The Story of Lucy Gault

It would have been on Henry’s list for Mrs McBride, John West’s red salmon, a treat because it was expensive. And there were the tiny, sweet tomatoes that Henry cultivated in the cold frame he had resurrected a few years ago. They made a salad, with lettuce and little onions, and slices of hard-boiled egg.

‘Shall we have wine?’ Lucy suggested. ‘White wine? I think I’ve never tasted wine except the bitter red in church.’

She went away and a moment later returned with a bottle and two glasses. There were many bottles left, she said, red and white, untouched on the pantry racks.

‘Look in all the drawers for a corkscrew. Somewhere there is one. Oh, now nice this is!’

They pulled two chairs up to a table they moved closer to the fire. Ralph poured the wine and he wanted, then, not ever to leave this house he had come to. He wanted, then, not to take Lucy from it but to be here with her, since she belonged here and tonight he felt he did also. On the gramophone the needle scratched through the Londonderry Air.

*

Two fishermen from Kilauran were lost at sea that night, caught earlier by the sudden storm when they had pulled their nets in and were beginning to row home. There was mourning in the village, a melancholy that affected Lucy when she and Ralph walked there on the day before he was to leave. The sound of keening came from a cottage around which people had congregated. A fiddler had come, to play a dirge if one was called for.

‘How could I have run away from them?’ Lucy said on the strand as she and Ralph walked back to Lahardane, with wicks for the lamps and the newspaper they’d bought. ‘I made them suffer as those women are suffering now. I long for their forgiveness. That will not just go away.’

These revelations came suddenly, and Ralph did not say anything as they walked on.

‘I was in love then, too – with trees and rock pools and footprints on the sand. Was I possessed, Ralph? I have always thought I was.’

‘Of course you weren’t.’

‘Like poor Mrs Rochester! Whom nobody had sympathy for!’

‘You were a child.’

‘A child can be possessed. Did I hate them when I made them suffer? Was that why so very soon I was ashamed?’

‘Please, will you marry me, Lucy?’

Slowly, she shook her head. ‘My father shot a man and did not kill him. My mother was afraid. I did not understand. Shall I tell you, Ralph?’

And he listened and was told what he knew already, and saw what so often he had seen: the figures on the shingle and the sands, the light brought from the house, darkness giving way to dawn.

‘I have found a little courage,’ Lucy said.

‘You are courageous, Lucy.’

‘Dear Ralph, how could I marry you?’

Her lips reached up for his and lightly touched them. The sea was as calm as a pond, waves softly breaking. The sky was a deeper blue than it had been all this hot summer. White, bunched-up clouds hardly moved on it.

‘I don’t care about what you did. I swear I don’t, Lucy.’

‘I have to live with it until they return.’

‘No, no, of course you don’t.’

‘You must go back to your contented life. Not be a visitor in mine. For you could only be that, Ralph, although I love you. When we love one another we are stealing what does not belong to us, what is not our due. Darling Ralph, we must make do with memories.’

‘We need not and I cannot. I cannot make do with memories.’

‘Oh, memories aren’t bad, you know.’

‘They’re nothing.’ There was an edge of bitterness in his tone. They walked in silence then, until he said:

‘I wouldn’t take you from Lahardane if you don’t want to go.’

She seemed not to hear. She drew with the point of her shoe on the sand. She looked up when their names were written. She said:

‘What do they think, Ralph, and do not say? Why do they not come back?’

But when Ralph began to answer he felt that what he said was hardly heard, and so desisted. They walked on slowly, and Lucy said:

‘I did not hate them, yet how do they know it, any more than they know all they so easily might? One day – today, tomorrow, some day a year away – they’ll find the strength to make the journey, and it will never be too late for that.’

‘Oh, Lucy, long ago they have forgiven you and now would want your happiness. Of course they have forgiven you.’

‘Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn’t do that. That is for me, and I shall do it. I shall live a life that is all memory of our love. I shall close my eyes and feel again your lips on mine and see your smiling face as clearly as every day I see the waves. What friends we’ve been, Ralph! How we’ve longed for this summer not to end! Another summer would be different – we both know that.’

‘I don’t know it. I don’t believe it for a moment.’