The Story of Lucy Gault

She heard the story of St Cecilia. A woman in the church told her, a slight, gently spoken woman she had seen there before, who approached her from among the empty pews. The miraculous, the woman pointed out in English, was in the eyes of the altarpiece’s image. Together they looked at the pale-blue eyes and at the tresses of fair hair, the halo finished in gold leaf, the dress so light it seemed almost colourless, the lyre held delicately. As a child, the woman said, St Cecilia had heard all the world’s music that was yet to come.

Lucy guessed that her mother – perhaps from this same source – had learnt that St Cecilia had been born to be a martyr, had been murdered when she mocked the ancient gods, becoming after death the holy patron of musicians, as St Catherine was of saddlers and Charles Borromeo of starch-makers, as St Elizabeth sought mercy for all sufferers from toothache.

Alms were begged for the church’s repair and then the woman went.

*

Lucy left Montemarmoreo reluctantly, yet knowing she would not ever return. Hers was a different allocation of time and circumstance from her mother’s, from her father’s. She could not pretend.

When winter came that same year, when the memory of her long journey had begun to lose its vividness, she read again – methodically in order of their composition – the letters she had received from Ralph. They stirred the love that still affected her, but the people of the letters were other people now, as her mother and her father were. She took the unfinished embroidery from her embroidery drawer and wrapped Ralph’s anguished pleas in it, tying the bundle with string she made from her coloured threads.

2

One afternoon in Enniseala Lucy looked for the black bicycle. She looked for it near the lighthouse where the fishing boats came in and in the poor part of the town. She thought she saw it once, outside the League of the Cross Hall, and again in MacSwiney Street, but when she went closer she realized she’d been mistaken. She took to sitting by one of the windows in the café attached to the bread shop. She did not know what she would do if the bicycle went by or what she would do if she saw it propped up against a shop window or a wall, as she had before. Her compulsion came from nowhere that she knew about, and seemed to feed on the very failure of her efforts. In the end she asked, and was told that the man she sought had been admitted to the asylum.

She brought that information back to Lahardane, but it elicited neither interest nor much of a response. It was a suitable thing, the unspoken opinion seemed to be; and Lucy imagined it voiced in the kitchen when she wasn’t there, with a note of satisfaction in whatever exchanges there were. She drove out to the asylum when she was next in Enniseala and drew on to the verge by high iron gates. The brick building on a hill had an empty look, as if there were no inmates, but she knew that wasn’t so. The locked gates were intimidating. A chain trailed down one of the pillars, a bell suspended from an iron bracket on the other side.

She drove away again.

*

On the dining-room table she stretched out another piece of linen, each corner weighed down with a book. Carefully she copied on to the cloth the watercolour sketch she had made: poppies on an ochre ground. She chose the silks and laid them in a row.

She wondered how many times she had done all this before; how many times she had said when an embroidery was finished, ‘You might like to have it?’ She had never found a better way of not appearing to presume that there was merit in what she offered. The giving was a pleasure, her exaggeration part of it when she said there was no room left on the walls at Lahardane.

She stitched in single threads to mark the colours: the orange and red of the poppies in half a dozen shades, four different greens for the spiky leaves, the ochre frilled with grey. Months it would take to complete, all winter.

*

‘Bring Miss Gault her tea.’

Behind the bread counter in the café the wife of the baker gave the order to a child in a flowered overall. So she was safely back, the observation had been in the café when she had returned from Switzerland and Italy, the purpose of her journey known but not remarked upon.

She hung her umbrella on the back of her table’s other chair. Rain had suddenly blown in that afternoon.

‘That’s shocking weather,’ the woman behind the bread counter called out to her.

The woman’s red hair was greying now and a look of relief had become established in her eyes, as if she gave silent thanks for no longer being of child-bearing age: she’d had ten girls and a boy. Never putting in an appearance in the café, her husband baked half the town’s bread, and cakes and buns and doughnuts.

‘Cakes, is it, miss?’ the child enquired, scattering with her hand the crumbs on the stained tablecloth and wiping away the milk that a cork mat hadn’t entirely absorbed. ‘Will I bring them assorted?’

‘Thank you.’