Lucy is only a child in 1921 when the Irish War of Independence begins. She is an Anglo-Irish girl who lives with her father and mother as an only child. They live on the coast. Loyalist Protestants are caught in the cross-fire so to speak, between the IRA (Irish Catholics who don't like Protestants), and the British army who doesn't really like Irish folks.
We meet Captain Gault, Lucy's father, who facilitates the martial law after arsonists set the Protestants's homes on fire. One day, the miscreants approach with hostility, and he opens fire, shooting a boy in the shoulder. Captain Gault decides to move the family to England. Lucy bemoans the move and dreams of the ocean view and the home she had grown to love. She doesn't want to leave, so when they depart, she hides, and her parents wrongly conclude that she has died, perhaps by falling into the water and drowning.
Her parents are long gone by the time she realizes what happened. She gets to stay in the house, more or less alone, and the servants and employees of their estate take care of her. She grows up, with full-blown existential dread from her life of loneliness, but one day, as a young woman, she meets Ralph. They like each other, but she realizes that unless she can connect with her parents and earn their forgiveness, that she cannot offer Ralph her heart.
When her father comes back from WWII, to the house they used to live in, he discovers his daughter, but life has dragged them so far apart, and they are so lonely already, that they don't really connect anymore. They never talk openly about what actually happened. She finds the boy whom her father shot in the shoulder all those years ago, and she forms a relationship with him. She visits him in an asylum.
The book ends with the introduction of headphones, cell phones, and the internet, but she is so old that she is simply perplexed by the developments.
