The Story of Lucy Gault

‘She loved Annunciations. She wondered about the nature of St Thomas’s doubt. Or if Tobias’s angel had taken the form of a bird. Or how on earth St Simeon managed on his pillar. We looked a lot at pictures.’

‘I’m sorry, Everard.’

The solicitor remembered the demure eyes of the girl he saw when the woman she had become was spoken of. He had often considered she was someone who in all her life had not sought to hurt a soul. Aloysius Sullivan, who never regretted that he had not experienced the intimacies of marriage, for a moment did so now.

‘You were a good husband, Everard.’

‘An inadequate one. We left Lahardane when we could bear the days no longer. I should have resisted that careless haste.’

‘And I should have set out myself to search for you. We could go on for ever.’

‘Is it necessary for Lucy to know what I have told you?’

‘It would be kinder if she did not.’

‘I think she should not know.’

‘And I am certain of it.’

The two men drank. Their talk loosened, sprawled, was easier for both. On the promenade a little later, their gait sprawling a bit also, they were again the friends they had been once. The solicitor – the older by eleven years and still as Everard Gault remembered him – spoke on their walk of people they were both acquainted with, his clerk, and the housekeeper whom he had had for so long. He came no closer than that to his private life, all he said still giving the impression, as in the past, that this was shared with no one. The Captain talked about his travels.

‘Heloise had a photograph that must have been taken hereabouts,’ he said, interrupting something else. ‘Faded brown and torn a bit and creased. I doubt she knew it was still among her things.’

He pointed to where the promenade had been built up when high waves had broken through. Lucy stood among the old breakwater posts that staggered out to sea in her mother’s photograph, and some of the rotting posts were still there. The breakwaters were to be replaced, Aloysius Sullivan said, and one of these days perhaps they would be.

They had stopped by a seat but did not sit down. Listening to what he was told about the breakwaters, the Captain stared out over the sea, to the splashes of gorse that dotted the far-off view. A silence gathered when the local news was exhausted, before he said:

‘You’ve seen to it that she had money. All these years.’

‘She has not spent much.’

‘Lucy does not talk to me.’

He spoke of the moment of their encounter, his embrace resisted, and of the silences in the dining-room, her finger tracing its patterns on the surface of the table, his euphoria so often shattered.

Mr Sullivan hesitated. It was not his place to be expansive, yet his affection for both father and daughter made it necessary that he should be now.

‘Lucy might have married.’ He paused, then added, ‘But she believed she had no right to love until she felt forgiven. She never doubted, when the rest of us did, that your return would come about. And she was right.’

‘This was some time ago? That she might have married?’

‘Yes.’ There was another pause, and then, ‘He has married since.’

They walked on at the same slow pace, and Aloysius Sullivan said, ‘It’s good you’re back, Everard.’

‘How like the rest of our domestic tragedy it is that I have come too late!’

4

The two men on the promenade were watched from far away.

The soldier who had been disturbed by delusions was no longer a soldier: when his period of service ended it had been put to him that he might consider continuing for a further spell, but he had declined to do so. Even though it had failed him, Horahan bore the army no ill-will and he had gone about the last of his military duties with his usual care and perseverance, brushing polish into his boots, shining his buckles and the buttons of his tunic. When his final day came he rolled up the mattress on the springs of his narrow cot. A black suit hung waiting in his locker.

He wore it now. He was temporarily out of employment, living in a room he rented in a house not far from the one where he had been a child, where his mother had continued to live until her death. Hearing of Captain Gault’s return, he had been on the look-out for him on the streets of the town. He had followed him today and, as he continued to observe the two figures on the promenade, tears that were not tears of sorrow or dismay welled behind his eyes, spilt out on to his hollow cheeks and ran down into the collar of his shirt. He knew, there was no doubt. This was, at last, Our Lady’s sign: at her holy intervention, Captain Gault had come back to bring the torment to an end.

Three Christian Brothers going by noticed the rapt expression on the ex-soldier’s face. When they had passed they heard him cry out and when they turned they saw him on his knees. They watched until he stood up again, until he mounted a bicycle and rode away.

5

‘They lived on alms,’ Ralph said when he was asked about the monks whose graves they walked on. ‘Augustinians were always beggars here.’