The Story of Lucy Gault

Every Wednesday, half-day in Enniseala, was his half-day too. Mr Ryall continued to lend him his motor car, calculating that if the tutor he had found for his boys felt himself stifled by the limitations of small-town life he might do what the man last summer had done and take himself off. Ralph had driven to Dungarvan and had walked about it, had driven to Cappoquin and walked about it, had driven to Ballycotton and Castlemartyr and Lismore. He had not been back to the house near the cliffs. He had not been invited.

‘So what do we know about AB and AC, Jack?’

They’re letters in the alphabet.’

‘I mean the lines you’ve drawn. The sides of the triangle?’

Jack’s toe prodded a stick one of the Ryalls’ spaniels had been chewing. He kicked it gently away, ensuring that it was still within his reach.

‘They’re good straight lines,’ he said.

‘What about the angles A,? and C, Jack?’

They’re good -’

The lines are all the same length. What does that tell us about the angles, Jack?’

Jack pondered for a moment, then for another, and another.

‘Is this thing, lenitate, long?’ Kildare asked. ‘A very long river, does it mean?’

‘Incredibili lenitate, with incredible smoothness.’

‘My brain hurts,’ Jack said.

The maid, Dympna, crossed the lawn with Ralph’s mid-morning tea and biscuits. Both boys stood up as soon as they saw her.

‘It’s most interesting about the Aedui and the Sequani,’ Kildare politely remarked before he and his brother ran off.

On Wednesday evenings Ralph was always asked where he’d driven that afternoon, and he sensed the disappointment when he mentioned the towns he’d walked about. It was apparent to him that the Ryalls hoped he would visit Lahardane again, even though no invitation had come. He could feel Mr Ryall thinking that this, too, could be a factor in guaranteeing the services of his boys’ tutor; and, with greater sentiment, Mrs Ryall deciding that here at last was company for a lonely girl. But how on earth could he simply drive up that avenue, how could he presume that a friendship had begun? Nothing of that kind had been said.

One Wednesday, however, Ralph did drive back to where the avenue began, to the unoccupied gate-lodge and the entrance gates hidden in the summer undergrowth. He slowed down but did not turn in. Instead he drove on, and found eventually a way to the strand, where he swam and lay in the sun. No one else appeared on the shingle or on the smooth, washed sand which faintly bore his own bare footprints. No flutter of white disturbed his solitude, no slight figure on the far-off rocks that stretched like a pointing finger into the sea. Driving away, he found again the avenue and the gate-lodge. He waited, but no one appeared there either.

On other days, every evening, Ralph walked up the long main street of Enniseala, pausing to gaze into the windows of the shops, passing the time with the meat that hung in MacMenamy’s, the dress dummies in Domville’s drapery, the groceries in O’Hagan’s and the Home and Colonial. Enormous glass retorts containing red and green liquid were the feature of Westbury’s Medical Hall; furniture crowded P. K. Gatchell’s auction rooms – beds and wardrobes and tables, chests of drawers, chairs and writing-desks and paintings. Scenes from films were changed three times a week in the display cases of the Picture House.

Ralph read the Irish Times and the Cork Examiner in the bar of the Central Hotel. He walked past the squat lighthouse and the railway station, by the summer boarding-houses – the Pacific, the Atlantic, Miss Meade’s, Sans Souci. He strolled on the promenade among couples exercising their dogs, and nuns, and priests, and Christian Brothers. Convent girls chattered by the yellow and blue bandstand or swung their legs on the sea-wall.

Sometimes he walked past the army Camp on the Cork road, and far beyond it, out into the country. Sometimes he explored the less gracious streets at the bottom of the town, where children ran barefoot and shawled women begged, where men played street-corner pitch-and-toss and the smell of poverty oozed from infested dwellings. There was the riverbank walk to the Protestant church, close to where the swans that gave the town its name nested. One evening, among the churchyard graves, Ralph met an elderly clergyman who held out a hand.

‘You teach the Bank of Ireland boys,’ he said as he did so. ‘I’m Canon Crosbie.’

It surprised Ralph to be addressed in this way but he covered that up by smiling. He had listened to Canon Crosbie’s sermons, one of his duties being to accompany his charges to church on the rare occasions when neither of their parents wished to attend the Sunday-morning service.

‘I do my best to teach them,’ he said when he had given the clergyman his name.

‘Oh now, I’m sure you do very well, Ralph. And I’m right in thinking you hail from County Wexford?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘I was a curate long years ago in Gorey. What an interesting county Wexford is!’ ‘Yes.’

‘Proud of its differences.’