Adam Gould (21 page)

‘Ah yes, poor Tobin!’

Last year Thady Quill had confirmed the old rumour while measuring Adam for a tailor-made overcoat. ‘Didja know that at one time there they were grooming him for a position in Rome? That was
before
he published his pamphlet saying usury was a sin. How are the shoulders? Tight? I could ease the cloth. What the Reverend T. didn’t know was that the Vatican had been borrowing from the banks. Strictly speaking – as I heard it – Tobin was right, so his superiors couldn’t deny him. He’d boxed them in, God love him! And how could they forgive that?’ Quill laughed with the relish of an agile man who had himself escaped his box. ‘He was too strict for Rome!’

In Adam’s memory, the priest had not been at all strict. But neither, good lord, could he condone Adam’s papa biting Mama’s leg in public! Maybe his papa had been drunk? Maybe remorse for what he feared he must soon do to her made him unstable? By then his debts must have been mounting.

With hindsight Adam marvelled at his own failure to guess any of this. The signs were there to be read! The most brazen turned on another Hallowe’en feature: rings or rather the one his father stole from the festive barmbrack. This was tampering with luck, and Adam had been shocked to see his papa pick shamelessly through fruit-flecked slices, find the ring nestling among currants and sultanas, then slide it from its greaseproof wrapping and onto Mama’s finger.

Ping!

She dropped it in his plate. The time for mollifying her with baker’s rings was past. How old was Adam then? Five? To this day his mother’s taut, white face was vivid in his mind, and so was the shine on the ring which his father began to polish on his coat. Doing that gave him a pretext for keeping his head bent, while the glint in his eyes was a little too bright.

A sourer row started with a pudding called ‘apple snow’. While savouring it one lunchtime, Father Tobin may have felt the need to fill one of those silences now frequent between the Goulds by recalling that the Latin word for apple meant evil too. He addressed his remark to Adam and later swore that innuendo was the last thing in his mind. He had, for goodness sake, been praising the pudding when he made his mild joke about good apples:
bona mala
.
Malum
was a vocabulary item in Adam’s primer.

‘We,’ Tobin told the parents, ‘have started on the dative. Show them, Adam. Give us the Latin for “The sailor gives the girl an apple”.’

Perhaps Adam was slow? Anyway his papa got in first.

‘Ha!’ Gary Gould must have had too much claret. ‘The poxy sailor gives the girl – what? What sort of
malum
is he likely to give her? Eh?’ Half rising from his chair, he seized the bowl of pudding and threw it on the floor where it cracked so that its foamy contents spurted through the cracks. Gary sat down. ‘Let’s have no more of your hints, Tobin,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m the evil one here, am I not? I’m the snake. Say it. Speak your mind like a man. Or did they emasculate you totally the last time you did that?’ Gary beat the table with his spoon.

It was upsetting to see a man use a child’s gesture to defy that other intrusive ‘father’, the priest. Nervously, Adam began repeating Latin verbs in his head.
Amo, amas
... Like the sheet which he pulled over his eyes at night to keep off ghosts, this stopped him hearing what was going on. By then he must have been older. Eight? Six? Impossible to work that out now. He had no event by which to date things, nor any fellow pupils against whom to measure his age. Father Tobin’s efforts to recruit companions for him failed. Nobody else studied with the priest, over whom a small cloud malevolently buzzed, the way flies did over cowpats, and midges over the sweat that foamed on Adam’s pony’s coat when he rode the animal in warm weather.

‘Here,’ his mother handed him a bracken frond when they rode out later that day in an attempt to clear their heads and forget the unpleasantness. ‘It’s for the flies. Wave it. Chase them away.’

The rain had thinned. Smells of rinsed greenery seeped in through a half-open door.

‘There’s something I’d better tell you.’ The monsignor closed his breviary. ‘Maupassant’s man, François Tassart, came to see me. Surprised? So was I. It seems he is at the end of his tether. His master won’t see him now at all. He says you have taken his place.’

‘But I’ve hardly seen Guy lately.’

‘Well,’ Belcastel pried a spoke of hay from the stuff of his sleeve, ‘Tassart says he has proof that you promised his master to help him do away with himself. I imagine he meant me to warn you.’ Belcastel fiddled with the clasps of his breviary.

‘I see!’ Standing up, Adam moved to the edge of the loft floor. It extended only halfway across the width of the storey below, before ending like a shelf. Squinting down at the door, he reported, ‘I think the rain is slackening.’

‘The director wouldn’t like talk of suicide.’

‘No.’ Adam raised a hand to steady himself against a rafter. There was no barrier to stop anyone falling off.

‘He was out when Tassart was here. Luckily.’

Adam asked: ‘Was this yesterday?’ He guessed it must have been because he had seen Tassart shortly after Guy’s lost ‘manuscript’ turned up. A maid, finding the dog-eared sheaf behind a cupboard in the billiard room, had recognized the foolscap on which the writer had spent his first days here scribbling, and brought it to Adam. Inky bladders, dark with afterthoughts, crammed its margins. One said: ‘I am flickering out like a lamp without oil.’ The smudged paper had been worn furry.

Finding Tassart posted outside Guy’s door, Adam pressed the sheaf into his hands.

The valet stared at its scribbles, read the words ‘I’m flickering out’, and said, ‘If this is a signal, he’s past meaning it. Leave him alone.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Tassart drew a strip of pasteboard the size of a bookmark from his pocket and held it up. ‘He called me “Adam” just now.’ Shrugging, ‘He mixes people up. Poor Monsieur! He knows that the doctors are doctors, but not which one is which. Ditto for the rest of us. “Don’t tell François,” he told me when asking me – whom he took for you – for some “help” which you seem to have promised. It’s not hard to guess what sort of help. “François,” he said, “stopped me last time and he’d do it again.” Well, I would. Read this.’

It was the strip of pasteboard. Stacked on it, one word above the other, like print on a sauce-bottle label, was the statement, ‘I refuse to survive myself.’

Tassart plucked it back from Adam’s fingers. ‘That’s
two years old
and was written in a black moment. He had a lot of those, poor Monsieur Guy! I sometimes thought that it was to keep his demons off as much as anything that he liked to have women around. Not that he wasn’t hot for them in between times. He cheered up after he’d written that, so when I found it I hid it. Maybe he’ll cheer up again. If he’s allowed to! But suicide tempts him.’ Tassart nodded. ‘He was fond of saying that he had “burst into literary life like a meteor and would go out like lightning”. Those were his words. Always the same ones! Working himself up! I used to worry when I’d hear him say them and had no way – or only small ways – of taking his mind off killing himself. He’s right to think I’d stop him if I could. But how can I if he won’t see me?’

‘Maybe he will if you give him this.’ Adam handed over the wadded-up papers.

So Tassart took them into Guy’s room from which, Belcastel now reported, he was soon ejected. ‘It seems his master is suffering from that hallucination he gets – auto-what?’

‘
Autoscopie
?’

‘Yes. When he saw the valet holding the manuscript, he took him for a vision of himself and began shrieking that this self was looking at him with contempt. Tassart had to leave. He kept the papers which, he says, record your promise to his master.’ Belcastel swung his feet out of the hammock, heaved his weight onto them and stretched his limbs. ‘It strikes me that the sooner you and I leave here the better.’

‘Are you telling me
not
to help Guy die?’

‘Do you need to be told?’ The priest’s tone was sharp. ‘I imagine that what poor Guy hoped not to survive was his dignity, but now he has. So any promise you may have made ...’

‘I’m not sure I made one.’

‘There you are then. Anyway, how could a promise bind you now? Who would keep you to it? Not Guy! Nor God. God is against suicide. The taking and giving of life is His prerogative.’

Adam said nothing.

The monsignor buttoned on his oilskin coat. ‘I’m in no position to give advice. I suppose my new project could be described as helping the monarchist party to commit suicide. Sorry. Too flippant. A human being’s death is a great deal more serious. Though, barring a miracle ... Ah, I
said
I wouldn’t preach. We’d best get back. Father de Latour is coming for lunch. We mustn’t show long faces or he’ll think he’s picked the wrong man to run his new paper.’

Wet surfaces glinted as the two picked their way past muddied lettuces, around the house and in by a side door.

‘The director was looking for you,’ Adam was told while they hung up their coats. ‘He needs you to speak English to someone.’

The monsignor turned to look at the front garden. ‘Isn’t that Madame d’Armaillé down there? She must have come with Latour.’

Danièle had been shown to the room which would be hers by a nurse who told her where to put her things, promised to help her settle in properly later, then excused herself and raced off. There was a crisis with which she had to help. Danièle did not grasp its nature. Meanwhile she, the awed nurse told her as she left, was to take lunch in the director’s dining room in less than half an hour.

‘With
Monsieur le Directeur
. And his guests. You’ll hear the gong.’

Nurses, it seemed, ate somewhere else. So what was Danièle? Realizing only now that her status could give trouble, she thought of the troubles others had suffered because of theirs. Among them was the princesse de Lamballe, who had once owned this house and whose elegant head had ended on a pike. Ninety-nine years ago! A martyr, thought Danièle, and fingered a red silk thread which she was wearing around her neck. In the past, women in families like hers had worn threads like this in memory of guillotined ancestors. Her own mother sometimes had, and today Danièle was wearing hers in memory of her mother. She had come upon it while packing her things after the scene with Uncle Hubert, and, on impulse, put it on: a gesture of family piety and remorse.

Poor, darling Uncle Hubert! She had not meant to mortify or hurt him. Indeed, no sooner had she made a stand by declaring her determination to come back to Paris to work in this
maison de santé
– sorry, uncle, but her mind was made up! – than she was tempted to stay with him in Brussels. She itched to throw pliant arms around him and kiss and make peace.

She did not, though. It would have undone whatever good she had achieved by being firm. Instead, she claimed to have an irresistible vocation to be a nurse and pointed out that he, anyway, might quite soon be travelling through Africa on behalf of the Belgian king. There was serious talk of this. He might make all their fortunes – his, hers and Philibert’s, about whom he would, besides, be able to keep constantly informed! As the king’s representative, Uncle Hubert’s position would be both safer and more exalted than those of the officers in the Force Publique.

‘If I stayed here I’d be holding you back,’ she had argued. ‘Don’t you see that my plan is really quite practical? You’d worry if I were alone.’

His answer was to look her gravely in the eye and say that he would joyfully give up any position, however lucrative, if she needed him. Delicately, starting at the back of her neck, he ran the tip of a slim finger around her throat, and smiled.

For moments neither said anything.

She went to her room.

Alone in her slightly down-at-heel, damask-hung bedroom – in Brussels she and he stayed with Belgian cousins – she was obliged to lie down. A fit – what else could it be called? – swept through her, and her pulses leaped. She shivered all over, and her teeth chattered. She thought of the catch in fishermen’s baskets: silver scales glistening, flame-shaped bodies thrashing, just as hers was doing now. She wasn’t alarmed, although she had never heard of the like happening to anyone before. She guessed, though, that the nerves which she had controlled so sternly while Uncle Hubert made his appeal were seeking a release. It wasn’t painful. If anything, it was a relief to let her baffled body be and to feel no responsibility for its leaps and twitches. In the days when people believed in demons she might have thought herself possessed.

Oddly, much of what Uncle Hubert had said about himself could be applied to what was happening to her. He had spoken of the brimming up of natural needs and of how such brimmings sometimes found outlets which, though unorthodox, were fulfilling. In among his obscure and obscurely reproachful appeals – instinctively, she kept throwing them off course – came reminders of his affection for herself and her dead mother, of his loyalty, family feeling, pride of caste, fidelity, integrity, solidarity and general good intentions. Holy, holy, holy, she thought sarcastically, then grew ashamed of her sarcasm, and began to pity Uncle Hubert whose excitable state must be due – he had hinted – to recent betrayals by former friends and allies. He had had news too, he now confided, of a lady whom he had known long ago in Rome and who had recently died. He felt, Danièle learned, that he had been unkind to the deceased and had wasted both their chances of happiness. Lack of generosity could ruin lives. One saw such things too late.

‘I was too rigid,’ he lamented, ‘intolerant, cruel and young!’

Young?

The words hung in the air.

Did he mean them to apply to her? Don’t ask, she told herself, then saw, with a throb of secret hilarity, that what she had better be was just that: rigid, intolerant and, yes, maybe cruel! Her hilarity worried her. Might it be hysteria?

‘I’m going back to Paris,’ she decided. ‘I’ll travel with Father de Latour who is leaving in some days. I know you don’t like his opinions, but he’ll be a safe companion.’