The Story of Lucy Gault

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.

5

On a grey December morning when a letter from Ralph again came with an Irish stamp, Lucy learnt that one of his wartime barracks had been in Cheshire, another in Northamptonshire. Modestly he recounted what the army censors had removed: he had fought in Africa, he had been present when the garrisons were captured on Corfu. His pleas, which had not ceased from wherever he’d found himself, were renewed from County Wexford.

But Lucy’s promise to herself, lasting fearfully for so long, faltered: that Ralph was safe drew tears of gratitude from her when she saw his handwriting on the envelope with its safe Irish stamp. Not at once but gradually, over days, her good intentions were washed away in a continuing sea of relief. The war had everywhere spread change; all over Europe, all over the world, nothing was the same. Was it not likely that the hiatus in her parents’ lives had run its course, that six years of war, and the peace that had come, were enough to bring them back to an Ireland in which there had been change also, which had itself been peaceful for a generation? She heard their voices as she remembered them. She saw the suitcases that had been bought in Enniseala, the shiny leather scuffed and battered now, clothes folded, already packed. My heart is not stone,

she wrote to Ralph, begging him to understand. And oh how happy I am that you are no longer in danger! I think of you in all the places you have told me of and now at last at home again. But afterwards, when she had posted it, she thought that letter sounded false; and it was too much, the reference to her heart. She wrote again to say she had been overwrought.

‘Ah, but you couldn’t know,’ Henry consoled his wife when Bridget’s intuition failed with the failure of Lucy’s promise to herself. Bridget said nothing. She might have spoken to Lucy, might have touched upon her own misplaced optimism as to the beneficial debris of war, might have spoken of Ralph’s devotion, of the warmth of the companionship there had been, of the letters that had kept a friendship going. But nervous of doing more harm than good, she said nothing.

When the last of Ralph’s letters came, Lucy didn’t know it was the last. But mulling it over when another did not arrive, she discovered in it a mood she had earlier missed, a meaning in statements and declarations that was imprecise, as if the wording had been reluctant to be otherwise; as if, beneath the ordinariness of what was related, despair was spelt out too, a futility at last accepted. A single line from her would have changed what could so easily be changed. That she felt betrayal within herself for not honouring love which had grown more intense with her fear for Ralph’s safety was a confession that was his due, and might be added to that single line. In fairness it belonged there; yet it seemed like betrayal, too, to lose faith with the hope that war and its ending might allow. Her insistence, again, that Ralph must not muddle his life with her distorted one was as painful as it had been before. That she felt she must trust some twist of fate – that all there was was fate – seemed hardly an explanation she could offer, and she did not do so.