The Story of Lucy Gault

  Afterwards in the parade yard this recruit stood apart. He looked about him, at huts, at latrines, at the high walls of a handball court, at soldiers idling in a corner. He had joined the army in the hope that military discipline and the noisy communal life, feet on the march and a healthy tiredness, would be more salutary in his affliction than the solitary nature of house-painting or the occupation of a railway-station porter. His mother, with whom until today he had lived, had wept when he declared his intention. She was reconciled to the change that had occurred in him while he’d still been employed at the railway station. In spite of it – or because of it, she often considered – he was a good son, clean and tidy in his habits and becoming more so as the years went by. That suddenly he’d got it into his head to join the army was as distressing a shock as ever she’d suffered. She feared the hazards that were natural in the military life, and considered her son unsuitable for exposure to them.

  In the parade yard the recruit made an enquiry of the soldiers who stood about as to the whereabouts of the Camp chapel. These men were smoking and at ease, the top buttons of their tunics open. Thinking to make fun of a newcomer, as was usual at the Camp when a face was unfamiliar, they sent him in the wrong direction, so that he found himself eventually at a hole dug in the ground, half filled with the Camp’s rubbish. Flies swarmed about it; a black and white mongrel dog rooted among tins and bones. The new soldier looked about him. He was at the periphery of the Camp, its boundary marked with posts and link-wire, and he walked back the way he had come. He did not ask for directions again, but found his own way to the chapel, noticing from a distance the black wooden cross on its roof.

  The place was empty, its varnished benches garishly yellow in strips of sunlight. The soldier dipped the tips of his fingers into the stoup of holy water and with that same hand made the sign of the cross, addressing this devotion to the altar. He found then what he sought, a plaster representation of the Virgin Mary, before which a single candle burned. Here he knelt, and pleaded that in return for his service to his country he would be rewarded with peace of mind, that his insistent dreams, oppressing and tormenting him by night and haunting his memory by day, would cease. He pleaded for the Virgin’s intervention on his behalf, proclaimed his obedience and begged for her acknowledgement of his plight. But when he finished there was silence in the chapel, as afterwards there always was in the places where he prayed.

  ‘What’s that?’ another soldier enquired of him that day, but the new recruit denied that he had spoken, although he knew he had.

  ‘You said something, man.’

  ‘Would the trousers itch your legs for long?’

  ‘It wasn’t that you said.’

  He knew it wasn’t, but what he’d said was lost now and could not be found, because he did not himself know what it was. He had painted, not long ago, the window-frames of the big mellow-bricked asylum and had become familiar with its inmates. That he belonged there with them, that he would one day share their restricted existence, was his perpetual dread.

  6

  The yard dogs barked when the car was heard in the distance. They came loping out of their resting place on the warm cobbles beneath the pear tree and were pointed back to it by Henry, who knew there was to be a visitor this afternoon and who that visitor was. From the archway in the wall that separated the yard from the front of the house he watched the dogs obeying the gesture he had made, then turned to lean against the side of the archway he had leaned against when the car that was expected had driven up before. He felt for a cigarette, as he had then too.

  When he’d heard from Bridget that the boy who had come that day was to return, Henry had said nothing. His impassive features remained undisturbed, but the lack of response seemed in no way significant to his wife, since often he chose not to comment when news was passed on to him. On occasion this reticence reflected the run of Henry’s thoughts; on occasion it concealed what he did not wish to reveal. When the information came that Ralph was to return there was concealment.

  He raised his left hand in a salute, answering Ralph’s greeting. With his right he returned matches and the Woodbine packet to his trouser pocket. IF 19, he noticed, as he had before. A big old Renault the car was.

  A few Sundays ago, after Mass in Kilauran, Henry had asked about the car. He’d asked a man who worked on the roads, who told him the car was Mr Ryall’s, that once a week Mr Ryall made the journey from Enniseala to Dungarvan in it, to the Bank of Ireland’s sub-office. How it was that this boy would be driving it, stranger that he appeared to be, the roadworker did not know. From what Bridget had overheard the last time the boy had been here, she said it seemed he was a teacher, but the loose ends in all that had not yet been gathered up.

  ‘He’s here.’ Henry said in the kitchen, and was aware when he spoke that his wife was pleased to about the same degree that he was not.

  ‘What it is, he’s teaching the Ryall boys,’ Bridget said. ‘She told me that this morning. He’s staying in the bank.’

  ‘So he’ll go back to where he emerged from one of these days?’

  ‘It’s why she wrote a letter to him – to say come out again before he’d go.’

  ‘He has an easy way with him.’

  ‘Ah, he’s a nice young fellow.’

  ‘I don’t know is he.’

  Bridget knew better than to take the disagreement further. She said instead:

  ‘She has a honeycomb brought in for their tea again.’

  ‘I’ll put the table up outside.’

  The boy was waiting, leaning against the side of the car, when Henry crossed the gravel with the slatted table. As he had on the previous occasion, he unfolded it on the hydrangea lawn and drew up the same two white-painted chairs. Passing by the boy as he returned to the yard, he said:

  ‘You’re over from England, sir?’

  ‘I live near Enniscorthy. I’ve never been to England.’

  ‘Arrah, why would you bother yourself?’ Henry nodded a reluctant approval before inclining his head in the direction of Mr Ryall’s car. ‘She moves all right for you, does she?’

  ‘I don’t go fast.’

  ‘There’s a few dinges on the mudguards, nothing only that. I was noticing them the other time. She’s well looked after.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’d like to see anything well looked after. I keep the trap up to it myself. I painted the old dog-cart a couple of years ago, but she’s shaky all the same.’

  The dickey was opened for him so that he could see the green-upholstered seat. The bonnet was unlatched and folded back so that he could inspect the engine. Henry wagged his head in admiration. That car would be worth a bit, he said.

  ‘It’s Mr Ryall’s.’

  ‘I heard you were stopping there. Here’s the missy for you now.’

  Henry walked slowly away. He felt better now that he’d had the conversation about the car. He listened to what was being said, the exchanges stuttering and nervous. The boy apologized for being early and was told it didn’t matter.

  *

  ‘I thought maybe you’d have gone away already,’ Lucy said. ‘I thought maybe my note would have missed you.’

  ‘I have a few more weeks in Enniseala.’

  ‘I was glad to get your letter.’

  I will come on Wednesday, Ralph had written, hurrying to catch the evening post. Six days had gone by then, during each one of which he had imagined what was happening now. While Caesar’s Gallic War progressed and geometry bewildered Jack, Ralph had wondered if she would smile in that same way, and had resolved that silences should not develop. Would she tell him, this time, what others had told him since last they met? Would it bore her to hear about himself? About the friends he’d made at boarding-school? About the timber yards and the sawmills he would one day inherit? Would any of it interest her, as everything about her interested him?

  ‘I keep bees,’ she said. ‘Did I tell you that before?’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’


  ‘I didn’t even tell you my name. But you know it now.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘You will have heard about the Gaults.’

  ‘Oh, not much.’

  It seemed natural to deny that there was talk. Yet he would have liked to say that, far from adversely affecting his attachment, the story that was renowned in Enniseala strengthened it. But all that was impossible, since she did not know of his attachment. He could not even claim that, being still close to childhood, he sensed something of what her child’s emotions had been when it was taken for granted that she should abandon without protest what she loved. He thought of her in that time and saw her clearly as she must have been, and remembered his own powerlessness in the boarding-school where he’d been assured he would be happy, his pillow drenched with tears, the home he’d been torn away from seeming like a heaven he had betrayed through a lack of the affection that was its due. How gentle in that alien dark his mother’s good-night embrace had been, how musical the clatter of his father’s timber mills, how cheerful his bedroom fire, how soft the carpet on the stairs! Nor was the hell that shattered his illusions yet fully spread about him: grimly spoken of were variations of discomfort and cold and discipline by disapproval; and again there’d be burnt morning porridge; again the stench of cabbage soup.

  In the silence that had gathered as they stood by the car, Ralph wanted to say that he knew about the snares of childhood, and knew as well that his experience was puny compared with what still continued for the girl he believed he loved. His sympathy was part of love, as tender as his fondness.

  ‘Would you like to see the hives?’

  She was wearing a different white dress, with sleeves that came halfway down her arms, its collar different too. Her necklace was of tiny pearls or what seemed like pearls.

  ‘Yes, please,’ he said, and they walked together beneath the wide archway, into the yard and through it to the orchard. One of the sheepdogs ambled after them, the other still lazed beneath the pear tree.

  ‘Beauty of Bath.’ She named apples that were not yet ripe, in clusters on old twisted boughs. ‘Kerry Pippins. George Cave.’ She pointed at a row of beehives and didn’t want him to go closer to them.

  ‘It’s lovely, this orchard,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  They passed beyond it to a neglected garden, by collapsed glasshouses and raspberries gone wild. They came out on the other side of the house, where the railing that bounded the field they were in began.

  ‘Shall we go for a walk?’

  Ralph thought of her as Lucy when she said that, the first time he had in her company. Lucy Gault, he saw written down, as she had written it. No other name could be as right.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  They passed from one field to another, then along the edge of one in which potatoes grew.

  ‘The O’Reillys’,’ she said.

  She led the way down the cliffs, and over the shingle to where seagulls stalked possessively on smooth, wet sand. Thongs of sea-weed had been left behind by the tide. Shells peeped up from where they were embedded. She said:

  ‘ “The girl is lame!” you’re thinking.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking that.’

  ‘You noticed before, of course.’

  ‘It isn’t what you notice much.’

  ‘Everybody notices it.’

  Her limp made her more herself, he’d thought. He knew how it had come about. He’d told Mrs Ryall when she’d asked that it wasn’t in the least unattractive. He might have said so now, but shyness held him back.

  ‘That’s Kilauran.’ She pointed at the distant pier and the houses beyond it, her extended finger so slight and delicate that he longed to seize the hand and clasp it into his.

  ‘I think I was there one day.’

  ‘I went to school in Kilauran. Our church is a tin hut.’

  ‘I think I saw it.’

  ‘I never go into Enniseala.’

  ‘Don’t you like Enniseala?’

  ‘I have no reason to go there.’

  ‘I thought I might see you in the streets, but I didn’t.’

  ‘What do you do in Enniseala? What is it like where you are staying?’

  He described the house above the bank offices. He told about his wandering the streets when he was free to do so in the evenings, how he often sat reading on the bandstand or in the empty bar of the Central Hotel, or walked on the promenade.

  ‘Did you mind my asking you to come to tea again? Is it a bore?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t mind. Of course it isn’t a bore.’

  ‘Why “of course”, Ralph?’

  That was the first time she called him Ralph. He wanted her to again. He wanted to be for ever on this strand because they were alone here.

  ‘Because it’s how I feel. It couldn’t possibly be a bore. It was lovely, getting your letter.’

  ‘How many are the few weeks you have left?’

  ‘Three, before the boys go back to school.’

  ‘What are they like, the boys?’

  ‘Oh, they’re all right. I’m not much of a teacher, the trouble is.’

  ‘What are you then?’

  ‘Nothing, really.’

  ‘Oh, you can’t be nothing!‘

  ‘My father owns a sawmills. I’ll end up owning it too. Well, I suppose so.’

  ‘Don’t you want to?’

  ‘I have no vocation for anything else. I’ve tried to want to be all sorts of things.’

  ‘What have you tried to want to be? An actor?’

  ‘Oh, heavens, I couldn’t act!‘

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m not the kind.’

  ‘You might be.’

  ‘I don’t at all think so.’

  ‘I would try everything. I would try for the stage. I would try marrying into riches. What are they called, the boys you teach?’

  ‘Kildare and Jack.’

  ‘How odd Kildare is! How odd a name!‘

  ‘It’s in the family, I believe.’

  ‘Earls of Kildare there were. And there’s the county.’

  ‘A town as well.’

  ‘I have an Uncle Jack in India. My father’s brother. I don’t remember him. D’you know how many books there are at Lahardane?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There are four thousand and twenty-seven. So old, some of them, they’re falling to bits. Others have never been opened. Do you know how many I’ve read? Can you guess?’

  Ralph shook his head.

  ‘Five hundred and twelve. Last night, for the second time, I finished Vanity Fair.’

  ‘I haven’t read it even once.’

  ‘It’s very good.’

  ‘I’ll read it one of these days.’

  ‘It has taken me years to read all those books. I began when I left school.’

  ‘I’ve read hardly anything compared with that.’

  ‘Sometimes there are jellyfish washed up here. Poor little creatures, but they sting if you pick them up.’

  They walked among the pools in the rocks where anemones and shrimps were. The sheepdog that had followed them prodded the clumps of seaweed with a paw.

  ‘Do you think it strange that I counted the books?’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  He imagined her counting, a finger passing from spine to spine along a bookshelf, and then beginning again on the shelf below. When he’d come the last time he hadn’t been invited into the house. He wondered if today he’d see the rooms, and hoped he would.

  ‘I don’t know why I counted them,’ she said, and added when a silence lengthened, ‘I think we have to go back now. Shall we walk somewhere else after tea?’

  *

  She wished she hadn’t said about the books. She hadn’t meant to. She had meant only to mention Vanity Fair, perhaps even to draw attention to William Makepeace Thackeray as a name because Makepeace was as unusual as Kildare and she liked the rhythm of it. It sounded peculiar, counting four
thousand and twenty-seven books. And yet he’d shaken his head decisively when she’d asked if it seemed strange.

  She cut the sponge cake Bridget had made and wondered if she should have bought a Scribbins’ Swiss roll, which you could sometimes get in Kilauran. The sponge cake felt clammy, the knife not slipping through as effortlessly as it might. Bridget’s hand was heavy with cakes, though never with bread.

  Thank you,’ he said, taking the slice she had cut.

  ‘It may not be very nice.’

  ‘It’s delicious.’

  She poured his tea and added milk, then poured her own. What should she say when they went quiet? This morning she had thought of questions to ask, but had already asked the ones she could remember.

  ‘Are you glad you came to Enniseala, Ralph?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, I am.’

  ‘Are you really not much of a teacher?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t taught the Ryall boys much.’

  ‘Perhaps they don’t want to learn much.’

  ‘No, they don’t. Not in the least.’

  ‘Then it’s not your fault.’

  ‘I have a conscience.’

  ‘So have I.’

  She hadn’t meant to say that, either. She was determined not to talk about her conscience. It wasn’t interesting to a stranger, and she would say too much.

  ‘I could not teach boys,’ she said.

  ‘Probably you could. As well as I can.’

  ‘I remember Mr Ryall. With a moustache.’

  ‘The Ryalls have been nice to me.’

  ‘There’s a man in Domville’s I remember. A stringy man, very tall, his tie tied tightly in his collar. I knew his name but I can’t remember it now.’

  ‘I’ve never been in Domville’s.’

  ‘There’s a little railway above your head and wooden balls that bring your change. Do you wonder why I wear white dresses?’

  ‘Well–‘

  ‘It’s my favourite colour. It was my mother’s too.’

  ‘White your favourite colour?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’ She offered the sponge cake again but he shook his head. She would have cut the Scribbins’ roll into slices and arranged them herself, a chocolate roll with vanilla filling, or just jam if that was all there was. ‘Tell me what Enniseala is like,’ she said.