‘If I go, they will let things die down. I can buy them off. I may have to let them have this palazzo, even though it came from my family.’
He told her that there was no place for her in his life. She wept and said he must be in love with someone else. He denied this. She clung to him; he managed to remove her, but even then felt unfree. He was caught in a quicksand of nausea.
‘I’m sorry, cara, I am planning to become a missionary priest. I had it in mind to do that anyway and what you just told me has helped me decide. I would rather deal with pagans than with the corrupt. Everything which happened in this city in the last weeks appals me.’
She looked at him coldly. ‘That,’ she said with a contemptuous grimace, ‘is a base improvisation.’
‘Like your own?’
‘No.’
She said no more then, but sat slumped and silent in an upright, seventeenth-century chair which did not accommodate slumping. For perhaps a minute, he was tempted to wonder whether what she had said could, after all, be true. But no, she was more likely to be engaging in a kind of charade. All Rome was doing this. People’s feelings were so suffocating and unprecedented that they needed to devise ways to release them. Days ago the seventy-eight-year-old pope had climbed the Scala Santa on his knees; last night the Zouaves had slept under the Bernini colonnade; Sauvigny himself had just devised a fantasy to trump what he took to be another fantasy. His felt half true, for he did feel appalled and thought he might well renounce the world which would now be run by makeshift measures and shabby contrivance. The old moulds had broken. In the long run disarray would surely spread everywhere, and already here nobody knew how to behave. New roles would have to be learned, and meanwhile Romans were hiding indoors. This had been strikingly obvious yesterday and this morning on his way here. The invading Italians had been neither reviled nor welcomed and the usually demonstrative Roman crowd was as much at a loss as a theatre company which has lost its props. No doubt, Sauvigny thought sourly, they were wishing they could put on the masks behind which they so enjoyed hiding in carnival time, when men and women did things which they undoubtedly denied later even to themselves. Not that he was any better! He was in a self-lacerating mood, and memories of his own lucky and light-hearted adventures sickened him. News that the white flag raised over St Peter’s was a domestic bed sheet supplied at the last minute by the family of some minor Vatican employee seemed emblematic. He imagined imperfectly washed stains sunk deep in its weave. He imagined smells.
Play-actress, he thought, as his mistress again began to sob, then, overcome by shame at his eagerness to get away from her, began, almost involuntarily, to play-act himself. He asked: ‘Is there a foreign flag on your roof? I forgot to look. Prussian? English? So many of the palaces have them. The pope was making sour jokes about it. At the moment of his Gethsemane, palaces belonging to Rome’s greatest Catholic families are flying foreign flags and claiming protection from foreign embassies to ensure that they will not be looted by the invaders. Am I your foreign protector or have you others? France, as you must know, has just been defeated by Prussia, so I suggest you look to a stronger power.’
She said she didn’t know what he meant. He – revelling in the chance to move – jumped up, opened a casement, ran out onto a balcony, looked up and saw an Austrian flag on the front of her palace. He laughed. She slapped his face. He left. Some time later he heard that a police inquiry – conducted by the Italian police who now ran Rome – was under way and that she had been charged with murder. Only then did the full horror of his self-deception register. And his shame, for of course she must have loved him.
But what, now, could he do about that?
He did not become a priest, but neither did he marry or take another mistress. His half-measure matched the – possibly venal? – decision eventually reached by the Italian authorities that there was insufficient evidence to bring the suspected murderess to trial. Arsenic proved to be native to the soil of the graveyard where her husband was buried; the pharmacist had withdrawn his testimony, and this reduced the evidence against her to hearsay and speculation.
***
At tea-time on the day after her visit to Monseigneur de Belcastel, Danièle’s uncle surprised her in her dressing-gown. She and Félicité had been caught in a downpour earlier when walking with Lulu, whose fault it was that the two young women got drenched. The previously docile little cocker had revealed a reckless streak and would neither come to heel, nor – greatly mortifying them both – stop trying to mount and, failing that, sniff the cul of an unsuitably large mongrel bitch. In the end the bumptious Lulu, while defending his untenable position from rivals, all but lost one of his pretty, silken ears.
‘It’s not his fault. It’s nature. She’s on heat,’ Félicité whispered while resourcefully ogling a sturdy young bystander who obligingly, and bravely, broke up the fight, then, as it was starting to rain, and they couldn’t find a cab, carried the loser home in his arms. The footman was dispatched forthwith to take Lulu to have his ear sewn up, while Félicité led the rescuer into the kitchen, to have eau de vie dabbed on his bites and scrapes and receive a glass of the same cure-all to keep up his strength. Danièle was upstairs towelling her hair when she heard the front door open and, glancing over the bannisters, saw Uncle Hubert move unsteadily in, looking, for all the world, as though he too had been brawling. His head was bandaged.
‘Uncle, what’s happened?’ Seen from above, the bandage was alarming. Running down to embrace him, she recognized the young man – Mr Gould, wasn’t it? – from the maison de santé walking in behind and cried, ‘What have you done to him?’
‘Madame, he had a small accident and I was asked to bring him home.’
‘Not his fault, not his fault!’ intervened a genial Uncle Hubert. ‘A billiard ball went astray. Monsieur Gould is a Good Samaritan.’ Her uncle’s breath smelled richly of brandy and his hug disarranged the flimsy dressing-gown in which she would not have chosen to be seen by either man.
‘The doctors have seen to him, Madame. Doctors Grout and Blanche. There’s no need to worry.’
‘A billiard ball?’
‘It hardly grazed me. Calm down, little rabbit!’
Their guest’s smile at the endearment made her fear that what she had told Monseigneur de Belcastel had already become the subject of gossip. Provokingly, Uncle Hubert repeated ‘twitchy as a rabbit!’ and stroked her hair. Though of course the monsignor must have respected her confidences. As a gentleman. Besides, it had been a sort of confession. But the young man was still smiling. Perhaps he too had been drinking brandy? Didn’t rabbits have an unfortunate reputation?
‘Your uncle,’ he told her, ‘is not badly hurt. You may safely try out your nursing skills.’
Mention of those told her that they had been talking about her! What else had been said? When Uncle Hubert went to look for some book he wanted to show Monsieur Gould, she had to stop herself asking. Instead, mounting her high horse – a nervous habit which she knew she should break – she couldn’t help giving her uncle’s medical history with a silly loftiness. Ninny, she told herself. Be quiet!
But Adam, who was used to terms like ‘the tabernacle of honour’, saw no foolishness in her using it of the battle in which her uncle had got an early wound. He was, besides, feeling charmed by the domestic untidiness into which he had intruded. He had not known the like since leaving Ireland. It struck him as intriguingly unpredictable and, in that, quite unlike the institutions – seminary, maison de santé – in which he had spent the last dozen years. There was a sameness to those, a reliability and a lack of mystery about arrangements which made him relish the feeling here of improvisation and – was it tolerance or forgetfulness which juxtaposed a gaudy religious chromo with a delicate watercolour and jammed a matchbox under the unsteady leg of a fine ormolu table? The seaweedy scent of his hostess’s hair was pleasingly intimate. The hall was a jumble of hats, shawls and walking sticks, and the room into which she now led him was
a forest of furniture through whose cosy murk there pulsed, like carp in pond-water, the vehement colours of several hectoring, historical paintings. These were so large that she, in her silk dressing-gown, could have just stepped from one of their frames. Of whom did she remind him? Lucretia? Susanna? Leda, perhaps? Cheeks flushed, hair rough from the towel, you could see in her any of the victim-heroines of antiquity, and it was reassuring to see that she, who had been so stiff when they met before, now seemed a little at a loss. Echoes from his school readers came to mind: ‘sweet disorder’ and ‘the tangles of Neæra’s hair’. He couldn’t voice them though. They were too delicately indelicate – and anyway not his! He had had no live experience of women. Humiliated at having a mind papered with other men’s dreams, he turned away his head.
Taking this for disapproval – the monsignor must have been indiscreet – she felt the need to explain that her tender devotion to her uncle was in part due to her hope that someone in faraway Africa would be as kind if her husband should ever find himself in need of a corporal work of mercy. Oh zut, she thought as soon as she’d said this. How priggish! And into her head shot the child’s word ‘pi’. It summed up her vexation. She had been pi!
Again little Lulu was to blame. Danièle had been unsettled by Félicité’s confidences during their walk home through the rain. While the wounded Lulu’s rescuer clumped behind, carrying him in his coat, mistress and maid had kept softly bumping umbrellas as Félicité leaned close to describe the erotomania of her last employer, a rich foreign widow now back in her own country. She, Félicité murmured, had said that, just as the cure for hunger was to eat, so the cure for uterine need was ... Danièle shushed her: a purely formal move since Félicité could not be shushed for long and in next to no time was again shocking them both by accounts of the widow’s views. The link, of course, was with the incident just now in the park. Males knew, Félicité asserted. They sensed female readiness and could not help but respond. Willy nilly! Nature took charge. There was no choice involved. Widows ... At this point Danièle, feeling a cold drip from her umbrella on the back of her neck, turned, saw that the fellow carrying Lulu had his ear cocked, told Félicité to hold her tongue, then marched testily ahead of her.
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.
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