The Story of Lucy Gault

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 waitingroom 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 drawingroom 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.