The Story of Lucy Gault

For her part, Lucy did not wonder much about the nature of exile, accepting, with time, what had come about, as she did her lameness and the features that were reflected in her looking-glass. Had Canon Crosbie raised with her the question of going out into the world, she would have replied that the nature and the tenets of her life had already been laid down for her. She waited, she would have said, and in doing so kept faith. Each room was dusted clean; each chair, each table, each ornament was as they were remembered. Her full summer vases, her bees, her footsteps on the stairs and on the landings, and crossing rooms and in the cobbled yard and on the gravel, were what she offered. She was not lonely; sometimes she could hardly remember loneliness. ‘Oh, but I’m happy,’ she would have reassured the clergyman had he asked her. ‘Happy enough, you know.’

Presents from him, from his wife, from Mr Sullivan, came again on her twenty-first birthday. Afterwards, in warm evening sunshine, she lay reading in the apple orchard another of the novels left behind by other generations. Enough of the world it was for Lucy Gault, at twenty-one, to visit Netherfield.

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.