The Story of Lucy Gault

‘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.