The Story of Lucy Gault Read online

  Henry darkened the leather where it showed, and stitched into one of the boots a new tongue, which he darkened also. Children would be born, Bridget said, and now and again they’d be brought to look at the old house, calling in at the gate-lodge on the way. One by one Henry stowed away the tools he’d used, on the rack above his workbench. He reached down his polishing rags from a nail in the wall and smeared polish on to the leather, taking his time, since he had plenty of it.

  *

  The war that Ralph had gone to fight in impinged on Ireland’s chosen neutrality. The precautions against invasion that had already been put in hand at the army Camp near Enniseala became general throughout the country, while armies advanced in Europe and distant cities were bombed. A nightly blackout was enforced; gas masks were issued; there was instruction in the use of the stirrup pump. Familiarly known as the Emergency, the war brought shortages – of petrol, of paraffin for the lamps that still illuminated Lahardane and houses like it, of tea and coffee and cocoa, of clothes made in England. Crops that had not been cultivated before – fields of sugarbeet and tomatoes – were grown. More wood and turf were burnt. Bread was less white.

  Every day Lucy walked to Kilauran to buy an Irish Times and read about what was happening. Parts of the few letters she now received from Ralph were blackly smudged out, or so cut away by the army censors that both sides of a page were deprived: for any information that was available, or permitted, she relied on reports in which death was spelt out in numbers – in the count of Spitfires that did not return, in the casualties of evacuation and retreat. And she knew that there were losses left unmentioned and uncalculated. Every Sunday evening on the wireless she had bought for the drawing-room there was the playing of the Allies’ national anthems, now and again a new one added, and that at least was cheerful.

  But cheerfulness was brief. For Lucy, on the strand and in the woods, Ralph’s features were as death had arrested them, his limbs gone rigid, the sprawl of his body awkward. Someone had pressed his eyelids down over his unseeing stare, and then passed on. Dirt was thick on the uniform she had never seen.

  These images haunted her until another letter came to contradict them, another brief reprieve before her fears began again. It was then, when reassurance had been too temporary a dozen times, that Bridget’s intuition became Lucy’s resolve. If Ralph returned she would go to him as soon as she heard.

  4

  ‘Signore! Signore!’ the caretaker called up the staircase. ‘Il dottore …’

  The Captain called back, and then there were the doctor’s foot-steps on the stairs.

  ‘Buongiorno, signore.’

  ‘Buongiorno, dottor Lucca.’

  The Captain made coffee while he waited. Outside, it was still freezing, the coldest winter they had known in Bellinzona for a generation, so it was said. From the window he watched people going to work, to the post-bus depot, to the clock factory to keep the machinery turning over in case it became defective through lack of use: during Switzerland’s isolation in the war years there had not been much trade in fancy clocks. The baker who had a short left leg stomped back in his lopsided manner from his night’s work, his overcoat pulled close around him. The road-clearers dug their spades into the snow.

  ‘If she does not wish to live,’ the doctor said in Italian, ‘she will not live.’

  He said it again, less confidently, in English. The Captain understood both times. It was what dottor Lucca always said. Less than five minutes his examination had taken and the Captain wondered if, this time, the stethoscope had even been taken from his bag.

  ‘My wife has influenza,’ he said, speaking in Italian also.

  ‘Si, signore, si.’

  They drank a cup of coffee together, still standing. The influenza was an epidemic now, the doctor said; hardly a house in the neighbourhood did not have a case. In the circumstances the spread of any epidemic was understandable and must be expected. The melancholy of la signora was a more pressing matter, more serious.

  ‘It is the truth, signore. With illness as well, to make a complication …’

  ‘I know.’

  The doctor shook hands before he left. He was a humane man, who charged little for his services, who wished only that all his patients might recover from their ailments and be happy in their good health. Life, he never tired of reminding them in a sensible Swiss way, was short, even when it went on a bit.

  ‘Grazie, dottore. Grazie.’

  ‘Arrivederci, signore.’

  He left behind the prescription he left for everyone. It would bring the temperature down and clear the headache. He instructed the Captain to keep his wife warm.

  The hopelessness in dottor Lucca’s eyes remained with Everard Gault after the doctor had gone. He made a jug of weak tea and carried a cup of it to the bedroom. During the many years that had passed since their exile began, he and Heloise had become used to making tea in a jug, no teapot being supplied either in Italy or in Switzerland, and they had never bought one.

  ‘Let it cool a minute,’ Heloise requested when he pressed the cup on her. It was a cup with a motif of leaves and blue flowers, one of the two they had brought from Montemarmoreo and which had always reminded the Captain of the hydrangeas at Lahardane. He had often, at first, regretted the reminder and had considered putting these cups and saucers away, pushing them to the back of a cupboard, but then it seemed absurd that he should indulge a weakness, so he resisted the urge.

  ‘Do you think Montemarmoreo’s St Cecilia survived the war?’ Heloise murmured while they waited for the tea to cool.

  Often, aloud, she wondered that. In the church of Santa Cecilia there had been Montemarmoreo’s single image of the saint the town honoured. Had that been lost in rubble, violently destroyed, as the saint herself had been?

  ‘I would not have known that St Cecilia had ever existed if we had not come to Italy.’

  ‘Yes, there’s that.’ He smiled, and held the cup out, raising it to her lips. But nothing was drunk from it.

  ‘I would not have stood before Piero della Francesca’s Risen Christ.’ Her voice had weakened to a whisper that was scarcely audible. ‘Or Fra Angelico’s Annunciations. Or Carpaccio’s terrified monks.’

  The Captain, who often didn’t remember what was so easily remembered by his wife, held her hand by the bedside and sat with her a while longer. They were the marvels in her life, she said after a moment, and slept then, suddenly falling into a doze.

  The Captain pulled the bedclothes up to keep her warm and settled her among her pillows. She did not wake while there was this attention, nor did the trace of a smile that had touched her lips when she’d spoken of Carpaccio’s monks slip away. Disposing of the tea she hadn’t drunk, he wondered if she was dreaming of them.

  When he left the room he closed the door softly behind him and stood for a moment in case there was anything to listen for, then moved away when there was not. How little difference it made to his love that at the heart of his wife’s every day there had been for so long the dread she had been unable not to nourish: the reflection was a familiar one as Captain Gault drew on his overcoat and gloves and set out on his habitual afternoon walk. For nearly a month, ever since the illness had begun, he had been solitary in this. People he met and who knew him enquired about his wife, assuring him that she would be better soon, since that was so in other instances of the local influenza.

  The air had not yet thawed and did not as the afternoon wore on. He remembered the day of their wedding, how she had laughed away the disapproval of her aunt, and someone he didn’t know seeking him out to say how lucky he was. In all the time since, he had never believed he’d been anything less. Their lives, conventionally joined that day with words, were locked together now, impossible to separate. He turned back soon, for he could not leave her long, although always she begged him to. Frost still glistened in the lamplight when it came on. In the café by the church he had a brandy and felt the better for it.

  ‘My dear,�
�� he murmured from the doorway of the sick-room when he returned, and knew before he went to her that she would not reply.

  *

  All that night the Captain wept, wishing he could be with her, no matter where she was. His shoulders heaved, his sobs were sometimes noisy, and between his bouts of grieving he went again to stare at the features he had loved for so long. He had been faithful in his marriage, never wishing to be otherwise, and he remembered how often Heloise had said she was happy – even during their last years together, here in Bellinzona, and before that in Montemarmoreo and on their excursions to Italy’s cities and busy towns. She had made herself as happy as she could be, and it seemed not to matter how she had done it. In mourning her, the good moments came back, the pleasures, her laughter and his own, their discovery of one another when first they were married, when love was untouched by shadows. And there was now a blankness as empty as the snow on the streets.

  ‘How steadfast you were!’ the Captain murmured, reaching again into the past, the time he had had to leave the army. He had known it then, but he knew it differently tonight: so quietly and so gently, with such self-effacement, she had supplied the strength for both of them. She had demanded no acknowledgement of that, would have denied it as absurd. Yet that truth from so long ago was what, more vividly than all the rest, she left behind.

  He remained by the bedside until the next day was well advanced, until bleak winter daylight settled again over the mountains and the town. Then he made the arrangements for the funeral.

  *

  When the coffin had been lowered, words in English were softly spoken. Heloise Gault was buried among stern Swiss graves, some decorated with artificial lilies beneath domes of glass, some with a photograph of the deceased on a polished granite stone. Among them, one day, there would be recorded also a stranger’s death.

  People who felt they had known this English woman a little, who had liked her in that distant way, attended the occasion in the church, a few going on to the cemetery. ‘Bella, bella,’ a woman whispered to the widower, not having to explain: his wife had been beautiful even as she aged, even when the blur of wearying pain had come into her eyes. In mentioning only beauty, the woman comforted more than she knew.

  *

  … for I believe you were Heloise’s only remaining relative of any closeness. Influenza, with complications, was too much for someone who was no longer young. All of it was peaceful.

  But Heloise’s aunt had died herself. The Captain’s letter was received by her long-time companion and the inheritor of her property and possessions. To Miss Chambré, that a niece existed or did not was neither here nor there. She reread what had been written before tearing the single sheet of paper into small, square pieces and dropping them into the fire.

  5

  On a grey December morning when a letter from Ralph again came with an Irish stamp, Lucy learnt that one of his wartime barracks had been in Cheshire, another in Northamptonshire. Modestly he recounted what the army censors had removed: he had fought in Africa, he had been present when the garrisons were captured on Corfu. His pleas, which had not ceased from wherever he’d found himself, were renewed from County Wexford.

  But Lucy’s promise to herself, lasting fearfully for so long, faltered: that Ralph was safe drew tears of gratitude from her when she saw his handwriting on the envelope with its safe Irish stamp. Not at once but gradually, over days, her good intentions were washed away in a continuing sea of relief. The war had everywhere spread change; all over Europe, all over the world, nothing was the same. Was it not likely that the hiatus in her parents’ lives had run its course, that six years of war, and the peace that had come, were enough to bring them back to an Ireland in which there had been change also, which had itself been peaceful for a generation? She heard their voices as she remembered them. She saw the suitcases that had been bought in Enniseala, the shiny leather scuffed and battered now, clothes folded, already packed. My heart is not stone, she wrote to Ralph, begging him to understand. And oh how happy I am that you are no longer in danger! I think of you in all the places you have told me of and now at last at home again. But afterwards, when she had posted it, she thought that letter sounded false; and it was too much, the reference to her heart. She wrote again to say she had been overwrought.

  ‘Ah, but you couldn’t know,’ Henry consoled his wife when Bridget’s intuition failed with the failure of Lucy’s promise to herself. Bridget said nothing. She might have spoken to Lucy, might have touched upon her own misplaced optimism as to the beneficial debris of war, might have spoken of Ralph’s devotion, of the warmth of the companionship there had been, of the letters that had kept a friendship going. But nervous of doing more harm than good, she said nothing.

  When the last of Ralph’s letters came, Lucy didn’t know it was the last. But mulling it over when another did not arrive, she discovered in it a mood she had earlier missed, a meaning in statements and declarations that was imprecise, as if the wording had been reluctant to be otherwise; as if, beneath the ordinariness of what was related, despair was spelt out too, a futility at last accepted. A single line from her would have changed what could so easily be changed. That she felt betrayal within herself for not honouring love which had grown more intense with her fear for Ralph’s safety was a confession that was his due, and might be added to that single line. In fairness it belonged there; yet it seemed like betrayal, too, to lose faith with the hope that war and its ending might allow. Her insistence, again, that Ralph must not muddle his life with her distorted one was as painful as it had been before. That she felt she must trust some twist of fate – that all there was was fate – seemed hardly an explanation she could offer, and she did not do so.

  A new generation of summer visitors in Kilauran glimpsed from time to time a solitary woman on the strand or among the rocks, and heard with pity the story that still was told. They did not condemn, as a previous generation of strangers had, a wayward child whose capriciousness had brought it all about. The wayward child belonged to the immediacy of the occurrence; what strangers made of past events was influenced in the present by the observation of a lonely life. Lucy herself was aware that this opinion was as temporary as the one that anger and distaste had once created: the story had not yet passed into myth, and would not be cast in permanence until her life was over, until it was reflected in time’s cold light. It did not greatly interest her that she was talked about.

  She took up petit-point embroidery, discovering she had a natural skill for it when she began to teach herself the stitches. The silks, and the linen she decorated with them, came by post from a Dublin shop, Ancrin’s, which specialized in domestic crafts. She had found one of their catalogues, sent for by her mother, forgotten in the pages of The Irish Dragoon. Between the two long windows of the first-floor landing there was a framed embroidery of a turkey on pale grey cloth, which very faintly she remembered her mother stitching. ‘It pained her eyes,’ Bridget said. ‘She gave up the embroidering after the turkey.’

  Ancrin’s sent linens with designs already marked on them, but Lucy preferred to ignore what was suggested in that way. The first embroidery she attempted was of the pear tree in the yard, the second of the crossing stones she and her father had arranged at the shallow part of the stream, another of the pinks that thrived on the cliffs. In time, she knew, there would be Paddy Lindon’s cottage, entirely a ruin now.

  ‘Well, I never!’ Mr Sullivan exclaimed with genuine admiration, seeing this work for the first time. ‘My! My!’ Recently retired from his legal practice, he had resumed his visits to Lahardane, petrol again being available. Canon Crosbie – though now in his late eighties – was still active in Church matters, but corresponded instead of making the journey.

  Mr Sullivan, also, remembered Heloise Gault stitching the speckled feathers of the turkey, its scarlet head and gobbly throat. But he kept that to himself, for the display spread out for him on the dining-room table – the pear-tree embroidery complete now, t
he stepping-stones just begun – made the occasion Lucy’s own. If something had developed in her friendship with Ralph – whom he had known on the streets of Enniseala in much the same way as Canon Crosbie had – Mr Sullivan might at last have begun to consider Lucy as more than a child. But his outsider’s eye saw Lahardane, and the small household that had come about there, as something petrified, arrested in the drama there had been. Lucy was stilled too, a detail as in one of her own embroidered compositions.

  ‘We must have them framed,’ he said, taking off the reading glasses through which he had been peering at the intricate stitching.

  ‘It’s just a pastime.’

  ‘Oh, but they’re beautiful!‘

  ‘Well, they are something.’

  ‘Things are easier, you know, now that the Emergency, thank God, is over. Goods are coming back in the shops. If ever you’d like a lift into Enniseala, Lucy, you’ve only to say.’

  The rubber boots she went for walks in through the rain came from the general store in Kilauran. Once in a long while shoes were sent on approval from Enniseala. When the white summer dresses her mother had left behind had worn out, the dressmaker in Kilauran had begun to make her ones that were quite similar. The hairdresser who came to the village cut her hair.