Adam Gould (31 page)

Thady grew worried. ‘You don’t hate him!’

‘My father? No, no!’

‘And will help him die in peace?’

‘I will. Of course! If what he wants is a ceremonial absolution, he shall have it! “
Absolvo te
, Papa! Die in peace.”’

Adam tried to say all this lightly. In his mind he hedged his promise between quotation marks and, like a man holding a bucket of burning pitch, did his best to keep its brimming heat at arm’s length. Touched, though, by Thady’s sentiment, he secretly melted.

After all, he saw he could do for his unhappy papa what nobody had been able to do for Belcastel. One should seize such opportunities.

And yet ...

Maybe he did hate him? Hatred was a horrid affliction. But could you have love without it? It was easy for Thady to talk about ‘redeeming the past’. That, in Adam’s mind, revolved around his mother.

After her accident, he had been so numbed by the rush of events that what he remembered later was fitful and overlaid by hearsay. One exception was his memory of how, at dinner that evening in Dr Keogh’s house, his vision had become distorted. It had not been like – or did not feel like – going blind.

‘You’d best stay with my family tonight,’ the doctor had insisted after twice seeing Adam turn his back on his father and refuse to speak to him. Adam had then rushed from the cabin and, a few discreet minutes later, Keogh came out after him and led him a little way off to make sure that they were not overheard. He was their family doctor, a robust, big-bummed, generously built, hunting man who had been out with the field that morning and was still in his riding boots. He had sons of his own. ‘I’ll drop you off at my place,’ he decided, ‘then come back here and explain to your pa where you are. It will be better to do that when you’re out of the way. Give you both a chance to simmer down. Wait a minute now, while I go back in and attend to a few things. I’ll meet you by my carriage.’

The doctor returned to the cabin where women were starting to lay out Adam’s mother’s body.

Earlier Adam had heard one of them ask, ‘Are they not taking her home?’

‘Careful, Bríd!’ another whispered. ‘Little pitchers! But no! Mr G. said no.
He
wants the corpse to stay here!’

‘Are you quite ...?’

‘Amn’t I telling you?’

After that the voices sank and Adam heard no more. But when his father returned and tried to talk to him, he turned away. His father had been shuttling back and forth between the cabin and outside where a few carriages were drawn up. There wasn’t room for any more people in the cabin. And perhaps some were afraid to intrude. The English guests might be, in any case. Some of the servants from home had been fetched, then Adam’s father had ridden off to get a priest and again to make who knew what arrangements.

Adam didn’t want to know. ‘Bundling her into the ground’, he thought furiously. ‘Keeping her out of the house even now!’ He felt something stony inside him and revelled in his anger, sensing that, once it passed, what followed would be unbearable. He had trouble catching his breath.

He prayed, ‘Let her not be dead.’ But had little hope, since God, though not bound by time, was unlikely to reverse things for those who were. Then: ‘Let her not have done it to herself.’

That prayer, since nobody knew whether she had or not, felt more hopeful, so he kept repeating it until the words meant nothing. They formed a kind of rope, though. ‘Not, not, not ...’ he repeated and felt the words change to ‘knot, knot’ as though he were threatened by a hurricane and the rope held him. He was still murmuring them when Dr Keogh appeared with his whiskey flask and persuaded him to swallow some to steady his nerves.

‘Ready then? Shall we go?’

‘Yes.’

The doctor drove at a smart trot to his own house by pony and trap. Dinner, when they got there, was already being served and a place was quickly set for Adam.

‘I’ll be back,’ the doctor told his family, ‘before you finish your fish.’ And left Adam to explain. But Adam was past explaining anything.

The fish was pink salmon served with a green cucumber sauce on blue-rimmed plates. But when Adam looked at his portion what he saw was a swirl without contours or consistency: a blur. He was dry-eyed, so this was odd. He kept staring, but what he saw didn’t change. The colours coiled and merged like pigments on a wet palette. Looking up, he half expected the room too to have dissolved. But no. There it all still was: chairs which were still load-bearing and still chairs, the doctor’s live wife ladling out sauce to family members who remained solidly intact, with their blood neatly packed inside their skin. They ate quietly, and spoke in lowered tones from respect for Adam’s loss. Only what was on his own plate swam smearily like the design on a spinning top. By an act of will, he focused on the smear until he had made it separate into its components, then, as these again began to mingle, forced them apart once more. He was reminded of stained-glass reflections and of vomit. Trying to focus stopped him dwelling on what had taken place when the doctor came out of the cabin for the second time and led the way to his carriage.

Then, too, Adam had been dazed and half-blind and had kept wanting to go back in to have a close look at his dead mother. Because of lagging behind the rest of the hunt, he had heard the news early, had been among the first to reach the cabin and had seen what now haunted him: her half-bare body when they used the tailor’s scissors to cut open her riding-habit. He thought he had seen the scissors pierce her flesh.

‘Adam, they didn’t,’ Dr Keogh had assured him. ‘I promise you that you imagined that.’

Adam knew that this must be true.

He had been taken outside as soon as someone noticed him looking, and when he was let come back his mother was covered by a sheet. They had put a handkerchief over her face, but he took it off and touched her hand and her grey forehead. Her eyes were closed. That time too he heard whispers. ‘Four months,’ he heard. ‘Four months gone. Mr Gould was over from London four months ago.’ Then there was shushing followed by a shocked silence. Unless that came later? The unpleasant incident did, anyway. It must have. It happened outside by the carriages.

When the doctor came out for the second time, carrying his bag, he produced a pocket flask, unscrewed the silver cup from the top, filled it with whiskey and offered it to Adam, saying that it would steady him. Adam, who was unused to the stuff, took a mouthful, which burned his throat and made him cough.

He was still coughing when someone stepped down from a carriage drawn up next to the doctor’s. It was Kate. Her mother, still inside, held the door open and seemed to be hissing at her to get back in. But Kate ran forward. She was no longer wearing riding clothes, so more time than Adam guessed must have gone by since he saw her last. Hours? A whole day? He saw luggage strapped to the roof. The girl looked younger than he remembered. He thought: she is as helpless as I am. He wondered whether it had been to talk – perhaps argue? – with her mother that his father had been going back and forth. Bargaining?

‘Adam, I am deeply sorry. Truly! We all are. It was a terrible, unpredictable thing! They say the rider ahead of her displaced a stone which was holding down some barbed wire, and that it leaped up just as her horse jumped. We are deeply, deeply sorry.’

‘Sorry? How sorry can you be?’ he heard himself spit the words at her. ‘You thought she – my mother – was dead before, didn’t you? Well now she is. You should be happy! Your prayers have been answered. I hope this fits your plans.’

Her crumpled face reproached him, but her tone was steady. ‘Mama and I,’ she told him, ‘are leaving for England. We shall take the train this evening. The house is free of us. We shan’t be coming back. Tell your father he can bring her body home. Tell him we shall write. Goodbye, Adam.’

Later, he would wonder if she had produced the story of the wire – it was one sometimes told to visitors as a warning – so as to prevent him thinking that his mother had taken unnecessary or deliberate risks. She was clever, he thought, quick-witted and would have made a good friend. He wished he had not insulted her – and would have liked to embrace her. But that was impossible. He couldn’t embrace anyone lest he break down.

At dinner in Thady’s house, the
blanquette de veau
finally made its appearance and was as succulent as Thady had hoped. While he worked his way through two helpings, Madame Thady – her formal title was, of course, Madame Quill – plied Adam with friendly questions. As she did, she turned her body as fully towards him as if they had been dancing.

The manoeuvre was almost certainly designed to allow Thady – who liked to slurp his food as though from a nosebag – to do so behind her back. Adam knew from Thady himself that she deplored his table manners. This evening though, he was clearly to have
carte blanche
to savour her meat as he chose. Adam saw the concession as proof that the tiff had been a mere conjugal readjustment.

Thady’s ‘
tendre moitié
’ – it was odd to hear him talk French – had a neat, no-nonsense
chic
. Her grey eyes were clever, her eyebrows finely arched, her dress well cut – which, since she was a dressmaker and an ex-lady’s maid, should be no surprise. Her upswept hair rose from a strong neck in an elegant curve. Socially she must have been several cuts above Thady, but perhaps did not know this, since Ireland would be as strange to her as the Congo was to the White Fathers. Adam remembered one of
them
talking approvingly of an ex-Zouave officer who had settled down with a Bantu wife and ‘raised her to his level’. Not that Thady would see himself as being like a Bantu! Or if he did, he would – no doubt like the Bantu themselves – feel cheerfully confident of his worth.

Come to think of it, Thady had been prized in Adam’s father’s racing stables for his hands which could gentle even the most skittish horse or mare. He had his own kind of subtlety which
la tendre moitié
must have divined. Adam, who had spent his childhood observing a doomed domestic union, was cheered to see a promising one. He smiled at Madame Quill.

‘So why,’ she quizzed, ‘are you leaving us?’

Behind her, Thady’s bony head dived like a cormorant for his plate. He made munching sounds.

She ignored them. ‘How long,’ she asked Adam, ‘will you be in Ireland?’

With measured candour, he told some of his story and of how, after being obliged – ordered! – to leave the
maison de santé
, he had sent a telegram to a friend, asking that an answer should be sent here. Madame Quill agreed to deal with this and expressed sympathy over the monsignor’s accident, which she described as ‘a piece of appallingly bad luck’. This view, by turning the death into a fluke, shrank Adam’s responsibility.

Thady’s feeding sounds stopped. Running bread over his plate, he marvelled, ‘Jaysus, Adam, you’re a dark horse!’ He had lapsed into Hibernian English, and his and Adam’s attempts to translate this for Madame Thady were hopeless.

In what way, she inquired patiently, if Adam was to be a horse, was this horse ‘
ténébreux
’? Was the expression droll?

The men had to admit that any drollery there might be was elusive, having to do with parody and exile. Indeed, now that they thought of it, drollery itself was ‘a dark horse’, something which somehow brought the distant close and made the here and now feel strange. Did she twig?
Non
? They laughed, and she looked mildly riled.

Wait, though! Was there not, she remembered, a brand-new song, ‘
Twiggez-vous
?’ Sung by Marie Lloyd? ‘
Nous twiggons
,’ she sang, and the men applauded: ‘
Elle pige
!’

Thady in French was only half his Irish self – and this helped Adam to shed his caginess.

‘You eat,’ Madame Quill had encouraged her husband when they first sat down, ‘and let me talk to Monsieur Gould.’ Which was why, freed from the mockery with which an English-speaking Thady would have greeted Adam’s revelations, Adam had felt able to make them.

Wondering if she guessed at the slyly defensive, volatile element in which her husband’s mind moved, he considered warning her – then saw there was no need. Thady’s agility of mood, like his ex-jockey’s bandiness, had survived its usefulness. Both were adaptations to circumstances which would not recur.

Adam, by contrast, should sharpen his defences before heading back to their tribal and waspish province. For now though, the bed-time tenderness which he felt rise like steam between his hosts made him envious and he wondered wistfully whether, before he left, Danièle and he might manage to be together for a few bonding, private, frolicsome days. His telegram had begged her to turn her mind to this.

Next morning, when he rose at an impatiently early hour, there his answer was: a telegram.

YOUR MESSAGE JUST FORWARDED STOP MEETING IMPOSSIBLE STOP AM WITH DR AND MADAME BLANCHE IN NORMANDY STOP BEST WISHES D’ARMAILLE

Gone from Paris then! Was the formality discretion? ‘D’Armaillé’! All those stops, then ‘best wishes’. Of course it was! It must be! He himself had warned her of how telegraph employees had been known to copy messages that passed through their hands. Some of Cardinal Lavigerie’s prudently encoded telegrams to Rome had been intercepted by monarchists.

‘I’ll be in the post office later. Shall I send a telegram for you to someone in Ireland? To say when you’ll arrive?’

Madame Quill and Adam were dunking stale bread in their
café au lait
, which did not taste of coffee at all but of toasted barley. He welcomed the revelation of how the married lived: fine food for company in the evening, then, when one penetrated behind the scenes, thrift.

‘That would be kind.’

He gave her the address of his father’s doctor.

Panama Affair: Trial Starts in Paris. Senators and Deputies Indicted.

The saloon of the Irish mail-boat was almost deserted. Adam, too restless to stay in his berth, gripped a rail and flicked through newspapers bought in Holyhead. He had already checked the foreign news and found nothing about Belcastel. Looking up, he locked glances with the only other man in the bar.