The Story of Lucy Gault

4

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

The Captain called back, and then there were the doctor’s footsteps 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.