Adam Gould (11 page)

Adam asks Blanche whether this fury could affect patients? ‘Should we stop their newspapers altogether?’

‘If we did,’ says Blanche, ‘how could we ever get them ready to return to the great madhouse outside? You too, Gould, may have trouble adapting to it! How come you’re so unlike your madcap uncle? He told me your papa was a bit of a wild man too.’

‘Maybe that’s why I’m cautious. I’m fearful of damaging people.’

‘Did you ever?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I won’t probe.’

Days go by. The thaw expands. Sap rises. Moisture glints.

‘ ... two ... three.’

In one of the exercise yards to the side of the old château a voice counts. It rattles with brusque precision through the kitchen window to where Adam and the cook are sitting at a deal table planning the week’s menu. Repeated scrubbings have so stripped the grain of the deal that its fibres feel to their fingertips like string. Adam thinks of Guy’s softened brain.

‘Calf’s head,’ licking her pencil, the cook writes greasily, ‘for Wednesday. Monsieur le Directeur is partial to it. We’ll need several.
Salsifis
would go well with them and plain boiled potatoes. I’ll make a sauce. For pudding ...’

‘One ...’

‘Poor gentleman!’ She shakes her head. ‘He’s fighting duels. In his fancy of course. Been at it since breakfast! A lot of them do that. Pull the trigger. Bang! I suppose it’s a relief. Is it something he read in the paper that got him agitated?’

Adam admits that they haven’t worked out how to keep the papers from Maupassant.

‘A shame!’

‘Yes.’

‘Not that I took to those things of his that Monsieur Tassart read to us. My little kitchen maids are so young. I had to send them away. Can’t have their minds corrupted before their bodies. I could do sweetbreads for Thursday, if you like, or pigeon pies, then turbot on Friday after a clear soup. No, I don’t like stories about low life. Keeping that at arm’s length is hard enough for decent people. So why read about it? Plain folk have to mind their step. As I said to Monsieur Tassart, one slip can topple you. Fast! No need at all to read about what’s below! Never look down, is what I say. Looking up to your betters can teach you things. Oh, you may laugh if you like.’

Working in an asylum has made the cook contentious.

‘Bang!’ shouts Guy.

‘That’s right,’ shouts Adam boisterously. ‘Bang!’

Reading Guy’s stories has expanded his view of the world. They disconnect doom from licentiousness. Maybe this is what worries the cook who, on second glance, is younger than she chooses to seem, possibly still in her twenties, with tender, blanched flesh. Trussed into a tight topknot, her hair pulls at her facial skin. Perhaps she thinks of prettiness as a lure? Something for which she could be blamed? Perhaps she craves the guard-rails with which Guy’s tales do away. The fallen women in his brothels are more cosy than randy and as easy to chat with as – well, herself.

‘Life’s a tightrope,’ she says now, while writing ‘
compote de pommes
or
crème caramel
?’

Reading this upside down, Adam asks greedily, ‘Why not both?’

She smiles.

‘One ...’ Guy’s footsteps pound monotonously back and forth. ‘Two ...’

Listening for fear in these shouts, Adam hears only rage and wonders whether this was always Guy’s trouble. ‘Cook, do you think fear keeps the world in order? Are you a timid person?’

She, thinking he’s flirting with her, snaps her notebook closed and stands up. ‘I’m not a rash one anyway.’

Dismissed, Adam leaves the kitchen, still wondering whether Guy’s rage began when he lived like the poor clerks in his early stories. Confined in their rabbit-hutch lives, their only safe outlets would have been visits to sanitized brothels supervised by the Paris police. Might Guy still be sane if he had stuck to those? The doctors are unsure how much the pox contracted in his youth weakened his constitution.

‘Am I a prig?’ Adam worries. Priggishness is the mark of the ‘spoiled’ priest or seminarian who, as they say here, flings his cassock in the nettles. A stinging image!

In the courtyard the shadow duellist is still fighting. The male nurse with him is Baron who, though mild-tempered, has wide-spanned, capable hands, able, if need be, to overpower a violent patient.

‘I could take over,’ Adam offers. ‘I’ll take him in.’

Baron grins doubtfully under his ticklish, barley bouquet of a moustache.

‘There’s coffee in the kitchen. And cook needs cheering up.’

Baron leaves. Guy keeps counting.

‘Bang!’ says Adam. ‘Bravo. You’ve decimated your enemies. But the weapon that really flattens those swine is your pen. As they know! Even their attacks are a tribute. I see,’ nodding at an old newspaper in Guy’s pocket, ‘that you read the one in
L
’
Écho de Paris
.’ Why, he wonders, was the paper not taken from him?

‘One ... two ...’

‘Guy, you mustn’t keep rereading that. Here, give me your copy. Just listen to the envy: “The author of
Notre Cœur
used ether to quicken the ink in which his brain dissolved ...” ’

‘... three.’

‘Why not challenge the shit? Prove him wrong? Write something, and we’ll send it to the papers with today’s date on it, just to confound them, what do you say? Hm? Here, give me that gun.’

Guy has no gun but lets himself be taken through a pantomime in which he hands one to Adam who breaks it open, swivels the drum, removes imaginary bullets, then puts gun and bullets into different pockets of an equally imaginary bag which he slings over his shoulder.

‘If your eyes are too bad for writing, you can dictate.’ Adam takes his arm. ‘If we’re to get you better, you’ve got to help. Making those bastards look silly will do you more good than any medicine. Are you listening, Guy?’

As they walk into the house, Adam slips the copy of
L
’
Écho de Paris
inside his shirt.

Back in his room, the patient flops on his bed. The pupils of his eyes strain in two directions. Strabismus is part of his condition. Strabismus and doubleness.

Sitting by the convex window-grating – it stops patients getting near the glass – Adam leafs through a file of newspaper cuttings. ‘Look what I’ve got here, Guy, your occasional pieces. My favourite is about boating at Argenteuil. Watching the dawn. Remember? It describes frogs perching on water-lily leaves to cool their bellies, while a kingfisher slips through tall grass. It is a lovely piece of writing, and – do I imagine this? – thrums with sexual excitement when the grasses part for that sleek, flashing bird. You must have pleasured a thousand hankerers – sad dreamers like
you
’
d
been when you were stuck in an office living for your next chance to get out on the river. But what’s odd is that the piece then grows glum. Why, Guy? Here’s some paper. Can you write? Can you tell us why you followed your account of radiant, moonlit water with the complaint – these are your words: ‘this symbol of everlasting illusion was born for me on the foul water which sweeps the filth of Paris down to the sea.’ Am I misreading you? Maybe it’s not a complaint? Maybe you were
glad
of the filth-borne radiance? Maybe you were reflecting that we were all born in shit? As priests say:
inter faeces nascimur
so –
Guy
! Calm down! Don’t stab yourself! Here! Let me have the pen. That’s right! Easy now. Lie back and we’ll forget about writing. Just be glad that the radiance you described still thrills people! You can still turn pessimism on its head.’

Silence. Guy breathes hard. His eyes fail to focus. Is he reflecting that, whatever the fate of his books, he himself is ending where he began! In the shit!
Merde
, thinks Adam. Why did I mention it?

‘Guy?’

More silence.

Adam moves closer. ‘
Guy
?’

The patient doesn’t answer. His mouth sags, and saliva threads shine on his chin. His beard sprouts sideways like a ruff. Aged forty-two, he looks like a half-mummified and obsolete life-form.

Elsewhere in the
maison de santé
the post had been distributed.

Monseigneur de Belcastel received a parcel and slit it open with a gold paper-knife which, according to asylum rules, he should not have had in his possession. Naturally, those rules were sometimes bent a little – indeed, in his case, they were bent a lot for, after all, he wasn’t mad. However, from politeness, he usually kept the knife concealed.

The parcel contained no letter, just a copy of
Le Petit Journal
, dated 17 February. In it was – but this was so unheard-of that he had trouble taking it in – an interview with the pope. In the popular press! The condescension was troubling, and the monsignor’s first impulse was disbelief. His next thought was that the newsprint must be counterfeit, a squib put out by some inky anarchist – or unhappy monarchist? – eager to imply that papal pronouncements were now much like those of the popular press. ‘A penny encyclical’! He could just hear Sauvigny’s drawl. ‘
Une encyclique à un sou
! Today’s Church,
mon cher monseigneur
, is ...’

What? Time-serving? A heresy-shop? He blotted Sauvigny out.

For of course the thing must be a sham. But reading on, he saw that it was not. He knew the tone: roundabout but firm. The Petrine Rock had found a voice and, astoundingly, it was that of a reporter called Ernest Judet in
Le Petit Journal
.

Rome – here came the real shock – had pulled the rug from under monarchist feet!

After so long! It must be a good fifteen months since the Algiers toast. And
all that time
the pope had kept disquietingly quiet! Were we to think that mists, only now lifted from his eyes, had blinded him to his temporal responsibilities? How could we when the main trust of Lavigerie’s – presumably ventriloquized? – speech had been that an authority which failed to hold things together lost legitimacy?

Restlessly, the monsignor smoothed the newspaper back in its folds then laid his paper-knife flat and spun it like the spoke of a golden wheel. Round and round it spun. A molten dazzle. The implications of Lavigerie’s thinking – which, it now transpired, was actually Pope Leo’s – could lead far.

For how legitimate by its gauge were kings-with-divine-right, or popes or divinities themselves, if they did not procure peace and goodwill? Whether or not God existed, faith in Him should surely be able to do that.

Unnerved, Belcastel’s thought turned back in search of God, faith and safety. For God was glue, and doubt led to thinking for yourself, which could restart the cycle of revolution, retaliation and rage. But the pope, in the copy of
Le Petit Journal
once more unfurling on the monsignor’s desk, had told his interviewer, ‘I want France to be happy.’

‘Happy!’ Belcastel spoke the word aloud and tried to think no further.

Not thinking, though, left a void and into this surged contradictory sensations. The first was shame over what he had done to Cardinal Lavigerie who had, now at long last, been vindicated. His Eminence had, after all – this interview proved it – been the pope’s stalking horse and scapegoat. He had been his apostle too, his John the Baptist, whose voice, valiantly crying its message to hundreds of ill-disposed French presbyteries, had prepared the way for Leo XIII’s public volte-face. For fifteen months the Vatican had left the sixty-seven-year-old Lavigerie to swing in the wind, a lone target for every kind of offensive abuse including – this had been reliably reported by the presbytery servants’ bush telegraph – anonymous letters smeared with excrement, sniping innuendos in the Catholic press and frontal attacks by former friends, among whom Belcastel had in all honesty to number himself.
His
strike had possibly been the most hurtful.

Mortification reached the capillaries in his face. Feeling it burn, he guessed that his unblemished cheek must be as red as the scarred one.

His paper-knife, having slowed and regained knifishness, had best be put away. Opening a desk drawer, he thrust it out of sight. As he did, his hand touched the box of monarchist mementoes which had accumulated during his stay in the
maison de santé
. Most had been gifts: offerings to the living martyr which the more excitable party-supporters held him to be. The blue leather missal, for instance, with the gilt fleur-de-lys had been sent by the duchesse d’Uzès. He could hardly send it back.

Returning to the paper, he found His Holiness taking the view that, since France badly needed a stable government, its citizens must accept the legality of the status quo. ‘Everyone,’ conceded the pontiff, ‘is entitled to his private preference, but, in practical terms, the only existing government is the one that France has chosen. A republic is as legitimate a form of government as any other ...’ An encyclical dealing with this matter at more length would, said
Le Petit Journal
, be published by the French Catholic press in four days’ time.

The monsignor refolded his paper and sat staring into space.

Guy’s remission was holding. Tassart was allowed to sit with him again, and tremulous foretastes of spring had been carried indoors in the form of potted narcissi. Sometimes, when the windows of the main part of the old house were open, shouts floated from the annexe where the writer was lodged.

‘
Mère
!’

Tassart wrote bulletins to his master’s mother, assuring her that the women she had blacklisted were being refused access to her son. She herself couldn’t come, he told anyone who asked. She was too ill. Too delicate. Too old.

‘Too selfish!’ murmured the nurses, who were used to patients’ relatives.

‘
Mère de ... merde, mère de Dieu
.’

Seeing his valet with a pen bewildered the writer. He accused Tassart of writing to God accusing
him
of having buggered a goat and a hen.

‘To whom I
am
writing,’ the valet told him, ‘is your mother. Madame Laure. And I haven’t stolen your ideas either!’

‘They were too salty. So was my wit!’