The Story of Lucy Gault

8

She watched the butterfly disappear and then come back, the magician’s wizened fingers splayed in triumph, the butterfly’s wings slowly folding away their bright pink and gold. The magician’s expression never changed. There was always his pursed smile, his stare, his parchment cheeks. Only his arms ever moved.

On the stairs there were Everard’s footsteps and then his key in the lock. He brought the shopping in. He’d been to the railway station as well, he said.

‘How good you are to me!’ Heloise murmured. For months, while she had rested, he’d read to her from books in English he’d found in a bookseller’s two streets away. He had cooked her meals and washed her nightdresses, had brushed her hair and brought her make-up to her. He had listened again while she remembered moments from her childhood. From the Saturday markets he brought back cups and saucers and plates, and china ornaments that would make their rooms more their own, storing away what had been supplied.

She watched while he wound up the clockwork of the magician. He had bought it to divert her while she rested, until early one morning her baby was lost and the doctor who’d been sent for struggled to find words when he learnt about miscarriages in the past. Commiserating but firm, he instructed that what had been attempted should not be again.

‘If it is what you would like,’ she said when the toy was still. ‘Yes, of course it would be nice.’

Fearing that her present lassitude would cling to her, the Captain had suggested that they should visit the great Italian cities. ‘Just once in a while,’ he had persuaded, ‘to be somewhere else for a week or so.’ He had read to her from the guide-book he’d bought, drawn her attention to photographs of buildings and sculpture, of frescoes and mosaics.

‘Of course,’ Heloise answered his further coaxing now. ‘Somewhere different would be nice.’

Yet Montemarmoreo was all the difference that mattered: she might have said that too. Their small appartamento above the shoemaker’s shop, their own possessions increasing, the walks that would begin again now: there was a kind of peace. That cucchiaio meant spoon, that seggiolo was chair and finestra window, that every morning across the street the porter at the Credito Italiano unlocked the doors for the waiting clerks to pass into the bank, that the woman at the Fiori e Frutta had begun to say more than a few words to her, that she woke to the chiming of the bells at the church of Santa Cecilia, the saint whose courage in her tribulations had for centuries given heart to this town: all that was peace, as much as there could be.

The pale hands of the magician were raised again, the butterfly appeared, was banished and then returned. The details copied from the timetables at the railway station – convenient trains, a choice of cities – were perused.

‘Shall we open the wine,’ Heloise suggested then, ‘a little early tonight?’