The Story of Lucy Gault

5

‘They lived on alms,’ Ralph said when he was asked about the monks whose graves they walked on. ‘Augustinians were always beggars here.’

Was there impatience in his tone when he said that? Some sign he had failed to disguise as tiredness after his day’s work? He smiled at his wife, an apology she would not know was one. The air was soft, without a breeze. Somewhere a pigeon cooed, not finished yet with the day.

They talked about the monks, wondering if all of them had been dedicated equally to simple goodness, driven equally by what gave their cloistered lives a meaning. Did faith such as theirs, she asked, make people the same? Had all of them been that, as their dress would have implied?

‘Hardly.’ Again in his tone there might have been impatience, a trace of unfair irritation, and again he was ashamed. More gently he said:

‘What’s left here is a bit of their church. Where they lived would have spread over all this field, and beyond it – their cells, their refectory, the garden they must have had, their fishponds.’

There was a single stone, its purpose not established, upright in a corner of the field. Damaged carving at its base was unidentified. It might have been the broken perpendicular of a cross, the jagged breach rounded, incisions of decoration added. But that was not known for certain.

‘Shall we go back now?’ Ralph suggested.

Their child was asleep. Through the open window, safely barred, a cry would reach them. In the still evening they listened for a moment.

‘Yes, perhaps we should go back.’

When she had hesitated about marriage he had pressed her. He had listened to her doubts, allaying them with laughter that was genuine and fond. It had not been humility that had held her back, not lack of confidence in her ability for what lay ahead – more like caution that, without quite knowing why, she felt wasn’t out of place. All this Ralph remembered now, as if time had waited to make sense of it.

‘A pity they’ve been let go.’ She looked back at the untended ruins. Among them the cows that grazed the field sought shade when the sun was hot, trampling the growth of nettles. It seemed odd to Ralph that that was what she said, and yet of course it was not.

‘Yes, it’s a pity.’

They climbed over the gate on to the road because that was easier than struggling with its rusty bolt. Bicycles were propped against the shiny pale-blue wall of Logan’s, its shop open in the evenings for as long as there was trade in the bar.

They talked about the day, what news had been passed on in the sawmills. When first they’d met he had confessed that once he couldn’t see himself a timber merchant for the rest of his life. Often she had brought that up and as if she had now, he said:

‘It’s what I am.’

Bewildered, she frowned, and smiled when he explained. They smiled together then.

‘I don’t want anything else,’ Ralph said.

It slipped out easily; he didn’t have to look away, could even take her hand. In her deep brown eyes was all the love that made their life together pleasurable.

‘How nice you are!’ she whispered.

They crossed the narrow bridge and then there was the bungalow where his parents lived, a smell of tobacco in the air. Bulky and grey-haired, his pipe gripped tightly in the centre of his mouth, Ralph’s father was unhurriedly watering his flowerbeds. He waved and they waved back. ‘It’s just you’d maybe be interested,’ the lorry driver had said.

What had never felt like deception had felt like it ever since. Keeping his own secret, obscuring it with vagueness when ages ago someone had asked too much about that summer in Enniseala, had been no more than protecting what was precious. It was more now. Past and present had somehow become one. What was Lucy thinking in this moment? What did she think when each morning she woke to another brightening half-light? That he had heard the news? That he would know what to do, that he would find some way?

The child lay undisturbed. No dream had frightened her, no sound shattered her empty peace. One cheek was a little reddened from where she’d rested it on her curled-up fingers.

*

When the Captain realized that since his wife’s death he had lost something of his military bearing – that with an old man’s carelessness he had let himself go, that he shambled when he was tired – he made up for these lapses in the care he took, for his daughter’s sake, with his dress and his appearance. He had his hair cut regularly in Enniseala. He clipped his fingernails close; he knotted his tie with care. Unfailingly every morning he polished his shoes, and had the heels replaced before it was entirely necessary.

But conversation was still easier with Bridget or with Henry than with his daughter. For them he recalled how he had wandered so aimlessly in the early days of his mourning, drifting on to this train or that, his movements dictated only once in a while by some half-lost sentiment or predilection. He recalled, too, idling one day on a seat in a park and thinking of the caretakers he had left behind in Ireland. Smoking one of his slim cigarillos, he had found himself reflecting that they would have become as old as he was, had worried that the herd might not still support them, and about their circumstances if it did not. He had wondered – but did not say it now – if they were still alive.

‘We could fix the gate-lodge up,’ he offered Bridget. ‘If you would like to return there.’

‘Ah no, sir, no. Not unless you’d rather that yourself.’

‘It’s not I who should rather one thing or another, Bridget. My debt’s to you.’

‘Ah no, sir, no.’

‘You brought my daughter up.’

‘We did what any people would. We did the best we could. We’d rather stop on in the house, sir, if it’s the same. If it’s not a presumption, sir.’

‘Of course it’s not.’

It was Bridget who had told him how his daughter’s limp had lessened with the years and how a stoicism had developed in her as a child when those same years failed her, how faith had still been kept, love shattered. Cutting away the brambles in the orchard or sealing the perforations in the lead of his roof with dabs of Seccotine, the Captain reflected that it was humbling to hear in this way about his own child, to have light thrown on her disposition as it had become. Yet it would have been surprising had he and she not been strangers, and he accepted that. He tried to imagine her at fourteen, at seventeen, at twenty; but his memory of her as an infant in his arms, or when he had been concerned about her as a child too much on her own, more potently intervened. Now, there was her seclusion in this gaunt old house, and it concerned him that she never went in to Enniseala, that as an adult she had never walked in its long main street, that she hardly remembered the swans on the water of the estuary, or the promenade, or the bandstand, or the squat little lighthouse she had known in childhood. Did she not wish to shop in better shops than the general store in Kilauran? How did she manage for a dentist?

In the dining-room, when he asked, he learnt that a dentist came once in a while from Dungarvan; that Dr Birthistle kept up a weekly practice in Kilauran, as Dr Carney had before him; that on Sundays a bright-faced young curate came out from Enniseala to the corrugated Church of Ireland church. But it was Bridget who recalled for him the days in his long absence when something out of the ordinary had happened: the icy morning when the pump in the yard froze, a Sunday when her nieces came to show her their First Communion dresses, the sunny afternoon when Canon Crosbie reported that France had fallen. It had been sunny in Bellinzona too; without an effort he remembered that.

‘I still have these,’ he said in the dining-room, and when Bridget came to collect the plates and vegetable dishes the table was strewn with picture postcards of Italian towns and landscape. Politely, so Bridget reported in the kitchen, Lucy nodded over each in turn before making a little pile of them.

Electricity came to Lahardane because for his daughter’s sake the Captain felt there should be that convenience. He bought an Electrolux vacuum cleaner from a salesman who came to the door, and one day brought back to the house a pressure-cooker. Bridget took to the Electrolux but put aside the pressure-cooker as dangerous.

From Danny Condon of the garage at Kilauran the Captain bought a motor car. It was a pre-war Morris Twelve with the sloping back of the period, green and black. The car that had been left behind in 1921, with solid rubber tyres, had even then been something of an antique and hardly ever used. In a shed in the yard robins had since nested between the folds of its hood, their droppings darkly staining its brasswork, dust dulling its gloss. Danny Condon took it, reducing the price of the Morris by a little.

The buying of the car was another attempt on the Captain’s part to rescue his daughter from her isolation. On the avenue and on their journeys to the cinema in Enniseala he taught her how to drive. ‘Today, the races?’ he suggested and they would set out for Lismore or Clonmel. He took her to the Opera House in Cork, dinner first in the Victoria Hotel, where an old woman once stood up and in a quavering voice sang the last few lines of an aria from Tannhäuser. The diners applauded and the Captain was reminded of the afternoon in the Citta Alta, the tunes of Tosca before military music was commanded. He spoke of that afternoon and was listened to politely.

*

For Ralph, it was always easier in the sawmills. Practicality brought relief; emotion was belittled by the hum of the saws and the rasp of planes, the men intent and careful, the smell of sweat and resin and dust. He was in charge and had to be in charge. But too readily, when he climbed the ladder-way to the office that looked down on the machinery and the men, when the noise fell away but still was there less loudly after he had closed the door, his thoughts escaped. Attention to orders and invoices and the columns in account books, concern about signs of wear in a driving belt or a saw gone blunt, the counting of the weekly wages, were tasks that suffered unintended interruption; and as from sleep, he would return minutes later to where he was, to stare in bewilderment at what he held in his hand or what was open before him.

Often his father came to the office, to share what had to be done that day. His father did not remark upon these moments of abstraction, the sudden crossing of the bare-boarded office floor in an attempt to disguise them, back turned for too long. Guile was not Ralph’s way: his father would say that. The men would say it when the saws went quiet at midday, when they sat with their sandwiches, outside in the sun if it was warm. People would say it in Logan’s bar, the evening drinkers, the women who came to shop in the grocery, people who had known Ralph all his life. Not for an instant was he doubted, as he was not in the house he had brought a wife to; not for an instant in the bungalow that had been built for his mother and his father.

Yet what became a habit began. ‘I’ll walk to Doonan,’ he would say when he returned to the house in the evenings, and would walk in this direction or that in order – so he knew it seemed – to ease away the rigours of the day, the worries left behind when things had not gone well, when a part for a machine was not yet available or there was failure again to deliver what had been promised. Lies that were not quite lies – slight deception, hardly there, the bluster of pretence – coloured every day. He had always despised all that.

‘Were Cassidy’s heifers out?’ his wife would ask when he returned from his evening walks. Or, ‘Have they begun the tarring at Rossmore?’

And he would say, although he hadn’t noticed. He could not bear to hurt her, yet her contentment seemed unnatural. Why did she feel no pain, since so much pain was there?

‘You used to tell me more.’ She would smile away what might have been mistaken for a complaint and he would say the tinkers were back at Healy’s Cross. Or say that Mrs Pierce had cut her fuchsia early. Or that the stream was running over at Doonan.

She was particular about the house, and he liked that quality in her, the care she took, not being slapdash. He liked the food she cooked; he liked the rooms kept clean, the way she so easily comforted their child. If ever he had told her what he had suppressed she would have listened in her careful, serious way, not interrupting. ‘In fact, I told nobody,’ he might have ended his confession. ‘It wasn’t only you.’ But it was too late for confessions now, too cruel that she should see a girl in a white dress, and Mr Ryall’s car, and tea laid out; too cruel that she should be there on the shore when the high waves splattered the rain with foam.

‘I’m thinking I should buy Malley’s slope,’ he said one evening.

‘The field?’

‘If you can call it that. Waste land more like.’

‘Why would you want waste land, though?’

‘I’d clear it to grow ash on. And maybe maple.’

An investment, he said. Something to take an interest in, he did not add; something to keep him where he belonged; a stake in the future that would give the future shape before it happened.

‘Is Malley wanting to sell?’

‘I doubt he ever thought anyone would want those few acres.’

It had become almost dark in the room where they sat and he sensed more treachery in not wanting to put on the lights. It was she who did so. Her happy face was there then, her dark hair loosening, as it sometimes did at this time of day. He watched her drawing down the blinds before she came to sit near him.