The Story of Lucy Gault

‘My country has treated Ireland badly,’ the woman said. ‘I’ve always thought so.’

‘Well, it’s over now.’

‘Yes, it’s over.’

There was a loss, too, in this woman’s life, a wedding the war had stolen from her: he sensed the common ground they did not stray on to, and was aware that she did also. Idly, they conversed through an afternoon – about Bruges and cities that seemed like it, of Ireland again, of England. They were companions for half a day, their exchanges still impersonal, keeping private what they wished to. Before he had a chance to meet the mother the two were gone.

A few weeks later the Captain went himself. He crossed from Calais to Dover, then rattled through Kent to London. There he made his enquiries about the regiment in India and was told his brother had years ago been killed in action. The sense of being alone, of being more than ever a survivor, filled the Captain then, and in the drab post-war capital, where victory seemed more like bad-tempered submission, he found little to cheer him. Dreariness was everywhere, in every face, in every gesture; only the streetcorner spivs and the multitude of sweetly scented tarts were jolly.

2

The morning was fine, bright March sunshine warm on Lucy’s arms and face. The bank of the stream might have been grazed by sheep, the grass was so short, but no sheep ever came here. It was a mystery that this grass, green throughout the longest heatwave, its springiness a pleasure to walk on, never seemed to grow at all. Lucy lay on it, staring up at the sky, her shoes kicked off, the book she had been reading face down beside her. She wasn’t thinking about it, neither of its people nor its cathedral places, not of Mrs Proudie or Mr Harding or the sun on the bell-tower. ‘Will you write and tell me?’ she had asked, but realized now that she had asked too much: of course Ralph hadn’t written to say what the wife he had married was like. He’d forgotten or was embarrassed; not that it mattered, and perhaps it was as well. In her reverie Lucy saw a pretty, capable face, and sensed a manner that went with it. A window of the creeper-covered house by the sawmills opened and tendrils of the creeper were cut away: tidiness was a quality too. When the saws were silent, husband and wife walked in the balmy evening air, across the bridge by Logan’s Bar and Stores. ‘How peaceful it is here!’ Ralph’s happy wife remarked.

Lucy sat up and reached for the book beside her, its red cover marked where rain had fallen on it once. Aloysius Sullivan had bought three lots of books at an auction a year ago and had brought them to Lahardane, a present, since he knew that reading novels was so much her pleasure. Alfred M. Beale was inscribed on the fly-leaf in dark ink, and Lucy made herself wonder who that had been. Monkstown Lodge, Only Canon Crosbie of all the people she had ever known would have been alive in 1858; musing through names and faces, she could think of no one else. Affectionately, she remembered the old clergyman – how concerned for her he had been, and Ralph’s saying he had been approached by him in the churchyard and how he had spoken of her. Canon Crosbie had lived into his ninetieth year.

Mr Harding had never been so hard pressed in his life. Drawn back at last to her novel, she read and was absorbed, and did not for ten minutes wonder about Ralph, his marriage or his wife.

*

A car brought him, and on the way from the railway station he said nothing to the driver. He had asked to be driven to Kilauran and would walk the distance that remained: he wanted to do that. Twice the driver spoke during the forty minutes the journey took, and then was silent.

At Kilauran the Captain remembered easily. There was a woman who used to search for shellfish in the rock water below the pier, and he wondered if the woman he saw searching there now might be her daughter. It seemed likely that she was, for in the distance there was some resemblance, or so he imagined. On the sands the fishermen had almost every day looked for the green glass floats that had slipped their nets. No fisherman was there today.

He walked by the sea. The cliff face was familiar, the jagged edge at the top, the crevices in its clay; only the clumps of growth seemed different. The smooth, damp sand became powdery when he turned to make his way to the shingle. The easy way up the cliff was as it had been.

Once or twice he had thought the house would be burnt out, that the men would have come back and this time been successful, that only the walls would be there. When the Gouvernets left Aglish they sold the house to a farmer who wanted it for the lead on the roof, who took off the slates and gouged out the fireplaces, leaving what remained to the weather. lyre Manor had been burnt to its foundations and the Swifts had stayed at Lahardane while they thought about what to do. There’d been talk of the remains at Ringville becoming a seminary.