The Story of Lucy Gault

In the drawing-room Lucy sat alone for a little longer, then drew the fire-guard in front of the embers that still glowed in the grate. She tidied the cushions and the chairs, closed the doors of the corner cupboard, easing them where they stuck and had to be pushed a little. Passing the bagatelle board, she set the marbles going among the pins. Two hundred and ten was her highest score, achieved when she was six, and she did not better it tonight.

For an instant when she looked back to see that everything was all right she saw the room as, once upon a time, fire might have ravaged it, and heard again the tormented voice. Often when she awoke from early-morning sleep she took with her from some unquiet dream the figure in bleak, black clothes crouched terrified in an armchair, the empty eyes. Once she’d seen the big old-fashioned bicycle propped against the wall near the lighthouse and, far away on the sands, the lanky form of the man who believed he was a murderer. She had watched him for a moment, not knowing why she did, not knowing why so easily she remembered and saw again the restless shuffle of the hands, the agitated fingers groping to touch each place of agony. On the sands he hadn’t moved from where he was but all the time stood staring at the sea.

*

Propped up on his pillows, the Captain listened for his daughter’s footsteps and heard them pass his door. For a moment in the night he was glad that they had tidied up the graves. Later he was aware of pain. It did not wake him.

FIVE

1

Long after the funeral, when another year had begun, Lucy went through her father’s belongings and his clothes. Nothing she came across was a surprise. Folding away shirts and suits, she wondered if drama was finished with at last in the house that now was hers. He had drunk his whiskey to the end, she had not stopped him. He had known that death was creeping up on him; more than once he had remarked that nothing was more certain than that it should. He had smiled through this acceptance of nature’s strict economy and she had too, keeping company with him in his dismissal of morbid anticipation, remembering him as he had been while she made the slow journey of loving him again, forgiven for her unspoken reproaches.

Some of his belongings she kept: his sets of cufflinks; his watch; the stick he had taken to using when, once in a while, he accompanied her on her walks; the wedding ring he’d worn. She drove into Enniseala with his clothes, to give them to the women who collected for the charity of St Vincent de Paul. She put away the picture postcards he had kept. The bedroom that had been like a grave during its unoccupied years was a grave again, its door closed, never entered.

A certain formality passed from the house with the Captain’s death, a way of proceeding that belonged to his past, that he had valued and cherished, that had fallen into place as a matter of course on his return. ‘No. It is not necessary,’ Lucy laid down, not wishing either Bridget or Henry any longer to carry trays of dishes back and forth between the kitchen and the dining-room. It was she who now, more and more, looked after them rather than they who attended her. She took her place at the kitchen table again, as she had during her childhood and for years after it. In the adjustments that were made it was they whose convenience she saw to, not her own. Without complaint, the trays would have been carried to the dining-room and from it, had her father still been there: Lucy knew that nothing he or she could have said or done would have altered that.