The Story of Lucy Gault

This eccentricity lingered with Captain Gault while he did as his wife requested. Could it be that the shock of a summer’s events, and being so distraught, had left behind an aftermath as terrible as any of the events themselves? Valuable documents had been unnecessarily entrusted to the post and were next to be exposed to the hazards of a journey back to the island they had come from. The disposal of the shares could have been arranged without the forwarding of any documents at all; only Heloise’s instructions were necessary. In the letter that outlined the bank’s reservations about the future of the railway company, this had been stated.

In Enniseala he was tempted to hand back the bulky envelope he collected, to ask that it be safely returned to where it had come from, to say there had been an error, perhaps understandable in the circumstances. But he did not do so, did not arrive back at Lahardane with some tacked-together excuse. Instead he handed over what he had been given, and passed on, too, the good wishes of Aloysius Sullivan. The envelope’s contents were scrutinized, the solicitor’s good wishes nodded away as if they were of no possible interest, although Heloise had always been particularly fond of Aloysius Sullivan.

That evening they might have walked together, in the house, in the orchard and the garden, through the fields. But Captain Gault did not suggest it and did not go on his own, as he had before. The apple trees, the bees of his hives, the cattle that had been his pride still drew him, but it was his wife who mattered more. It was a cruel last straw if what appeared to be was so.

Sombre and silent, drinking in solitude, he tried not to wonder if there was punishment in this. For had not, after all, the people risen up, and was not that the beginning of the hell which had so swiftly been completed in this small corner? He could not know that, as certainly as the truth had no place in an erroneous assumption, so it had none in such fearful conjectures of damnation. Chance, not wrath, had this summer ordered the fate of the Gaults.

*

On the train to Dublin, Heloise was silent. She hated, as much as she hated the seashore they had left behind, the fields and hills they passed among, the woods and copses, the quiet ruins. She asked no more than to be separated for ever from landscape that had once delighted her, from faces that had kindly smiled, and voices that had spoken gently. A rented villa in a Sussex suburb was not far enough away: for days she’d known that, but had not said it. She did so now.

The Captain listened. It was not beyond his understanding or his sympathy that the wife he had brought to Lahardane thirteen years ago should wish, in leaving it, to travel on and on, further and further, until some other train deposited them where strangers did not excite comment or curiosity. Their future in pleasant, easy England, once imagined, could not be imagined now.

‘The Sussex address is the one we’ve left behind,’ he said, needing to say something. But neither Sussex nor its suburbs nor its villas, nor England’s tranquillity, concerned him. What did was his wife’s face gone thin and white, her staring so at the landscape with deadened eyes, her voice without its timbre, her folded hands seeming like a statue’s. But even so he felt relief as well. She had not acted in confusion when she’d sent a telegram to her bank, only with determination that she might more firmly close down the past. The documents he had collected for her went with them in their luggage, to become their livelihood wherever the end of their journey was to be.

‘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.

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