Adam Gould (37 page)

But she too had been thinking. ‘Wait. I have a plan. I must talk to Félicité. There are two dressing-gowns in that wardrobe. Can you bring them here?’

He did. They were heavy silk and oriental. Whose? Her uncle’s? She looked magnified and male when she put on the long, masterly, exotic gown and told him that she had thought of a way to put off her return to Belgium. If she stole two nights from her conjugal life, could Adam spend them here with her?

Two nights! They seemed like an eternity.

When they were decorously gowned and seated in separate armchairs, she rang for Félicité and instructed her to send the manservant to Belgium with legal papers for Monsieur d’Armaillé to sign. Didier – this was the man’s name – would find these in a drawer of the escritoire. There was money for his journey there too. Here. She handed over keys. He should leave at once and must tell his master that the lawyers wanted her to stay here until he had brought back the papers and they had reviewed them.

‘Meanwhile send a telegram,’ she told Félicité, ‘to my husband. Tell him that I shan’t be arriving as expected, but that Didier will and will explain everything. Sign it “Danièle with love”.’

When Félicité left, Adam asked how reliable she was.

‘Completely,’ Danièle assured him, ‘especially for a thing like this. She loves keeping secrets from Didier. He was in the Congo with my husband and
his
loyalties are to him, not me. He’ll be back the day after tomorrow, and you must be gone by then.’

‘Are you sure it will take so long? To and from Belgium?’

‘It’s not the train which takes time. It’s travelling on into the hinterland. Bad roads. No roads. We have two nights. Then you must go.’

‘For ever?’ Already two nights seemed less long.

She told him that she could not hurt her husband. ‘What I am enjoying with you, Adam, will give me the strength to renounce you.’

‘Do you love him?’

‘There are different sorts of love. Do you remember telling me once that by being gentle with the world you could make it gentler? Well, now I must make it gentle for Philibert. He deserves that. He’s grown gentle himself.’

Gentle
? Adam, who had been picturing the duellist as a heraldic beast – maimed but rampant – resented this metamorphosis. Was restoring the beast’s conjugal status not enough? Must they also invite him into the haven of their dream? It was as if Brother Wolf, on being tamed by St Francis, had asked to join the monastery. What would Francis himself do? Wear a wolf skin and take to the woods?

‘He never wrote to you!’ Adam reminded wolfishly. ‘Nor,’ he reproached, ‘did you write to me after I left. Not even to say goodbye! We might say that you “took French leave”. For honourable reasons to be sure!’ He knew he was bullying her.

‘In French,’ she reminded, ‘we say of someone who left without taking leave that “he left like an Englishman”.’

Still wolfish, he ignored this. ‘Why
didn
’
t
you write?’

Silence.

He read it to imply that he was wasting precious time on a quarrel – which was true. How, anyway – queried the tilt of her chin –
could
she have written in any meaningful way? What kind of letter could she have sent which would satisfy them both?

Absorbed by her imagined voice, he was confused to hear her real one echo it.

‘If I wrote that I was unhappy, you would have been encouraged to hope the break was not final. But anything else would have hurt you.’

Had he
heard
her say those words? Or imagined them? Both. We
are
one, he thought. We have the same thoughts! And felt such a choking tenderness that, instead of surrendering to the pleasures of a quarrel – there was no time anyway for these – he made love to her again and then again, before and after eating a meal brought by Félicité, who had taken a cab to a restaurant to get the most delectable dishes available.

No need, she told the lovers, while laying these out on two card tables which she had covered with a creamy, damask cloth, no need at all in their case to choose food with aphrodisiac properties. She could tell. ‘I’m remembering my time working for an older, foreign lady,’ she told Adam carefully. ‘Madame here is so innocent, she may not even get my meaning.’

Adam felt flattered, then, as he drifted into sleep, remembered that Félicité must have a repertoire of such remarks.

He awoke to find the place beside him empty. The shutters had been opened and, through the clotted darkness outside, a dim dawn was seeping like milk. Closing his eyes, he pulled the covers closer, only to hear a voice in his ear.

‘Monsieur Adam!’ Félicité was lighting a gas bracket. ‘There’s been an accident. We have to leave. I’m to take the keys to the lawyer. Madame has gone to the station. She had no time to talk to you and asked me to explain. We got a telegram saying that the master fell downstairs. She’s demented with worry.’

‘Fell downstairs?’ Still befuddled by sleep, he saw Danièle’s stockings dangling from the arm of a chair. So she can’t have left, he thought foolishly. The stockings were grey silk embroidered with clocks. Two slippers, pointing in different directions, lay on the floor underneath.

Félicité, now folding things into a bag, spoke over her shoulder. ‘It looks as though he fell just after getting
her
telegram, the one she got me to send, saying she was not coming home as planned. The accident must have happened before Didier got there to explain why. The master can be very moody if he’s left alone.’

‘Why,’ Adam tried to collect his wits, ‘could she not tell me this herself ? Does she blame me? Does she think he ...’

‘... tried to kill himself ?’ Félicité nodded.

‘And that I’d be glad? Is that what she has against me?’

‘I don’t think she’s thinking of your feelings, Monsieur Adam.’

Letting himself out through the garden, Adam caught a remembered glimpse of the manservant standing here in leafy starlight. Getting up to relieve himself, he had spotted Didier who should by then have been on his way to reassure Monsieur d’Armaillé that, though tediously delayed, his wife would soon be home. If something other than tedium had delayed her, it would be better for his master not to know. Yet there the fellow stood – unless Adam had dreamed him. Air slashed by slanting rain was starting to erase him and when Adam looked again he was gone.

But the worst dupery

Is that the price of ivory

Will be our bones!

Nos os

Will stay
au Congo
,

With no tombstones

To show

Where we lie

When we die,

Having sold

Our souls to Leopold!

There was ironic clapping, and the singer – a priest whose skin had a sallow, tropical tinge – sat down, drank some wine and said, ‘That’s only one version of the railway builders’ lament. It is always polyglot, but never the same. Singers improvise. Sometimes there are bits in Dutch or Danish. Here’s a Latin bit:

So with fury,

King of vain cant,

Morituri

Te salutant
.

‘What never changes is the mood.’

‘
Le cafard
!’

‘Congo doldrums!’

‘The natives’ songs are more harrowing. They sing about
wanting
to die. They dread being forced to build the railway.’

‘Well, they wouldn’t work if they weren’t forced.’

‘But the methods ...’

‘
If
one believes the rumours!’

‘I heard that they sing about white savages. I hope they don’t mean us.’

‘I fear they do.’

‘I mean
us
: the White Fathers!’

‘I know.’

‘Do you feel savage, Father Emile?’

‘Yes, Father, I feel very savage when I learn that not long since nine hundred black railway workers died of disease in four months. That was nearly a fifth of those engaged in laying track.’

‘It is a mercy poor Cardinal Lavigerie didn’t live to see ...’

‘Oh come, Father, one can’t believe everything one hears. More myths than rubber come out of Africa.’

Saturday dinner was finishing in the White Fathers’ refectory where talk was combustible and the food as bad as Latour had warned it would be. The Fathers, who had lost their battle to stay in the Congo Free State, spoke bitterly of how the Belgians who had replaced them closed their eyes to their country’s atrocities. To be fair, they had little choice. Candour earned reprimands from Rome, where King Leopold had succeeded in presenting himself as a champion of Catholic civilization. Talking too openly could be risky. Some who
had
, murmured the singer, had come a cropper. The king’s arm was long. Gossips’ voices sank, but Adam caught the name d’Armaillé.

‘Hadn’t you heard?’ Father de Latour poured brandy. ‘Philibert d’Armaillé was amputated.’ He gestured at his own legs. ‘Below the knees. Has to be pushed about in a Bath-chair.’

‘Amputated!’ Reproach stirred in Adam’s memory. ‘I called to see his wife,’ he told Latour, ‘at her uncle’s place. She didn’t mention that.’

‘No?’ Delicately, the priest’s fingertips stroked his eyelids. ‘Too painful, no doubt. So she’s in town?’

‘Not now. She left. It seems he’s had a fresh accident.’

Latour nodded. ‘Nobody recovers from that place. Survivors bring home their nightmares. The calvary goes on.’

Talk returned to tales from the jungle. The one about d’Armaillé was depressingly plausible.

‘He talked too freely,’ Latour murmured. ‘Rumours in London newspapers were traced back to him.’

‘Were they true?’

A shrug. D’Armaillé, Latour explained, had done well during the fighting phase of his time in the Congo and got rich without violating his conscience. Later, though, he had fallen foul of the king’s Belgian rubber-collectors who, he learned from his black soldiers, were committing worse atrocities than the Arabs ever had. Children were being held to ransom so as to force their parents to harvest large quotas of rubber. This was slavery of a new kind. The stories were persistent; the men reporting them had fought for the Force Publique in the name of freedom, and their officers felt dishonoured. The
FP
was a small, old-style mercenary army whose hundred or so white officers had quite different relations with the natives from those of the rubber-collectors. When d’Armaillé’s protests were ignored, he shared his indignation with friends who were about to leave the service and sail for home.

‘You’re saying he blew the gaff
on the king
?’ Adam was taken aback. The news raised the spiritual stakes. It meant that d’Armaillé’s wife loved him for his courage and his conscience. Adam felt humiliated. What competition could he offer? Legs? Good God! He did not want to be loved – loved? – for those.

Hating himself, he tried not to imagine the shifts to which the couple must resort when making love. He could not restrain jealousy at the thought of the nobly menial tasks which she must perform for her husband.

‘So he blew the gaff,’ he asked again so as to rid his inflamed mind of these images.

‘He tried,’ said Latour. ‘But who listened? King Leopold owns and greedily milks a vast, secret
domaine privé
in the Congo. Officially the Belgian state – which will one day inherit it – is unaware of what goes on there, so it suited no one to have ex-officers’ friends publishing reports in foreign papers. Officers who were back in Europe were safe enough. But d’Armaillé, while still in the Congo, was set upon, shot in the legs and left in a remote location to die. By the time he was found, gangrene had set in.’

While the priest talked, Adam’s mind wrestled with an image of a man in a Bath-chair bumping down a staircase. At what time had this happened? Perhaps while Félicité was warming the bought-in food?

Might the chair have fallen over? Skidded? Tossed him out?

‘More brandy? You look green.’ Latour was amused. ‘See how much tougher than the laity we have to be.’

At another table Father Emile was discussing the case of a priest he had known – perhaps now an ex-priest? – who, having knotted his alb around a large stone, used it to batter to death two drink-sodden rubber-collectors who had impaled a baby on a stake. Long after he had killed them, the novice executioner had kept frenziedly bashing their skulls until a porridge of pink brain emerged.

‘When we found him,’ said Father Emile, ‘he was still bashing the ground with his wrapped stone. How is
he
ever going to forget what he did?’

Just perceptibly, Father de Latour shook his head. Don’t worry, Adam read this to say, Father Emile himself will soon calm down.

Should that priest’s act be considered a murder, Father Emile wanted to know. Note: he gave his victims no chance to repent and save themselves from hell. Which killing, he challenged, his or theirs, was the more evil? They, it could be argued, knew not what they did.

Just eight years ago, Father Emile went on, the powers at the Berlin Conference on African Affairs had pledged themselves to – he quoted, ‘watch over the preservation of the native tribes and to care for the improvement of their moral and material well-being ...’ Designated enemies then were the Islamic slavers whom the Force Publique had since defeated. Who now, did his listeners think, most threatened the native tribes’ well-being?

There were contradictory replies. Some agreed about the need to speak out. Others said no, since if a new colonial power were to take over, it might be Protestant and even less benign. King Leopold was not typical of Catholic rulers.

Latour murmured in Adam’s ear that the story about the rubber-collectors was probably true. His own guess was that, to force the baby’s parents to provide more rubber, they had threatened to kill it without at all intending to do so. Then, as if the threat had poisoned their minds, they carried it out.

Wondering whether his mind too was poisoned, Adam produced a parable. Imagine, he begged, a young woman in d’Armaillé’s wife’s situation. Suppose a man were in love with her. Would he be justified in rescuing her from a life of conjugal drudgery and the sins it must surely, in the long run, make her commit?