The Story of Lucy Gault

1

Restless in Bellinzona, the Captain travelled. Because he knew it would sadden him, he had not returned to live again in Montemarmoreo, as he and Heloise had planned to when the war was over. Nor, for the same reason, had he revisited the cities of their many Italian journeys. At the end of the first year of being on his own, he went instead to France, disposing of his household possessions before he left Bellinzona, since he did not intend to come back: nostalgia dogged him there too. He arrived in Bandol when the mistral was blowing and took a room on the front.

When spring and summer had passed he moved on, to Valence and Clermont-Ferrand, to Orleans and Nancy. He found himself in landscape he half recognized, passed through towns and villages with names that had a familiar ring. In the war before the last one he had led his men through Maricourt. There was a recollection of emerging at night from a copse that ran along a railway line, of a farmhouse that was found to be deserted, the bread in the kitchen not yet stale, milk in a saucepan on the stove. They had slept there, in the farm sheds and in the house itself, marching on again when dawn came.

As a child, Everard Gault had imagined war, had invented for himself its discomforts and adventures, had been attracted by the formality and traditions of army life, inspired by tales of the Crusades. It was an inspiration compounded by his father’s repeated return – always suddenly – to Lahardane; when the gleam of his boots, his wide leather belt, the rough material of the tunic that smelt so of tobacco, his deep, quiet voice, were again a presence in the drawing-room and the garden. The honour associated with his father’s profession and with his father himself, and with the heroes of history books, had always attracted Everard. Later in his life he did not know – and never came to know – if he might privately claim honour as a quality in himself; or if other people considered him an honourable man. It was not a word his wife had used and he had never prompted her in that regard, had never confessed that the quality had influenced him in his choice of vocation or that he valued its possession. There was too much, the Captain considered now, they had not said. Because love nourished instinct, and instinct’s short cuts and economies, too much had been too carelessly left.

All this occupied his thoughts when he revisited the places of his war. Tramping over soil fed by the blood of the men he had led and whose faces now stirred in his memory, it was his wife’s response that came – as if in compensation for too little said before – when he wondered why his wandering had led him back to these old battlefields: in his sixty-ninth year he was establishing his survivor’s status. He nodded that into place, feeling it to be true, and being a survivor was something at least, more than it seemed. He had been much less of a soldier than his father, was sure he had felt fear more often, was sure he had experienced less courage. It was a mockery that death for his father had not been marked with gallantry on a battlefield, but had crept in upon him through disease, the kind of domestic death that belonged to wives and children. Everard had been twenty then, had stood with his brother in the little graveyard at Kilauran while the three coffins were lowered. It was his brother who, years later, had brought Heloise to Lahardane, as his fiancée. ‘Please write and tell him,’ she had begged when first they decided to leave Ireland, and he had promised that he would. But during that unsettled time he had put off doing so and later, in Montemarmoreo, had procrastinated further, fearing that a letter would bring – as readily from India as from Ireland – a reply that would have to be suppressed. But evervthing of course was different now.

The next day he travelled on, to Paris. A woman stopped him as he was crossing the Place de la Concorde to ask the time. His French being uncertain, he displayed for her the face of the watch he took from his waistcoat. Smilingly she admired the watch and then his waistcoat, before drifting into conversation with him in English. She had been to Folkestone; she had been to London; she had lived for a time in Gerrards Cross; she was a couturière.

‘Madame Vacelles,’ she said, holding out a well-tended hand.

They went to a café, where Madame Vacelles drank absinthe. ‘Vous êtes triste,’ she murmured, her ready smile for the moment subdued. ‘You are in pain, monsieur.’ It was a statement, although the tone implied a question, and he shook his head, not wishing to share his mourning with a stranger. He spoke instead of the war he had taken part in and of his experience of her country at that time, and playfully Madame Vacelles denied that he was old enough to have fought so long ago. In a friendly way she seized his arm, as if confident of finding beneath her grasp a young man’s muscle.

The Captain returned with Madame Vacelles to her rooms, which were high up in a corner house, above a baker’s. But when the moment the couturière had been waiting for arrived he apologized and shook his head. It disappointed him to have to go away, and so hastily. The drag of his solitude was not easy to overcome and the hour he had spent in Madame Vacelles’s company had not been disagreeable. ‘Cochon!’ she shouted after him, leaning dangerously over the banister.

That evening the Captain wrote to his brother. The detail of his letter was copious, the Irish side of things no doubt already known, for of course his brother would have heard.

I wonder if Ireland is now a country you and I would recognize. I wonder if you have been back and know more about it – and Lahardane – than I do now. Ireland of the ruins I have heard it called, more ruins and always more.

He related a little of his feelings, and Heloise’s, after the incident in the night. He wrote of the years in Italy, of Switzerland and the deprivations of the war, of Heloise’s death. There had never been resentment that Heloise did not continue to return his brother’s feelings, only disappointment; no one had been to blame, no bitterness lingered. Well, there you are, the Captain’s lengthy missive ended. I wonder how you are.

There was nowhere to send that letter, no recent regimental address that would ensure its safe reception. The Captain kept it in his luggage, resolving when the opportunity arose to make enquiries about the fate of his brother’s regiment following Indian independence. A month later he made the long journey to Vienna, for no other reason except that he had always hoped to see its grandeur one day. But what he saw was a broken city, its great buildings looming like spectres among the ruins, a brash night-life enlivening shabbiness and corruption. He did not stay long.

War had sucked the heart out of Europe: everywhere there was weary evidence of that. There had been too much death, too much treachery, too great a toll paid in the defeat of greed. He thought of Ireland, drained of its energy by centuries of disaffection, and the feeling he had experienced at the beginning of his exile came back – of punishment inflicted for those sins of the past to which his family might have contributed. Had it been greed that the Gaults had held their ground too long? While penal laws were passed there had been parties at Lahardane, prayers said in church for King and Empire, the aspirations of the dispossessed ignored. Had such aspirations at last been realized? Had Ireland in his absence remade itself, as Europe was doing now?

In Bruges he put up at a house that took in visitors, near the Groeningemuseum. Heloise had stayed in this town, had described the brick and grey stone of its buildings, its gilded figures and window displays of chocolate, its cafés and jaunting cars. She had talked about a tea-room that wasn’t there any more, a convent lawn where a sign begged that the nuns should not be photographed. ‘Oh, how I loved that little city!’ Her voice floated through the Captain’s musings as so often it did, and when, in Ghent, he looked up at the painting of the Adoration of the Lamb he imagined her as awestruck as he was now.

‘You are English?’ he was asked in his guest-house and for a moment he hesitated, not knowing in that moment what he was. Then he shook his head.

‘No, I’m an Irishman.’

‘Ah, Ireland! How beautiful Ireland is!’

The enthusiast was an English woman, younger by maybe twenty years than he was, not at all like the woman who had accosted him in Paris. He wondered if it happened that lone old men on their travels were naturally the subject of such attention and although, again, he welcomed it, he was more cautious than he had been in the Place de la Concorde. He had noticed the woman in the dining-room, sitting with another, whom he presumed to be her mother, a deduction that was later to prove correct.

‘Yes, it is beautiful.’

‘I have visited Ireland only once, but I have not forgotten.’

‘I haven’t been there myself for close on thirty years.’

The woman nodded, not curious. She was fair-haired, her prettiness a little faded but attractively so. She wore no wedding ring.

‘I hope I did not offend you,’ she apologized, ‘by assuming you were English.’

‘My wife was English.’

He smiled to disguise the weight of his bereavement, for murmurs of sympathy, however kind, were trivial in spite of their intention. Travel had not rescued his spirits as he had hoped it might, and he began to doubt that he would ever throw off the mourning that possessed him or that, somehow, he was ever meant to. The least demanding of wives, in death Heloise demanded more than he could sometimes bear.

‘My country has treated Ireland badly,’ the woman said. ‘I’ve always thought so.’

‘Well, it’s over now.’

‘Yes, it’s over.’

There was a loss, too, in this woman’s life, a wedding the war had stolen from her: he sensed the common ground they did not stray on to, and was aware that she did also. Idly, they conversed through an afternoon – about Bruges and cities that seemed like it, of Ireland again, of England. They were companions for half a day, their exchanges still impersonal, keeping private what they wished to. Before he had a chance to meet the mother the two were gone.

A few weeks later the Captain went himself. He crossed from Calais to Dover, then rattled through Kent to London. There he made his enquiries about the regiment in India and was told his brother had years ago been killed in action. The sense of being alone, of being more than ever a survivor, filled the Captain then, and in the drab post-war capital, where victory seemed more like bad-tempered submission, he found little to cheer him. Dreariness was everywhere, in every face, in every gesture; only the streetcorner spivs and the multitude of sweetly scented tarts were jolly.