"There aren't many consolations in life Jean. Good whiskey happens to be one of the few." The expression on Jean's face was wry as she swept past him towards the kitchen and Lucien couldn't help but follow with the more private thought that looking at beautiful woman was another of those rare consolations.
For many years after the war Lucien had held out hope that he would find his wife and child. As time passed though there came the slow realisation that their survival for so many years without discovery was becoming more and more unlikely. Though he continued to mourn them his heart and mind had very slowly, and without voluntary action on his part, recognised that he was no longer a married man. And oh, he'd had a few dalliances but he had never found himself falling so deeply in love with another woman that he wanted permanence, to walk down the aisle again, to become a father again. Perhaps because there was a tiny sliver of hope that Lucien could never quite let go of. It was why he sent money every month to a private investigator for more years than was sensible. And why every letter of 'regret to inform you that there was still no new information' caused his chest to constrict in renewed loss.
And then the telegram had come calling him back home to Ballarat. There was he discovered sobering few things, few ties to cut, few business matters to sort out, before he was free to leave from the place he had settled. There had been a replacement for his position, a new job for the maid, furniture to dispose of and a lease to break but not friends to say goodbye to, or at least not friends who understood permanence or who mourned ones absence from their daily lives. He had easily bundled most of his possessions into a few trunks and set out for Ballarat, that place shrouded in the fog of childhood memory, without much sadness.
Though he would not have admitted it at the time arriving back in Ballarat Lucien had floundered a little in the face of expectations, expectations he had never felt in places past. He was immediately assumed to intend to take, and to want to take, responsibility for his father's practice, his role in the community, and for his house and its residents. On the voyage to Australia he had been so sure he was just going to clear out and sell up, shuffle the borders off to new homes and find a job for the housekeeper his father had come to rely on in later years. Instead he had found himself seeing patients, visiting schools and called on by the police to step into his father's role. And because he had nowhere else to be, and because all of these things needed to be done, needed to be seen to, and a little because he could feel his father's distant disapproval when he thought about saying no to the next request and moving on, he did them. And while he was running surgery, making house calls and deciphering his father's handwritten vaccination schedule, he was also somehow being absorbed into a routine, a routine of hot meals, cups of tea, someone picking up after him and reminding him to check his father's notes or calendar. That someone picking up after him, setting a routine and reminding him of a patients name or to check the calendar happened to be the very feminine but very prim form of his father's housekeeper, Jean.
Ah dear old Dad, you still had a few tricks up your sleeve to surprise me, Lucien thought to himself as he carried the bucket of bottles out to the bins. How his father managed to keep a housekeeper like Jean for twelve years Lucien had no idea. They'd kept up a distant but regular enough correspondence over the years but apart from a few very brief mentions of Jean at the beginning of her employment Dad hadn't spoken about her much. However, Lucien's opinion of his father was as a fairly cold and disciplined man and he'd expected his housekeeper to be an ancient female version of him. Jean was most definitely not ancient, and though she was proper, she was also warm and caring. And it also quickly became apparent to Lucien that she was witty and humorous, and beautiful. And sometimes Lucien hoped that perhaps she was just a little like himself, a little lonely, a little heartbroken and now a little hopeful of the future.
I'm seriously hoping that you two kept a strictly professional relationship going, Dad, or else I'm a drunken cad Lucien observed to the Blake house in general as he set off to the Colonists Club for I am hoping to add a few more permanent consolations to my life.