The Story of Lucy Gault

Twice before, Henry had repaired the boots he was repairing now. He had taught himself the knack of this work, guessing at first what each knife was for, eventually finding that the skill required came naturally, with patience. Cutting a new sole, he found himself reflecting, as he often did, on how it would be now if this remote house had been forgotten in the vengeance of 1921, if a threat in the night had not engendered such fear and such distress. Another man, different in nature and temperament from the Captain, might not have heeded the nervous premonitions of his wife, might have dismissed them as unwarranted and foolish, might not have considered it a wife’s place to be upset. That three callow youths, hardly knowing what they were doing in their excitement, had exercised such power still seemed to Henry to be extraordinary.

He trimmed the edge of the leather until the sole perfectly fitted the boot, then cut the second one. The time he’d made Lucy a pair of shoes they hadn’t been comfortable, but she hadn’t said. ‘Arrah, throw those old things away,’ he’d urged her when he noticed she was hobbling, but she wouldn’t. When he had been against her marrying that boy, when he had been against the friendship, he hadn’t understood what Bridget had, she being quicker than he was in ways like that. ‘It’s the lonesomeness would worry you,’ Bridget had said.

It worried both of them now. The letters that were exchanged were what was left, but the postman’s bicycle, free-wheeling on the last few yards of the avenue, scattering the gravel pebbles in front of the house, came less frequently now, sometimes for months on end not at all. One day, when it had not been for almost the whole of one winter, Henry saw a distant figure on the strand and wondered who it was. He saw the same figure again, much later and at a different time of year. It might have been anyone, for Henry was not one to rush to conclusions, but when he told Bridget she said of course it wasn’t anyone. Henry watched, but the solitary visitor did not return, and a day came then which seemed – for Henry at least – to bring to an end all that had begun when, years ago now, Mr Ryall’s Renault had first tentatively appeared between the two stately lines of the avenue’s trees. ‘She says he’s after joining up,’ Bridget reported when the war in Europe began and, to Henry’s confusion and surprise, she added that it was an ill wind that blew no good. For couldn’t it happen, Bridget argued, that the separation, and the danger there’d be, would straighten things out? Wasn’t it often the case when a man came back safely from a war that there was a different way of looking at things?

Henry tapped the second sole into place and filed down the leather instep. Not saying so, he had dismissed these prognostications at first as the wishful thinking to which Bridget was prone; but there was no doubt about it, this was an outcome that yet might come about. The young fellow would come back, and in the relief he brought with him the question would be asked: where was the sense of waiting any longer for what would not occur? It would be Lucy then who would say close the house up, as her father had before. Stored away were the window boards Henry had taken down, and none the worse for that. One of these days he’d fix the slates on the roof of the gate-lodge so that he and Bridget could go back to where they belonged. With the doors and windows open, he’d get rid of the damp that had begun there and slap on a bit of paint where it was needed. He’d dig over the patch at the back. When the time came he’d secure the packing-cases that had never been sent for, and Bridget would find new sheets to put over the furniture. No matter how things happened, Henry guessed this would be what Lucy would want when the marriage was fixed, before she was taken away to County Wexford. As Bridget herself said, something in you knew when a thing was meant.

Henry darkened the leather where it showed, and stitched into one of the boots a new tongue, which he darkened also. Children would be born, Bridget said, and now and again they’d be brought to look at the old house, calling in at the gate-lodge on the way. One by one Henry stowed away the tools he’d used, on the rack above his workbench. He reached down his polishing rags from a nail in the wall and smeared polish on to the leather, taking his time, since he had plenty of it.

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