The Story of Lucy Gault

3

We often think of you,

Mrs Ryall wrote,

and wonder how you are. How many times have I said, ‘Today I shall write to Ralph’, and yet again do not do it! But then there is always something – when the boys are here the house is upside-down, when they are not there is jam to make and something for them to take with them when they go away again. They are growing up more sensible than you’ll remember them. Quite lanky now, Kildare

is,

quite the young man! Jack wants to be a horticulturist, though I believe myself it is just the word he likes! Both of them speak of you often, and we are grateful for the months you spent here. Lucy Gault, whom you’ll remember, I’m sure,

is

still at Lahardane. There has been no change there. All of us here are well.

*

It was nice of you to write,

Ralph replied,

and I am glad to hear the boys are settling down. I do not forget your kindness to me and often think about those long warm mornings in the garden. Do please remember me to

Mr

Ryall, and to the boys when next they’re home. Perhaps one day our paths will somehow cross again. It’s good to hear that all of you are well.

He could not imagine the Ryalls otherwise. He could not imagine them unhappy or dispirited. They would have known, of course, that he had not been back to Lahardane.

*

I have found another book,

Lucy wrote.

‘Florence Macarthy’ by Lady Morgan. I didn’t think it would be good. But it is far better than I could have guessed.

Yesterday there were cormorants on the rocks. I thought of you particularly then because – do you remember? – we watched them one afternoon. How long ago it seems, our summer, and in another moment seems hardly any time at all!

And often Lucy read, for yet another time, the first of all Ralph’s letters since he had gone.

… I

add up figures and lose my way in them. I look down through the paned glass of an office to the hubbub of activity below and in my melancholy feel its mockery. What does it matter if the machinery rattles on or stops? What does it matter if the elm is only fit for coffins or that the oak has warped while seasoning? The belts are tightened on their wheels, the cogs connect. I watch a tree trunk carried into place, planks lifted away when they are sawn. Sunlight catches the dust in the air, the men are silenced by the engines’ clatter. You stand in white in the wide doorway. You wave and I wave back. But how little comfort there is in the ghosts of daydreams!

Always she touched that letter with her lips before she tied it away with the others that had come. It was not difficult to see the scene described, to hear the machinery’s noise, to smell the freshly sawn wood. I have been a nuisance to you, she read as well. I have disturbed the vigil you keep. I blame myself for hours on end and then do not blame myself at all. Do you know how much I love you, Lucy? Can you possibly guess?

One day they would not write, Lucy supposed, for all of it was repetition now. Ralph, you must live your life, she wrote herself.

*

In wrenching off the worn sole of a boot, Henry found it did not come cleanly, held by a few remaining brads, which he loosened with pliers. Some time in the past, well before his own time at Lahardane, a Gault had gone in for shoe-making. All the tools, the knives and the last, were still in the outhouse that even then had been a workshop. Leathers still hung there, and on a shelf beside them were tins of brads, metal half-heels, cobbler’s thread.

Twice before, Henry had repaired the boots he was repairing now. He had taught himself the knack of this work, guessing at first what each knife was for, eventually finding that the skill required came naturally, with patience. Cutting a new sole, he found himself reflecting, as he often did, on how it would be now if this remote house had been forgotten in the vengeance of 1921, if a threat in the night had not engendered such fear and such distress. Another man, different in nature and temperament from the Captain, might not have heeded the nervous premonitions of his wife, might have dismissed them as unwarranted and foolish, might not have considered it a wife’s place to be upset. That three callow youths, hardly knowing what they were doing in their excitement, had exercised such power still seemed to Henry to be extraordinary.

He trimmed the edge of the leather until the sole perfectly fitted the boot, then cut the second one. The time he’d made Lucy a pair of shoes they hadn’t been comfortable, but she hadn’t said. ‘Arrah, throw those old things away,’ he’d urged her when he noticed she was hobbling, but she wouldn’t. When he had been against her marrying that boy, when he had been against the friendship, he hadn’t understood what Bridget had, she being quicker than he was in ways like that. ‘It’s the lonesomeness would worry you,’ Bridget had said.

It worried both of them now. The letters that were exchanged were what was left, but the postman’s bicycle, free-wheeling on the last few yards of the avenue, scattering the gravel pebbles in front of the house, came less frequently now, sometimes for months on end not at all. One day, when it had not been for almost the whole of one winter, Henry saw a distant figure on the strand and wondered who it was. He saw the same figure again, much later and at a different time of year. It might have been anyone, for Henry was not one to rush to conclusions, but when he told Bridget she said of course it wasn’t anyone. Henry watched, but the solitary visitor did not return, and a day came then which seemed – for Henry at least – to bring to an end all that had begun when, years ago now, Mr Ryall’s Renault had first tentatively appeared between the two stately lines of the avenue’s trees. ‘She says he’s after joining up,’ Bridget reported when the war in Europe began and, to Henry’s confusion and surprise, she added that it was an ill wind that blew no good. For couldn’t it happen, Bridget argued, that the separation, and the danger there’d be, would straighten things out? Wasn’t it often the case when a man came back safely from a war that there was a different way of looking at things?

Henry tapped the second sole into place and filed down the leather instep. Not saying so, he had dismissed these prognostications at first as the wishful thinking to which Bridget was prone; but there was no doubt about it, this was an outcome that yet might come about. The young fellow would come back, and in the relief he brought with him the question would be asked: where was the sense of waiting any longer for what would not occur? It would be Lucy then who would say close the house up, as her father had before. Stored away were the window boards Henry had taken down, and none the worse for that. One of these days he’d fix the slates on the roof of the gate-lodge so that he and Bridget could go back to where they belonged. With the doors and windows open, he’d get rid of the damp that had begun there and slap on a bit of paint where it was needed. He’d dig over the patch at the back. When the time came he’d secure the packing-cases that had never been sent for, and Bridget would find new sheets to put over the furniture. No matter how things happened, Henry guessed this would be what Lucy would want when the marriage was fixed, before she was taken away to County Wexford. As Bridget herself said, something in you knew when a thing was meant.

Henry darkened the leather where it showed, and stitched into one of the boots a new tongue, which he darkened also. Children would be born, Bridget said, and now and again they’d be brought to look at the old house, calling in at the gate-lodge on the way. One by one Henry stowed away the tools he’d used, on the rack above his workbench. He reached down his polishing rags from a nail in the wall and smeared polish on to the leather, taking his time, since he had plenty of it.

*

The war that Ralph had gone to fight in impinged on Ireland’s chosen neutrality. The precautions against invasion that had already been put in hand at the army Camp near Enniseala became general throughout the country, while armies advanced in Europe and distant cities were bombed. A nightly blackout was enforced; gas masks were issued; there was instruction in the use of the stirrup pump. Familiarly known as the Emergency, the war brought shortages – of petrol, of paraffin for the lamps that still illuminated Lahardane and houses like it, of tea and coffee and cocoa, of clothes made in England. Crops that had not been cultivated before – fields of sugarbeet and tomatoes – were grown. More wood and turf were burnt. Bread was less white.

Every day Lucy walked to Kilauran to buy an Irish Times and read about what was happening. Parts of the few letters she now received from Ralph were blackly smudged out, or so cut away by the army censors that both sides of a page were deprived: for any information that was available, or permitted, she relied on reports in which death was spelt out in numbers – in the count of Spitfires that did not return, in the casualties of evacuation and retreat. And she knew that there were losses left unmentioned and uncalculated. Every Sunday evening on the wireless she had bought for the drawing-room there was the playing of the Allies’ national anthems, now and again a new one added, and that at least was cheerful.

But cheerfulness was brief. For Lucy, on the strand and in the woods, Ralph’s features were as death had arrested them, his limbs gone rigid, the sprawl of his body awkward. Someone had pressed his eyelids down over his unseeing stare, and then passed on. Dirt was thick on the uniform she had never seen.

These images haunted her until another letter came to contradict them, another brief reprieve before her fears began again. It was then, when reassurance had been too temporary a dozen times, that Bridget’s intuition became Lucy’s resolve. If Ralph returned she would go to him as soon as she heard.