The Story of Lucy Gault

5

On a grey December morning when a letter from Ralph again came with an Irish stamp, Lucy learnt that one of his wartime barracks had been in Cheshire, another in Northamptonshire. Modestly he recounted what the army censors had removed: he had fought in Africa, he had been present when the garrisons were captured on Corfu. His pleas, which had not ceased from wherever he’d found himself, were renewed from County Wexford.

But Lucy’s promise to herself, lasting fearfully for so long, faltered: that Ralph was safe drew tears of gratitude from her when she saw his handwriting on the envelope with its safe Irish stamp. Not at once but gradually, over days, her good intentions were washed away in a continuing sea of relief. The war had everywhere spread change; all over Europe, all over the world, nothing was the same. Was it not likely that the hiatus in her parents’ lives had run its course, that six years of war, and the peace that had come, were enough to bring them back to an Ireland in which there had been change also, which had itself been peaceful for a generation? She heard their voices as she remembered them. She saw the suitcases that had been bought in Enniseala, the shiny leather scuffed and battered now, clothes folded, already packed. My heart is not stone, she wrote to Ralph, begging him to understand. And oh how happy I am that you are no longer in danger! I think of you in all the places you have told me of and now at last at home again. But afterwards, when she had posted it, she thought that letter sounded false; and it was too much, the reference to her heart. She wrote again to say she had been overwrought.

‘Ah, but you couldn’t know,’ Henry consoled his wife when Bridget’s intuition failed with the failure of Lucy’s promise to herself. Bridget said nothing. She might have spoken to Lucy, might have touched upon her own misplaced optimism as to the beneficial debris of war, might have spoken of Ralph’s devotion, of the warmth of the companionship there had been, of the letters that had kept a friendship going. But nervous of doing more harm than good, she said nothing.

When the last of Ralph’s letters came, Lucy didn’t know it was the last. But mulling it over when another did not arrive, she discovered in it a mood she had earlier missed, a meaning in statements and declarations that was imprecise, as if the wording had been reluctant to be otherwise; as if, beneath the ordinariness of what was related, despair was spelt out too, a futility at last accepted. A single line from her would have changed what could so easily be changed. That she felt betrayal within herself for not honouring love which had grown more intense with her fear for Ralph’s safety was a confession that was his due, and might be added to that single line. In fairness it belonged there; yet it seemed like betrayal, too, to lose faith with the hope that war and its ending might allow. Her insistence, again, that Ralph must not muddle his life with her distorted one was as painful as it had been before. That she felt she must trust some twist of fate – that all there was was fate – seemed hardly an explanation she could offer, and she did not do so.

A new generation of summer visitors in Kilauran glimpsed from time to time a solitary woman on the strand or among the rocks, and heard with pity the story that still was told. They did not condemn, as a previous generation of strangers had, a wayward child whose capriciousness had brought it all about. The wayward child belonged to the immediacy of the occurrence; what strangers made of past events was influenced in the present by the observation of a lonely life. Lucy herself was aware that this opinion was as temporary as the one that anger and distaste had once created: the story had not yet passed into myth, and would not be cast in permanence until her life was over, until it was reflected in time’s cold light. It did not greatly interest her that she was talked about.

She took up petit-point embroidery, discovering she had a natural skill for it when she began to teach herself the stitches. The silks, and the linen she decorated with them, came by post from a Dublin shop, Ancrin’s, which specialized in domestic crafts. She had found one of their catalogues, sent for by her mother, forgotten in the pages of The Irish Dragoon. Between the two long windows of the first-floor landing there was a framed embroidery of a turkey on pale grey cloth, which very faintly she remembered her mother stitching. ‘It pained her eyes,’ Bridget said. ‘She gave up the embroidering after the turkey.’

Ancrin’s sent linens with designs already marked on them, but Lucy preferred to ignore what was suggested in that way. The first embroidery she attempted was of the pear tree in the yard, the second of the crossing stones she and her father had arranged at the shallow part of the stream, another of the pinks that thrived on the cliffs. In time, she knew, there would be Paddy Lindon’s cottage, entirely a ruin now.

‘Well, I never!’ Mr Sullivan exclaimed with genuine admiration, seeing this work for the first time. ‘My! My!’ Recently retired from his legal practice, he had resumed his visits to Lahardane, petrol again being available. Canon Crosbie – though now in his late eighties – was still active in Church matters, but corresponded instead of making the journey.

Mr Sullivan, also, remembered Heloise Gault stitching the speckled feathers of the turkey, its scarlet head and gobbly throat. But he kept that to himself, for the display spread out for him on the dining-room table – the pear-tree embroidery complete now, the stepping-stones just begun – made the occasion Lucy’s own. If something had developed in her friendship with Ralph – whom he had known on the streets of Enniseala in much the same way as Canon Crosbie had – Mr Sullivan might at last have begun to consider Lucy as more than a child. But his outsider’s eye saw Lahardane, and the small household that had come about there, as something petrified, arrested in the drama there had been. Lucy was stilled too, a detail as in one of her own embroidered compositions.

‘We must have them framed,’ he said, taking off the reading glasses through which he had been peering at the intricate stitching.

‘It’s just a pastime.’

‘Oh, but they’re beautiful!’

‘Well, they are something.’

‘Things are easier, you know, now that the Emergency, thank God, is over. Goods are coming back in the shops. If ever you’d like a lift into Enniseala, Lucy, you’ve only to say.’

The rubber boots she went for walks in through the rain came from the general store in Kilauran. Once in a long while shoes were sent on approval from Enniseala. When the white summer dresses her mother had left behind had worn out, the dressmaker in Kilauran had begun to make her ones that were quite similar. The hairdresser who came to the village cut her hair.

‘I manage well enough with Kilauran,’ she said.

For Aloysius Sullivan she quite eerily resembled her mother, and not just because she wore the dresses. Often he was struck by intonations in her voice that startlingly recalled Heloise Gault’s: it seemed as though in the early years of her life she had absorbed, and never forgotten, her mother’s Englishness, an emphasis on certain syllables, a choice of phrase. ‘Well, I am probably imagining that,’ Mr Sullivan often remarked to himself, driving away after his visits. Yet the next time he closed his eyes and listened it was the same: he was listening to the Captain’s wife.

‘Please have this,’ he was offered when again he admired the embroideries, and took away with him the one of the pear tree in the yard. He had it framed, and after that when another one was ready he took it in to Enniseala to be framed also, and returned it when next he visited.

On Thursday March the tenth 1949, he read in the Irish Times – as Lucy did too – that Ralph was to marry.