The Story of Lucy Gault

On the pale clay road beyond the gates he turned to the left, the berried honeysuckle scentless now, September fuchsia in the hedges. They would not for long have to rely on Heloise’s legacy. Vaguely, he saw himself in a shipping office, even though he hardly knew what the work undertaken in such places involved. It didn’t much matter; any decent occupation would do. Now and again they would return, a visit to see how everything was, to keep a connection going. ‘It isn’t for ever,’ Heloise had said last night, and had spoken of the windows opened again, the dust sheets lifted, fires lit, flowerbeds weeded. And he’d said no, of course not.

In Kilauran he conversed with the deaf and dumb fisherman, as he had learnt to in his childhood: gestures made, words mouthed. They said good-bye. ‘Not for too long,’ he left his silent promise behind, and felt a falsehood compounded here too. He stood for a while on the rocks where sea-pinks grew in clumps. The surface of the sea was a dappled sheen, streaked with the last faint afterglow of sunset. Its waves came softly, hardly touched with foam. There was no other movement on it anywhere.

Had he been right not to reveal to Heloise, or to his child, the finality he had begun to sense in this departure? Should he have gone back to that family in Enniseala to plead a little longer? Should he have offered more than he had, whatever was felt might settle the misdemeanour he had committed, accepting that the outrage of that night was his and not the trespassers’ who had come? Climbing down the rocks on to the shingle, shuffling over it to the sand, he didn’t know. He didn’t know when he walked on, lingering now and again to gaze out at the empty sea. He might have said to himself on this last night that he had too carelessly betrayed the past and then betrayed, with easy comforting, a daughter and a wife. He was the one who was closest to place and people, whose love of leftover land, of house and orchard and garden, of sea and seashore, fostered instinct and premonition. Yet when he searched his feelings there was nothing there to guide him, only confusion and contradiction.

He turned towards the cliffs, crunching over the shingle again. Lost for a while in the trees, his house re-appeared, a light coming on in an upstairs window. His foot caught on something among the stones and he bent to pick it up.

*

‘Lucy!’ Heloise called and Henry said she might have gone after her father. He hadn’t seen her to pass on the Captain’s message but, contrary as she was these times, she’d maybe been hiding about in the yard somewhere and had heard it for herself. She hadn’t spoken a word to him for three days, nor to Bridget either. The way things were, it wasn’t surprising she hadn’t come in for her tea.

Heloise heard him shouting Lucy’s name in the yard sheds. ‘Lucy!’ she shouted herself in the apple orchard and in the field where the cattle were, which was the way back from the O’Reillys’. She passed through the gate in the white railing that separated the fields from the turn-around in front of the house. She crossed the gravel to the hydrangea lawn.

It was she who had first called it that, just as it was she who had discovered that the Lahardane fields had once been known as Long Meadow and Cloverhill and John Joe’s and the river field. She’d always wanted to hear those names used again, but nobody had bothered when she suggested it. The hydrangeas were heavily in bloom, their blue still distinctive in the darkening twilight, bunching out around the semi-circle they formed along a grey stone wall. They were the loveliest of all Lahardane’s features, she had always thought.

‘Lucy!’ she called through the trees. She stood still, listening in the silence. She went further into the woods, coming out twenty minutes later on the track that ran down to the stream and the crossing stones. ‘Lucy!’ she shouted. ‘Lucy!’

She called out her child’s name in the house when she returned to it, opening the doors of rooms that weren’t used, climbing up to attics. She went downstairs again. She stood by the open hall door, and in a moment heard her husband returning. She knew he was alone because there were no voices. She heard the gate she had passed through earlier creaking as he opened it and closed it, the latch falling into place.

‘Is Lucy with you?’ she raised her voice again to ask.

His footsteps on the gravel halted. He was hardly more than a shadow.

‘Lucy?’ she said.

‘Isn’t Lucy here?’

He still stood where he had stopped. There was something white in his hand, a shaft of lamplight from the open hall door spilling over it.

2

‘Holy Mother of God!’ Bridget whispered, her face gone pallid.

‘I’m telling you.’ Henry nodded slowly. They were down on the strand, he said. The Captain had come up through the fields and then they’d both gone back to the strand.

‘He found her clothes. The tide was going out and he walking over from Kilauran. That’s all was said.’