‘François wants me dead,’ he had screamed. ‘Get him out.’
Wanted him ... Flinching, the manservant’s attention swerved to the scene below his window where two women had now stepped from the carriage. One looked familiar. He tried to place her, then gave up as the memory of his master’s ravings rang in his ears and distracted him. Back and forth his mind flickered, and he shook his head to empty it of hurt. For how could he hold poor Monsieur Guy’s rages against him? That they were mad rages was plain from his gentleness with others, while only François got the rough side of his tongue. Maybe this was because Monsieur knew he could rely on him no matter what? In some part of his moithered mind, he surely knew that. It was possible too that he meant the opposite of what he said. He had always been a great one for reversals and practical jokes, as François should know, for he had often had to set them up. Nine years François had been with him. He had cooked for him, travelled with him, helped him move house a number of times, organized decorators – Monsieur’s taste was opulent – nursed him with massages and cold showers and fallen in with all his whims. Some of these could be embarrassing. On one occasion, François had been required to deliver a covered basket of live frogs to a society lady and, on another, a container full of jacks-in-the-box. There had been other japes. With Monsieur Guy you had – though not everyone twigged this – to stay on the qui vive. When he flattered the titled ladies who visited his yacht, it was his valet, not they, who saw the irony behind his charm. He could be quite brusque too, and women who tried to breach his privacy got short shrift. Perhaps – it struck François as he stared out at that veiled lady whom he had better head off – in the end he himself had got too close to Monsieur Guy, one of whose fears was of meeting his double? Better think about that.
First things first though. Who were those two women? And how had they got in? No question but that they needed brusque treatment. François started for the stairs.
III
The to-do at the gate had been due to the director’s absence. Blanche, before taking off for a taste of the salon life he so loved, had told Adam, ‘Now is your chance to make amends.’
The amends were for an incident just after their staff meeting when Adam, still hot with indignation at fate, life, self, the press and the sleek Dr Meuriot, went to answer the bell at the gate and found himself confronting a reporter from L’Écho de la semaine – who offered him money, and whom he knocked down. Ah well. He could hardly knock himself down, could he? Or fate? Or Dr Meuriot?
He had never done such a thing before and, to his shock, relished the sensation. Till now, as he had been trained to do, he had kept his feelings in a shell. But this now seemed to have cracked, for he had to be pulled off the journalist by the porter who should have answered the bell in the first place and who, on seeing whom he was throttling, apologized. They were by now outside the gate in the rue Berton, where the man seemed to feel that anarchy should be allowed some play.
‘Désolé, Monsieur Gould. Here. Smash the fellow’s glasses.’ Invitingly, he liberated Adam. ‘Better still,’ he advised, ‘give him a swift kick in the gut! It hurts and doesn’t show.’
But by then the journalist had fled.
‘He,’ said the porter in a satisfied voice, ‘will think twice before coming back to snoop!’
This spite, so alien to the entente usually prevailing in the maison de santé, came from feeling besieged. So did the director’s eagerness to breathe happier air.
‘So you’ll hold the fort here, Gould?’ he had cajoled, then, sealing the bargain, flicked Adam’s shoulder with a white glove which released talcum powder in airy puffs. ‘Zut! Sorry! Get them to brush that off.’
Chin-wagging in self-reproof, Blanche stepped into his carriage. Though plump, he was light on his feet and, dressed in tails and topper, was already mentally savouring the pleasures of Princess Mathilde’s soirée where he was resolved, he confided with a friendliness clearly intended to make up for the spilled talc, not to let himself be pumped by Maupassant’s malicious friends. Gossip, he murmured from the carriage window, was causing half our troubles. ‘So: motus! Mum’s the word!’ He mimed the act of turning a key in the lock of his own mouth, then called to the porter – but did the man take this in? – that the key to this gate was from now on to be kept in his desk drawer. In his study. Understood? Only the vicomte should be let in. The doctor then sank back in his carriage and, as it clattered down the rue Berton, could be imagined drawing a happy sigh. He had delegated duties which were getting onerous for a man of seventy-two.
Adam locked the gate and put the key in the desk, but not until the vicomte’s plight grew alarming would anyone remember this arrangement. Seeing to everything in a household, as François Tassart had done for Maupassant, might be feasible when working for one man. Here the chain of command was as prone to fray as a piece of bright cord kept for playing with a kitten. The trouble was that Adam’s role had expanded. Blanche was visibly aging and fading, and the other doctors were not always available. So Adam did the practical things: organized washerwomen and ordered supplies, kept accounts and was turning into a male Martha without whom all might founder. Tacitly, it was understood that he might, when need be, play doctor.
***
‘More trouble, Monsieur!’ The servant who had called for his help earlier was here again. With the glum relish of a man reporting trouble for which he cannot be blamed, he murmured, ‘Those ladies ...’
‘The ones with the vicomte?’
‘That’s just it. It seems that they’re not with him – or only one is. He says he never set eyes on the other until you got him down from the gate and he found her in the carriage talking to his niece. He thought she must be a nurse here.’
‘You mean that she just stepped into the carriage while it was held up?’
The man shrugged.
An intruder! And Adam had as good as escorted her in! How could he have been so careless? And now, said the servant, Monsieur Maupassant’s man, Tassart, was beside himself and almost in tears!
‘You see, Monsieur, he blames himself.’
‘For what? What happened?’
‘Well it seems he asked one of the ladies who she was – confronted her like, and while he did, the other ...’
‘What? Spit it out, man!’
The servant sighed. The fat was in the fire. ‘She slipped into Monsieur de Maupassant’s room and started carrying on. Wept! Tried to coax and cajole him. Threw herself at him! Fell or maybe was pushed off, and the upshot was that the patient began to have a fit. He gets these now, and they terrify him. The doctors say it’s a false epilepsy, which is neither here nor there because his great fear is that if he gets agitated his brain will melt and flow away through his nose. Anyway he was yelling that he needed to stay calm, and she was wailing that he should think of her children’s future – she said they were his children – so in the end Baron rushed in and had to shove her out the door. Bodily! He says she fought like a cat. And even while she fought, she was shouting that she loved Monsieur Guy. She was scratching at Baron’s hands and calling, ‘Guy, do you remember when you took me driving by moonlight? In the mountains. Do you remember what you said?’
The man began to snigger, stopped and, as though struck by something in Adam’s face, said kindly, ‘It’s all in the day’s work here, Monsieur. You have to harden your heart.’
***
The voice coming from Maupassant’s room could have been filtered through wet wool. It breathed panic and wheezed. ‘Quick,’ it quavered. ‘Get this woman out. I’m done with women. I know what Mademoiselle Litzelmann wants, but it’s not up to me to let her have it. My poor mother ...’ – here the voice strangled – ‘has had enough troubles. Why should she have to put up with entanglements like this at the end of her life? My lawyer has made provision for Mademoiselle Litzelmann’s children. They won’t starve. Is that not enough for her? Then get her out! Out! Foutez-la dehors! Don’t come back, Joséphine.’ There followed a
resonant and repeated thud as though some empty vessel, possibly a tin jug, had hit the floor with such vigour that it bounced. ‘Out!’
But Joséphine was already out. Even while the sick man struggled with his perplexities, she was being comforted.
Looking in through the door of a drawing room at the end of a long corridor, Adam saw the ladies sitting with their arms around each other. Which was Maupassant’s visitor? The high-coloured one in the grey mantle or the willowy girl whose face reflected an elusive radiance? Come to think of it, there was a shine to them both. Tears? Wintry light shed a chill on their embrace. They were – you could see – forming an alliance. For no reason on which he could have put a finger, Adam thought of his childhood, of smells of frosty earth, straw, fungus and steaming animals, and of dawdling home through glinty northern twilight – to be seized at last with scolding tenderness in brisk, protective arms. The longer that moment was put off, the better it was.
He felt a nip of loneliness.
Perhaps he was feeling frail? Dereliction hung like a miasma in the air! It could explain the doctor’s sloping off so early, the vicomte’s impetuosity and the ladies’ gall. Even Adam’s behaviour could be due to a contagion. He was amused to recognize the source of this thought in a debate which had been rambling on in the asylum kitchens where someone had raised the fear that people dealing with the mad risked going mad themselves.
‘Nonsense,’ the doctors had insisted when consulted about this. ‘Susceptible patients have to be kept isolated, but that’s not why. Hysterics can mimic epileptics. There’s no contagion.’
The staff, though, having often heard these same doctors offer mendacious comfort to the hopeless, were hard to convince. Anyway, what, they asked each other, about Monsieur de Maupassant? He had lately developed epileptic symptoms, hadn’t he? Those didn’t look like mimicry? Shuttling between worry and titillation, maids and menservants chewed over the question. Monsieur Guy’s case was of more interest than most because, thanks to what Monseigneur de Belcastel called the ‘forced education of the poor’, several were keen readers; those who couldn’t read could listen, and all enjoyed chatting about the shocking Monsieur Guy and his stories in the drowsy hour after supper over a glass of gros rouge or calvados.
‘Just how long,’ chambermaids challenged each other, ‘would you have resisted the seducer in Monsieur Guy’s novel, Bel-Ami? How hard would he have had to try with you?’
‘How hard or how long?’
Titters touched off shy bursts of teasing. Just like drawing room folk.
Well, why not? After all, Hachette’s railway-station stalls sold Monsieur Guy’s books.
Oh?
Yes indeed! His vogue was wide! He had caught a mood. It was canny and in tune with the times. Reading of how the brazen Bel-Ami used love to leapfrog past his betters wasn’t just fun. No, because the city was full of men like that who would walk across your face to get what they wanted. The book showed the dangers of hope. And most readers nowadays greeted that with a shrug: especially the hope of people bettering themselves! Before, whenever the barricades went up, expectancy had blazed – then choked. Like an unriddled stove! That had provided people with a ‘forced education’ all right! Maybe not the sort the monsignor meant, but it explained why the kitchen made a receptive audience when Tassart agreed to read from his master’s work and defended its scepticism and taste for scandal. Tassart himself might not have chosen to reveal that taste, but, once the press did, he grasped the nettle.
The maison de santé was a gossip-shop, so Adam knew just which questions had been put to the valet. One was about a flayed and withered human hand which his master was said to own, but when a maid asked if he had it here, she was told to pipe down. And what about the macchabées – corpses – he had fished from the Marne? On his boating trips? Ten, was it? Some had been in the water so long that – but at this point the women listening would refuse to hear more.
‘Stop! That’s horrible!’
‘I’m only telling you what he said himself!’
A footman, who had worked in a house which the writer used to visit, had heard him with his own ears describe the state to which these corpses were often reduced: a kind of swollen mush like papier mâché. The descriptions, of course, were designed to frighten ladies, to make them shriek and pretend ...
‘Why “pretend”?’ cut in the cook.
‘Because,’ smirked the footman, ‘they were more titillated than upset. Some high-born ladies have appetites that might surprise you.’
‘Yes, well, we’ll have less of your double meanings in this kitchen, if you don’t mind!’
When asked about the macchabées, Tassart snapped that his master was prouder of the live people he had managed to save. The footman, though, refused to drop the subject. He was sure he had heard that ‘the Macchabées’ was also the name of a group which met in a certain fashionable lady’s drawing room to indulge in odd practices. ‘Macabre ones!’ Murmuring behind his hand, ‘They say Monsieur Guy was the life and soul – or should we say the death and soul of ...’
‘What? Who says? How do they know?’
A shrug. The footman’s grin was insolent. ‘They send away the servants.’ Savouring his calvados, ‘That in itself ...’
‘What?’
‘Sets minds racing.’
Hurt and indignant, Tassart spoke again of Monsieur’s saving men from drowning and of how, by rights, he should have had a life-saver’s medal. But the topic of contagion would not go away. A warder claimed to know that, when he had his health, Monsieur de Maupassant had attended Dr Charcot’s displays of hypnosis at the Salpêtrière Hospital where the mad were put on show, and gentlemen could watch the most painful frenzies being calmed. There was even a rumour that one of the female patients – a former lady’s maid – had been infected with the pox by none other than himself and that that was what had triggered her folly. This time gossip had gone too far. Tassart was upset and though the warder said that he had meant no disrespect to anyone, an all-out row was only just avoided.
‘If my master did go there,’ Tassart declared, ‘it would not have been in an idle spirit, but for his research. He liked to see things for himself. Always. He was scrupulous that way.’
Aha, thought his listeners. Contagion! And felt unnerved. Later, they would exchange bracing jokes which, from kindness, they refrained from voicing in Tassart’s hearing. He – ‘Monsieur’ Tassart to the kitchen – shone with sanified reflections of his master’s raffish glory, and was treated with a pitying respect. Did it rankle that that master now refused to see him? Adam, who had taken Tassart’s place today, would have liked to placate him. Guessing that he had a soft heart, he too pitied it as he might some delicate invertebrate – a sea anemone, say – which lay stranded in a drying rock pool.
Adam had, as it happened, a private reason for being wary of valets. It was clothes. Two years ago when he first left the seminary and had nothing to wear but cassocks or the cast-offs which the bursar was likely to supply, he had gone in search of a man called Thady Quill who had tended Uncle Charles in the days before this uncle went, all too literally, to the dogs and the card tables where he lost his shirt, his social standing and all need of a valet.
Thady Quill had been an apprentice jockey in Adam’s father’s stables, until he grew too heavy and was put instead to the trade of manservant. This was a crushing comedown for a young fellow whose sights had been set on winning the Chester Cup and other trophies. Indeed, so glum and peevish did Thady become that, as Adam heard the story later, he got on everyone’s nerves, which was why, when Uncle Charles, then aged eighteen and hoping to be a painter, insisted on leaving for France, Thady was sent with him. Neither youth was to return, though for a while both wrote home. A decade later, when Adam, who was by then nearly twelve years old, found a foxed and cobwebby bundle of Thady’s letters hidden in the butler’s pantry, he squirrelled it off to a hideyhole of his own where he fingered his way through accounts of adv
entures which bemused and inflamed him. Quill’s bulletins, having been intended for a fellow servant’s eyes, were hard to make out, being ink-blotched, shadowy with innuendo and ablaze with the timorous amazement of a cage-born creature newly released in the wild. Thady Quill’s France – Adam perceived in a stunned dazzle – was part Garden of Eden, part den of vice. As mapped by Thady – who, at the time, could not have had more than fifty words of French and whose English was half-Gaelic – it was a Kingdom of Adulthood, a predatory lottery where women were apt to be easy but poxy, brandy cost two francs a bottle and life was spirited and rash. The French he described were princely connoisseurs of the flesh, fearless, easygoing, freedom-loving and fun! Some of what he saw, Thady admitted, he had neither words nor nerve to describe and made no claim to understand. His account of it all was baffled but intrigued, tempted, yet fearful. Had people here, he marvelled, no fear of Judgement Day and getting their deserts? Had they not heard of Sodom and Gomorrah? ‘Sometimes,’ his letters confided, ‘you’d have to wonder whether French Catholics are Christians at all!’ This contradictory picture matched and expanded one with which Adam was already familiar. It was the impetuous France of Irish songs: the gallant ally which might yet help us boot out the dull, oppressive Saxon – ‘Oh the French are on the say/ They’ll be here without delay ...’ – but also the sharp-minded nation, ‘on the say’ in more ways than one, which had retained membership in the Roman Catholic family while keeping its priests firmly in check. Adam, as one who longed both to be free and to belong, found that feat heartening and remembered it when, shortly after reading the letters, his own small world fell apart. It cracked open with alarming suddenness, like an eggshell around a nestling and he, the nestling vacillating on an Atlantic cliff-edge, had to think of taking flight. To where though? The first proposal was Canada. So far? Adam’s shivering mind raced like windblown clouds over a cold ocean. Then quailed. No, he thought. No! His mother had by now been buried, and he and his father had bitterly fallen out. As his cousins were either too shocked by this scandal or too scandalous themselves to be of help, the only family left to Adam seemed to be the Church. But, though agreeing with his tutor, Father Tobin, that yes, very well, Father, maybe he’d as well go into a seminary to get himself an education, he stipulated that the seminary should be French.
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