The Story of Lucy Gault

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.