The Story of Lucy Gault

8

When Ralph had twice again visited Lahardane on Wednesday afternoons, when he had been shown the house, had gone from room to room, had seen the books in the several bookcases, the bagatelle in a corner of the drawing-room, the billiard table on the upper landing, Lucy said:

‘Won’t you stay a while when you finish with the boys?’

‘Stay here?’

‘It’s not as though there isn’t room.’

It was the end of the first week in September when he finished his tutoring. On the evening before the day the boys were to return to school Mr Ryall paid what was owing, then carried Ralph’s two suitcases to the car while Ralph said good-bye to Mrs Ryall and to the boys. On the way to Lahardane Mr Ryall said:

‘It’s good of you to befriend her.’

‘It isn’t befriending, really.’

‘Well …’ And at Lahardane Mr Ryall said, ‘I haven’t seen you since you were a little girl of eight or nine, Lucy.’

She smiled, but did not say if she remembered that last occasion or not, and when the car had driven off she led the way up the wide stairs to the room that was to be Ralph’s. It was square and spacious, with a mahogany wash-stand in one corner, a wardrobe and chest of drawers, a white quilt on the bed, darkly framed engravings of Glengarriff on all four walls. Its windows looked out over the fields where the cattle were, to the sea.

‘Nothing’ll happen,’ Lucy warned, ‘if you pull that bell knob.’

Bridget had brought the dining-room back into use for the visit, had aired it and polished the long dining-table, covering it with a tablecloth she had folded away years ago. There was an excitement in her hurrying about with trays and cutlery, her cheeks flushed, starched white aprons clean every day.

‘Bridget enjoys a fuss,’ Lucy said, and Ralph said he had noticed that.

He loved their mealtimes. When the dining-room door closed behind Bridget he imagined it would be like this if they were married. He loved everything about Lahardane, where it was, the house itself, going to the strand in the early morning, being shown the trees on which L.G. was carved. He loved it when they lay on the grass by the stream and when they crossed it on the stepping stones. He loved what she loved, as if it would be unnatural not to.

‘I’ll show you something else,’ she said, and brought him to the ruined cottage high up in the glen. ‘Henry’ll tell you about Paddy Lindon.’

Ralph knew without being told that it was the place she had hobbled to as a child and he imagined her there, terrified and hungry and alone. He wanted to ask her about that time but could not, since she had never in any way referred to it except to mention her limp. When they were on the strand she talked about the nameless dog who’d run away again in the end, but didn’t touch upon the part it had played in what had happened. When he turned the pages of the photograph album in the drawing-room he saw, through a brown mist, a couple standing by a pram among the apple trees. His scrutiny was more intent than it usually was when he paused at one of the album’s photographs, but Lucy did not comment.

One day in the woods she suddenly said, ‘We must go back,’ as if she sensed his longing to hear what she might have said, as if she feared it. But the longing that had begun did not go away, and Ralph wondered if it would ever be more than longing, and wondered too if he would ever take her into his arms and touch with his lips her smooth, pale hair and her neck and her cheeks, her freckled arms and her forehead and closed eyes, her lips. He wondered if his wanting to would be all there ever was.

‘You mustn’t leave Lahardane,’ she said, ‘until you have finished Vanity Fair.’

‘I haven’t begun it yet.’

‘When you’ve finished it we must talk about it. And that will take time, too.’

Sometimes when they walked, the backs of their hands brushed for a moment, or their palms met and were grasped as the stepping stones were crossed. There was a stone wall that was difficult and there was closeness then too.

‘There are six hundred and forty-two pages,’ she said.

*

They would not have met if he had not lost his way: Lucy tried to think of that, of their never meeting, of not knowing that Ralph existed. It seemed to her that he had come out of nowhere, and she wondered if when he left Lahardane he would return to nowhere and not come back. She would never forget him. All her life she would remember the Wednesday afternoons there had been, and the time that was passing now. And when she was old, if she began to believe that Ralph had been a figment, and this summer too, it would not matter because time turned memories into figments anyway.

‘In all the world, Ralph, what would you wish for most?’

He stooped to pick up a pebble from the sand and skim it over the water. Twice, then three times, it touched the surface and bounced on. His manner was less shy now because, she supposed, he knew her better, or imagined he did. His feeling shy and his gentleness were what she liked about him.

‘Oh, I suppose, you know, that every day was doing nothing.’

‘That is something I have.’

‘Then you are lucky.’

‘I’ll miss you when you go. I doubt you’ll ever come back.’

‘If I’m invited -’

‘You have things to do.’

‘What things have I to do?’

‘Well, everything, when you think about it.’

They bathed, as they did twice every day, and then they walked to Kilauran. They clambered over the rocks to the pier. No one was about there or on the village street. Lucy said:

‘That’s where I went to school.’

They looked through one window and then the other. The shiny maps and charts still hung on the walls, with Mr Aylward’s portraits of kings and queens, William the Conqueror, Queen Maeve, the Emperor Constantine. Let x =6 was the writing on the blackboard.

‘Now I have shown you everything,’ Lucy said.

That day Ralph kissed her. On the way back to Lahardane he reached out for her hand and clumsily drew her closer to him on the shingle at the bottom of the cliffs. They did not speak.

Afterwards they climbed up by the familiar jagged path. The potato crop in the O’Reillys’ field had been harvested. Only the withering haulm lay about.

‘I love you, Lucy,’ Ralph said then. ‘I am in love with you.’

She did not reply. She looked away, and after a moment said:

‘Yes, I know.’ She paused again. ‘It’s no good, loving one another.’

‘Why isn’t it?’

‘I’m not someone to love.’

‘Oh, Lucy, you are! If only you know how much you are!’

They had not stopped and did not now. Slowly they walked on, and when Ralph again reached for her hand Lucy didn’t take it away. He said:

‘I have loved you since the first time I came here. I have loved you more every instant I have known you. I never loved anyone before. I shall never love anyone else. I could not.’

‘You didn’t tell me you had finished Vanity Fair. We haven’t talked about it. We must before you go.’

‘I never want to go. I never want to be without you, all my life.’

*

Ralph knew when Lucy shook her head that it was not in denial of what he’d said, that it was not a way of doubting the passion in his tone and in his eyes. She shook her head in protestation at the folly of his unbridled hope: none of this could be, her wordless response reiterated, repeating in that manner her statement that she was not someone to love.

‘You’re the first friend I’ve had, Ralph. I haven’t made friends as other people do. Or as people in novels do.’

‘I would do anything for you.’

‘Tell me more about where you live, the house and everything else. So that I know, when you have gone.’

‘Oh, Lucy, it’s just ordinary!’

‘Tell me all the same.’

Confused and unhappy, Ralph did so. He described the house and, beyond the bridge he could see from the windows of his bedroom, Logan’s Bar and Stores, where hardware was sold as well as groceries. He had never assumed he would do anything other than inherit the sawmills and go on living in that two-storey roadside house, creeper-covered and compact. In a field near the bridge there was some kind of abbey, not much of it left.

‘How much?’

‘Only a tower, or part of one. Hardly anything else.’

‘What a pity that is!’

‘I think there are monks’ graves as well. So people say.’

‘Do you go there, Ralph?’

‘There’s nothing much to go for.’

‘To look for the graves.’

‘No, I don’t do that.’

‘I would.’

‘Lucy – ‘

‘Do they know you in Logan’s Stores?’

‘Know me?’

‘Know who you are.’

‘They have always seen me about.’

‘Tell me about your boarding-school.’

‘Oh, Lucy-’

‘Please tell me. Please, Ralph.’

‘There were two.’ And Ralph described the first, where he was homesick: the grey house in a Dublin square, crocodile walks through empty streets on Sundays, the cabbage soup.

‘It couldn’t have been cabbage soup. You can’t have cabbage soup.’

‘We called it that.’

‘And did you have it at the next school too?’

‘The next one was better. I didn’t mind it.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Tell me about it. Tell me everything.’

‘It was outside Dublin, in the mountains. We wore gowns. Scholars wore special ones, more voluminous.’

‘Were you a scholar?’

‘Oh, no.’

‘What were you good at?’

‘Nothing much. They wouldn’t remember me there now.’

‘Did you play games?’

‘We had to.’

‘What were you good at?’

‘I wasn’t bad at tennis.’

‘Is that why you didn’t hate that school so much?’

‘Yes, perhaps. Did you mind my kissing you?’

‘We must go in now. No, I didn’t mind.’

*

The meal Henry sat down to every evening in the kitchen was similar to his breakfast and always the same: fried eggs and fried bread, a rasher of bacon. Tea accompanied it, which Henry took strong and sweet and milky.

On the evening of the day when Ralph had confessed his love nothing was different about this meal except what was said during it. An hour ago Henry had noticed a change in Ralph’s manner, and Lucy’s too, when they passed through the yard. They’d been abashed, affected by what was clearly a privacy between them, neither saying much. Henry wondered if there had been a quarrel; but Bridget, who later caught that same mood also, had several times noticed Ralph’s glance across the table in the dining-room and had surmised the nature of his feelings: the difference now would be that he had spoken of them.

In the kitchen Bridget passed this speculation on, at a loss when she tried to guess what would happen next. Their visitor would leave Lahardane and the autumn days would shorten as the season gave way to winter. Christmas would go by, the worst of the weather in the first months of the new year. Would he come back to Enniseala when another summer came? Would he again be here, at Lahardane? Or would time, fickle in its arrangements, slip him away from them?

There were often moments at Lahardane when Bridget would still have comforted Lucy, as she had comforted her in her infancy, as she had in her childhood. Always so close and yet not close at all, there was the solitary figure reading by lamplight or in the apple orchard, or wandering alone in the woods of the glen and on the seashore, her friends a stout solicitor and an elderly clergyman. When a letter arrived in the house there still was expectation, still a hope, but only for the instant before the envelope was scrutinized. The envelope always told.

‘You’re right enough,’ Henry agreed, nodding each word into place, his hindsight stirred by Bridget’s perceptions. He finished his tea and pushed his cup away. ‘And it’s maybe not a bad thing at the heel of the hunt.’

Clearing the table of dishes, Bridget was not surprised to hear this: she’d known that sooner or later she would. But she did not respond to the change of sentiment in her husband, for what could be said except to repeat what already she had herself declared? What had come about this summer was where hope flickered now.

‘They’re lost to her,’ she said. ‘Even if they’d come back tomorrow.’

Saving a match, Henry lit his Woodbine with a spill from the range. He did not know his feelings were that of a father, was aware only that he felt protective of the Captain’s child and, as a father might be, suspicious of a stranger’s fondness. Yet while Ralph had been staying in the house Henry had continued to like him more than he had at first. And in saying that what had happened was not a bad thing he had meant more than the assertion stated. It was not bad that the Captain’s child should be taken from this place, separated at last from the dark that clung to it.

*

It rained in the night and all the next day. They played bagatelle, and Lucy began the conversation she wanted to have about Vanity Fair. Then they played bagatelle again. Ralph said:

‘I love you, Lucy.’

Lucy did not remind him that he had told her so already and more than once. Gently she stroked with her fingertips the back of his hand. She stroked his hair.

‘Dear Ralph,’ she whispered, ‘you must not love me.’

‘I cannot help it.’

‘One day, when you marry, will you write and tell me? So that I know and can imagine that too. And will you write when each child is born? And tell me your wife’s name and give some slight description of her? So that I can always see you and your wife, and children, in that house beside the sawmills. Will you promise, Ralph?’

‘It’s you I want to marry.’

‘You’ll forget me. You’ll forget this summer. It will fade and turn into shadows, and voices will be murmurs you cannot hear. Now – this present as we sit here – is a reality that will not last and is not meant to. You’ll see this room no more clearly than I see the faces described to me in novels. You’ll dream of Lahardane, Ralph, once in a while, or perhaps you never will. But if you do I’ll be a ghost by then.’

‘Lucy -’

‘Oh, I shall dream of you, of all the times you came here, of these days that are passing now, of this very moment when bagatelle has bored us because we have played too long, of my saying in the moment that comes next, “Shall we play Twenty-one instead?”’

‘Why do you say I must not love you?’

‘Because loving me will make you unhappy.’

‘But it doesn’t. It makes me happy.’

‘Shall we play Twenty-one? It’s going to go on raining.’

‘We could walk in the rain. At least on the avenue.’

The trees sheltered them a little. The air was fresh; delicious air, Lucy called it. They dawdled on the avenue, and dawdled again, standing in the porch of the gate-lodge.

‘Of course I love you too,’ Lucy said. ‘If you are wondering about that.’

*

Bridget lit a fire in the drawing-room, feeling that something cheerful must be done. The rain was heavier now, drops rolling down the windows, and then the first gusts of wind made its falling different. The wind was slight when it began, but within an hour had changed the character of the day. It brought the leaves down, swirling them about before they became sodden and still. It rattled the hall door and the windows. It drove sheets of rain against the panes, disrupting the drops that had earlier accumulated, before sliding monotonously down the glass. The sea would be a sight, Henry said.

In the drawing-room they made toast at the fire, poking their slices of bread into the red ashes of the logs. They sat on the hearthrug, reading. ‘Who’s that?’ Ralph asked about the only portrait in the room, above the writing-desk, and Lucy said it was some Gault she didn’t know about. She wound up the gramophone, then put a record on. John Count McCormack sang ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’.

They went to look at the sea, the wind so strong now that they could scarcely hear one another speak. The waves reared up like wild white horses, spectral forms exploding into foam, one chasing another as they broke. The thrash and crash of the sea sucked in the wind’s whine, a seashore sound that belonged nowhere else.

When the two embraced at the sea’s edge, each tasted the salt on the other’s lips. Drenched, Lucy’s hair was straggly and matted, Ralph’s pressed tight on to his scalp. The excitement of the storm held them in thrall, as completely as their love did. Would there ever again in her life, Lucy wondered, be such happiness as this?

‘How can we forget today?’ she whispered and was not heard.

‘I could never not love you,’ Ralph said, and this was lost as well.

They dried themselves in front of the drawing-room fire. Bridget brought in a tray, since it was warmer here than in the dining-room. Seeing them happy, she remembered that in a few days Ralph would be gone. She did not pray; it was not a subject for prayer. Instead, she willed a time in the future and saw them smiling in one room and then another, and heard them speaking of love, and saw them together always.

‘Look, it’s tinned salmon!’ Lucy cried.

It would have been on Henry’s list for Mrs McBride, John West’s red salmon, a treat because it was expensive. And there were the tiny, sweet tomatoes that Henry cultivated in the cold frame he had resurrected a few years ago. They made a salad, with lettuce and little onions, and slices of hard-boiled egg.

‘Shall we have wine?’ Lucy suggested. ‘White wine? I think I’ve never tasted wine except the bitter red in church.’

She went away and a moment later returned with a bottle and two glasses. There were many bottles left, she said, red and white, untouched on the pantry racks.

‘Look in all the drawers for a corkscrew. Somewhere there is one. Oh, now nice this is!’

They pulled two chairs up to a table they moved closer to the fire. Ralph poured the wine and he wanted, then, not ever to leave this house he had come to. He wanted, then, not to take Lucy from it but to be here with her, since she belonged here and tonight he felt he did also. On the gramophone the needle scratched through the Londonderry Air.

*

Two fishermen from Kilauran were lost at sea that night, caught earlier by the sudden storm when they had pulled their nets in and were beginning to row home. There was mourning in the village, a melancholy that affected Lucy when she and Ralph walked there on the day before he was to leave. The sound of keening came from a cottage around which people had congregated. A fiddler had come, to play a dirge if one was called for.

‘How could I have run away from them?’ Lucy said on the strand as she and Ralph walked back to Lahardane, with wicks for the lamps and the newspaper they’d bought. ‘I made them suffer as those women are suffering now. I long for their forgiveness. That will not just go away.’

These revelations came suddenly, and Ralph did not say anything as they walked on.

‘I was in love then, too – with trees and rock pools and footprints on the sand. Was I possessed, Ralph? I have always thought I was.’

‘Of course you weren’t.’

‘Like poor Mrs Rochester! Whom nobody had sympathy for!’

‘You were a child.’

‘A child can be possessed. Did I hate them when I made them suffer? Was that why so very soon I was ashamed?’

‘Please, will you marry me, Lucy?’

Slowly, she shook her head. ‘My father shot a man and did not kill him. My mother was afraid. I did not understand. Shall I tell you, Ralph?’

And he listened and was told what he knew already, and saw what so often he had seen: the figures on the shingle and the sands, the light brought from the house, darkness giving way to dawn.

‘I have found a little courage,’ Lucy said.

‘You are courageous, Lucy.’

‘Dear Ralph, how could I marry you?’

Her lips reached up for his and lightly touched them. The sea was as calm as a pond, waves softly breaking. The sky was a deeper blue than it had been all this hot summer. White, bunched-up clouds hardly moved on it.

‘I don’t care about what you did. I swear I don’t, Lucy.’

‘I have to live with it until they return.’

‘No, no, of course you don’t.’

‘You must go back to your contented life. Not be a visitor in mine. For you could only be that, Ralph, although I love you. When we love one another we are stealing what does not belong to us, what is not our due. Darling Ralph, we must make do with memories.’

‘We need not and I cannot. I cannot make do with memories.’

‘Oh, memories aren’t bad, you know.’

‘They’re nothing.’ There was an edge of bitterness in his tone. They walked in silence then, until he said:

‘I wouldn’t take you from Lahardane if you don’t want to go.’

She seemed not to hear. She drew with the point of her shoe on the sand. She looked up when their names were written. She said:

‘What do they think, Ralph, and do not say? Why do they not come back?’

But when Ralph began to answer he felt that what he said was hardly heard, and so desisted. They walked on slowly, and Lucy said:

‘I did not hate them, yet how do they know it, any more than they know all they so easily might? One day – today, tomorrow, some day a year away – they’ll find the strength to make the journey, and it will never be too late for that.’

‘Oh, Lucy, long ago they have forgiven you and now would want your happiness. Of course they have forgiven you.’

‘Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn’t do that. That is for me, and I shall do it. I shall live a life that is all memory of our love. I shall close my eyes and feel again your lips on mine and see your smiling face as clearly as every day I see the waves. What friends we’ve been, Ralph! How we’ve longed for this summer not to end! Another summer would be different – we both know that.’

‘I don’t know it. I don’t believe it for a moment.’

‘I wish it could always be there, stopped in time, this summer we have had. Don’t let’s be greedy now. I used to be afraid of their returning. Sometimes I used to think I didn’t want them to, for what good to them was my awful, sore regret? There was too much for them to forgive: how could I hope for forgiveness? Yet if they came now, if they were there when we climbed the cliff, if they were astonished while Bridget told them, how marvellous it would be! And you and I would not make do with memories.’

Two days later Ralph left, taken by Henry in the trap to the railway station in Enniseala. Lucy might have accompanied them, might have stood waving on the railway platform as the train took Ralph away. But she said she didn’t want that, and waved instead from the hall door, and then from the avenue.