The Story of Lucy Gault

She shook her head. Her clothes were what she chose to wear. She looked away, at the unlit fire in the grate, the black mantelpiece above it, the familiar blue stripes of the wallpaper. She pushed about on her plate food she didn’t want to eat. What terrible folly had possessed her? All these years to have so stubbornly waited for no more than an old man’s scattered words?

‘There was a balcony,’ he said, ‘and the people passing on the street below would call out “Buon appetito!” when the tablecloth was spread for lunch.’ The magician’s butterfly disappeared and then came back. There were processions on St Cecilia’s day. ‘All that,’ he said.

She drew her knife and fork together. The images she might herself have conjured up were too fragile to be talked away in dinner-time conversation over plates and dishes on a table, too precious to be offered as a triviality. She had come to terms with what was there to come to terms with; she had managed, but could not now. She could not grieve; no more than a fact it felt like that her mother was not alive.

‘The Mitchelstown Caves?’ her father said.

‘I’ve never been there.’

‘Shall we go?’

‘If you would like to.’

*

A few days later the Captain passed into his seventy-first year but did not say so, although he would have liked to. He wanted to share with his daughter what was sometimes considered to be a milestone in a life, but as that day advanced the inclination slipped away. He could not comfort her and it mattered more than the milestones of ageing that he could not.

He suffered for her. He understood the trait in her that had forbidden her to draw someone else into her disquiet: for that, she was remarkable but did not know it. Nor would there have been consolation if she had.

In the evenings after dinner they sat together in the drawing-room, her company dutifully there. She read. He smoked a single cigarillo and drank a little whiskey. Every evening it was the same.

But once, restless, Lucy put her book aside, sat for a moment doing nothing, and then lifted out her embroidery drawer from the sofa-table and placed it on the floor. She knelt beside it to sort out skeins of silk, needles, drawings on scraps of paper, stubs of pencil, linen pieces, pencil-sharpener, rubbers. As her father watched, she unfolded a wide rectangle of linen on which she had drawn one of her sketches. She spread it on the hearthrug, quite close to where he sat: seagulls were only just discernible as such, little more than specks on the sand; a curve of broken lines indicated the shingle beneath the cliffs. Two figures stood by the spit of rocks that poked out into the sea. The embroidery had been abandoned and her tears came while he watched her rearranging the drawer’s disorder; other sketches that had lain there were examined and bundled away, this one kept.

‘Lady,’ he murmured, but she did not hear.

The Captain lay awake that night, thinking that Heloise would have ordered all this better, would have been wise in what she said to their daughter and how she said it. Her practicality came into that. It was she who had wallpapered their bedroom when first she came to Lahardane, she who had insisted that the smoking of the breakfast-room fire could be cured and had been right, she who gave their summer parties and in December had a Christmas tree in the hall for the children of Kilauran.

He turned on his bedside lamp to look at the faded roses of the wallpaper, then turned it off again. In the darkness he got up and stretched out on the sofa beneath the windows, which he sometimes did when he couldn’t sleep. He might tiptoe across the landing, as once or twice he had, to gaze down at the soft fair hair spread on the pillow, eyes gently closed. But tonight he didn’t.

He dozed, quite easily in the end, and then in some Italian church the woman sacristan read the evening lesson. In the shaded corner of the piazza men played cards. ‘Love is greedy when it is starved,’ Heloise reminded him when they walked across the difficult paving. ‘Don’t you remember, Everard? Love is beyond all reason when it is starved.’

*

She would rather be anywhere but here, Lucy thought, and wished she hadn’t agreed to explore the caves at Mitchelstown.

On a damp morning she and her father were the only visitors. The way lit by their guide, they clambered over slippery rock beneath the stalactites, while the different caves were named for them: the House of Commons, the House of Lords, Kingston Gallery, O’Leary’s. They waited for the spiders that were peculiar to the place to creep out from the crevices, and afterwards they walked about the town that gave the caves their name. Its great, wide square and the Georgian elegance of a refuge for impecunious Protestants were its main attractions. Nothing remained of the once stately Mitchelstown Castle, burnt and looted the summer after petrol cans had been brought to Lahardane.

‘Eccentric family,’ her father said, ‘those poor mad Kingstons.’