee, one lump and then another. That gave him pleasure; so much, he wondered why. Well, it was real, he told himself; and perhaps no more than that gave pleasure when artificial conversation was interrupted. He had written to Lahardane. He had expressed concern for the well-being of the servants who were his caretakers now, asked about the Friesians and the house. More than once he had written, but each time had drawn back when the moment of posting came. There would be a reply, surreptitiously received, a secret correspondence begun, the breaking of the trust that had always been there in his marriage. He kept the letters hidden, their envelopes stamped. It was as much deceit as he could manage.

  ‘How beautiful all this is!’ she said.

  Near where they sat, gondolas came and went at a landing stage. Further out on the canal a steamer crept slowly in from the sea. A dog barked on the deck of a working boat.

  When it was cooler they walked on the Zattere. They took a boat to the Giudecca. In the evening there was the Annunciazione in the church of San Giobbe. Then waltzes played at Florian’s.

  That night in the Pensione Bucintoro, while her husband slept, Heloise lay wakeful beside him. What riches there had been! she told herself when the sacred images of the day came back to her, with all that had been said. She did not feel deprived tonight, and resolved in the euphoria the day had nurtured to find the courage in the morning to confess that it was not enough to say a generous husband had been good to her, not enough to say that he listened perfectly to her childhood evocations. ‘We are playing at being dead,’ he had once gently protested, and she hadn’t been able to explain why it was that she would always want to forget. But in the morning she would do better. She heard her voice a
pologizing, and talking then of all she didn’t want to talk about; before she closed her eyes she found the sentences came quite easily. But when she slept, and woke after a few minutes, she heard herself saying she couldn’t have that conversation and knew that she was right.

  4

  Henry lit a Woodbine and threw the match down. From the archway that was the entrance to the yard he peered at the car that had come – at its wheels, its dickey seat, its green upholstery, the little mascot above the radiator, the peaked bonnet, the number plate, IF 19. The canvas hood was down.

  He had heard the car’s approach, then the crunching of the sea-gravel beneath its wheels. He had imagined that Canon Crosbie had come again, or that at last there had been news enough to bring the solicitor. But the voice he’d heard calling out, apologizing, was neither’s. Lucy had come out of the house, the way she did when a car arrived. ‘Who are you?’ she was saying now, and the driver of the car repeated his apology, then turned the engine off in case she could not hear him.

  He was a young man, not wearing a jacket, and when he got out of the car Henry could see that a tie supported his flannel trousers, stripes of green and brown and purple pulled taut and knotted. Henry had never seen him before.

  ‘I didn’t realize there was a house here.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Lucy asked again, and a name was given that was unfamiliar to Henry. Lucy half shook her head, indicating that it was unfamiliar to her, too.

  Leaning against the wall of the archway, the Woodbine packet still in his hand, Henry was reminded of the time when other visitors besides a solicitor and clergyman came to the house – the Morells and the people from Ringville, and people from Enniseala and Cappoquin, from as far off as Clonmel. There were summer parties, picnic baskets carried through the fields to the strand, children playing in the orchard and the garden. Lady Roche from Monatray came, and Colonel Roche, and the three Ashe sisters, and old Mrs Cronin and her flighty middle-aged daughter who once in greeting kissed the Captain. Henry hadn’t seen any of them since the winter of 1920, and wondered about them now. Was this young man one of the children grown up, in spite of what he said about not knowing there was a house at the end of the avenue?