The day’s events had keyed him up. Teasingly, he noted that, though he would like Adam’s frendship for himself to be unreserved, his friendship for Adam meant that he must advise against this. ‘For both our sakes,’ he said, ‘if, as I hope, we go into the world together, you may as well learn by my mistakes. Cultivate suspicion. Allow for paradox!’
He talked then of his experiences with the cardinal and Father de Latour. ‘You read the piece in Le Petit Journal? Yes? So you see why I feel that treachery is rarely the simple turning of a coat. Loyalty, in difficult times, can be a savage option. Blinkered! Harsh! When troubles ease, it is only fair to remember this when judging people’s past conduct. Do you follow me?’
‘I think so. You’re thinking of my father.’
Belcastel nodded. Ireland, he observed, was a bit off the map. Would he be wrong in supposing that options there were more clear-cut than here? Harsher therefore? Priests must be simple souls.
Adam, remembering conversations with Thady Quill, said it was a quicksand and the home of paradox.
‘My tutor was a priest,’ he told the monsignor, ‘Father Tobin. He may have sympathized with my father’s contradictions. Anyway, he didn’t – perhaps couldn’t – force him to commit himself. He colluded in the fantasy that my papa was only waiting for a dispensation to come from Rome to marry my mother.’
Belcastel sighed. ‘For twelve years? Was anyone really taken in? Well, you were living in the backwoods.’
‘I think people were used to closing an eye.’
‘I see. Well, Rome, they may have told themselves, was far away, and canon lawyers likely to be – what? Over-conscientious? Corrupt? Many reasons could be thought up. Meanwhile, I would guess that Father – what’s his name? – was giving your father a chance to put things right. Hypocrisy can often be a form of charity. When it is, I am all in favour of it.’
‘I suppose she should have guessed?’
‘That he was paying court to another woman?’ A veteran of the confessional, Belcastel dismissed the idea. ‘It wasn’t in her interest to guess. Anyway, how can you let yourself believe that the person you love is a liar? Human love is a poor mirror of the divine, but we keep pursuing that life-redeeming image.’
‘Seen in a glass darkly?’
‘It’s the best explanation I know for irrational hope. Which reminds me,’ said the monsignor with a change of tone, ‘that I need you to take a letter to Latour. By hand. The post is sometimes pilfered and interfered with. Not by Republicans either, I may say. No, the bribes paid to have telegrams copied and letters opened and read are paid by those we think of as friends.’
***
There was a press of people trying to get into the church of St Sulpice, where Cardinal Lavigerie was expected to show his controversial face. To be sure, his purpose today was to raise funds, so he was unlikely to say anything piquant. Besides, he had been vindicated, hadn’t he? Perhaps he was a saint? Or – oddly, a Republican minister was said to have said this – a Richelieu? A man who in another era could have run the realm! Saintly or scandalous, it would be interesting to see him. He was a big man, big in every way, and could have posed for a portrait of the fat St Thomas Aquinas. The Divine Doctor!
Apologetic jostling melted any shyness people might have felt, and Adam was not surprised to see a lady smile at him. Then he recognized her.
‘Madame d’Armaillé!’
‘Monsieur Gould! This is Monsieur Gould, my cousin, Gisèle Coutelier! And you know Mademoiselle Litzelmann.’
Held back by the bottleneck at the church doors, the young women were caught in a crush which swayed like a turning tide. Inside, white-robed missionaries pushed and nudged. There were excited nuns here too in starched coifs, and ladies whose feathered hats recalled the equatorial lands where missionaries worked. Pinned to an easel were freehand maps of some of these territories and a picture of a black madonna. Tables piled with tracts were manned by seminarists, and black children were handing out small, gaudy, religious pictures tailored to fit between the pages of a missal. Some were three-dimensional with silk embroidery, done perhaps by nuns.
A priest whose skin was as crumpled as a much-used paper bag accepted several, fanned them like playing cards and thanked the black child in some African tongue. The boy looked puzzled, and the priest shrugged as he caught Adam’s eye. ‘Wrong language! There are so many!’ He laughed then, abruptly, sighting a priest he knew, whirled, pushed towards him, greeted him with an elated bear hug, and cried, ‘Twelve years since Ujiji. Twelve! Ah, mon père, there aren’t many of us from those days left!’
The other man kept nodding his head and saying, ‘Not many. No! We were the pioneers!’ Wiping their eyes, the two passed a single, grubby handkerchief back and forth. Above their heads the choir sang exultantly, then paused for a sermon.
‘Let’s sit!’ Discreetly vigorous, Madame d’Armaillé pushed into a small space on a pew, forcing those already there to move along. ‘Come,’ she told Adam. ‘There’s plenty of room.’ Her cousin and Mademoiselle Litzelmann had disappeared in the crowd. ‘Gisèle,’ she explained, ‘went to subscribe for us both to a mission magazine.’ At the high altar, surrounded by more black boys in lace surplices, a stout prelate with a hoarse rolling voice began explaining why the missions needed funds.
‘That’s His Eminence,’ whispered Madame d’Armaillé. Then, sotto voce, during a listing of those who had already made donations: ‘Do you know what Mademoiselle Litzelmann told me? She got an answer to a letter she wrote to Maupassant! Isn’t that good news? Do you think he’s softening towards her?’
‘No,’ Adam told her. ‘He never read it. We were afraid to upset him. It was I who wrote the answer to her letter. And signed it too. Didn’t she tell you?’
Madame d’Armaillé sighed. ‘No, but, come to think of it, I more or less wrote her letter. I dictated it.’
‘So you and I have been corresponding with each other!’
A muffled laugh united them. When a nun looked reproving, they hid it behind their hands.
Lavigerie, whose great white beard was shaped like the letter W, cried out, ‘The slavers kill ten natives for every one they catch. And then they kill the weak ones and the children if we don’t buy them off them. Yes, dearly beloved, I said “kill”.’ He paused before adding in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘That’s where your money goes. These,’ he waved at the small black altar boys, ‘will be tomorrow’s Christians.’
A smear of colour from stained-glass fell across the pew, reddening tears in Madame d’Armaillé’s eye, and Adam, shocked to find he was still smiling, blushed.
‘Oh,’ he heard her murmur, ‘I left my purse with Gisèle!’
‘There are places today,’ shouted the cardinal, ‘where you can buy several women for a goat, and a child for a packet of salt.’
Someone shook a collection plate in front of Adam, who put down more than he could afford, enough maybe for half a goat, then saw that his motive was vanity and a desire to impress Madame d’Armaillé. Never mind! Amounts, not motives were what mattered. Perhaps he should empty his pockets? But he needed what he had left to bring him to his next pay day. Oh God! Were children being eaten because he needed to ride the omnibus? He owed Thady Quill too for some shirts. Well, Thady would wait. It was all right to bilk one’s tailor, and, anyway, Thady was not so much his tailor as an impossible mix of mentor, vassal and possible future employer who, sooner or later, would get his money’s worth.
‘In the wilder parts,’ the cardinal was telling the congregation, ‘humans, not cowrie shells, are the preferred currency for making small purchases. I leave you to guess the ultimate fate of those we fail to buy.’
‘I can’t listen to this.’ Madame d’Armaillé stood up, grasped her skirts and stepped with nimble energy past the knees and feet of those in her way. ‘Excuse me. Sorry, but I might be sick. It’s nausea, morning sickness, you’ve got to let me pass.’
‘Is it really?’ Adam had followed her nervou
sly.
‘Of course not,’ she whispered. ‘How could I have morning sickness? I haven’t seen my husband in a year. He’s with the Force Publique in one of those awful places. I’m here to ask if anyone has heard anything about its officers. Some of these missionaries might have.’
‘I’m here to deliver a letter to one of them, Father de Latour. Maybe he can tell you something.’
But Father de Latour, when found in the sacristy, had no news. A bony, pale-eyed, sandy-haired man, he seemed to be run off his feet. Pocketing the letter Adam had brought from Monseigneur de Belcastel, he explained that he would have to wait until later to read it and that, as he was kept busy nowadays running the White Fathers’ House here in Paris, he no longer travelled to Africa. However, on seeing Madame d’Armaillé’s distress, he remembered that there were priests here who had recently returned from Boma at the mouth of the River Congo. They might have heard something.
‘I’ll send for them,’ he told her and dispatched several black children through the crowd to seek them out. ‘Meanwhile, Madame, you had better sit down. You don’t look at all well.’
The first man to appear was one of those who had earlier been weeping into a shared handkerchief. Father de Latour left him and two younger priests to sit in the sacristy with Adam and Madame d’Armaillé who had grown pale and kept pressing a handkerchief to her lips. The weepy priest, Father Augier, did all the talking, and it was soon clear that his gabbling was nervous and his nerves shot to bits. Shaking and shrugging, he said that when he left Boma there had been no news for months of the men in the Force Publique, and that they might well have come to grief, since the average Belgian – most FP officers were Belgian – lacked the stamina to make long treks. Back home they had been softened by the introduction of the tramway, so how could they survive in Africa? Piqued, Madame d’Armaillé protested that her husband had stamina, which prompted one of Augier’s companions to murmur audibly in his ear that he should not distress her. But Augier had the bit between his teeth. ‘Europeans,’ he rattled on, ‘die there like flies. They succumb to disease, drink, women and’ – here the companion gave him a visible kick – ‘manic rage! The furor africanus!’
The other priest now tried to intervene, but Augier, talking him down, raised his voice to list further risks, including the use of native soldiers. He was talking, bien entendu, of the rank and file. ‘The FP, sadly, has no choice. It relies on volunteers and impressment. Wives tag along, and so do attendants and dependants who of course pillage and ...’
‘I don’t think, mon père, that Madame wants to hear ...’
‘... orgies of cannibalism after every battle. The moral degradation is contagious.’
Madame d’Armaillé looked about to faint.
‘Some witnesses say the Belgians are now worse than the natives. You hear of women’s hands being chopped off ...’
Adam stood up.
‘... to get the gold bangles.’
‘Stop! Silence!’ Adam used a dog-trainer’s voice which was surprisingly effective. ‘You’d better get him away,’ he whispered to the other two, thinking that they and he might have been dealing with one of Dr Blanche’s patients. And perhaps the thought showed in his manner, for they did as he said. One furtively touched his forehead.
‘Our poor friend,’ he murmured, ‘has had appalling experiences.’
‘I understand!’ Adam turned back to tell Madame d’Armaillé, ‘I’ll see if I can find a cab and take you home.’ However, he was unsure about leaving her even briefly and felt relieved when Father de Latour reappeared to offer a loan of a carriage and promise to reassure Madame’s cousin and friend if they should happen to come looking for her.
At the church door, Adam and Madame d’Armaillé caught a last glimpse of Father Augier. He was dictating names to a seminarist who was writing them on a blackboard: ‘The Reverend Father Xavier Le Blanc,’ intoned Augier, who was too absorbed to notice them. ‘The Reverend Father Jacques Georgel, Father Louis Lebrice ...’ After each priest’s name, instead of a prayer for eternal light to shine on him, came the words: ‘killed and eaten, killed and eaten, killed and eaten’. Each time he said them, Father Augier’s lower teeth shot forward and bit the air. They were neat, yellowed teeth and reminded Adam of the ivory hair combs which had been appearing more frequently in shop windows since the interior of Africa had opened up. ‘Tués et mangés!’ the priest repeated, and his lips closed like a noose around the ‘u’ of ‘tués’.
Perhaps the seminarist saw Adam’s surprise, for he turned from the blackboard to ask, ‘Should I write “martyred” as well, Father?’
Augier’s head jerked upwards, ‘Yes. By all means do. They were all doubly martyred! Just going to that place is a martyrdom. Going there is a martyrdom and coming back is a miracle. Have you any red chalk?’
‘Red, father?’
‘Yes, fili mi, the liturgical colour for martyrs.’
Madame d’Armaillé’s face was still frozen, and Adam couldn’t tell whether she had heard. He felt relieved when they came out into the winter daylight. In its shine, her forehead had the clarity of mother of pearl.
***
After they had settled in the carriage and told the coachman where to go, her expression remained congealed, and he didn’t know whether to be as reticent as she. On impulse, he decided to break the silence. ‘Madame ...’
She managed a twist of a smile. ‘Oh, I think you can call me Danièle. Formality, after what we’ve just heard ...’ She waved it away.
‘Very well, and my name, as you know, is Adam.’
‘Adam!’ A spurt of nervous laughter ran out of power. ‘What a pity I have no apple to tempt you! Yet here we are in a carriage which must be the modern equivalent of sitting under the tree of knowledge.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s just that carriage-rides are seen as great occasions of sin, are they not, since the one in Madame Bovary by poor Maupassant’s friend? I imagine poor Mademoiselle Litzelmann – oh dear, why do I keep saying “poor”?’ She shivered, and he saw that the effort to make conversation was too much for her.
To soothe her, he said, ‘That priest wasn’t reliable.’
‘The Congo is a terrible place.’
‘But there are miracles.’
She said drearily. ‘I don’t think he believes in them, do you? His faith is full of holes.’ She fell silent for moments, then said thoughtfully, ‘So is mine. After all, my husband may have become morally degraded, as le Père Augier would say, or his body may have been divided among the Bantu.’
He was unsure what to say to this and, though raw with sympathy, feared to make her anguish worse. He would have liked to put an arm around her, but didn’t dare. He felt his hands open, then close. Being invited to call her Danièle was not, he guessed, an encouragement to make advances. On the contrary, it granted him a brotherly status, which in itself was a sort of taboo.
‘If someone ate his flesh ...’
Seeing his shock, she stopped, then, after perhaps a minute, added, ‘It’s all quite mad, isn’t it? Grotesque!’ Her tone was cooler now, and before he could speak, she said, ‘Wait, let me get my thought clear. You were in a seminary, yes? Someone said so. Then tell me: if we’re all to rise glorious and immortal on the last day, bodily, as we learned in the catechism, but someone has eaten Philibert’s flesh, who gets it on the last day? Do the Bantu have to cough it up?’
‘Madame ...’
‘Danièle!’
‘Danièle! Stop. You’re hurting yourself.’
‘Well,’ she said steadily, ‘if I had been tied up with a rope and wriggled out of it I would chafe my flesh, but then I’d be free. My mind is in a tangle, so I have to hurt myself.’
He thought: she’s telling herself that if she imagines the worst, it needn’t happen! To let her know he had guessed, he said: ‘You prefer magic to miracles? I remember when I did.’
‘When you were a child?’
‘Yes.
’
‘When I was one I didn’t think about either,’ she told him. ‘Until three years ago I was in boarding school where everything was quite sensible and predictable and things were controlled. Then they decided I knew enough and sent me home. But being an adult is not how I thought it would be. Nothing is predictable at all.’ Her laughter lasted a little too long.
Hysteria? He wondered whether morphine might have helped. If they had been in the maison de santé, he could have asked one of the doctors. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said humbly, ‘that you’re unhappy! I wish I could do something.’ This sounded pathetically weak. ‘Oh,’ he raged, ‘that sounds weak! And evasive!’
‘Is it?’
‘Maybe. But you must see that I daren’t take any initiative with you. And what can I do about your husband? If there were something I could do, I would. Yet it sounds like bombast to say so.’
‘Why are you timid?’ She turned to look fully at him, and her face now was flecked with red patches which contrasted with the polleny whiteness of her neck. Wondering if she was angry reminded him of Maupassant. He thought: if she is, the anger is a distraction. It’s to keep her from going to pieces.
‘Are you asking me,’ it occurred to him, ‘to help distract you? Tell me how?’
‘You are timid, aren’t you? Is it because you were too long in a seminary? Did they breed your instincts out of you?’
Controlling his own anger, he said, ‘So tell me what to do.’ He thought her pitiful, beautiful and infuriating.
‘Instincts, Adam! Summon them. Wake them up.’
‘I don’t have to. They’re as rampant as the Bantu’s but ...’
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