The Story of Lucy Gault

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.