The Story of Lucy Gault

by William Trevor

  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.

  2

  One afternoon in Enniseala Lucy looked for the black bicycle. She looked for it near the lighthouse where the fishing boats came in and in the poor part of the town. She thought she saw it once, outside the League of the Cross Hall, and again in MacSwiney Street, but when she went closer she realized she’d been mistaken. She took to sitting by one of the windows in the café attached to the bread shop. She did not know what she would do if the bicycle went by or what she would do if she saw it propped up against a shop window or a wall, as she had before. Her compulsion came from nowhere that she knew about, and seemed to feed on the very failure of her efforts. In the end she asked, and was told that the man she sought had been admitted to the asylum.

  She brought that information back to Lahardane, but it elicited neither interest nor much of a response. It was a suitable thing, the unspoken opinion seemed to be; and Lucy imagined it voiced in the kitchen when she wasn’t there, with a note of satisfaction in whatever exchanges there were. She drove out to the asylum when she was next in Enniseala and drew on to the verge by high iron gates. The brick building on a hill had an empty look, as if there were no inmates, but she knew that wasn’t so. The locked gates were intimidating. A chain trailed down one of the pillars, a bell suspended from an iron bracket on the other side.

  She drove away again.

  *

  On the dining-room table she stretched out another piece of linen, each corner weighed down with a book. Carefully she copied on to the cloth the watercolour sketch she had made: poppies on an ochre ground. She chose the silks and laid them in a row.

  She wondered how many times she had done all this before; how many times she had said when an embroidery was finished, ‘You might like to have it?’ She had never found a better way of not appearing to presume that there was merit in what she offered. The giving was a pleasure, her exaggeration part of it when she said there was no room left on the walls at Lahardane.

  She stitched in single threads to mark the colours: the orange and red of the poppies in half a dozen shades, four different greens for the spiky leaves, the ochre frilled with grey. Months it would take to complete, all winter.

  *

  ‘Bring Miss Gault her tea.’

  Behind the bread counter in the café the wife of the baker gave the order to a child in a flowered overall. So she was safely back, the observation had been in the café when she had returned from Switzerland and Italy, the purpose of her journey known but not remarked upon.

  She hung her umbrella on the back of her table’s other chair. Rain had suddenly blown in that afternoon.

  ‘That’s shocking weather,’ the woman behind the bread counter called out to her.

  The woman’s red hair was greying now and a look of relief had become established in her eyes, as if she gave silent thanks for no longer being of child-bearing age: she’d had ten girls and a boy. Never putting in an appearance in the café, her husband baked half the town’s bread, and cakes and buns and doughnuts.

  ‘Cakes, is it, miss?’ the child enquired, scattering with her hand the crumbs on the stained tablecloth and wiping away the milk that a cork mat hadn’t entirely absorbed. ‘Will I bring them assorted?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The child’s features were pinched, the hand that was rearranging the sugar bowl and milk jug affected by chilblains. Her other hand was bandaged.

  ‘Isn’t the rain heavy for itself, miss?’

  ‘It is. Are you Eileen? I confuse you with your sister. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Is it my older sister?’

  ‘I think it might be.’

  ‘My older sister’s Philomena.’

  ‘And you’re Eileen?’

  ‘I am, all right. Wait till I’ll bring you the tea now.’

  Above the door that led to the back regions, a plaster figure, fingers raised, blessed the café. Lucy watched the child pass beneath it, then rooted in her purse for a threepenny piece in case she forgot later. She dropped it into her glove, knowing she would feel it there. She watched the rain through the painted letters on the glass of the wide half-curtained window. People were hurrying on the street, raincoats over their heads.

  ‘You’ll have us drowned, Mattie!’ the woman behind the counter shouted at a ragged man who’d just come in, whose drenched clothes were dribbling on to the floor. He was often on the streets, playing his accordion for coppers.

  ‘Sure, won’t it wash the floor for you?’ He sat down at a table near the door, his accordion on the table in front of him.

  ‘There’s only these ones left,’ the girl called Eileen said, referring to the cakes she’d brought. A wedge-shaped piece had been cut out of the sponge of each, artificial cream and raspberry jam inserted and the piece replaced. Six there were on the plate. ‘They’re the nicest anyway, miss.’

  ‘They’re lovely, Eileen.’

  A dinged metal teapot was carefully lowered on to the cork mat, a knife placed beside an undecorated white plate.

  ‘Would I bring you a slice of the brack, miss?’

  ‘No, no, I have plenty, Eileen.’

  She poured out the strong, dark tea and weakened it with milk. She peeled the paper from the bottom of one of the sponge cakes. Other people came in from the rain, a pram pushed to the table next to the accordion player’s, drops shaken from a red umbrella, one of its ribs protruding awkwardly when it was collapsed. ‘It’s here for the duration,’ someone remarked and there was laughter.

  How she would like to be addressed in the easy way the accordion player had been! How she would like to take part in the badinage! ‘The Protestant woman’s still waiting for her change,’ one of the counter girls had said in Domville’s not long ago. It was how they thought of her, how they described her when her name escaped them or if they didn’t know it, what her appearance and her dress suggested, as her voice did, as their manner with her did. A Protestant woman was a relic, left over, respected for what she was, not belonging. And she among such women was more different still. After she’d left Domville’s that day, the girl who hadn’t known her would have been told.

  She poured more tea and asked for hot water, which came with time. Blurred sunlight weakly lit the window, was lost and then flickered back again. The colour-wash of the houses across the street brightened – pink and green, slates of a roof glistening. She was as used to being different as she was to feeling alone. The same thing perhaps it was, and anyway it was ridiculous to mind.

  The moment passed. Elation – exhilaration almost – had been her mood during the months she’d stitched her embroidery of poppies. She had not sought to understand, only continuing in her obedience to an intention that was entirely her own, to do what she was drawn to do. She watched the people in the café for a little longer, the accordion player finishing the cup of tea he was not asked to pay for, the baby sleeping in its pram, a couple eating fish and
fried potatoes, two women intently conversing. She found the threepenny piece in her glove and left it under the rim of her saucer. She paid at the counter.

  Outside, the pavement had already begun to dry in patches when she walked to where her car was. Tinker children begged; behind her somewhere the accordion music began. Blue spread in the sky.

  She drove on to find a place where she might turn and then drove back again, past the Bank of Ireland and Coughlan’s warehouses, on through the town and into the country.

  When she came to the iron gates she drew on to the verge, as she had before. The embroidery that had taken her all winter to complete was framed in ash-wood so pale it was almost white. She reached into the back of the car for it and carried it with her to the pillar where the bell-chain hung.

  Rusty on its pivot, the heavy bell swung soundlessly at first before its clanging echoed against the hill. She waited, but no one answered. No gardener or workman came. No one appeared on the short, steep avenue. She stayed a while, then drove away.

  She stopped when she saw a line of men approaching a crossroads ahead of her. Ten or eleven of them there were, all darkly clad. A keeper walked in front, another brought up the rear. She waited until the men were closer and then got out of her car.

  ‘He’s not with us today,’ the keeper at the head of the line said when she gave the name. ‘But if you’ve something for him I’ll pass it on.’

  She gave him the framed embroidery. The other keeper said:

  ‘Did you make it yourself, ma’am?’

  They crowded round to see. ‘Beautiful,’ the same keeper said. ‘Beautiful,’ one of the men repeated, and then another said it, and another.

  She asked if it would be possible, once in a while, to visit the recipient of her gift.

  *

  ‘Sure, what sense does it make?’ Henry muttered when the spring and summer of that year passed and another winter had settled in.

  Bridget dried a cup and placed it inside another, both on their sides, their saucers beneath them. Her fingers today were slow in what was required of them, the knuckles reluctant to unstiffen.

  ‘No sense,’ she said. ‘But then.’

  ‘Is she all right, would you think?’

  Not knowing what to say, Bridget didn’t answer. She carried the cups and saucers to the big green dresser, hung the cups on their hooks, settled the saucers upright, behind the ridge on the shelf. It was the damp in the air that made a bad day of it. When it was cold the knuckles weren’t so affected.

  ‘She comes back tired,’ Henry said.

  ‘Ah well, she would.’

  Five years it was since the man had come to the house, thirty-four since he had come before. Bridget remembered walking down the avenue from the gate-lodge the morning after the first time and Henry saying something was wrong, how he had mentioned the dogs being poisoned a week or so ago, how he’d cleared away the gravel pebbles because they had blood on them. She remembered Lucy, dressed up, coming into the kitchen when the man came again, saying she’d carry the tea in. And afterwards Lucy not saying what she and Henry and the Captain had: that the insane maybe couldn’t be held responsible for being a nuisance. You couldn’t have blamed Lucy. You couldn’t have blamed her for hating the man.

  ‘There’s people talking about it,’ Henry said. ‘Her going there.’

  ‘There would be, all right.’

  They’d talk about it because they wouldn’t understand it, any more than it was understood in this kitchen. Wasn’t it enough that things had settled in the end – the Captain persevering with his sympathy, the jaunts they went out on, his fondness and his companionship at last accepted? Wasn’t it enough again, the memory of her friend’s love all down the years, still there for all anyone would know? ‘Why d’you want to go out to that old place?’ – Bridget had her protest ready, had had it ready for ages now, but she kept it to herself.

  ‘Snakes and ladders they play,’ Henry said.

  3

  One day, not long after she first came, the keeper said to him, ‘I’ll instruct you how to sharpen the razors.’

  The breakfast dishes were on the tables at the time, knives and forks across them, all the knives blunted with a file, the tin mugs with dregs of tea in them. His turn it was to gather up what there was, piling everything on to the tray and passing it through the hatch, waiting there until it came back, while the keeper put other things in the cupboards – the salt and pepper, any cutlery that would not have been used, the sugar dishes. Matthew Quirke the keeper was that morning. He had his coat off, bands on his shirtsleeves, his cap on the chest by the door. No one else was there.

  ‘A privilege,’ Mr Quirke said. ‘The razors.’

  No one was allowed near the razors only Matthew Quirke himself. It was he who shaved the men; since Eugene Costello had kept a razor by him and they found him the next morning, it was Mr Quirke who shaved the men, a rule made then.

  ‘How’s that then?’ a voice called out from the other side of the hatch, hands pushing back the tray, the spills wiped from it. MacInchey’s hands they were; you’d know the voice.

  ‘You understand me?’ the keeper said. ‘You know what I’m saying to you?’ Mr Quirke let what he said stay where it was, not pressing it. ‘Ah, you do, you do,’ he said, squeezing out a cloth into a basin of water. Matthew Quirke would take a glance at you and know was he understood or not. ‘There’s not another man I’d trust with the razors,’ he said. South Tipperary he came from, set for the priesthood only something went wrong. ‘Brush down that table now,’ he said. ‘Leave the long one to me and then we’ll go out the back.’

  The shed that had black-painted windows was across the big yard with the drain in the middle. There were two padlocks on it, one high, one low. Inside there was a light to put on.

  The door closed behind them, a bolt shot into place. The light was a bulb hanging down over the workbench. The keeper unrolled a bundle in green baize and lifted out the razors, then oiled the sharpening stone.

  ‘Isn’t it a grand thing she comes by?’ he said.

  The first razor went into the vice for a speck of rust to be rubbed off with sandpaper, then the edge was passed over the stone, wiped with a rag before the strop was pulled taut on the hook it hung from.

  ‘You’d get the way of it,’ the keeper said. ‘Isn’t it grand, though?’ he said.

  You didn’t have to answer. Matthew Quirke knew you wouldn’t. The new keeper who came instead of Mr Sweeney didn’t get it at first, not until Briscoe told him there was a man who didn’t want to speak.

  ‘Ah it is, it is,’ Mr Quirke said.

  Myley Keogh’s bar was on the road back that day, a jug of water on the counter. ‘That’s a great cycle you’re after getting off,’ the woman said, and the only thing was you couldn’t ask for a sup from the jug and the woman’d be waiting. No person would be fit to ask for water after seeing the house the way it was and people living in it. No person’d be fit to speak at all.

  ‘It’s coming up good,’ the keeper said. ‘Continue with the sandpaper a while yet.’

  When it was shining in the light he said to stop. ‘You have a friend in her all right,’ he said. ‘Sure, isn’t it that that matters at the heel of the hunt?’

  Mr Quirke handed him more sandpaper. He tightened the vice on the next razor he took from the baize. There was more rust on this one than on the last, Mr Quirke said. ‘Don’t be in a hurry with it.’

  You wouldn’t want to be in a hurry the way the days were. Any day at all, its hours would go by without haste. You’d take a line from that. No need for hurry.

  ‘That’s good, that’s good,’ Mr Quirke said. He was whistling, soft, under his breath. He was whistling ‘Danny Boy’ and then he sang. The razor had gone dark wherever it had been kept, but it could be made shiny again, Mr Quirke said, easy enough. By the time they’d finished with it, it would be better than new from the factory.

  For an hour and then longer the work continued in th
e little shed. There was a calendar hung up, a picture of a mountainside on it, trees felled and lying down, the days laid out on it. At the beginning and in the middle of a month she always came, and when you woke up in the morning you’d know. You wouldn’t know what day it was, only that it was the one when she came. It wouldn’t be today.

  ‘We’ve made a job of that,’ the keeper said.

  He folded the baize around the first of the sharpened blades and then around another one. He held them there with a rubber band around the baize.

  ‘Would you think of a little bird-box?’ he said. ‘You put it on to a tree trunk and the robins would nest inside.’

  He drew it out on a piece of ply-board. He showed how you’d cut the wood, two sides with a slant, the piece for the back taller than the front, a hinge marked where you’d lift open the lid and look in. The measurements were written down in red pencil on the ply-board. 9 × 4 the back, 6¾ × 4 the front, 5 × 4 and 4 × 4 were the lid and the bottom, 8 × 4 × 6¾ the sides. ‘Would you think of it for her?’ Mr Quirke said.

  The bell went for twelve o’clock. ‘We’ll shut up shop,’ Mr Quirke said, propping up the ply-board against the ledge of a window-sill. Wouldn’t it be something for you to be thinking about?’ he said in the yard, and again in the passageway. ‘When she’d win with the dice wouldn’t you give her a prize one time?’

  In the hall the men had gathered for the Angelus prayer. Mr Quirke was in charge this morning and he went forward to the platform. Father Quirke he’d be now if he’d gone for the priesthood, giving out his orders on a Sunday, everything different for him.

  Feet shuffled when the prayer was over; there was talking again and someone shouting out and then someone else. You’d have it wrapped up ready, made the way Mr Quirke would instruct you. She’d throw a six and go up and then she’d throw a four and she’d be home. You’d give it to her and she’d say what it was. She’d say it for you, like she always did.