The Story of Lucy Gault

The hand of her watch says twenty past five, the early-morning light gauzy and then becoming brash. She closes her eyes again. First thing once you’d lie there and hear the turkeys gobbling in the yard, Henry calling in the cows. On the wash-stand a crack runs from the lip of the jug through delicate green tracery and then is lost: always that has been there. The same green decorates the basin, is repeated on the wash-stand’s single row of tiles. One of the three high windows is open a few inches at the top because she likes the air at night even when there’s a storm. The outside paint has flaked away, the wood bleached by the sun.

She bundles her nightdress over her head, the floorboards creaking comfortingly when she crosses to the bent-wood chair where her clothes are still folded from the night, stockings draped, shoes tidy in shoe-trees. She pours out water and slowly washes, and slowly dresses. A seagull alights on the window-sill, its beady stare impertinent before it swoops off. Kitty Teresa said she’d like to be a seagull, but Bridget said Kitty Teresa hadn’t the brains for it.

She presses in her hairpins, sets her collar as she likes to have it, looks at herself in her dressing-table glass, stands up to pull her dress straight, still guided by her reflection. She pours away the water from the wash-stand basin and carries the enamel waste-bucket across the room to the door. On the bed she makes the top and bottom sheet taut, stroking away the creases, smoothing each blanket also, shaking the pillows, tucking the quilt in.

After the first time, whenever she pulled the bell-chain on the pillar the shouting began, reaching her dimly from far away. And then the keeper appeared on the steep avenue, picking his steps because the surface was furrowed, keys jangling when he was nearer. ‘Ah no, the Horahans don’t come,’ he said the first time, speaking of brothers and a sister who had moved away from Enniseala, who had last been back for their mother’s funeral. ‘A family would be ashamed,’ he said, beside her in the car when he had locked the gates. He always said to wait when they reached the house. Not until the din inside quietened was the grey hall door opened.

In those days she dressed up a bit: this morning, finishing in her bedroom, she remembers that. She dressed up for them because they liked it. They said it sometimes when she passed through the hall, where some of them loitered, when they came to her until they were restrained, incoherent in their mumbling speech. They didn’t mind restraint. Those who did were elsewhere, the same keeper said, a step ahead of her on the stairs. He looked over his shoulder, pointing down at the five stone steps in case she would trip. He turned the corner into the wooden stairway, turning again into the long, yellow-distempered passage in which all the doors were closed and the boards uncarpeted, the walls without pictures. The room set aside for visitor and inmate was bare, the same yellow on the walls, a light burning beneath Christ in glory, her embroidery given pride of place. ‘Well now, well now, a visitor today.’ That keeper had a laugh you’d remember. He’d been amused when he’d told her that on the road that day some of them had taken her to be the wife of the inmate whose name she’d known. Arguments about it there’d been, he said, and later on arguments as to whether on one visit or another the correct day had been observed. The first day of a fortnight she always came on, but several times it was spread about that she’d got it wrong, that she’d miscalculated. ‘You never did, though,’ that keeper said. ‘In all the years.’ Seventeen it was in the end.

That keeper’s face comes back to her on her way across the landing to the bathroom. Some faces do, more readily than others. Was it he who said he would arrange for her to have her own key to the gates? One day in winter, when the panes of the barred windows had iced up so that you couldn’t see out? A day in spring it was when the key was ready, specially cut for her and they tried it in the lock because a new key doesn’t always turn. A ceremony they made of it, showing her the knack.

She pours away the water she has washed in, tipping the enamel bucket on the bath’s edge. On her way downstairs she goes into all the rooms, only to see what yesterday she saw, but wanting to do that. A spider clings to a cobweb that is within her reach, that has been woven in the night. She takes the spider to the window, releasing it when she has eased up the sash, flicking away that remains of the cobweb also. This time of year, every morning there is one somewhere.

In the kitchen she turns on the plate of the stove that heats more swiftly than the others. She watches its coils redden, listening when the News begins: in the night a farmer has been murdered for the money he kept by him, a golfer somewhere has set a record. It was when Henry’s sister emigrated to America that the little blue Bakelite wireless came into the kitchen, turned on on Sunday evenings for Joe Linnane’s Question Time and for nothing else. Nineteen thirty-eight or so.

The groceries came yesterday, the bread still fresh in the tin. ‘If you’re not on the Internet,’ a brisk voice warns, ‘you’re not at the races.’ Making tea, she wonders what that means, remembering Baltimore Girl coming in at nine to one, her father’s money on it at Lismore, hers on Black Enchanter. ‘You’re not going to tell me you’ve never been to the races!’ His astonishment comes back to her and the memory trails into something else, she doesn’t know why: she wonders if Ralph ever read Lady Morgan. Henry sat close to the range, chilled to his bones, he said, and she drove off to get the new lady doctor, and the priest came out with his stuff all ready in his flat black case. A year after that it would have been when Bridget didn’t come down one morning.

She eats slowly, the radio turned off now. When she finishes – after she has poured what remains in the kettle over her cup and saucer and plate, and wiped the knife clean, after she has emptied the tea-leaves and turned the teapot upside down on the draining-board – she carries a chair out to the yard. She carries another, and then a third, her gait hardly affected by the limp that has become slighter with the years. She sits and waits, dozing in the sun.

The colours were what he liked: the red and the green, yellow and purple, the blue his favourite. He liked the forked tongues, the eyes as black as pitch; two boards from Ronan’s they’d worn out.

‘Sit by the window, shall we?’ she said the day they heard the cuckoo, and they looked down at the ragwort-laden grass of the hill, no trees breaking its green monotony, no fence or rail bounding the brief avenue, the high brick wall. ‘Oh, listen!’ she said when the two notes of the cuckoo’s song began.

He threw the dice and moved his disc; he always wanted her to win, not that he ever said so, but she knew. She heard his voice that one time, in the drawing-room, not ever again: the oblivion that possessed him was his secret. There were many secrets in the asylum, a younger keeper said; in asylums everywhere there were secrets preciously guarded because there was so little else. Oblivion often was an inmate’s last, his sole, possession. That younger keeper was given to talk that was a bit on the fanciful side.

When they looked down, squirrels searched the unkempt grass, heads occasionally cocked, ears suddenly alert. Once a fox had strolled about among them, too wise to make enemies of them. She said so, and wondered if he understood.

That’s there again when she slips deeper into sleep. The keeper says it’s time now and on the stairways and in the passages the wild faces draw back from her. Hands reach out and then are harmless in the air.

*

‘Well, there you are!’ Sister Mary Bartholomew exclaims.

Clean and tidy in the habit they wear nowadays, the two nuns cross the cobbles, each bringing her something, and bringing her the news as well – of a change there is to be at the convent, new lockers outside the refectory. There is something else but she doesn’t quite hear and doesn’t ask because Sister Mary Bartholomew is already going on, about the two novices who have begun this week. Sister Antony brings her currant shortbread today, Sister Mary Bartholomew some kind of herbal tea.

‘Enniseala?’ Sister Mary Bartholomew repeats what she has been asked. ‘Oh now, what’s new?’

The car is giving them trouble, the radiator heating up. They’ll have to come on bicycles if the car gives out. Not that it would come to that, of course; and there is laughter.

‘Condon’s closed,’ Sister Antony said. ‘Young Halpin’s back from America.’

‘You wouldn’t call Eddie Halpin young.’ Sister Mary Bartholomew softly murmurs her contradiction. ‘No way.’

‘I meant young when he left.’

‘Oh, young then right enough.’

‘Say about Father Leahy.’

‘Father Leahy’s maybe going out to the Equator.’

It’s pleasant, listening to the nuns, usually on a Tuesday. Not once since they’ve begun to come have they forgotten her.

‘It’s good of you,’ she says. Good of them to bother with someone who isn’t of their faith, whose solitude they heard about. Good of them to come all this way. ‘Kind,’ she says.

An outing for them, they replied when she said it before, and told her that last summer at the Mount Melleray Retreat a crotchety old nun was critical when she heard they drove fourteen miles to visit a Protestant woman. ‘Wouldn’t her own do that for her?’ the old nun grumbled and they didn’t say how they’d replied. Ever since they heard all that’s still talked about they have come; one morning they just drove up. It’s famous in Enniseala that years ago she walked behind the funeral through the town, as famous as it is that for so long she visited the asylum. It shouldn’t be, her own view is, for does it matter, really, why people visit one another or walk behind a coffin, only that they do?

‘The swans?’

‘They’re still there always.’

She usually asks about the swans, reminding herself earlier to do so. If the swans left Enniseala it would be a loss. The last thing her father said to her was about the honey bees in the orchard.

Their faces smile at her, Sister Mary Bartholomew’s elongated, a hair curling out of a mole on her chin, Sister Antony’s as round as the sun. Already in the yard there is the aroma of the coffee they’ve made. Freshly ground in O’Hagan’s, Sister Antony says, and Sister Mary Bartholomew sets up the green-baized card table she has carried out from the dog passage. Rickety it is, going on beyond its time.

‘I thought we brought scones,’ she says, noticing they’re not on the table when Sister Antony spreads the cloth.

‘They’re in the tin yet,’ Sister Antony says. ‘They’ll keep fresh in the tin.’

There are the macaroons that one of the lay sisters bakes, and slices of her fruitcake, the scones in a flowery tin.

‘How lovely it is, the autumn sunshine!’ Sister Mary Bartholomew remarks.

‘Yes, it’s beautiful.’

Her tranquillity is their astonishment. For that they come, to be amazed again that such peace is there: all they have heard, and still hear now, does not record it. Calamity shaped a life when, long ago, chance was so cruel. Calamity shapes the story that is told, and is the reason for its being: is what they know, besides, the gentle fruit of such misfortune’s harvest? They like to think so: she has sensed it that they do.

Their wonderment is in their gestures and in their presents, and gazing from their eyes. They did not witness for themselves, but others did, the journey made to bring redemption; they only wonder why it was made, so faithfully and for so long. Why was the past belittled? Where did mercy come from when there should have been none left? They laud the mercy and silently applaud the figure at the funeral, but hearsay tells them nothing more.

She could manage without them, they often say, since she has made an art of being solitary. Nothing is dirty in the kitchen: she has seen them thinking that. She dresses more carefully than when she was a girl. Once in a while a hairdresser comes out from Enniseala to attend to her in her sedate old age.

‘All things Italian I love,’ Sister Mary Bartholomew remarks when the conversation for a moment lapses.

Italy is often talked about, the trip to the town called Montemarmoreo. They know about its narrow, cluttered streets, the walk to the marble quarries, the black sour cherries on the way. They know about the honouring of St Cecilia, a saint she introduced them to, whom they have taken to their hearts.

‘Poor girl,’ Sister Mary Bartholomew commiserates. ‘Poor little Cecilia, I often think.’

For a few minutes they talk about all that, the acts, the punishment, the life. They pour more coffee, milk added as she likes it. She cannot explain what so astonishes them. She might say that chance was in charge again when she noticed the old-fashioned bicycle propped against the sea-wall, when she looked and saw a figure standing still. It was chance that she was passing then, as it was when her father looked down and saw what the O’Reillys’ dog had tired of burying in the shingle.

But the nuns do not believe in chance. Mystery is their thing. Take from the forest its mystery and there is standing timber. Take from the sea its mystery and there is salted water. She found that somewhere when first she read the books in the drawing-room bookcases; long afterwards she repeated it to the nuns when it came back to her. ‘Well, isn’t it tidily put!’ Sister Antony exclaimed in admiration, and Sister Mary Bartholomew asked if it was Charles Kickham or Father Prout who was the author. But she said no; someone foreign, she thought.

‘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.