The Story of Lucy Gault

Was there impatience in his tone when he said that? Some sign he had failed to disguise as tiredness after his day’s work? He smiled at his wife, an apology she would not know was one. The air was soft, without a breeze. Somewhere a pigeon cooed, not finished yet with the day.

They talked about the monks, wondering if all of them had been dedicated equally to simple goodness, driven equally by what gave their cloistered lives a meaning. Did faith such as theirs, she asked, make people the same? Had all of them been that, as their dress would have implied?

‘Hardly.’ Again in his tone there might have been impatience, a trace of unfair irritation, and again he was ashamed. More gently he said:

‘What’s left here is a bit of their church. Where they lived would have spread over all this field, and beyond it – their cells, their refectory, the garden they must have had, their fishponds.’

There was a single stone, its purpose not established, upright in a corner of the field. Damaged carving at its base was unidentified. It might have been the broken perpendicular of a cross, the jagged breach rounded, incisions of decoration added. But that was not known for certain.

‘Shall we go back now?’ Ralph suggested.

Their child was asleep. Through the open window, safely barred, a cry would reach them. In the still evening they listened for a moment.

‘Yes, perhaps we should go back.’

When she had hesitated about marriage he had pressed her. He had listened to her doubts, allaying them with laughter that was genuine and fond. It had not been humility that had held her back, not lack of confidence in her ability for what lay ahead – more like caution that, without quite knowing why, she felt wasn’t out of place. All this Ralph remembered now, as if time had waited to make sense of it.

‘A pity they’ve been let go.’ She looked back at the untended ruins. Among them the cows that grazed the field sought shade when the sun was hot, trampling the growth of nettles. It seemed odd to Ralph that that was what she said, and yet of course it was not.

‘Yes, it’s a pity.’

They climbed over the gate on to the road because that was easier than struggling with its rusty bolt. Bicycles were propped against the shiny pale-blue wall of Logan’s, its shop open in the evenings for as long as there was trade in the bar.

They talked about the day, what news had been passed on in the sawmills. When first they’d met he had confessed that once he couldn’t see himself a timber merchant for the rest of his life. Often she had brought that up and as if she had now, he said:

‘It’s what I am.’

Bewildered, she frowned, and smiled when he explained. They smiled together then.

‘I don’t want anything else,’ Ralph said.

It slipped out easily; he didn’t have to look away, could even take her hand. In her deep brown eyes was all the love that made their life together pleasurable.

‘How nice you are!’ she whispered.

They crossed the narrow bridge and then there was the bungalow where his parents lived, a smell of tobacco in the air. Bulky and grey-haired, his pipe gripped tightly in the centre of his mouth, Ralph’s father was unhurriedly watering his flowerbeds. He waved and they waved back. ‘It’s just you’d maybe be interested,’ the lorry driver had said.

What had never felt like deception had felt like it ever since. Keeping his own secret, obscuring it with vagueness when ages ago someone had asked too much about that summer in Enniseala, had been no more than protecting what was precious. It was more now. Past and present had somehow become one. What was Lucy thinking in this moment? What did she think when each morning she woke to another brightening half-light? That he had heard the news? That he would know what to do, that he would find some way?

The child lay undisturbed. No dream had frightened her, no sound shattered her empty peace. One cheek was a little reddened from where she’d rested it on her curled-up fingers.

*

When the Captain realized that since his wife’s death he had lost something of his military bearing – that with an old man’s carelessness he had let himself go, that he shambled when he was tired – he made up for these lapses in the care he took, for his daughter’s sake, with his dress and his appearance. He had his hair cut regularly in Enniseala. He clipped his fingernails close; he knotted his tie with care. Unfailingly every morning he polished his shoes, and had the heels replaced before it was entirely necessary.