The Story of Lucy Gault

They drove away, through rain that turned to mist. Men clearing out a ditch saluted them as they went by. They met no one else until they stopped in Fermoy, a town familiar to her father since his army days. ‘D’you know Fermoy?’ she remembered Ralph asking and of course she didn’t. He had driven to it in Mr Ryall’s car on a Wednesday afternoon before he’d ever been to Lahardane. He had driven to half the towns in County Cork, he’d said, before he knew her, and she imagined being with him, being with him now.

‘Nice old town,’ her father said.

They walked together on an empty pavement, the mist still falling. Turf smoke was cloying in the air. Cattle were being driven on the street.

‘Would we try for coffee here?’ her father said.

In the quiet lounge of a hotel a clock was ticking softly. A waitress in black and white stood by a window, the lace of the curtain pulled back a little. They took their coats off, piling them with their scarves on an empty sofa. They sat in armchairs and when the waitress came to them they ordered coffee.

‘And something – biscuits perhaps?’ Lucy’s father said.

‘I’ll bring you biscuits, sir.’

The clock struck twelve. The waitress returned with a coffee pot and a jug of milk, and a plate of pink-iced biscuits. An elderly couple came in, the woman holding on to her companion’s arm. They sat near the window where the waitress had been standing. ‘We need more nails,’ the man remembered when they were settled. ‘And Keating’s Powder.’

Lucy broke a biscuit in half. The coffee had a scalded taste; the sweetness of the icing was a help. Marriage was not for ever any more. Marriage could be set aside, as often these days it was: in Ireland too it could be set aside.

‘That guide didn’t know much,’ her father said.

‘Not much.’

The waitress brought tea for the couple who had come in. It was fair day in Fermoy, she said, and the old woman said they knew: you couldn’t not, the state of the streets. Oh, something shocking, the waitress agreed. Six o’clock in the morning the cattle started to come in: she was watching them earlier. She came from Glanworth herself, she said before she went away; she often used see the cattle driven on the roads all night, going to the Fermoy fair.

‘We’re old familiars here,’ the old woman called across the lounge and Lucy tried to smile. Her father said he’d known the hotel a long time ago.

‘Everything’s long ago now,’ the old woman said.

Teaspoons rattled on their saucers. The clock ticked in a silence; then the old man’s whisper became loud because his companion had indicated that she couldn’t hear. He was ashamed that they had fleas in the house, he said. Coming in off the fowls or not, he was ashamed.

‘Lady.’

Already, a moment ago, her father had tried for her attention; she’d been aware of that.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘Early on, I wrote letters I didn’t post.’

She didn’t understand; she didn’t know what letters he meant. She shook her head.

Enquiries had been natural in the circumstances, her father explained, and told how he had stamped each envelope, how he had afterwards kept the letters by him. Years later he had dropped them, one by one, into the fire and watched the blackened paper curling before it fell away.

‘All that,’ he said, and there was something about her mother not wanting ever to know the news from Ireland, and how his love had caused him too assiduously to protect her and take from her a greater marvel than she saw in pictures. He sought no sympathy but blankly laid out these facts as if apologizing for some failure in himself.

She nodded. In novels people ran away. And novels were a reflection of reality, of all the world’s desperation and of its happiness, as much of one as of the other. Why should mistakes and foolishness – in reality too – not be put right while still they might be? The pleas there’d been, the certainty that this was what mattered most, everything so often repeated, the longing, the begging: word for word, spoken, written, all became a torrent in Lucy’s head while her father was silent and she was silent too. She heard the old man complaining that when people went away from the house they noticed they had fleas in their clothes. You couldn’t hold your head up.

‘I can’t not tell you,’ her father said, ‘that the guilt your mother felt was a bit too much for her.’

‘I’m glad you’ve told me.’

The old man stood up. The rain had stopped, he said, and the two gathered up their belongings. Coins were left on the table before, slowly, the old couple went away, clinging to one another again. The Captain and his daughter sat in silence then.

*

Back and forth, back and forth, the digger crossed Malley’s slope, prodding at the rocks, lifting one to the pile when it was loose enough. Against the rabbits, every inch of the fencing would have to be renewed, the mesh at the bottom dug six inches in. Yesterday Ralph had ordered the saplings. Ashes and maples would change the landscape, seen for miles around when they strengthened and spread.