The Story of Lucy Gault

The Captain knew they weren’t. They were obstinate in their ways, an obduracy nourished by pride. They were proud of Lahardane as they had maintained it, of the continuing part they had played in it, of managing it, of improvising, of making themselves more than the caretakers he had left behind. It was Henry who suggested how the pasture might be saved from neglect and deterioration in the future: for a small annual rent, and undertaking to maintain the fences, the O’Reillys agreed to have the grazing.

Of the visitor who had come again to the house one afternoon, more than a year ago now, it was only said that, being insane, strictly speaking he was not responsible for his intrusion. Henry said it reluctantly and Bridget, after prayer, reluctantly agreed; but in neither was resentment entirely dissipated. The Captain said it more wholeheartedly.

Lucy did not, again, write to Ralph, as she had known she wouldn’t, not even when a note came from him, as also she had known it would. The confusions of an afternoon, so strangely happening, calmed in retrospect, and yet for Lucy the afternoon had not dulled to greyness but had kept its colours as fresh as in a painting. Images of reality and of illusion still were there. The car stopped, and turned back. She lifted the tea-towels from the bushes. The man who’d come, whose presence was incidental and yet was not, knelt down to pray. Her father held her.

It is how things have happened, Ralph wrote. No one is to blame. What she had willed was not his way: that it was not was why first she’d loved him and still did. She had not known it then but only now: that all the letters in the world, all the longing, would not have made a difference. Until her life ended she would love a man who was married to someone else.

‘Tell me about Montemarmoreo,’ she asked at breakfast one morning, as if her father never had, and he repeated what he had told already. There were, again, the journeys to the races and to the Opera House, and Lucy was aware that her father hoped for what would never be: that out of a racecourse crowd or a theatre audience a man would step, as so long ago Ralph had stepped out of nowhere. Her father did not speak of this, but Lucy sensed such aspirations in his solicitude.

Their companionship – on Lucy’s side once edgy with resentment, on her father’s anxiously seeking too much – settled for what there was. She had rejected him was how it seemed to Lucy now, as it must have seemed to him at the time. She felt ashamed of that, and ashamed that she had not mourned her mother, that love’s selfishness had so unkindly got the upper hand. Circumstances had shaped an emptiness in her existence; and love’s ungainly passion belonged, with so much else, to the undemanding past. On her thirty-ninth birthday she and her father saw Nicholas Nickleby in the smart new cinema in Enniseala that had replaced the Picture House. They sat together far into the night when they returned to Lahardane, as sometimes now they did.

A few weeks later, on a fine November afternoon, they tended together the family graves at Kilauran, which Lucy in the past had always done on her own.

‘We are among our people,’ her father remarked, clipping away grass that had grown rank.

The stones were laid flat, as by tradition the Gault stones were, and the grass around them had grown high. Buttercup shoots sprawled in places over the lettering, clover softened the limestone edges.

Lucy rooted out herb Robert and ragwort and docks. In the time that had passed she had often reflected on the equanimity with which her father had listened to the ravings in their drawing-room. Simple man that he was, he might have gone that afternoon to find the rifle that had been fired from an upstairs window and with a soldier’s instinct might have threatened its use again. Instead, he had withdrawn from an occasion that was beyond him; and he had done so since.

‘One day, of course,’ he predicted now, ‘there’ll be no one here to do all this. Not that it’ll matter, since we do it for ourselves, don’t you think?’

She nodded, digging out another root. Their people would end when they did, all duty to them finished, all memory of them dead. Only the myths would linger, the stories that were told.

‘Oh, yes, all that,’ he agreed.