The Story of Lucy Gault

His marriage was more than a year old but had it taken place only a day ago it would have made no difference. Not quite as she was imagined, Ralph’s wife was brown-eyed and tall, with dark hair drawn tightly back, a natural slenderness now returning after the birth of her first child. It happened that she was, as imagined, capable and tidy: advancing tendrils were indeed clipped back from the windows of the creeper-covered house that had become Ralph’s on his marriage, his parents moving to the nearby bungalow they had begun to build when they realized the house would one day be too much for Ralph’s ailing mother.

It was in the middle of a Monday morning that Ralph learnt of Captain Gault’s return. Years ago he had discovered that a lorry driver who often picked up a load of timber at the sawmills came of a Kilauran family and kept in touch with his sisters there. He and Ralph had talked about the village and the neighbourhood, Ralph often speaking of the house on the cliffs, though not of his intimate connection with it. A secrecy had always influenced him where Lucy Gault was concerned. During his six years in the army he had been reticent, not once revealing what by then had seemed inevitable: that he and Lucy Gault would never marry. Nor had he spoken of her, or of his time at Lahardane, to the wife he had married in her place – a circumstance that in no way indicated, in the marriage, an absence of love or that Ralph had settled for second best. The impossible had simply been retreated from.

‘Surely not?’ he said, calm when the lorry driver told him.

‘Oh, I’d say it’s right enough, sir.’

The man was certain. There was a sureness in his tone that made Ralph want to close his eyes and look away, that stabbed him somewhere, and he imagined in the heart. But his heart was throbbing, for he could feel it, more than he ever had before. A dryness had come into his mouth, as if some bitter fruit parched it. The lorry driver had to shout when the motion of another saw began, adding to the snarl of beech planks slowly cut.

‘A while back, sir.’

They went outside.

‘Mrs Gault too?’

‘They’re saying Mrs Gault died.’

Ralph gave the man the invoice that had been prepared. He guided him when the lorry was backed out of the mill-yard on to the road. Still simulating calm, he waved good-bye and went away to be alone.

*

When he’d heard of the return, Mr Sullivan had been nonplussed. In his view Everard Gault was a simple man to whom a complicated thing had happened, and further complications were added now: Aloysius Sullivan didn’t know whether to be pleased or apprehensive.

‘Well, you’ll see a change or two in Enniseala, Everard,’ he remarked in the back bar of the Central Hotel when eventually the two men met again. He considered it advisable to keep the conversation to the surface, as he remembered so much talk with Everard Gault had been in the past. ‘Would you have guessed we’d be manufacturing mackintosh coats in Enniseala?’

‘There’s that?’

‘Oh, indeed, indeed. There’s not much in Enniseala that’s the same.’

Some of this the Captain had seen for himself. Certain boarding-houses he remembered were gone, the main-street shops were different. The railway station was in decay, the doors of Gatchell’s auction rooms were closed and it was said would not open again. Familiar shops were no longer familiar when he stepped inside, the faces that came forward new to him.

‘To be expected, of course,’ he remarked now in the Central Hotel. ‘A different Ireland everywhere.’

‘More or less.’

‘I must apologize for not suggesting that you and I met sooner. It has taken a bit of time to settle in.’ ‘It’s understandable that it would.’

They were the only drinkers in the small bar, where no one served unless summoned. The Captain stood up and crossed to the wooden counter with their two glasses.

‘The same,’ he said when a squinny youth appeared. They were drinking John Jameson.

‘We would not have gone, you know,’ the Captain said when he returned to the table they sat at. ‘Had we searched the woods and found her we would not have gone.’

‘Best not to dwell on that, Everard.’

‘Oh, I know, I know.’ He lifted his glass and when there had been a silence he imparted what he was fearful of relating in his dining-room. ‘Heloise believed her child took her own life.’

The conversation had crept beneath the safety of the surface the solicitor preferred. He made no effort to check that, knowing he would not be able to now. The Captain said:

‘But graceful in all things, she was as graceful as it is possible to be, living with that.’

‘Heloise could not be otherwise.’

‘The outward sign of her beauty was always there.’

Aloysius Suilivan nodded. He said he remembered the first occasion he had met Heloise Gault, and as if he had said something different, or nothing at all, the Captain went on: