The Story of Lucy Gault

3

The images of the Sacra Conversazione did not entirely obliterate those of an English afternoon, and English twilight gathering in December. Through the detail of Bellini’s composition – marble columns and trees in leaf, blue and green and scarlet robes – there were teacups on a rosewood table, and misty window-panes, coal blazing in a fireplace: the recollections which an hour ago Heloise had lit in her husband’s imagination lingered still.

He had never met the woman who was informed during that teatime that she’d been widowed, but he glimpsed her now, a shadow among the saints who surrounded the Virgin and her infant and the demure musician. These figures were a crowd yet seemed, each one of them, to be alone. Less complicated, the telegram that had come lay on the rosewood surface, the hall clock struck. ‘Ladysmith,’ Heloise’s mother said.

The church was cool in the heat of the day, a smell of polish coming from where the sacristan worked. The holy water stoup was almost empty; on the steps outside a cripple begged. ‘No, please let me,’ Heloise pleaded, searching her handbag, then dropping the coin she found on to the palm that was held out.

They passed along a sunless alley, went slowly, reluctant to emerge into the afternoon’s glare. She would have been sixteen that teatime, he calculated.

‘Why are you so good to me, Everard? Why do you listen so well?’

‘Perhaps because I love you.’

‘I wish I had more strength.’

He did not say that she’d had strength enough once, nor reassure her as to its return. He did not know about that. Unable, when the distant past of her childhood was evoked, to contribute, himself, from that same time, he told instead about being a soldier, going over in greater detail what he had told already, speaking of the men he had briefly led in his modest fields of battle.

On the Riva they ordered coffee. He heard, before it came, of the household of the guardian aunt, the orphan’s refuge it had been in later childhood years. ‘No more than boys they were,’ he said himself, and told the names of the men in his care. ‘I often see their faces.’

He watched her slender fingers dipping a lump of sugar into her coffee, one lump and then another. That gave him pleasure; so much, he wondered why. Well, it was real, he told himself; and perhaps no more than that gave pleasure when artificial conversation was interrupted. He had written to Lahardane. He had expressed concern for the well-being of the servants who were his caretakers now, asked about the Friesians and the house. More than once he had written, but each time had drawn back when the moment of posting came. There would be a reply, surreptitiously received, a secret correspondence begun, the breaking of the trust that had always been there in his marriage. He kept the letters hidden, their envelopes stamped. It was as much deceit as he could manage.

‘How beautiful all this is!’ she said.

Near where they sat, gondolas came and went at a landing stage. Further out on the canal a steamer crept slowly in from the sea. A dog barked on the deck of a working boat.

When it was cooler they walked on the Zattere. They took a boat to the Giudecca. In the evening there was the Annunciazione in the church of San Giobbe. Then waltzes played at Florian’s.

That night in the Pensione Bucintoro, while her husband slept, Heloise lay wakeful beside him. What riches there had been! she told herself when the sacred images of the day came back to her, with all that had been said. She did not feel deprived tonight, and resolved in the euphoria the day had nurtured to find the courage in the morning to confess that it was not enough to say a generous husband had been good to her, not enough to say that he listened perfectly to her childhood evocations. ‘We are playing at being dead,’ he had once gently protested, and she hadn’t been able to explain why it was that she would always want to forget. But in the morning she would do better. She heard her voice apologizing, and talking then of all she didn’t want to talk about; before she closed her eyes she found the sentences came quite easily. But when she slept, and woke after a few minutes, she heard herself saying she couldn’t have that conversation and knew that she was right.