The Story of Lucy Gault

3

In the village of Kilauran and the town of Enniseala people were on the look-out for Captain Gault. A glimpse of him was anticipated as keenly as that moment in a play when an offstage character of significance first appears. He had thought – so it was said in speculation – to walk through the darkened rooms of his house and then to go away. Instead, there was his living daughter.

In Lahardane itself the events since the night he had aimed his rifle from an upstairs window had not become a chronicle as they had elsewhere. They had not ever been tidily put together for the sake of their retailing, but in memory remained haphazard, as they had happened. Nor was the upheaval occasioned by the Captain’s return, and the news he brought of his widowing, taken to be the completion of a pattern of events, as they were assumed to be elsewhere. At Lahardane there was the rawness of a shock and, more ordinarily, the smell of the small cigars the Captain smoked and of the whiskey in the bottles he opened. It was remarked upon between Bridget and Henry that his voice had grown deeper with the years. His footsteps on the stairs were not quite a stranger’s, but almost so; his shirts seemed alien, hanging out to dry in the orchard.

The Captain himself was still affected by confusion, occasionally by disbelief. Was this some perpetuating dream – that his daughter should be alive, that there should seem to be in all he had imagined for this place a greater veracity than in what was now around him? His instinct when in his daughter’s company was to reach out for her hand, seeking the child she’d been, as if in touching her he would somehow find what had been lost to him. But the instinct was each time stifled.

‘Lahardane is yours,’ he clumsily insisted instead, any statement seeming better than none at all. ‘I am a visitor.’

Her response came full of protest, but was no more than words. Forgiveness for a child’s silliness was at least what he could offer, not only his own but her mother’s too. His daughter would have been absolved of her small transgression within an hour of its perpetration: reassurance as to that tumbled sincerely from his lips. That a child’s anxieties had been impatiently ignored was the cruelty that remained.

But in spite of all he said in terms of contrition and regret, the Captain was aware that he could not say enough. His daughter’s brooding years had created something of their own that long ago had possessed her, wrapping her like fog that chilled. So at least it seemed.

The two sat at either end of the long table in the dining-room, which was where their conversations mostly occurred, although as often as not nothing at all was said. During meal after meal, the Captain watched his daughter’s slender forefinger drawing on the polished surface of the mahogany patterns he could not identify from the finger’s movement. When politeness demanded it, she sometimes said what she had done that day, or would do if it was still early. There was honey to gather, there were the flowers she grew.

*

In time, Ralph heard.

His marriage was more than a year old but had it taken place only a day ago it would have made no difference. Not quite as she was imagined, Ralph’s wife was brown-eyed and tall, with dark hair drawn tightly back, a natural slenderness now returning after the birth of her first child. It happened that she was, as imagined, capable and tidy: advancing tendrils were indeed clipped back from the windows of the creeper-covered house that had become Ralph’s on his marriage, his parents moving to the nearby bungalow they had begun to build when they realized the house would one day be too much for Ralph’s ailing mother.

It was in the middle of a Monday morning that Ralph learnt of Captain Gault’s return. Years ago he had discovered that a lorry driver who often picked up a load of timber at the sawmills came of a Kilauran family and kept in touch with his sisters there. He and Ralph had talked about the village and the neighbourhood, Ralph often speaking of the house on the cliffs, though not of his intimate connection with it. A secrecy had always influenced him where Lucy Gault was concerned. During his six years in the army he had been reticent, not once revealing what by then had seemed inevitable: that he and Lucy Gault would never marry. Nor had he spoken of her, or of his time at Lahardane, to the wife he had married in her place – a circumstance that in no way indicated, in the marriage, an absence of love or that Ralph had settled for second best. The impossible had simply been retreated from.

‘Surely not?’ he said, calm when the lorry driver told him.

‘Oh, I’d say it’s right enough, sir.’

The man was certain. There was a sureness in his tone that made Ralph want to close his eyes and look away, that stabbed him somewhere, and he imagined in the heart. But his heart was throbbing, for he could feel it, more than he ever had before. A dryness had come into his mouth, as if some bitter fruit parched it. The lorry driver had to shout when the motion of another saw began, adding to the snarl of beech planks slowly cut.

‘A while back, sir.’

They went outside.

‘Mrs Gault too?’

‘They’re saying Mrs Gault died.’

Ralph gave the man the invoice that had been prepared. He guided him when the lorry was backed out of the mill-yard on to the road. Still simulating calm, he waved good-bye and went away to be alone.

*

When he’d heard of the return, Mr Sullivan had been nonplussed. In his view Everard Gault was a simple man to whom a complicated thing had happened, and further complications were added now: Aloysius Sullivan didn’t know whether to be pleased or apprehensive.

‘Well, you’ll see a change or two in Enniseala, Everard,’ he remarked in the back bar of the Central Hotel when eventually the two men met again. He considered it advisable to keep the conversation to the surface, as he remembered so much talk with Everard Gault had been in the past. ‘Would you have guessed we’d be manufacturing mackintosh coats in Enniseala?’

‘There’s that?’

‘Oh, indeed, indeed. There’s not much in Enniseala that’s the same.’

Some of this the Captain had seen for himself. Certain boarding-houses he remembered were gone, the main-street shops were different. The railway station was in decay, the doors of Gatchell’s auction rooms were closed and it was said would not open again. Familiar shops were no longer familiar when he stepped inside, the faces that came forward new to him.

‘To be expected, of course,’ he remarked now in the Central Hotel. ‘A different Ireland everywhere.’

‘More or less.’

‘I must apologize for not suggesting that you and I met sooner. It has taken a bit of time to settle in.’ ‘It’s understandable that it would.’

They were the only drinkers in the small bar, where no one served unless summoned. The Captain stood up and crossed to the wooden counter with their two glasses.

‘The same,’ he said when a squinny youth appeared. They were drinking John Jameson.

‘We would not have gone, you know,’ the Captain said when he returned to the table they sat at. ‘Had we searched the woods and found her we would not have gone.’

‘Best not to dwell on that, Everard.’

‘Oh, I know, I know.’ He lifted his glass and when there had been a silence he imparted what he was fearful of relating in his dining-room. ‘Heloise believed her child took her own life.’

The conversation had crept beneath the safety of the surface the solicitor preferred. He made no effort to check that, knowing he would not be able to now. The Captain said:

‘But graceful in all things, she was as graceful as it is possible to be, living with that.’

‘Heloise could not be otherwise.’

‘The outward sign of her beauty was always there.’

Aloysius Suilivan nodded. He said he remembered the first occasion he had met Heloise Gault, and as if he had said something different, or nothing at all, the Captain went on:

‘She loved Annunciations. She wondered about the nature of St Thomas’s doubt. Or if Tobias’s angel had taken the form of a bird. Or how on earth St Simeon managed on his pillar. We looked a lot at pictures.’

‘I’m sorry, Everard.’

The solicitor remembered the demure eyes of the girl he saw when the woman she had become was spoken of. He had often considered she was someone who in all her life had not sought to hurt a soul. Aloysius Sullivan, who never regretted that he had not experienced the intimacies of marriage, for a moment did so now.

‘You were a good husband, Everard.’

‘An inadequate one. We left Lahardane when we could bear the days no longer. I should have resisted that careless haste.’

‘And I should have set out myself to search for you. We could go on for ever.’

‘Is it necessary for Lucy to know what I have told you?’

‘It would be kinder if she did not.’

‘I think she should not know.’

‘And I am certain of it.’

The two men drank. Their talk loosened, sprawled, was easier for both. On the promenade a little later, their gait sprawling a bit also, they were again the friends they had been once. The solicitor – the older by eleven years and still as Everard Gault remembered him – spoke on their walk of people they were both acquainted with, his clerk, and the housekeeper whom he had had for so long. He came no closer than that to his private life, all he said still giving the impression, as in the past, that this was shared with no one. The Captain talked about his travels.

‘Heloise had a photograph that must have been taken hereabouts,’ he said, interrupting something else. ‘Faded brown and torn a bit and creased. I doubt she knew it was still among her things.’

He pointed to where the promenade had been built up when high waves had broken through. Lucy stood among the old breakwater posts that staggered out to sea in her mother’s photograph, and some of the rotting posts were still there. The breakwaters were to be replaced, Aloysius Sullivan said, and one of these days perhaps they would be.

They had stopped by a seat but did not sit down. Listening to what he was told about the breakwaters, the Captain stared out over the sea, to the splashes of gorse that dotted the far-off view. A silence gathered when the local news was exhausted, before he said:

‘You’ve seen to it that she had money. All these years.’

‘She has not spent much.’

‘Lucy does not talk to me.’

He spoke of the moment of their encounter, his embrace resisted, and of the silences in the dining-room, her finger tracing its patterns on the surface of the table, his euphoria so often shattered.

Mr Sullivan hesitated. It was not his place to be expansive, yet his affection for both father and daughter made it necessary that he should be now.

‘Lucy might have married.’ He paused, then added, ‘But she believed she had no right to love until she felt forgiven. She never doubted, when the rest of us did, that your return would come about. And she was right.’

‘This was some time ago? That she might have married?’

‘Yes.’ There was another pause, and then, ‘He has married since.’

They walked on at the same slow pace, and Aloysius Sullivan said, ‘It’s good you’re back, Everard.’

‘How like the rest of our domestic tragedy it is that I have come too late!’