The Story of Lucy Gault

‘You didn’t tell me you had finished Vanity Fair. We haven’t talked about it. We must before you go.’

‘I never want to go. I never want to be without you, all my life.’

*

Ralph knew when Lucy shook her head that it was not in denial of what he’d said, that it was not a way of doubting the passion in his tone and in his eyes. She shook her head in protestation at the folly of his unbridled hope: none of this could be, her wordless response reiterated, repeating in that manner her statement that she was not someone to love.

‘You’re the first friend I’ve had, Ralph. I haven’t made friends as other people do. Or as people in novels do.’

‘I would do anything for you.’

‘Tell me more about where you live, the house and everything else. So that I know, when you have gone.’

‘Oh, Lucy, it’s just ordinary!’

‘Tell me all the same.’

Confused and unhappy, Ralph did so. He described the house and, beyond the bridge he could see from the windows of his bedroom, Logan’s Bar and Stores, where hardware was sold as well as groceries. He had never assumed he would do anything other than inherit the sawmills and go on living in that two-storey roadside house, creeper-covered and compact. In a field near the bridge there was some kind of abbey, not much of it left.

‘How much?’

‘Only a tower, or part of one. Hardly anything else.’

‘What a pity that is!’

‘I think there are monks’ graves as well. So people say.’

‘Do you go there, Ralph?’

‘There’s nothing much to go for.’

‘To look for the graves.’

‘No, I don’t do that.’

‘I would.’

‘Lucy – ‘

‘Do they know you in Logan’s Stores?’

‘Know me?’

‘Know who you are.’

‘They have always seen me about.’

‘Tell me about your boarding-school.’

‘Oh, Lucy-’

‘Please tell me. Please, Ralph.’

‘There were two.’ And Ralph described the first, where he was homesick: the grey house in a Dublin square, crocodile walks through empty streets on Sundays, the cabbage soup.

‘It couldn’t have been cabbage soup. You can’t have cabbage soup.’

‘We called it that.’

‘And did you have it at the next school too?’

‘The next one was better. I didn’t mind it.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Tell me about it. Tell me everything.’

‘It was outside Dublin, in the mountains. We wore gowns. Scholars wore special ones, more voluminous.’

‘Were you a scholar?’

‘Oh, no.’

‘What were you good at?’

‘Nothing much. They wouldn’t remember me there now.’

‘Did you play games?’

‘We had to.’

‘What were you good at?’

‘I wasn’t bad at tennis.’

‘Is that why you didn’t hate that school so much?’

‘Yes, perhaps. Did you mind my kissing you?’

‘We must go in now. No, I didn’t mind.’

*

The meal Henry sat down to every evening in the kitchen was similar to his breakfast and always the same: fried eggs and fried bread, a rasher of bacon. Tea accompanied it, which Henry took strong and sweet and milky.

On the evening of the day when Ralph had confessed his love nothing was different about this meal except what was said during it. An hour ago Henry had noticed a change in Ralph’s manner, and Lucy’s too, when they passed through the yard. They’d been abashed, affected by what was clearly a privacy between them, neither saying much. Henry wondered if there had been a quarrel; but Bridget, who later caught that same mood also, had several times noticed Ralph’s glance across the table in the dining-room and had surmised the nature of his feelings: the difference now would be that he had spoken of them.

In the kitchen Bridget passed this speculation on, at a loss when she tried to guess what would happen next. Their visitor would leave Lahardane and the autumn days would shorten as the season gave way to winter. Christmas would go by, the worst of the weather in the first months of the new year. Would he come back to Enniseala when another summer came? Would he again be here, at Lahardane? Or would time, fickle in its arrangements, slip him away from them?

There were often moments at Lahardane when Bridget would still have comforted Lucy, as she had comforted her in her infancy, as she had in her childhood. Always so close and yet not close at all, there was the solitary figure reading by lamplight or in the apple orchard, or wandering alone in the woods of the glen and on the seashore, her friends a stout solicitor and an elderly clergyman. When a letter arrived in the house there still was expectation, still a hope, but only for the instant before the envelope was scrutinized. The envelope always told.

‘You’re right enough,’ Henry agreed, nodding each word into place, his hindsight stirred by Bridget’s perceptions. He finished his tea and pushed his cup away. ‘And it’s maybe not a bad thing at the heel of the hunt.’

Clearing the table of dishes, Bridget was not surprised to hear this: she’d known that sooner or later she would. But she did not respond to the change of sentiment in her husband, for what could be said except to repeat what already she had herself declared? What had come about this summer was where hope flickered now.