Adam Gould (17 page)

Félicité’s former employer’s notions amounted to a subversion of everything that Danièle had ever been taught. Poor, darling Philibert’s improprieties, being conjugal and blessed by the Church, could never be as shocking as this. His were technical. The widow’s tackled the soul. If there was
no choice
, my goodness, it meant that we were all as free as little Lulu, and the only considerations which need restrain us were the equivalent of the good canine sense which might have prevented the near loss of his pretty, silken ear.

Danièle was so dazed by the principle that she did not at once apply it to her own case.

Later, though, while towelling her wet hair, a little before the arrival of Uncle Hubert and Monsieur Gould, she had the alarming thought that if widows gave off such blasts of uterine power, then she too might be emitting signals. This would explain poor Uncle Hubert’s unhappy fumblings and made it her duty to either (1) move away, (2) become repellently nunlike or (3) – though this choice could not be seriously entertained – eliminate her ardours by satisfying them.

Sauvigny’s wound throbbed, and he could see cobwebs on the ceiling. He was lying on his study floor where he had collapsed while hunkering down to take a book from a floor-level shelf. Best stay here for now. Mustn’t worry Danièle by presenting himself like this. He had let himself get deplorably unfit and, while crouching, his blood flow seemed to have got cut off at the knees. The room was rotating. That was the brandy! He and young Gould had sat drinking it after the doctor finished with his wound. They had been waiting for Belcastel to liberate himself from his guest, and in the course of their chat it had turned out that Gould had had a black-sheep cousin who died at Spoleto, fighting for the pontifical army.

‘The Italians called us
all
black sheep,’ Sauvigny reproved. ‘You don’t want to go repeating their slanders.’ But Gould said his cousin had been the genuine article: dyed-in-the-wool black. All his cousins were like that, and two had died jumping high walls for wagers. They had shared the use of a mean-looking nag which could outjump any thoroughbred. ‘It was more cat than horse and, for a while, earned them a tidy income. Nobody bet against it twice, but they tended to bet heavily the first time.’ Gould laughed and Sauvigny had to tell him he disapproved of men who laughed at their kin. Plenty of wild fellows, he told Gould instructively, had signed with St Patrick’s Battalion, and some had died and died well. General de la Moricière, who, in an earlier war, had moulded a tribe of wild North Africans – the first Zouaves – into crack troops, would have done the same with the Irish if time had not run out on the Eternal City! Time
and
rifles! ‘Rome expects miracles’, the general used to joke, ‘but can’t supply them – or indeed much else.’ Three ha’ pence a day was what the rank and file were paid when they could have had a shilling from the British army.
And
they’d had to fight with muskets.

Sauvigny remembered clearly now that it was a search for a memoir about all this which had led to his dizzy fit. So here he was! On the floor! He had rung twice for the footman, but the wretch must be asleep. Even reaching for the bell-pull made his head swim. He had felt worse in the asylum. It had taken his last grain of willpower to put the bag of gold into Belcastel’s hands as soon as Latour was off the scene, and he had had no strength left to ask about
him
. Just as well, maybe. Let Belcastel stew in his shame if he
had
been conniving. Meanwhile, where was that footman? And Félicité? What was that little piece up to?

Very gingerly, Sauvigny got to his feet and, being too dizzy to bend and put on his shoes, padded down the stone steps to the kitchen in his stocking vamps and opened its door to find Félicité in the arms of a rough-looking thug on whom he had not set eyes before. ‘In the arms’ was putting it delicately, for her bodice was undone and a black-nailed hand was burrowing between breasts where Sauvigny had sometimes imagined sliding his own. Imagined only! He had never permitted himself an impropriety with Danièle’s maid.

Danièle! Oh dear!

She
must be in the drawing room just now, unchaperoned, dressed in her
peignoir
and alone with the young man whom Sauvigny himself had brought to the house! He trusted his niece. But trust must not be tried too hard. Besides, one thing led to another, as what was happening in front of him made abundantly clear. The two had their eyes shut as the boy’s other hand reached under Félicité’s thick skirt and began clumsily raising it. Up her thigh he inched his handful of bunched cloth, peeling and rolling so that the watcher could see stretches of goosepimpled skin. Up, up ... Surely they must have heard the door? Taut with insult, Sauvigny caught the thug’s shoulder – ecstasy seemed to have made him deaf – spun him round, propelled him towards the outer basement door, flung it open, then kicked the fellow out. Pity he hadn’t shoes on to kick harder! Turning to Félicité, he raised his other hand, saw her flinch, then flinched himself, as pain shot up his wrist. Guessing that he must have injured it earlier when he fell, he watched the hand change course of its own volition, take flight and land, like a homing animal, in her warm, tabooed and beckoning cleft. He withdrew it, turned away, then back, saw her smile and left the kitchen. He would not, she was clearly thinking, turn her out now. Nursing the hurt hand, he went back to his study where he managed, with some difficulty, to put on his shoes.

Minutes later, erupting into the drawing room, he found the two young people there sitting yards apart and in total propriety, his niece having at some point draped herself in an ample cashmere shawl. Seeing their surprise at this sudden entrance, he felt his face redden and, to justify both redness and suddenness, told them of his embarrassment when, as he was ready to leave Passy, Dr Blanche had asked if he thought that Madame d’Armaillé was serious about wanting to do a
stage
at the
maison de santé
. Sauvigny, having had no idea what the doctor was talking about, must have cut a poor figure.

‘You might have told me,’ he reproached Danièle.

She said – he didn’t hear what, for it was dawning on him that, like himself, she might have thoughts which she preferred people not to know. Well, she was a married woman, after all, and not the maidenly Mystic Rose he sometimes liked to imagine. Just now, with the wet tendrils of her hair tangling around her, she looked in no need of the protective
noms de guerre
from the Blessed Virgin’s arsenal which he had mentally staked around her. (‘Hope of the ship-wrecked! Tower of ivory!’) His blood was pumping hotly, and the hand warmed by Félicité’s cleft was tingling. Maybe it would be as well to let Danièle go on that training course. Félicité, since she was clearly useless as a chaperone, could be otherwise employed.

On his return by tram to the
maison de santé
, Adam told the director that the vicomte was unlikely to make trouble with regard to his accident. He then went upstairs to make the same report to the monsignor whose mind, however, was full of his own concerns. These touched only obliquely on Sauvigny’s accident. What was bothering Belcastel was that the clergy were no longer quite trusted by laymen, that Sauvigny didn’t quite trust
him
and would be wise not to trust him at all.

‘The sad thing is that he stood in the garden looking up at my window where he saw Father de Latour, yet refused to draw the obvious conclusions.’

Adam said nothing. And Belcastel continued to muse about the vicomte’s motives in entrusting money to him after he had seen him with an enemy. It was, he decided, a challenge. ‘A challenge to me to be as honourable and simple as he wishes the world to be.’ Belcastel’s laugh seemed to Adam to mix self-dislike with indignation. It was hard to be sure, for the monsignor’s mood was mercurial. Moments later he said that, in the world in which we now lived, scruples and delicacy were unaffordable.

The day’s events had keyed him up. Teasingly, he noted that, though he would like Adam’s frendship for himself to be unreserved, his friendship for Adam meant that he must advise against this. ‘For both our sakes,’ he said, ‘if, as I hope, we go into the world together, you may as well learn by my mistakes. Cultivate suspicion. Allow for paradox!’

He talked then of his experiences with the cardinal and Father de Latour. ‘You read the piece in
Le Petit Journal
? Yes? So you see why I feel that treachery is rarely the simple turning of a coat. Loyalty, in difficult times, can be a savage option. Blinkered! Harsh! When troubles ease, it is only fair to remember this when judging people’s past conduct. Do you follow me?’

‘I think so. You’re thinking of my father.’

Belcastel nodded. Ireland, he observed, was a bit off the map. Would he be wrong in supposing that options there were more clear-cut than here? Harsher therefore? Priests must be simple souls.

Adam, remembering conversations with Thady Quill, said it was a quicksand and the home of paradox.

‘My tutor was a priest,’ he told the monsignor, ‘Father Tobin. He may have sympathized with my father’s contradictions. Anyway, he didn’t – perhaps couldn’t – force him to commit himself. He colluded in the fantasy that my papa was only waiting for a dispensation to come from Rome to marry my mother.’

Belcastel sighed. ‘For twelve years? Was anyone really taken in? Well, you
were
living in the backwoods.’

‘I think people were used to closing an eye.’

‘I see. Well, Rome, they may have told themselves, was far away, and canon lawyers likely to be – what? Over-conscientious? Corrupt? Many reasons could be thought up. Meanwhile, I would guess that Father – what’s his name? – was giving your father a chance to put things right. Hypocrisy can often be a form of charity. When it is, I am all in favour of it.’

‘I suppose
she
should have guessed?’

‘That he was paying court to another woman?’ A veteran of the confessional, Belcastel dismissed the idea. ‘It wasn’t in her interest to guess. Anyway, how can you let yourself believe that the person you love is a liar? Human love is a poor mirror of the divine, but we keep pursuing that life-redeeming image.’

‘Seen in a glass darkly?’

‘It’s the best explanation I know for irrational hope. Which reminds me,’ said the monsignor with a change of tone, ‘that I need you to take a letter to Latour. By hand. The post is sometimes pilfered and interfered with. Not by Republicans either, I may say. No, the bribes paid to have telegrams copied and letters opened and read are paid by those we think of as friends.’

There was a press of people trying to get into the church of St Sulpice, where Cardinal Lavigerie was expected to show his controversial face. To be sure, his purpose today was to raise funds, so he was unlikely to say anything piquant. Besides, he had been vindicated, hadn’t he? Perhaps he was a saint? Or – oddly, a Republican minister was said to have said this – a Richelieu? A man who in another era could have run the realm! Saintly or scandalous, it would be interesting to see him. He was a big man, big in every way, and could have posed for a portrait of the fat St Thomas Aquinas. The Divine Doctor!

Apologetic jostling melted any shyness people might have felt, and Adam was not surprised to see a lady smile at him. Then he recognized her.

‘Madame d’Armaillé!’

‘Monsieur Gould! This is Monsieur Gould, my cousin, Gisèle Coutelier! And you know Mademoiselle Litzelmann.’

Held back by the bottleneck at the church doors, the young women were caught in a crush which swayed like a turning tide. Inside, white-robed missionaries pushed and nudged. There were excited nuns here too in starched coifs, and ladies whose feathered hats recalled the equatorial lands where missionaries worked. Pinned to an easel were freehand maps of some of these territories and a picture of a black madonna. Tables piled with tracts were manned by seminarists, and black children were handing out small, gaudy, religious pictures tailored to fit between the pages of a missal. Some were three-dimensional with silk embroidery, done perhaps by nuns.

A priest whose skin was as crumpled as a much-used paper bag accepted several, fanned them like playing cards and thanked the black child in some African tongue. The boy looked puzzled, and the priest shrugged as he caught Adam’s eye. ‘Wrong language! There are so many!’ He laughed then, abruptly, sighting a priest he knew, whirled, pushed towards him, greeted him with an elated bear hug, and cried, ‘Twelve years since Ujiji. Twelve! Ah,
mon père
, there aren’t many of us from those days left!’

The other man kept nodding his head and saying, ‘Not many. No! We were the pioneers!’ Wiping their eyes, the two passed a single, grubby handkerchief back and forth. Above their heads the choir sang exultantly, then paused for a sermon.

‘Let’s sit!’ Discreetly vigorous, Madame d’Armaillé pushed into a small space on a pew, forcing those already there to move along. ‘Come,’ she told Adam. ‘There’s plenty of room.’ Her cousin and Mademoiselle Litzelmann had disappeared in the crowd. ‘Gisèle,’ she explained, ‘went to subscribe for us both to a mission magazine.’ At the high altar, surrounded by more black boys in lace surplices, a stout prelate with a hoarse rolling voice began explaining why the missions needed funds.

‘That’s His Eminence,’ whispered Madame d’Armaillé. Then,
sotto voce
, during a listing of those who had already made donations: ‘Do you know what Mademoiselle Litzelmann told me? She got an answer to a letter she wrote to Maupassant! Isn’t that good news? Do you think he’s softening towards her?’

‘No,’ Adam told her. ‘He never read it. We were afraid to upset him. It was I who wrote the answer to her letter. And signed it too. Didn’t she tell you?’

Madame d’Armaillé sighed. ‘No, but, come to think of it, I more or less wrote
her
letter. I dictated it.’

‘So you and I have been corresponding with each other!’

A muffled laugh united them. When a nun looked reproving, they hid it behind their hands.