Trevor, William - The Story of Lucy Gault

‘I think what will happen,’ she predicts, passing on a thought that came in the night, ‘is that they’ll make a hotel of the house.’ She lay sleepless and the transformation lingered: a cocktail bar, a noisy dining-room, numbers on the bedroom doors. She doesn’t mind. It doesn’t matter. People coming from all over, travellers like never before; that is the way in Ireland now. Young fishermen from Kilauran with waiters’ suits on them, and cars drawn up. In Enniseala people walk about the streets chatting on the telephone.

‘Ah no, no,’ Sister Mary Bartholomew says when she mentions a hotel again, and Sister Antony shakes her head.

They don’t like to think about all the changes, even though they’re there already. They like the safety of what has been, what they can come to terms with. The nuns will be displaced, as the family that is still hers was, as the Morells of Clashmore were, the Gouvernets of Aglish, the Priors of Ringville, the Swifts, the Boyces. It had to be; it doesn’t matter. But it would hurt her visitors to say that maybe it has to be again and she holds that back, an unimportant lie of silence.

They ask and she tells them: about Paddy Lindon and the fisherman who communicated with his fingers, the trap standing waiting on the sea-gravel, the oil lamps lit. All gone, it feels like, and yet not gone at all.

‘We best be off,’ Sister Antony ends the morning, the conversation down to earth again.

*

The O’Reillys’ cattle graze all the fields now, big brown-speckled creatures. She looks down from the edge of the cliffs but does not descend by the easy way to the strand, for it is not easy any more. A dragonfly flutters up from the grass, then flies away into the afternoon lull.

She likes this day of the week best, even though she is lonely for a while after her friends have gone. In winter they light the drawing-room fire for her and they have the coffee there. Sister Antony came to the convent from a farm, Sister Mary Bartholomew from an institution. Sometimes they talk about that, recollecting the neighbourhoods they knew in their childhood, reminiscing about people she might have heard of.

The heat of the day has cooled. Late afternoon has a sunlit haze about it, the sea as calm as she has ever seen it, waves lapping so gently you could listen to the sound for ever. She does not hurry; there is no need to hurry. Better it should be a mystery, better in the story that still is told, even though Bridget was cross because of it, and Henry too. The gift of mercy, the nuns have said: forgiveness was the offertory of St Cecilia, while music played and her murderers were in the house. They would visit that church in Italy; one day, they said.

She smiles all that away. What happened simply did. The cow parsley was white every month of May when she drove away from the high spiked gates, the fuchsia bright in autumn at the cottage where the greyhound was always on the wall. Her visits were the joy in that inmate’s life, an old keeper said years later, before they pulled the place down. A flicker in the dark, he said, even though the inmate never knew who she was.

She should have died a child; she knows that but has never said it to the nuns, has never included in the story of herself the days that felt like years when she lay among the fallen stones. It would have lowered their spirits, although it lifts her own because instead of nothing there is what there is.

She watches the tide coming in. She watches it turning before she goes back, through the fields and the orchard. The nuns have collected the fallen apples, but still some lie about. The bees are safely there, browsing through honeysuckle, the hives fallen away to nothing. The lines where clothes were once pegged out to dry are still there too, grey with moss and damp.

The stick she keeps to assist her on the steep track down to her crossing stones is where she left it weeks ago, leaning against the archway wall. She feels up to that difficult journey today, although nothing will have changed: the bark grown over the initials she once carved, the stream curving as it always has, filching no more from its banks than it did before her time. Her journey takes all afternoon, and evening comes without her noticing.

In the house she boils an egg, makes toast, and finishes her kitchen chores before she goes again from room to room. Thunderflies lie beneath the glass of her embroideries where they have crept, tiny corpses decorating rock pools and flowers. In the downstairs bathroom the bath is streaked, discoloured green and brown; the blind, half down, has a gash; the electric bulb hangs without a shade.

She walks about the drawing-room, touching the surfaces with her fingertips – the glass of a cabinet door, the edge of a table-top, the writing-desk beneath the portrait of the unknown Gault, a shepherd’s head. Again there is the scent on her mother’s handkerchief; again her father calls her lady.

She settles in her chair by the window, to gaze out at the dusky blue of the hydrangeas. The avenue has gone shadowy, the outline of its trees stark against the sky. The rooks come down to scrabble in the grass as every evening at this time they do, her companions while she watches the fading of the day.

WILLIAM TREVOR was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in 1928, and spent his childhood in provincial Ireland. He attended a number of Irish schools and Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. Among his books are After Rain, Death in Summer, Excursions in the Real World, Felicia’s Journey, and The Hill Bachelors. Many of his stories have appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines. In 1977, William Trevor was named honorary Commander of the British Empire in recognition of his services to literature, and was awarded an honorary knighthood in 2002. In 1996, he received a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. He lives in Devon, England.