Adam Gould

by Julia O'Faolain

  Adam and Danièle waited for the rest to drift off, then stood looking at each other.

  ‘So you’re to work with us after all!’ Flatly. Waiting.

  Perhaps he had looked forward too much to seeing her? She was less intimidating than in his memory; there were shadows under her eyes and she had dressed almost like a nun. Might she be in mourning? Surely he would have heard if the crusading husband were dead? Of course he would! Besides, if she were a widow, she would not be here. No, indeed, she would then be free to seek friendships with men of her own station, and his moment would not recur. So: ‘I hope,’ he said quite sincerely, ‘that you have had reassuring news of your husband.’

  She said she had not, but that Father de Latour had brought reports about the situation in the Upper Congo. ‘As you see, he is already here.’ She nodded towards the other side of the drawing room where the priest was talking to Madame Blanche. His birdlike profile moved observantly, keeping the company in view. ‘He is to show them to me after lunch.’

  ‘And you are seriously going to learn to be a mental nurse?’

  ‘Why not? It is a useful skill.’

  ‘Indeed.’ He thought: how curious it was that she should have come to this asylum, then: how curious that anyone should. This was a parenthesis of a place, a limbo. The reflection saddened him. Only in a limbo could he and she come close. With sly temerity, and at a rarely acknowledged depth of himself, he believed the opposite of this, but hedged his hopes for fear of a massive disappointment. His dwindling religion had left him with a residual habit of using small mental tricks and rituals to keep his feelings in control. Judiciously dosed dips into a layer of hidden optimism buoyed him up like a drug.

  The reason he was late was that a German doctor had been examining Maupassant. He had not much French, so Adam had been sent to beg him in English to temper his Teutonic thoroughness and join the company at table.

  He had found Dr F. in Guy’s apartment, making excitable entries in a notebook. He showed these to Adam. ‘Is the French correct?’ he wanted to know.

  Adam read: ‘thick, short nose; low forehead; brutally sensual mouth; brow prominent as in a Cro-Magnon skull. Erotic dementia an early symptom of mental decline.’

  ‘I need to discuss this with some of the students at the Hospital of the Salpêtrière.’

  ‘Me-eh-eh ...’

  The murmur trickled into inaudibility. Guy, slumped in an armchair in a kind of torpor, must have been sedated. Baron was holding his hand.

  ‘His are the typical characteristics of a sensualist,’ said the doctor, whose own characteristics were a small, goatish beard, pale eyes and a skull so flat at the back that it looked vertically scalped. Europe, he confided, France to the fore, was sinking into degeneracy, and writers like Maupassant had led the way. A man ‘predisposed towards a cellular deficiency triggered by debauchery’, the patient was now in the throes of leucoencephalitis. ‘Read his work,’ challenged the doctor. ‘Read what he wrote about smells. He could write whole paragraphs on a topic which is at best trivial and at worst obscene. Yet he lavished talent on this least noble of the senses and his skill testifies against him. His revelling in morbid sensations points to cerebral exhaustion.’

  Guy’s eyelids flickered. Could he see? Or hear? Adam hoped not. He wished, perversely, that Guy would give one of his fierce cries of revolt.

  Dr F. adjusted his lorgnette, stared at the comatose patient and shook his head. ‘This,’ he said disdainfully, ‘is a man whom the French public idolized! You’re not French, are you? No. No French blood? Well, you may depend upon it, his disease progressed from the nerves to the white substance of the brain. The decay is a moral one and emblematic of our time. Sensations squeeze out the healthy feelings which keep families and countries together.’

  ‘The gong has sounded for lunch,’ Adam told him. ‘The doctors will be eager to discuss all this with you.’

  But Doctor F. said he could hardly tell Frenchmen that his plan was to write an account of French degeneracy. ‘Sensual excess,’ he kept murmuring in English, as Adam herded him down stairs and corridors to the dining room, ‘and drug abuse played their part. Misogyny too! Yes, young man, libertines are misogynists!’

  Merde, thought Adam, remembering how much poor Guy had hated Prussians. He should not have been exposed to this.

  At table, the guests flicked open their napkins and started sniffing the aromas being released from silver covers with a gusto likely to confirm Dr F.’s opinion of French sensual excess.

  After the meal Danièle and le Père de Latour disappeared upstairs with Monseigneur de Belcastel. A little later, passing the monsignor’s door, Adam thought he heard sobbing, but was unable to pause as he was still with Dr F. who had asked to be shown the bathroom where some patients, including Maupassant, were given therapeutic showers and baths.

  ***

  ‘There can be no invasion of privacy here,’ Latour told Danièle. ‘Letters from the priests of our order are addressed to our whole community and have no secrets. However, I have folded these in such a way as to cover sections which can be of no interest to you. I shall attempt no censorship, but, for your own sake, you should remember that news from the Congo is rarely reliable, and that if you read something disturbing in one letter, it may well be contradicted by another. The monsignor and I are going for a walk, so that you may read in peace.’

  Danièle sat at the monsignor’s desk, drew the folded sheets of paper towards her, closed her eyes, fished one out and read,

  ... Brussels was not, by all accounts, ready for a break with the Arabs, so peace was preserved and only broke down when the Force Publique forced the Bantu vassal of an Arab leader to defect and join it. The ensuing troubles led to two European officers who were resident in the Arab town of Kasongo (population 30,000) being turned overnight into hostages. The fear is that they may now have perished.

  Here a fold in the page interrupted the narrative and, on opening it out, Danièle found that the writer had turned his thoughts to heaven. He and his fellow priests were recruiting the hundred or so freed and baptized slaves who lived with them to help pray for a satisfactory outcome to all this. The next letter she picked confined itself to a description of a mission village.

  Dipping into the papers was like a game of divination. A frightening one! Might Philibert be one of the two officers at Kasongo? No. When a letter yielded up the – now dead – men’s names, his wasn’t one of them. And it was with shamed relief that she learned of how their hands had been cut off and sent to the Arab leader of that town. At about the same time, it turned out, the Force Publique, ignoring ‘impossible’ orders from Brussels to restore peace, had massacred three thousand men.

  ‘The Christians were implacably bloodthirsty and the battle terrifying,’ declared a missionary whose handwriting might have shrunk from terror, so tiny were his words. Perhaps the taut neatness of his lettering was an attempt to keep order in the one, small area where he felt confidently in control?

  One of our priests – Father Aubert – who went to comfort the dying, found that the losses were almost entirely on the other side. Our Bantu allies, whose defection from the Arabs had caused all the trouble, were looting and worse. When he saw a group cooking a human leg, he begged an officer from the Force Publique to interfere, but was told that we must pretend not to see since we were in no position to object. We hadn’t the power, and anyway, everyone knew that it was to get meat that they had agreed to fight. Besides, these practices were, the wretch – a Belgian – added, hygienic, and left the battlefield clean. And indeed, Father Aubert could not but notice that as fast as the Arabs and their vassals were killed, the Bantu ate them up.

  The European officers are cockahoop at their victory, and it must be said that it was clearly their eagerness for the spoils of battle rather than any distaste for the slave trade which finally led to the break with the Arab slavers. Brussels didn’t want this, but God surely did, and, though His Belgian agents are far from
being in any way admirable – indeed many of our Bantu converts are more pious – the outcome is to be welcomed.

  As Danièle riffled through a bundle of crisply folded letters, phrases flashed out at her. Some meant little. Two or three made her tremble: ‘further battles may ...’; ‘skulls hung up like hats’; ‘commission to be made on the ivory one buys’; ‘captured Arab towns with orchards, gardens, fine furniture, silks and amenities such as the officers had not seen for years...’; ‘Thousand and One Nights ...’; ‘one officer, Philibert d’Armaillé...’

  On sliding that letter from its bundle, she learned that a party of French officers had brought gifts to a mission station along with news of friends known to its priests. Among those mentioned – she smoothed the paper and drew breath before reading – was, yes, her Philibert, who had been left in charge of a captured Arab town where, though there had been considerable danger for a while, there was none for now, and ‘the brave Philibert, when last seen, was living like a pasha, eating like a milord and enjoying the favours of several pretty Arab women ...’ The case-hardened priest hardly bothered to deplore this tasting of the Mohammedan warriors’ paradise. Neither could Danièle. Poor, hot-headed Philibert deserved a few houris. At least, thank heaven, he was alive! And apparently intact! Indeed, hale and hearty! He had, said the report, fought gallantly and could, along with quite a number of his fellow officers, expect to be decorated. Money, moreover ...

  She put away the letter.

  The sobs which Adam had heard through the door had almost immediately turned to laughter, signalling – oh, relief, then deliverance from the need for relief. Pain. Anger, and a slow recognition of its absurdity. She felt released! Almost lighthearted. ‘Pretty Arab women’ indeed! Well, that was Philibert! That was how he was! It was as well to know it, and useless to take it to heart! ‘Oh dear!’ she thought, ‘O mon Dieu!’ And this time the blubbering and chuckling merged.

  A little later, overcome by a great wave of fatigue, she folded her arms on the monsignor’s desk, let her head sink on them and fell into a remedial sleep. When Adam, who had finally finished with Dr F., knocked at the door, she sat up and managed to ask calmly: ‘Is there somewhere in this madhouse where we too can be mad?’

  ‘You and I?’

  ‘If you’d like that?’

  Wordlessly, he drew her after him out of the door and upstairs to another floor. He had, he explained, access to all the keys.

  ***

  An hour later they had hardly spoken more than thirty or so words, but their fever had peaked, been assuaged, then peaked again. The air around them felt used up, and their skin was slick with sweat. A clock struck five.

  Adam broke from their embrace. ‘We’d better go down.’

  ‘Yes.’ She turned. ‘Can you help with this?’ It was the thin neckband whose fastening had become entangled in wispy curls at the nape of her neck. Though his fingers were at first all thumbs, he got it free, then took this for a promising omen. Perhaps he could free her from other attachments too. He was still keyed up.

  ‘Do you feel as if we’d passed into another dimension?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can we live in it for a while?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  They were in a room reserved for inmates, where thick, convex bars bellied back from the window to prevent suicide attempts. Looking out, they could see nothing of the foreground, only a pale-gold horizon frayed by the tops of distant trees.

  She said, ‘Our horizon is in a cage!’

  ‘We mustn’t think like that.’

  Drawing her to him, he examined her face. It was calm.

  Already the bed on which they had been lying had been smoothed in case a maid should come in after they left. They had also, while exchanging few words, straightened each other’s clothes and hair – the room had no mirror – and agreed that she should leave first. If she ran into someone who wondered what she was doing on this floor, she could claim to have got lost on this her first day. But, as she was unlocking the door, he pulled her back in.

  ‘You said we should be mad,’ Adam reproached. ‘I don’t want you to feel that. What I feel is that I am saner than I’ve ever been. I feel whole for the first time in years.’

  ‘In how many years?’ Teasing. ‘With whom were you whole before?’

  ‘My mother when I was quite small. Am I ridiculous? Is what I feel now an illusion? Don’t tease me.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘This has to be serious. If not, let us stop now. I couldn’t bear for you to disappear again. It’s too painful. Do you know that it has been the best part of three months since we met?’

  ‘Do you want a promise?’

  ‘Do you keep promises?’

  ‘Ah you don’t trust me! You’re thinking, “She’s an adulteress; by being here she’s breaking a promise”! Well it’s not quite like that. Philibert ...’

  ‘I don’t want to know about him.’

  ‘But you must! How else can I explain how much of me is free? You say you feel whole. Well, I don’t and ...’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How can I tell? You have to let me feel my way away from him and towards you.’

  ‘But you might go back to him?’

  ‘If he needed me I’d have no choice. Wait. Think.’ Putting two fingers on his mouth. ‘Suppose he were in need. Ill, wounded ...’

  ‘Mad? I remember. That’s why you’re taking up mental nursing?’

  ‘Now you’re being cruel.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Maybe we shouldn’t talk. Words are dangerous. You see I am feeling a bit mad – yes, I know I said we shouldn’t say that, but I was thinking of the sort of madness which afflicts people here. My madness – jealousy – is allowed for by the law. Do you know that if I killed you and pleaded mine was a crime passionnel, I might escape the guillotine?’ Playfully, he plucked the red thread from her fingers and held it across his throat. ‘After the way you tormented me!’ He whipped it away. ‘Whereas people like, say, Guy ...’

  ‘Maybe their feelings are real too? You asked whether I kept promises. Well, tell me: if you had made a promise to one of them, would you keep it?’

  ‘You mean to ... Guy?’

  ‘Yes. Would you?’

  ‘I can’t answer.’

  ‘Don’t look so upset!’

  ‘There’s a reason. I’ll explain about it another time. Why did you ask about Guy?’

  ‘Because not all promises remain binding. I was thinking of mine to Philibert who – no, let me speak – has not kept his to me. That is a kind of release. Isn’t it? Or maybe it isn’t? Perhaps I’m deluding myself.’

  ‘Do you expect him to consider any of this when he comes back?’

  ‘I’m not thinking of what he will consider.’

  ‘Can we put off thinking about it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He checked the corridor. ‘Quick! The coast is clear.’

  She left, and some minutes later he went up to the attics then, by a roundabout route, down to the kitchens to talk to the cook. Elation made his knees rise as though he were levitating or were a soldier going smartly through his paces: up, up they came as he sped along corridors. Up almost to his chest! This time he must not let happiness disappear as had happened when he was a child and taken by surprise. Sternly he warned himself – the sternness was ballast for fly-away hopes – to ensure that each of the two of them always knew what the other was thinking. Could this be done?

  He thought: I haven’t told her I love her. The word frightened him. To love was to risk being hurt and hurting others. Then he remembered that it was she, worrying about her husband, who had reminded him of that. Sensible girl!

  While telling the cook about two extra guests who would be coming for the evening meal, he marvelled to hear himself talk with cogent sobriety about sorrel soup and plum compote and whether to spit-roast a few extra plover. At a side table two menservants were cleaning silver and discussing the Panama scandal. One quot
ed the newspapers, and the words ‘man of straw’ tripped Adam’s attention. Is that what I am, he worried, a man of no substance who can offer her no future? Never mind! Tant pis! My straw is dry! I’ll burn well! Maybe I’ll set the Seine on fire? I must remind the monsignor of his offer to find me a position.

  He felt tipsy, though he had drunk nothing.

  Crossing the hall, he passed François Tassart who turned away and refused to acknowledge his greeting. Adam wondered whether to stop and mollify him, then reflected that this could take a while and that he had fallen behind with his day’s tasks. The couple who were to dine here were old friends of Guy’s who would want to greet him if this was at all possible. Best go and find out from Dr Blanche if the patient was in any condition to be seen.

  However, when he reached the doctor’s drawing room the visitors were already there, drinking lemonade and exchanging reminiscences. The wife, whose parents had rented a seaside villa one summer in Étretat, Normandy, where Guy’s mother then lived, had sparkling memories of him as a golden lad. He was employed in Paris at the time and only came for visits, but she had caught glimpses of him, wearing stripy maillots and straw hats, pulling jauntily on his oars, then, as his boat shot forward, flourishing them in bright dripping arcs. Harnessed rainbows! Leaping prisms! She had been ten years old and dazzled.

  ‘He’d have been this young man’s age.’ The husband, nodding at Adam, was possibly feeling his mortality and touching the keys in his trouser pocket – iron for luck! – while his wife’s mental snap-shots of Guy ricocheted along the surface of their minds: muscular and proud, a lost image.

  Another she produced was of Guy putting or pretending to put a small frog down the front of a lady’s dress – a favourite trick.

  ‘Then he tried to persuade me that he had found it in my pinafore pocket.’ She shuddered comically as her listeners imagined the creature’s frantic pulsing and the fragility of its skin. Guy himself, as Blanche and Adam knew, was now frequently as frantic as that frog.