The Story of Lucy Gault

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.