The Story of Lucy Gault

‘They’re lost to her,’ she said. ‘Even if they’d come back tomorrow.’

Saving a match, Henry lit his Woodbine with a spill from the range. He did not know his feelings were that of a father, was aware only that he felt protective of the Captain’s child and, as a father might be, suspicious of a stranger’s fondness. Yet while Ralph had been staying in the house Henry had continued to like him more than he had at first. And in saying that what had happened was not a bad thing he had meant more than the assertion stated. It was not bad that the Captain’s child should be taken from this place, separated at last from the dark that clung to it.

*

It rained in the night and all the next day. They played bagatelle, and Lucy began the conversation she wanted to have about Vanity Fair. Then they played bagatelle again. Ralph said:

‘I love you, Lucy.’

Lucy did not remind him that he had told her so already and more than once. Gently she stroked with her fingertips the back of his hand. She stroked his hair.

‘Dear Ralph,’ she whispered, ‘you must not love me.’

‘I cannot help it.’

‘One day, when you marry, will you write and tell me? So that I know and can imagine that too. And will you write when each child is born? And tell me your wife’s name and give some slight description of her? So that I can always see you and your wife, and children, in that house beside the sawmills. Will you promise, Ralph?’

‘It’s you I want to marry.’

‘You’ll forget me. You’ll forget this summer. It will fade and turn into shadows, and voices will be murmurs you cannot hear. Now – this present as we sit here – is a reality that will not last and is not meant to. You’ll see this room no more clearly than I see the faces described to me in novels. You’ll dream of Lahardane, Ralph, once in a while, or perhaps you never will. But if you do I’ll be a ghost by then.’

‘Lucy -’

‘Oh, I shall dream of you, of all the times you came here, of these days that are passing now, of this very moment when bagatelle has bored us because we have played too long, of my saying in the moment that comes next, “Shall we play Twenty-one instead?”’

‘Why do you say I must not love you?’

‘Because loving me will make you unhappy.’

‘But it doesn’t. It makes me happy.’

‘Shall we play Twenty-one? It’s going to go on raining.’

‘We could walk in the rain. At least on the avenue.’

The trees sheltered them a little. The air was fresh; delicious air, Lucy called it. They dawdled on the avenue, and dawdled again, standing in the porch of the gate-lodge.

‘Of course I love you too,’ Lucy said. ‘If you are wondering about that.’

*

Bridget lit a fire in the drawing-room, feeling that something cheerful must be done. The rain was heavier now, drops rolling down the windows, and then the first gusts of wind made its falling different. The wind was slight when it began, but within an hour had changed the character of the day. It brought the leaves down, swirling them about before they became sodden and still. It rattled the hall door and the windows. It drove sheets of rain against the panes, disrupting the drops that had earlier accumulated, before sliding monotonously down the glass. The sea would be a sight, Henry said.

In the drawing-room they made toast at the fire, poking their slices of bread into the red ashes of the logs. They sat on the hearthrug, reading. ‘Who’s that?’ Ralph asked about the only portrait in the room, above the writing-desk, and Lucy said it was some Gault she didn’t know about. She wound up the gramophone, then put a record on. John Count McCormack sang ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’.

They went to look at the sea, the wind so strong now that they could scarcely hear one another speak. The waves reared up like wild white horses, spectral forms exploding into foam, one chasing another as they broke. The thrash and crash of the sea sucked in the wind’s whine, a seashore sound that belonged nowhere else.

When the two embraced at the sea’s edge, each tasted the salt on the other’s lips. Drenched, Lucy’s hair was straggly and matted, Ralph’s pressed tight on to his scalp. The excitement of the storm held them in thrall, as completely as their love did. Would there ever again in her life, Lucy wondered, be such happiness as this?

‘How can we forget today?’ she whispered and was not heard.

‘I could never not love you,’ Ralph said, and this was lost as well.

They dried themselves in front of the drawing-room fire. Bridget brought in a tray, since it was warmer here than in the dining-room. Seeing them happy, she remembered that in a few days Ralph would be gone. She did not pray; it was not a subject for prayer. Instead, she willed a time in the future and saw them smiling in one room and then another, and heard them speaking of love, and saw them together always.

‘Look, it’s tinned salmon!’ Lucy cried.