The Story of Lucy Gault

For Ralph, it was always easier in the sawmills. Practicality brought relief; emotion was belittled by the hum of the saws and the rasp of planes, the men intent and careful, the smell of sweat and resin and dust. He was in charge and had to be in charge. But too readily, when he climbed the ladder-way to the office that looked down on the machinery and the men, when the noise fell away but still was there less loudly after he had closed the door, his thoughts escaped. Attention to orders and invoices and the columns in account books, concern about signs of wear in a driving belt or a saw gone blunt, the counting of the weekly wages, were tasks that suffered unintended interruption; and as from sleep, he would return minutes later to where he was, to stare in bewilderment at what he held in his hand or what was open before him.

Often his father came to the office, to share what had to be done that day. His father did not remark upon these moments of abstraction, the sudden crossing of the bare-boarded office floor in an attempt to disguise them, back turned for too long. Guile was not Ralph’s way: his father would say that. The men would say it when the saws went quiet at midday, when they sat with their sandwiches, outside in the sun if it was warm. People would say it in Logan’s bar, the evening drinkers, the women who came to shop in the grocery, people who had known Ralph all his life. Not for an instant was he doubted, as he was not in the house he had brought a wife to; not for an instant in the bungalow that had been built for his mother and his father.

Yet what became a habit began. ‘I’ll walk to Doonan,’ he would say when he returned to the house in the evenings, and would walk in this direction or that in order – so he knew it seemed – to ease away the rigours of the day, the worries left behind when things had not gone well, when a part for a machine was not yet available or there was failure again to deliver what had been promised. Lies that were not quite lies – slight deception, hardly there, the bluster of pretence – coloured every day. He had always despised all that.

‘Were Cassidy’s heifers out?’ his wife would ask when he returned from his evening walks. Or, ‘Have they begun the tarring at Rossmore?’

And he would say, although he hadn’t noticed. He could not bear to hurt her, yet her contentment seemed unnatural. Why did she feel no pain, since so much pain was there?

‘You used to tell me more.’ She would smile away what might have been mistaken for a complaint and he would say the tinkers were back at Healy’s Cross. Or say that Mrs Pierce had cut her fuchsia early. Or that the stream was running over at Doonan.

She was particular about the house, and he liked that quality in her, the care she took, not being slapdash. He liked the food she cooked; he liked the rooms kept clean, the way she so easily comforted their child. If ever he had told her what he had suppressed she would have listened in her careful, serious way, not interrupting. ‘In fact, I told nobody,’ he might have ended his confession. ‘It wasn’t only you.’ But it was too late for confessions now, too cruel that she should see a girl in a white dress, and Mr Ryall’s car, and tea laid out; too cruel that she should be there on the shore when the high waves splattered the rain with foam.

‘I’m thinking I should buy Malley’s slope,’ he said one evening.

‘The field?’

‘If you can call it that. Waste land more like.’

‘Why would you want waste land, though?’

‘I’d clear it to grow ash on. And maybe maple.’

An investment, he said. Something to take an interest in, he did not add; something to keep him where he belonged; a stake in the future that would give the future shape before it happened.

‘Is Malley wanting to sell?’

‘I doubt he ever thought anyone would want those few acres.’

It had become almost dark in the room where they sat and he sensed more treachery in not wanting to put on the lights. It was she who did so. Her happy face was there then, her dark hair loosening, as it sometimes did at this time of day. He watched her drawing down the blinds before she came to sit near him.

6

‘You should have better clothes, lady.’

Her mother had had a coat made in Mantua, pearls strung for her at a stall on the Ponte Vecchio. Her mother was never less than smart, and had acquired Italian ways and taken to Italian fashions. Her mother had delighted in the cherubs of Bellini, was kind to waiters and hotel maids, and spoke Italian with a natural ease. Her mother was recognized by beggars on the streets, her generosity famous in Montemarmoreo.

In the dining-room Lucy listened, and nodded now and again. ‘I used to wear her dresses,’ she said.

‘Well yes, of course.’

‘They’re all worn out now.’

‘Will we buy you a few new ones?’