The Story of Lucy Gault

It seemed natural to deny that there was talk. Yet he would have liked to say that, far from adversely affecting his attachment, the story that was renowned in Enniseala strengthened it. But all that was impossible, since she did not know of his attachment. He could not even claim that, being still close to childhood, he sensed something of what her child’s emotions had been when it was taken for granted that she should abandon without protest what she loved. He thought of her in that time and saw her clearly as she must have been, and remembered his own powerlessness in the boarding-school where he’d been assured he would be happy, his pillow drenched with tears, the home he’d been torn away from seeming like a heaven he had betrayed through a lack of the affection that was its due. How gentle in that alien dark his mother’s good-night embrace had been, how musical the clatter of his father’s timber mills, how cheerful his bedroom fire, how soft the carpet on the stairs! Nor was the hell that shattered his illusions yet fully spread about him: grimly spoken of were variations of discomfort and cold and discipline by disapproval; and again there’d be burnt morning porridge; again the stench of cabbage soup.

In the silence that had gathered as they stood by the car, Ralph wanted to say that he knew about the snares of childhood, and knew as well that his experience was puny compared with what still continued for the girl he believed he loved. His sympathy was part of love, as tender as his fondness.

‘Would you like to see the hives?’

She was wearing a different white dress, with sleeves that came halfway down her arms, its collar different too. Her necklace was of tiny pearls or what seemed like pearls.

‘Yes, please,’ he said, and they walked together beneath the wide archway, into the yard and through it to the orchard. One of the sheepdogs ambled after them, the other still lazed beneath the pear tree.

‘Beauty of Bath.’ She named apples that were not yet ripe, in clusters on old twisted boughs. ‘Kerry Pippins. George Cave.’ She pointed at a row of beehives and didn’t want him to go closer to them.

‘It’s lovely, this orchard,’ he said.

‘Yes, it is.’

They passed beyond it to a neglected garden, by collapsed glasshouses and raspberries gone wild. They came out on the other side of the house, where the railing that bounded the field they were in began.

‘Shall we go for a walk?’

Ralph thought of her as Lucy when she said that, the first time he had in her company. Lucy Gault, he saw written down, as she had written it. No other name could be as right.

‘Yes, of course.’

They passed from one field to another, then along the edge of one in which potatoes grew.

‘The O’Reillys’,’ she said.

She led the way down the cliffs, and over the shingle to where seagulls stalked possessively on smooth, wet sand. Thongs of seaweed had been left behind by the tide. Shells peeped up from where they were embedded. She said:

‘“The girl is lame!” you’re thinking.’

‘I wasn’t thinking that.’

‘You noticed before, of course.’

‘It isn’t what you notice much.’

‘Everybody notices it.’

Her limp made her more herself, he’d thought. He knew how it had come about. He’d told Mrs Ryall when she’d asked that it wasn’t in the least unattractive. He might have said so now, but shyness held him back.

‘That’s Kilauran.’ She pointed at the distant pier and the houses beyond it, her extended finger so slight and delicate that he longed to seize the hand and clasp it into his.

‘I think I was there one day.’

‘I went to school in Kilauran. Our church is a tin hut.’

‘I think I saw it.’

‘I never go into Enniseala.’

‘Don’t you like Enniseala?’

‘I have no reason to go there.’

‘I thought I might see you in the streets, but I didn’t.’

‘What do you do in Enniseala? What is it like where you are staying?’

He described the house above the bank offices. He told about his wandering the streets when he was free to do so in the evenings, how he often sat reading on the bandstand or in the empty bar of the Central Hotel, or walked on the promenade.

‘Did you mind my asking you to come to tea again? Is it a bore?’

‘Of course I didn’t mind. Of course it isn’t a bore.’

‘Why “of course”, Ralph?’

That was the first time she called him Ralph. He wanted her to again. He wanted to be for ever on this strand because they were alone here.

‘Because it’s how I feel. It couldn’t possibly be a bore. It was lovely, getting your letter.’

‘How many are the few weeks you have left?’

‘Three, before the boys go back to school.’

‘What are they like, the boys?’

‘Oh, they’re all right. I’m not much of a teacher, the trouble is.’

‘What are you then?’

‘Nothing, really.’

‘Oh, you can’t be nothing!’

‘My father owns a sawmills. I’ll end up owning it too. Well, I suppose so.’

‘Don’t you want to?’

‘I have no vocation for anything else. I’ve tried to want to be all sorts of things.’

‘What have you tried to want to be? An actor?’

‘Oh, heavens, I couldn’t act!’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m not the kind.’

‘You might be.’

‘I don’t at all think so.’