The Story of Lucy Gault

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.