The Story of Lucy Gault

He loved their mealtimes. When the dining-room door closed behind Bridget he imagined it would be like this if they were married. He loved everything about Lahardane, where it was, the house itself, going to the strand in the early morning, being shown the trees on which L.G. was carved. He loved it when they lay on the grass by the stream and when they crossed it on the stepping stones. He loved what she loved, as if it would be unnatural not to.

‘I’ll show you something else,’ she said, and brought him to the ruined cottage high up in the glen. ‘Henry’ll tell you about Paddy Lindon.’

Ralph knew without being told that it was the place she had hobbled to as a child and he imagined her there, terrified and hungry and alone. He wanted to ask her about that time but could not, since she had never in any way referred to it except to mention her limp. When they were on the strand she talked about the nameless dog who’d run away again in the end, but didn’t touch upon the part it had played in what had happened. When he turned the pages of the photograph album in the drawing-room he saw, through a brown mist, a couple standing by a pram among the apple trees. His scrutiny was more intent than it usually was when he paused at one of the album’s photographs, but Lucy did not comment.

One day in the woods she suddenly said, ‘We must go back,’ as if she sensed his longing to hear what she might have said, as if she feared it. But the longing that had begun did not go away, and Ralph wondered if it would ever be more than longing, and wondered too if he would ever take her into his arms and touch with his lips her smooth, pale hair and her neck and her cheeks, her freckled arms and her forehead and closed eyes, her lips. He wondered if his wanting to would be all there ever was.

‘You mustn’t leave Lahardane,’ she said, ‘until you have finished Vanity Fair.’

‘I haven’t begun it yet.’

‘When you’ve finished it we must talk about it. And that will take time, too.’

Sometimes when they walked, the backs of their hands brushed for a moment, or their palms met and were grasped as the stepping stones were crossed. There was a stone wall that was difficult and there was closeness then too.

‘There are six hundred and forty-two pages,’ she said.

*

They would not have met if he had not lost his way: Lucy tried to think of that, of their never meeting, of not knowing that Ralph existed. It seemed to her that he had come out of nowhere, and she wondered if when he left Lahardane he would return to nowhere and not come back. She would never forget him. All her life she would remember the Wednesday afternoons there had been, and the time that was passing now. And when she was old, if she began to believe that Ralph had been a figment, and this summer too, it would not matter because time turned memories into figments anyway.

‘In all the world, Ralph, what would you wish for most?’

He stooped to pick up a pebble from the sand and skim it over the water. Twice, then three times, it touched the surface and bounced on. His manner was less shy now because, she supposed, he knew her better, or imagined he did. His feeling shy and his gentleness were what she liked about him.

‘Oh, I suppose, you know, that every day was doing nothing.’

‘That is something I have.’

‘Then you are lucky.’

‘I’ll miss you when you go. I doubt you’ll ever come back.’

‘If I’m invited -’

‘You have things to do.’

‘What things have I to do?’

‘Well, everything, when you think about it.’

They bathed, as they did twice every day, and then they walked to Kilauran. They clambered over the rocks to the pier. No one was about there or on the village street. Lucy said:

‘That’s where I went to school.’

They looked through one window and then the other. The shiny maps and charts still hung on the walls, with Mr Aylward’s portraits of kings and queens, William the Conqueror, Queen Maeve, the Emperor Constantine. Let x =6 was the writing on the blackboard.

‘Now I have shown you everything,’ Lucy said.

That day Ralph kissed her. On the way back to Lahardane he reached out for her hand and clumsily drew her closer to him on the shingle at the bottom of the cliffs. They did not speak.

Afterwards they climbed up by the familiar jagged path. The potato crop in the O’Reillys’ field had been harvested. Only the withering haulm lay about.

‘I love you, Lucy,’ Ralph said then. ‘I am in love with you.’

She did not reply. She looked away, and after a moment said:

‘Yes, I know.’ She paused again. ‘It’s no good, loving one another.’

‘Why isn’t it?’

‘I’m not someone to love.’

‘Oh, Lucy, you are! If only you know how much you are!’

They had not stopped and did not now. Slowly they walked on, and when Ralph again reached for her hand Lucy didn’t take it away. He said:

‘I have loved you since the first time I came here. I have loved you more every instant I have known you. I never loved anyone before. I shall never love anyone else. I could not.’