The Story of Lucy Gault

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 the 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 x 4 the back, 6¾ x 4 the front. 5X4 and 4X4 were the lid and the bottom, 8 x 4 x 6 ¾ 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.

SIX

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.