Adam Gould (14 page)

She acknowledged his sigh by arguing with it. ‘If I stay, I’ll end up as Uncle Hubert’s concubine, and he will come to hate me. He already hates what I make him feel. I can tell by the way he uses idiotic pet names like “bunny rabbit” and “little squirrel”. He’s trying to pretend I’m someone else. I’ve been having nightmares.’

‘What help do you think I can give you?’

‘He trusts you. You could maybe ...’ She paused hopefully.

‘Talk to him? Impossible!’ He saw her shock. ‘I’m sorry. Trust between us now is, well ... under strain. Have you another plan?’

Again she blushed. ‘It’s to work,’ she told him. ‘Women in our family never did anything like that, of course, but I nursed my mother. I could train to be a mental nurse. Here. In this house. I was hoping you could perhaps put in a word for me with the director? Might they let me live in? I know female nurses do.’

Before he could answer, she added, ‘In the long run the experience could be useful.’ She explained about her husband being in Africa and how, having had no letters for a while, she had sought out returned missionaries at the White Fathers’ Paris house to ask for news.

‘You visited the White Fathers?’

‘Yes. And if Philibert comes back in the state I found some of them, I’ll
need
to have had training. Many are as mad as hares.’

‘Was there news?’

‘No. I was almost glad.’ She clasped her hands. ‘Don’t be shocked, Monseigneur. If I could
do
something for him I would. Truly. If he lost a limb or caught some tropical disease, I would go and nurse him. But I can’t stay idly at home wondering about a man who may be dead. Until recently I kept making superstitious bargains with God. Then I saw that they were affecting my mind. That can’t be good, can it? What if poor Philibert survived, came home and found a mad wife?’

Belcastel, as if emptying his head of his own bargains, shook it and agreed that it couldn’t be good.

‘At the missionaries’ house,’ she told him, ‘I heard that cannibals attacked a mission near the Upper Ubangi river and ate six priests. Philibert could have been there. I think I remember his mentioning the Ubangi. Those cannibals, the missionaries said, are of a refined ferocity. They break their captives’ legs and leave them, still alive, in running water. The next day the skin comes off like the peel of a fruit. I have had to put away my rosary beads. Shall I tell you why? It’s because now the crucifix reminds me of how the two thieves’ legs were broken.’

‘That story comforted people for nineteen hundred years.’

‘But stories go bad. I imagine that this house is full of people who fell into their stories the way you might fall into a well.’

Belcastel, before he knew it, found that he had promised to ask Dr Blanche to consider taking her on as a trainee. Why had he, he wondered, then saw that it was because he envied her nerve and candour. He himself lacked both, being so caught up in compromise that, having hit the cardinal when he was down, he was going to have to do the same to the vicomte. What she had said about stories going bad seemed to apply. This amazed him. Out of the mouths of babes!

By the time she left, escorted out by the same grave footman whose face was now deferent to the point of irony, Belcastel was feeling such gloom that when Adam Gould came in he asked him for morphine.

Dear Monseigneur de Belcastel
,

Contrary to recommendations in my last letter, His Eminence asks you to postpone severing your ties with the party you served so well. Its members are now as mad as wasps and likely to do something intemperate. Having a friend who is privy to their plans and able to restrain them may be useful. So, for now, not a hint about your change of heart
.

What a reproachful phrase, mused Belcastel: change of heart! Why had this never struck him before?

Ouf
! Danièle was glad to have got that over. Indeed, so relieved was she that, on collecting her maid, Félicité, who had been gossiping in the asylum kitchens, she suggested a turn in the park when they got home. Her cocker spaniel, Lulu, would love it. All three could do with some fresh air.

‘We’ll give him a run in the Luxembourg Gardens.’

Félicité, who had an eye for the students who might be idling there, was all for this. She was a neat little person, with a plump, kissable mouth, and could be nobody’s idea of a chaperone. The outing, however, had to be put off, for, when they got home, Uncle Hubert was there before them. He had returned unexpectedly soon from his trip to Belgium and wanted Danièle’s company. His work for the Cause was looking up, he told her with a pleased grimace, though he must not, for now, say more.

Where had
she
been, he wondered, and was mildly surprised when she said she had been to confession to Monseigneur de Belcastel – which was true in a way.

‘What’s wrong with our local
curé
?’

Her fib had the merit of not reflecting too badly on the poor man. She said his breath smelled of onions.

Floral smells slid through the slats of blinds along with Guy’s blasphemies.

‘Shut the window,’ Belcastel instructed. ‘I keep wondering why that poor devil isn’t an atheist. He would be more at ease. But no, he’s like an escapee from some old tale called
The Sinner
’
s Conversion
.’

‘Where debauchery is a way of refusing mediocrity?’

‘That’s it! The old sermon-writers had a soft spot for extreme conduct.’ Belcastel sighed. Changing the subject, he asked Adam why he had left the seminary. ‘Were you unhappy there?’

On the contrary, said Adam. He had been as snug as a seed in a seed plot, which, after all, was what a seminary was. ‘It was only when the time was approaching for the seedlings to be transplanted that I began to panic. I had been uprooted before, and it is easier to go than wait to be pushed ...’

When he paused, Belcastel apologized for upsetting him.

‘Oh,’ Adam claimed, ‘it’s easier to talk about it now.’ Turning from the window’s stippled damp, he told the monsignor, ‘My father threw me out when I was twelve. Me and my mother. He had never married her, you see, and – it was a shock to us to discover this – was now planning to marry someone else. For money. He had lost most of his, and it looked as if his estate would have to be sold up, just as several neighbouring ones had been. I, of course, understood none of this, but others must have seen the blow coming. Things had been bad since the famine thirty years before, when
his
father lacked the ruthlessness needed to evict the starving, clear the land and turn from wheat to pasture. Landlords who did that prospered. Those who didn’t – didn’t. I suppose,’ Adam heard himself say, ‘my papa felt it was now time for heartlessness.’

His voice cracked.

‘Is he still alive?’

‘I don’t know. I sent back his letters for a while. Then they stopped coming.’ Abruptly he admitted, ‘That’s untrue. I know he’s alive.’

‘I imagine that if he had lost the estate, you and your mother might have been no better off.’

Though this view had not occurred to Adam, he was prepared to consider it. ‘He did cry,’ he remembered, ‘when my mother died. Crocodile tears? Maybe not? Anyway,’ he hurried on, ‘thanks to my tutor who had studied there himself, the seminary took me in. Le Séminaire d’Issy. I spent ten years there and couldn’t bear to wait to be put out again when I was twenty-four. So – I left. Two years ago.’

‘But you wouldn’t have been put out. You would have become a priest.’

‘Ah, but the seminary was like a regiment. I belonged there as I never could in a parish where I’m told there are now such feuds ... Also, I hated having to get a dispensation to be a priest because of my ...’

‘Illegitimacy?’

Adam looked away.

‘You are right about feuds.’ The monsignor spoke from the shadow of his deep leather chair. ‘Nowadays one has to choose one’s side and can find oneself
having
to betray people. Someone said to me just yesterday that we can fall into our own stories. That may have happened to your father. You don’t have to be over-reaching. Just unlucky. Talking to inmates here is instructive. Most seem sane except for the odd one who thinks he’s Napoleon. But then, as the joke goes, Napoleon too thought he was Napoleon, and how sane was he? It’s all to do with winning. As long as he did win, he was admired.’ Belcastel sighed. ‘You said your uncle gambles. Well, all France does that now.’

Adam felt it was his turn to change the subject. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘about Guy? You said just now that he would be happier as an atheist.’

‘Only because ideals torment realists. People like him try to embrace and control reality. And he did for a while. Then when he no longer could he must have longed for a God to help him, but couldn’t believe in one – and was ashamed, I’d imagine, at even wanting to. So he’s enraged and torments us with his shouts. I suspect he began by wondering what might be
hors-là
beyond ordinary reality. Then – you see this happen in stories like
Le Horla
– his inventions began to take control of him.’ Turning his burnt cheek towards Adam, Belcastel confided, ‘When he stares at my scars, I am sure I remind him of his Horla. He could do something ...’

‘... violent?’

‘Oh easily.’

‘
Mère de ... de merde
...’

The window had come unlatched. Adam closed it.

‘Do you correspond with any of your family?’

‘Never.’

‘Your mother died? Before you left?’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps you should try to forgive your father. That’s just a suggestion.’

But Adam wanted to drop the subject.

For the Goulds, property and religion were psychically entwined. This was because they had been Catholic landowners at a time in the past when the English Crown had aimed to make their kind obsolete, and tales of the stratagems by which the threat was foiled were still part of their heritage. These hinged on the plight of the single ‘renegade’ son, who, in each generation, had had to pretend to convert to Protestantism and risk his soul so as to keep the patrimony intact. Though the renegades counted on heaven’s allowing them to repent of their apostasy in time to earn a deathbed absolution, a stigma could not but attach to them. For how could relatives be sure that, one day, a false renegade might not keep the estate for himself and cheat his family? Or die unshriven and go to hell? God too, being part of the equation, came to be seen as untrustworthy. So though the Goulds pulled through with their property intact, a propensity for double-dealing remained bred in the bone. Or so neighbours claimed.

Adam’s father, Garret, was considered a typical throwback. His guile and optimism were viewed as incorrigible, and stood him in good stead when he was running his racing stables or riding one of his own horses in a reckless steeplechase. Brave as a stallion and tricky as an eel, he would jump any obstacle for a wager, including the spiked iron gate at his own front entrance. He had a disarming smile and relished risk. Women forgave him his deceptions, but men were leery of doing business with him and accused him of trying to ride two – if not three – horses at once if he thought he could. This was a reference to his ten years spent as a member of Westminster Parliament where, having simultaneously courted the landlord and tenant vote, he ended by losing both. It was even said – Adam, when at the crawling stage, heard things from listening-posts under benches and tables – that Gary Gould had not only spoken up for Irish tenants in the House of Commons, but was a member of a secret sworn brotherhood, a Fenian, and had tried to keep in with the nocturnal ribbonmen who favoured direct action and whose aim was to terrify landlords like himself into lowering their rents. Yet how could he lower his? He couldn’t. He needed money. His roof leaked and was for ever threatening to fall in. Jokes were made about its loose slates and those in his own head, and some of his son’s earliest memories were of listening to water falling into the pots marshalled in the library and drawing room to catch drips whose sounds varied with the recipient’s fullness and capacity. Rolled up to one side would be Persian rugs bought in London when Gary was flush. Profits from the stables had soared when – a fluke – a horse, foaled by a mare taken from between the shafts of the Gould carriage, won the Chester Cup in England then went on to win more purses. For some years after this, money eased Gary’s choices; his oratory won him favour at the hustings and the rugs with their fanciful designs turned his front drawing room into a bower.

This was when he fell in love with his sixteen-year-old cousin Ellen, whom he swore to marry as soon as he could get a dispensation to do so.

Or maybe Gary never did quite swear to this? Wary of that old adversary, the law, he would, Adam guessed with hindsight, have shied from committing promises to words, let alone paper. He imagined his young father’s courtship as teasingly tempestuous. Combining cousinly tenderness with some playful bullying, he must have broken down the unpractised girl’s defences before she knew it.

Adam had adored him. He remembered lively returns from London when his father produced gifts, tossed him in the air, then soothed Ellen with hugs. He had an eager grin, a quiff of curls high as a cock’s comb, and played his role of father with élan.

Love of horses drew the cousins close. The great glossy creatures thundering under them must have magnified their sense of their own possibilities. Poor Ellen! How could she guess how narrow were the limits of her and even Gary’s power? It had taken Belcastel to point them out to Adam! His memories were evolving.

Ellen sank her interests in her cousin’s. She kept his accounts, tried to bring order into their forests of wild figures and took on the thankless task of trying to make the racing stables pay for his political career. Running things at home when he was in London, she campaigned with him when he came back.

‘We’ve got to keep in with the priests,’ he kept telling her. ‘They’ll deliver the Catholic vote. Then we can cock a snook at the old landlords.’