The Story of Lucy Gault

6

In the town of Montemarmoreo, in via Cittadella, they had taken rooms above the premises of a shoemaker. ‘What shall we do today?’ the Captain would ask, always knowing what the response would be. Well, walk a little, Heloise would suggest, and they would walk in the hills where sour black cherries grew near marble quarries now exhausted. In fits and starts the conversation would drift about – never to Lahardane or to Ireland, but back to Heloise’s childhood, to memories of her father, and of her mother before she became a widow, to places and people of that safe time. The Captain encouraged with patient questions and patient listening; Heloise was talkative, for such recollections dispelled the nag of melancholy. Her beauty and Everard Gault’s straight back, his soldier’s stride, picked them out in Montemarmoreo, a couple who were mysterious at first and then not so at all.

Another child, so long denied them, might one day be born in Italy: for his wife’s sake that was Captain Gault’s hope; for his sake, it was hers. But they were wary of expectation, drew back from it as they did from what must not be spoken of. Expert now at altering sentences already begun, or allowing them to wither or smiling them away, they gave themselves to the unfamiliarity of the place they had arrived in as invalids of distress, to its rocky hills and narrow streets, to a language they learnt as children do, to the simplicities of where they dwelt. In the ways they had devised they used the hours up, of one day and of another and another, until the moment came to open the first bottle of Amarone. They were a nuisance to no one in Montemarmoreo.