The Story of Lucy Gault

‘How lovely it is, the autumn sunshine!’ Sister Mary Bartholomew remarks.

‘Yes, it’s beautiful.’

Her tranquillity is their astonishment. For that they come, to be amazed again that such peace is there: all they have heard, and still hear now, does not record it. Calamity shaped a life when, long ago, chance was so cruel. Calamity shapes the story that is told, and is the reason for its being: is what they know, besides, the gentle fruit of such misfortune’s harvest? They like to think so: she has sensed it that they do.

Their wonderment is in their gestures and in their presents, and gazing from their eyes. They did not witness for themselves, but others did, the journey made to bring redemption; they only wonder why it was made, so faithfully and for so long. Why was the past belittled? Where did mercy come from when there should have been none left? They laud the mercy and silently applaud the figure at the funeral, but hearsay tells them nothing more.

She could manage without them, they often say, since she has made an art of being solitary. Nothing is dirty in the kitchen: she has seen them thinking that. She dresses more carefully than when she was a girl. Once in a while a hairdresser comes out from Enniseala to attend to her in her sedate old age.

‘All things Italian I love,’ Sister Mary Bartholomew remarks when the conversation for a moment lapses.

Italy is often talked about, the trip to the town called Montemarmoreo. They know about its narrow, cluttered streets, the walk to the marble quarries, the black sour cherries on the way. They know about the honouring of St Cecilia, a saint she introduced them to, whom they have taken to their hearts.

‘Poor girl,’ Sister Mary Bartholomew commiserates. ‘Poor little Cecilia, I often think.’

For a few minutes they talk about all that, the acts, the punishment, the life. They pour more coffee, milk added as she likes it. She cannot explain what so astonishes them. She might say that chance was in charge again when she noticed the old-fashioned bicycle propped against the sea-wall, when she looked and saw a figure standing still. It was chance that she was passing then, as it was when her father looked down and saw what the O’Reillys’ dog had tired of burying in the shingle.

But the nuns do not believe in chance. Mystery is their thing. Take from the forest its mystery and there is standing timber. Take from the sea its mystery and there is salted water. She found that somewhere when first she read the books in the drawing-room bookcases; long afterwards she repeated it to the nuns when it came back to her. ‘Well, isn’t it tidily put!’ Sister Antony exclaimed in admiration, and Sister Mary Bartholomew asked if it was Charles Kickham or Father Prout who was the author. But she said no; someone foreign, she thought.

‘I think what will happen,’ she predicts, passing on a thought that came in the night, ‘is that they’ll make a hotel of the house.’ She lay sleepless and the transformation lingered: a cocktail bar, a noisy dining-room, numbers on the bedroom doors. She doesn’t mind. It doesn’t matter. People coming from all over, travellers like never before; that is the way in Ireland now. Young fishermen from Kilauran with waiters’ suits on them, and cars drawn up. In Enniseala people walk about the streets chatting on the telephone.

‘Ah no, no,’ Sister Mary Bartholomew says when she mentions a hotel again, and Sister Antony shakes her head.

They don’t like to think about all the changes, even though they’re there already. They like the safety of what has been, what they can come to terms with. The nuns will be displaced, as the family that is still hers was, as the Morells of Clashmore were, the Gouvernets of Aglish, the Priors of Ringville, the Swifts, the Boyces. It had to be; it doesn’t matter. But it would hurt her visitors to say that maybe it has to be again and she holds that back, an unimportant lie of silence.

They ask and she tells them: about Paddy Lindon and the fisherman who communicated with his fingers, the trap standing waiting on the sea-gravel, the oil lamps lit. All gone, it feels like, and yet not gone at all.

‘We best be off,’ Sister Antony ends the morning, the conversation down to earth again.

*

The O’Reillys’ cattle graze all the fields now, big brown-speckled creatures. She looks down from the edge of the cliffs but does not descend by the easy way to the strand, for it is not easy any more. A dragonfly flutters up from the grass, then flies away into the afternoon lull.