The Story of Lucy Gault

5

On the day Lucy Gault’s letter arrived in the house above the Bank of Ireland there was a new recruit at the army Camp that Ralph often passed on his evening walks. The officer in charge at the time saw a tall, hollow-faced man with an intensity in his dark eyes that was particularly noticeable. The impression received by the officer was that the man was troubled, but since he had been declared medically fit, since he had been interviewed in the usual manner and declared worthy of the uniform he was to wear, the officer stamped the papers that recorded such details as name and age and the period of service undertaken. The typewritten name was incorrectly spelt, the new recruit pointed out, and the officer drew two lines through the error. Horahan he wrote instead.

Afterwards in the parade yard this recruit stood apart. He looked about him, at huts, at latrines, at the high walls of a handball court, at soldiers idling in a corner. He had joined the army in the hope that military discipline and the noisy communal life, feet on the march and a healthy tiredness, would be more salutary in his affliction than the solitary nature of house-painting or the occupation of a railway-station porter. His mother, with whom until today he had lived, had wept when he declared his intention. She was reconciled to the change that had occurred in him while he’d still been employed at the railway station. In spite of it – or because of it, she often considered – he was a good son, clean and tidy in his habits and becoming more so as the years went by. That suddenly he’d got it into his head to join the army was as distressing a shock as ever she’d suffered. She feared the hazards that were natural in the military life, and considered her son unsuitable for exposure to them.

In the parade yard the recruit made an enquiry of the soldiers who stood about as to the whereabouts of the Camp chapel. These men were smoking and at ease, the top buttons of their tunics open. Thinking to make fun of a newcomer, as was usual at the Camp when a face was unfamiliar, they sent him in the wrong direction, so that he found himself eventually at a hole dug in the ground, half filled with the Camp’s rubbish. Flies swarmed about it; a black and white mongrel dog rooted among tins and bones. The new soldier looked about him. He was at the periphery of the Camp, its boundary marked with posts and link-wire, and he walked back the way he had come. He did not ask for directions again, but found his own way to the chapel, noticing from a distance the black wooden cross on its roof.

The place was empty, its varnished benches garishly yellow in strips of sunlight. The soldier dipped the tips of his fingers into the stoup of holy water and with that same hand made the sign of the cross, addressing this devotion to the altar. He found then what he sought, a plaster representation of the Virgin Mary, before which a single candle burned. Here he knelt, and pleaded that in return for his service to his country he would be rewarded with peace of mind, that his insistent dreams, oppressing and tormenting him by night and haunting his memory by day, would cease. He pleaded for the Virgin’s intervention on his behalf, proclaimed his obedience and begged for her acknowledgement of his plight. But when he finished there was silence in the chapel, as afterwards there always was in the places where he prayed.

‘What’s that?’ another soldier enquired of him that day, but the new recruit denied that he had spoken, although he knew he had.

‘You said something, man.’

‘Would the trousers itch your legs for long?’

‘It wasn’t that you said.’

He knew it wasn’t, but what he’d said was lost now and could not be found, because he did not himself know what it was. He had painted, not long ago, the window-frames of the big mellow-bricked asylum and had become familiar with its inmates. That he belonged there with them, that he would one day share their restricted existence, was his perpetual dread.