The Story of Lucy Gault

Bridget continued to cook; Henry split logs in the yard, and milked, and did his best with the long grass in the orchard. On Sundays Lucy took them with her when she drove to Kilauran, arriving half an hour early for church so that they could go to Mass, all three of them remembering how years ago this, too, had been the other way around. Henry bought his cigarettes and then they waited for her outside the shop. Attending Mass, and seeing people afterwards, was an occasion Bridget had enjoyed since her girlhood, and she still did. That the gate-lodge was derelict now wasn’t mentioned when they passed it on their Sunday journeys. In the kitchen the talk was more about how Henry, when he’d married into Lahardane, had missed the sea and how, when he hadn’t settled for a while, Bridget had been unhappy, believing she had deprived him of his way of life. ‘But, sure, you get used to anything,’ Henry said, and he had, and it had been all right. A pedlar used to go about the roads at that time, with little floor rugs that came from Egypt, and buttons of all sizes and colours, and skewers for roasting that he made from the ash he cut, and sticks of chalk and brown jars of ink. You’d never see the like nowadays, you hadn’t for maybe thirty years. Another man had called at Lahardane selling lamp mantles, and every year the Old Moore’s Almanac man had come. Tinkers mended the saucepans in the yard, the horses were taken four miles to be shod.

That was the talk now, and Lucy listened, hearing that on the day she was born it had been misty all morning, and that she might have been called Daisy or Alicia. The drawing-room chimney had gone on fire the first Christmas Eve she was alive. The wren-boys made up something about an infant for St Stephen’s Day. Going home once on the strand, Hannah heard a banshee.

‘No more than the wind,’ Henry said, ‘moaning down through the hollow in the cliffs.’

But Bridget said Hannah had seen a wispy form not a yard from where she stood.

*

The Captain’s wish was honoured. On a bright March morning in 1953, Lucy looked down at her mother’s grave.

Heloise Gault in her 66th year. Of Lahardane, Ireland.

The dark letters shone out from unpolished granite, and Lucy tried to see the face she remembered as it must have become with age. The cemetery in Bellinzona was small; no one else was there. She knelt and prayed.

Afterwards she ordered coffee in the café opposite the railway station. Everything was strange to her: never before had she left Ireland. The long train journeys in England and France and Switzerland had spread before her a foreignness she had encountered only in the novels she read. The language spoken by the waiter who brought her coffee was a language she had never heard spoken before, every word of it incomprehensible. Swiss walkers came in a bunch to fill the tables around her, their sticks and haversacks piled on to the unoccupied chairs. Somewhere in this town there was a kindly doctor.

Another journey took her across the Italian border. That evening in a small room in Montemarmoreo’s one hotel she unpacked the blue suitcase she had once been assured was particularly her own, even though there hadn’t been an opportunity to have her initials pressed into the leather. She ordered food not knowing what would come.

In the early morning she found via Cittadella and the house of the shoemaker, whose wares were displayed in the downstairs windows. On the first-floor balcony that overlooked the street there was just enough room for a table and two chairs. She did not disturb the shoemaker, either then or later, only wondering if he was the son of the shoemaker of the past or if someone else had bought the business.

She walked about in cramped, congested streets. There was an altarpiece in the church that honoured St Cecilia. The public lighting was being improved, new lamp posts settled into the holes that had been excavated at the pavements’ edge, traffic diverted. She learnt her first Italian words: ingresso, chiuso, avanti. She found a restaurant her father had told her about, modest in a back street. Outside the town she found the finished marble quarries.

Her mother had belonged here. More than England, more than Lahardane, she had made this ordinary small town her own, and Italy her country. For Lucy there was still a shadow and the distant echo of a voice remembered, but in the bustle of the streets and on the road to the marble quarries she sensed a stranger. I shall remain a little longer, she wrote on a postcard to Bridget and Henry, and wondered if she too – through some new quirk of chance – would stay for ever.