The Story of Lucy Gault

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 apologizing, 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?

‘She wants to give him tea,’ Bridget said a few minutes later in the outhouse where Henry did his carpentry, coming there to ask him to set up the trellis table on the grass of the hydrangea lawn. A flush had come into Bridget’s cheeks, and Henry remembered that, too, from the past – excitement engendered by what Bridget called ‘society’.

He brushed grime and cobwebs from the slats of the table, then wiped them with a rag. On the lawn he brushed the seats of two of the white iron chairs that broke at intervals the curve of the wall over which the deep blue hydrangea blooms fell. The rust on the ironwork needed to be attended to, the chairs themselves repainted. One of these days he would do it, Henry resolved, knowing he wouldn’t.

*

‘It didn’t look like an avenue,’ Ralph said. ‘The gate-lodge was closed up.’

He hadn’t noticed the faded green entrance gates, obscured by nettles and dying cow parsley. He’d driven beneath a canopy of leaves and suddenly the big stone house was there.

‘That’s Lahardane you visited,’ Mrs Ryall said. ‘And that was Lucy Gault.’

The girl who’d come out of the house hadn’t said her name. The woman who spread a tablecloth on the slatted table had arranged cups and saucers on it in silence, milk jug and teapot, brown bread and butter and a honeycomb. Her big wooden tray had a raised rim running round it and white porcelain handles. When the tea had been poured the woman came back to see if everything was all right, and returned again, with soda bread that had sultanas in it.

‘IF 19 went well for you?’ Mr Ryall enquired, and Ralph said the car he had been lent that afternoon had given no trouble. ‘It was very kind of you,’ he repeated, having shown his gratitude in this way already.

‘You need a holiday from the boys.’