The Story of Lucy Gault

Mr Ryall had advertised for someone to tutor his two sons during the summer months, since according to their preparatory-school reports they were backward in all subjects. So Ralph, at a loose end that summer, not yet settled in what he intended to do with his life, had come to the house above the offices of the Bank of Ireland, Mr Ryall being the bank’s agent in Enniseala.

He was a small, tidily moustached man, his wife a contrast in almost every way. Carelessly running to fat, Mrs Ryall was indulgent of herself and uncritical of other people, the generosity of her disposition reflected in her plumpness and her manner. That her boys were indolent failed to worry her. Worrying was her husband’s department, she had a way of saying, vaguely implying that worrying was an enjoyment for him.

It was half past nine, dusk gathering in the Ryalls’ well-furnished dining-room. A vast sideboard repeated the tortured curlicues of an equally grandiose tallboy. A set of dining-chairs matched the rosy Rexine finish of sofa and armchairs. Flowered wallpaper echoed damask curtains that did not draw across, drapes of net being permanently in place against the glass. Blue tasselled blinds obscured in daytime the windows’ upper panes.

A late sustenance was laid out on a great mahogany table, for no matter what the hour Mrs Ryall wished no one to be hungry. Beneath an unlit oil lamp on a pulley, cream crackers and Galtee cheese, cake and brandy-snaps were on offer. An hour ago the boys had been packed off to bed, the dregs of their cocoa cold now in the cups that remained on the table.

‘I imagine you weren’t told,’ Mrs Ryall said, ‘what happened at Lahardane.’

Fair-haired, blue-eyed, an angular quality in features that were handsome in their way, Ralph listened while the Ryalls told the story between them, Mr Ryall factual and precise, his wife supplying emotional overtones.

‘You’ll find it talked about in the town,’ Mr Ryall added when there was a pause in the recounting of events.

Spreading a cream cracker, his wife confirmed that. ‘I have heard she grew up pretty,’ she said.

When Lucy Gault smiled, a dimple came and made the smile seem mischievous. There were freckles on the bridge of her nose, her eyes were a faded azure, her hair as pale as wheat. Driving back in his employers’ motor car, Ralph had been accompanied by all that, and the image was vivid again while he listened to the continuing story.

‘I was approached,’ Mr Ryall said, ‘when Captain Gault and Mrs Gault could not be traced. There’d been a hope that he might be in touch, but there was no reason why he should be and of course he wasn’t. It is the saddest thing.’

Mr Ryall lowered the lamp and took off its glass globe to light the wick. Mrs Ryall swept particles of cream cracker from her bosom and left the table to pull down the blinds.

‘Would you say she’s pretty?’ she enquired. ‘Or perhaps she’s beautiful? Would you say Lucy Gault’s beautiful, Ralph?’

Ralph said he thought she was.

*

Lucy Gault was beautiful all that summer. She was beautiful in her plain white dress, the sunlight catching the dots of silver in the stoneless earrings she wore. They would have been her mother’s, Mrs Ryall said, probably the dress too; all left behind in a departure that had been hasty in the end.

Beneath the wide spread of a beech tree in the garden, while his pupils managed not to listen to what Ralph tried to teach them, the girl who had come out of the house he hadn’t thought was there haunted every morning and every sleepy afternoon. Vaguely aware of Kildare’s muttered conjugations and pretending he had not noticed that Jack was drawing animals on the inside cover of his exercise book, Ralph sometimes did not trust himself to speak in case, by foolish chance, he described the solemn stare that often came before Lucy Gault’s smile, and the way she had of sitting with her hands clasped in her lap, as still as marble. In his shy recall she poured their tea and said that visitors did not often come by mistake.

‘There is a river, the Arar, which flows through the territories of the Aedui and the Sequani into the Rhone,’ Ralph slowly repeated in the garden of the bank. ‘Estflumen, Kildare: there is a river. Quod influit per fines: which flows through the territories. You understand, Kildare?’

The translation came from Dr Giles’s Keys to the Classics, which Ralph had perused as he lay in bed in the early morning.

‘Aeduorum et Sequanorum is the Aedui and Sequani bit. You understand, Kildare?’

‘Indeed I do.’

‘Well, see if you can work out incredibili lenitate, ita ut non possit judicari oculis in utram partem fluat.’

Jack had transformed an isosceles triangle into a tarantula. Ralph drew another triangle, marking its angles A,? and C. Both boys wore floppy white hats because the sun this morning was strong.

‘Now, Jack,’ Ralph said.