The Story of Lucy Gault

1

Long after the funeral, when another year had begun, Lucy went through her father’s belongings and his clothes. Nothing she came across was a surprise. Folding away shirts and suits, she wondered if drama was finished with at last in the house that now was hers. He had drunk his whiskey to the end, she had not stopped him. He had known that death was creeping up on him; more than once he had remarked that nothing was more certain than that it should. He had smiled through this acceptance of nature’s strict economy and she had too, keeping company with him in his dismissal of morbid anticipation, remembering him as he had been while she made the slow journey of loving him again, forgiven for her unspoken reproaches.

Some of his belongings she kept: his sets of cufflinks; his watch; the stick he had taken to using when, once in a while, he accompanied her on her walks; the wedding ring he’d worn. She drove into Enniseala with his clothes, to give them to the women who collected for the charity of St Vincent de Paul. She put away the picture postcards he had kept. The bedroom that had been like a grave during its unoccupied years was a grave again, its door closed, never entered.

A certain formality passed from the house with the Captain’s death, a way of proceeding that belonged to his past, that he had valued and cherished, that had fallen into place as a matter of course on his return. ‘No. It is not necessary,’ Lucy laid down, not wishing either Bridget or Henry any longer to carry trays of dishes back and forth between the kitchen and the dining-room. It was she who now, more and more, looked after them rather than they who attended her. She took her place at the kitchen table again, as she had during her childhood and for years after it. In the adjustments that were made it was they whose convenience she saw to, not her own. Without complaint, the trays would have been carried to the dining-room and from it, had her father still been there: Lucy knew that nothing he or she could have said or done would have altered that.

Bridget continued to cook; Henry split logs in the yard, and milked, and did his best with the long grass in the orchard. On Sundays Lucy took them with her when she drove to Kilauran, arriving half an hour early for church so that they could go to Mass, all three of them remembering how years ago this, too, had been the other way around. Henry bought his cigarettes and then they waited for her outside the shop. Attending Mass, and seeing people afterwards, was an occasion Bridget had enjoyed since her girlhood, and she still did. That the gate-lodge was derelict now wasn’t mentioned when they passed it on their Sunday journeys. In the kitchen the talk was more about how Henry, when he’d married into Lahardane, had missed the sea and how, when he hadn’t settled for a while, Bridget had been unhappy, believing she had deprived him of his way of life. ‘But, sure, you get used to anything,’ Henry said, and he had, and it had been all right. A pedlar used to go about the roads at that time, with little floor rugs that came from Egypt, and buttons of all sizes and colours, and skewers for roasting that he made from the ash he cut, and sticks of chalk and brown jars of ink. You’d never see the like nowadays, you hadn’t for maybe thirty years. Another man had called at Lahardane selling lamp mantles, and every year the Old Moore’s Almanac man had come. Tinkers mended the saucepans in the yard, the horses were taken four miles to be shod.

That was the talk now, and Lucy listened, hearing that on the day she was born it had been misty all morning, and that she might have been called Daisy or Alicia. The drawing-room chimney had gone on fire the first Christmas Eve she was alive. The wren-boys made up something about an infant for St Stephen’s Day. Going home once on the strand, Hannah heard a banshee.

‘No more than the wind,’ Henry said, ‘moaning down through the hollow in the cliffs.’

But Bridget said Hannah had seen a wispy form not a yard from where she stood.

*

The Captain’s wish was honoured. On a bright March morning in 1953, Lucy looked down at her mother’s grave.

Heloise Gault in her 66th year. Of Lahardane, Ireland.

The dark letters shone out from unpolished granite, and Lucy tried to see the face she remembered as it must have become with age. The cemetery in Bellinzona was small; no one else was there. She knelt and prayed.

Afterwards she ordered coffee in the café opposite the railway station. Everything was strange to her: never before had she left Ireland. The long train journeys in England and France and Switzerland had spread before her a foreignness she had encountered only in the novels she read. The language spoken by the waiter who brought her coffee was a language she had never heard spoken before, every word of it incomprehensible. Swiss walkers came in a bunch to fill the tables around her, their sticks and haversacks piled on to the unoccupied chairs. Somewhere in this town there was a kindly doctor.

Another journey took her across the Italian border. That evening in a small room in Montemarmoreo’s one hotel she unpacked the blue suitcase she had once been assured was particularly her own, even though there hadn’t been an opportunity to have her initials pressed into the leather. She ordered food not knowing what would come.

In the early morning she found via Cittadella and the house of the shoemaker, whose wares were displayed in the downstairs windows. On the first-floor balcony that overlooked the street there was just enough room for a table and two chairs. She did not disturb the shoemaker, either then or later, only wondering if he was the son of the shoemaker of the past or if someone else had bought the business.

She walked about in cramped, congested streets. There was an altarpiece in the church that honoured St Cecilia. The public lighting was being improved, new lamp posts settled into the holes that had been excavated at the pavements’ edge, traffic diverted. She learnt her first Italian words: ingresso, chiuso, avanti. She found a restaurant her father had told her about, modest in a back street. Outside the town she found the finished marble quarries.

Her mother had belonged here. More than England, more than Lahardane, she had made this ordinary small town her own, and Italy her country. For Lucy there was still a shadow and the distant echo of a voice remembered, but in the bustle of the streets and on the road to the marble quarries she sensed a stranger. I shall remain a little longer, she wrote on a postcard to Bridget and Henry, and wondered if she too – through some new quirk of chance – would stay for ever.

She heard the story of St Cecilia. A woman in the church told her, a slight, gently spoken woman she had seen there before, who approached her from among the empty pews. The miraculous, the woman pointed out in English, was in the eyes of the altarpiece’s image. Together they looked at the pale-blue eyes and at the tresses of fair hair, the halo finished in gold leaf, the dress so light it seemed almost colourless, the lyre held delicately. As a child, the woman said, St Cecilia had heard all the world’s music that was yet to come.

Lucy guessed that her mother – perhaps from this same source – had learnt that St Cecilia had been born to be a martyr, had been murdered when she mocked the ancient gods, becoming after death the holy patron of musicians, as St Catherine was of saddlers and Charles Borromeo of starch-makers, as St Elizabeth sought mercy for all sufferers from toothache.

Alms were begged for the church’s repair and then the woman went.

*

Lucy left Montemarmoreo reluctantly, yet knowing she would not ever return. Hers was a different allocation of time and circumstance from her mother’s, from her father’s. She could not pretend.

When winter came that same year, when the memory of her long journey had begun to lose its vividness, she read again – methodically in order of their composition – the letters she had received from Ralph. They stirred the love that still affected her, but the people of the letters were other people now, as her mother and her father were. She took the unfinished embroidery from her embroidery drawer and wrapped Ralph’s anguished pleas in it, tying the bundle with string she made from her coloured threads.