‘Memories!’ the young wife sighed. ‘Is it sadder to have or to lose them, as he must have done? Will he know us, do you think?’
Blanche could not say.
Talk turned to Guy’s racy novels which her mother had forbidden her to read because, being sold in railway stations, they were disparaged as ‘littérature de gare’.
In Adam’s mind, the word gare – which also meant ‘beware’ – began to flash and redden. He was remembering Carmen’s cry: ‘If you love me, beware!’ But he had had earlier warnings about love.
***
When he was twelve his papa, who was spending more and more time in London, seemed hardly to come home at all. Oh, reasons were given: the worst harvest in living memory, tenants’ demands for rent reductions, agitators’ threats, rumours of violence and attempts by Papa and his friends in Westminster to bring in new, mollifying legislation. These things would be settled there, not here. If at all. Adam’s tutor and his mother shrugged. We must all be patient, Adam! Just as soon as he could, Papa would be back home and would expect him to have made progress with his studies. His Cicero and, yes, algebra too ... No, we’re not just saying this! Of course he’d be back as soon as he could and of course he loved Adam. He loved us all and was working for our futures. That was why he stayed away. It was a paradox. Did Adam know what a paradox was? It was a seemingly self-contradictory truth! Seemingly only! Well then!
Father Tobin traced Papa’s journey to Westminster on a map. His pointer slid across the prawn-pink cluster of the British Isles, showing Dragon England, with pronged coastline, chasing the flayed, scampering, bear-cub shape of Ireland. The pointer then skipped to the violet hexagon of France: a Catholic country. Well, less Catholic than it had been, but congenial. It had rules we could understand.
‘It’s Catholicism with a small “c”!’ said Father Tobin, who seemed to see this as an advanced and on the whole noble state of mind in which you absorbed the best of your opponents’ ideals. It was not like Protestantism. No, nor like anything in these mist-sodden islands. It was a way of thinking which kept you on your toes! You could so easily be seen as a heretic.
‘A paradox?’
‘That’s it!’ said the priest happily, then grew glum as he remembered that, in his youth, he had not kept on his toes and had been seen as a heretic. He taught Adam to speak and sing in French, which Adam did boisterously for he was seething with eager, impatient energy and missed his father who had taught him to jump double ditches and unreliable dry-stone walls which fell apart behind him. His mother didn’t like his doing this by himself, but he did it anyway, for he was afraid of growing soft, living as he did now among priests’ and women’s petticoats. Sometimes there was barbed wire hidden in the walls which sprang up when one of the stones fell. Maybe the agitators were to blame? If a second horseman arrived just as the wire rose, it could trip his mount and bring it down. Adam had seen this happen and had seen horses’ and riders’ limbs broken. The horses had had to be put down, which was sad, but, in this part of the country, if you neither rode nor raced, you grew dull.
***
Guy had been sedated. Why did they think he didn’t know? Syringes, drinks, tablets, food and, for all he knew, flowers, carried secret drugs into his body and had peculiar effects. Just now he couldn’t talk. His tongue had swollen and seemed paralysed. It filled his mouth and gagged him. He could think though, and judge what the spectators in this one-man zoo were thinking. Here were two old friends – friends? – pretending to be distressed for him. Maybe they were distressed? Probably they were! But, woven through their distress, was a steely thread of relief that Fate, for now, had picked off someone other than themselves. He saw it in the glitter of their eyes. He remembered feeling it himself when his brother, Hervé, went mad and was locked up and screamed, just as Guy, who had had no choice but to do this, was leaving him in the madhouse: ‘You’re the madman of our family, Guy. You, not me!’ Terrifying! Guy had fled in shame, pity and fright. The pity was for Hervé. The shame and fright were for himself. Later, in Morocco, where he had gone shortly afterwards on his yacht, a madman in an asylum he had visited – why had he? – yelled that everyone was mad, including the sultan.
Just as well his tongue was the way it was, or who knew what he might have yelled! He felt as though someone had stuck a penis into his mouth. Just as well to be gagged! If he shouted, he might shout for his mother. ‘Mère!’ was the word he must stop himself yelling or, if he failed to stop himself, must at once disguise. If he did not, some well-meaning busybody might think he wanted her to visit him.
Just as well to be gagged!
After the doctor took away his visitors – ‘Goodbye, Guy,’ they cried with false good cheer, ‘we’ll come again!’ – Gould came in with a new nurse called Danièle Something-or-other who said, ‘Good evening, Monsieur Guy, can we get you anything?’ Nurses were of more interest than visitors. At least they’d be here tomorrow, which visitors would not, and this one was worth looking at. She had the flesh of a Flemish Venus. Curdy. Firm. Probably salty with sweat. He imagined the taste of it on his tongue, his poor paralysed tongue! Curls like licks of flame nibbled her neckline and a flush reddened her fingertips. Ears like small shells. He had known so many girls like that – so many that in memory they all fused, then scattered like a shoal of silver sprats or like the earth which would soon be flung on his coffin. Like himself when he rotted inside it. Everything now reminded him of death. Not that he minded. On the contrary. What was that line of verse about sleep and death being kindly sisters? With luck one might lead him to the other. He mustn’t be buried in a lead coffin. No. He wanted to reunite as fast as possible with Mother Earth.
Mère – deddde!
***
When Danièle left the room, Guy seemed to wake up. Lying quite flat and staring at the ceiling, he murmured fretfully, ‘Gould!’
‘I’m here. Are you uncomfortable?’
‘Uncomfortable? I’m in the Circle of the Envious, watching your dallying.’
‘Mine?’
‘Dillydallying with the Flemish filly! The one who said she’d just come from Brussels. Do you know what Dante did to the Envious?’
‘Sewed up their eyelids.’
‘I knew you’d know.’ There was a pause, then: ‘Gould. I want to ask you something urgent. Wait. You’re not going?’
‘I must. Dinner will be starting any minute, and I have still to talk to the coachman. Sorry. We’ll talk tomorrow.’
‘You’re dodging me, aren’t you?’
‘Only for now. Sorry, Guy, I’ll send up Baron.’
‘Gould! Adam ...’
‘Here’s Baron now. He’ll get whatever you need.’
***
News came that Adam’s father was coming at last. With a house party. Oh? Yes, so the place had to be got ready and, as there might not be space for everyone, Adam and his mother were to move out and into the gate lodge. Several of the rooms in the main house were too damp to be used. Those leaks in the roof had grown worse. Besides, the guests would bring their own servants. And a cook was to come from Dublin.
‘So we’ll be moving out. Just while they’re here.’
‘Who are they?’ Adam wondered. ‘The guests. Do we know them?’
It turned out that they did. A year ago the same group had stayed in a castle some thirty or so miles from here, and the two households had met at a point-to-point race in which Adam’s father was riding. Some days later they had met again for a picnic. There was a girl called Kate who was five years older than Adam. English.
And now he remembered. She had been surprisingly bold, perhaps because, though not quite adult, she wasn’t a child either and could shuttle between selves. Her hair wasn’t up yet, nor her skirts down, but she told him that she was obliged to be ladylike and begged him to lay a bet for her without her mother knowing. Nobody would object to a boy talking to a bookie.
‘You are a brick!’ she commended while slipping him money and a p
iece of paper with the horse’s name. ‘But you mustn’t tell anyone it’s for me.’
‘I’ll happily oblige,’ he told her, looking at the paper, ‘but maybe you should have another think.’ For her bet was on a horse which he, knowing the local form, told her had positively no chance. ‘I could give you a better tip.’
‘Really?’
‘Honour bright!’
She took his advice and, when she won, wanted him to keep some of the winnings. A tip?
‘I accepted yours!’
He was offended. So she laughed and dared him to help her take a bottle of wine from one of the hampers that her party had brought along.
‘To celebrate! We’ll need a corkscrew too, and glasses. I’ll hide the wine while you go back for those. Don’t let yourself be caught.’
He managed this and they drank it secretly behind a haystack well out of sight of both their mothers. Kate had learned to like wine in France where, she told him, even nuns drank. She had been in school there for two years. So she and Adam had France in common and he, emboldened by drinking, sang her sotto voce one of Father Tobin’s French songs. Why had she gone there, he asked. To France?
‘Oh, my mamma says a plain girl like myself needs every accomplishment. She sent me to Austria too. The other girls in the school, though, had a more likely explanation. They said that all our mothers wanted to be rid of us so that they could pretend to be years younger than they were. Having big, hulking daughters around would cramp their style.’ She swung her long braid over her shoulder. ‘It’s also why my mamma won’t let me put this up.’
‘I don’t think you’re plain.’ This wasn’t quite true. He hadn’t thought it until she said it, but now saw that there was something of the cottage loaf about her knob of a nose, wide, puffy cheeks and small, currant eyes. Plain! But lively! It made her easier to talk to. Less of an adult, somehow. ‘Even if you were,’ he comforted her, ‘you could develop into a swan.’
‘It’s nice of you to say so, but I’m resigned, and it won’t matter. I’m rich enough to get a husband.’
***
‘If proof were needed,’ said Belcastel, ‘that, in a time of change and in the absence of a tightly organized religious institution, men slip into folly, we’d find it in the example of poor Sauvigny who, according to Latour’s latest telegram, has got wind of our plans. It seems that he’s making wild threats and telling everyone in Brussels that he regrets letting his niece come to live in this coven of traitors. Luckily, he’s to sail for Africa shortly. His appointment has been confirmed.’
‘In what way are we traitors?’ Adam hoped his face didn’t betray him.
The two were again strolling in the grounds where the storm had left the grass flattened and slightly mangy after a previous dry spell.
‘I’m the traitor,’ Belcastel told him. ‘Why include yourself? Unless ...’ He paused. ‘I hope you haven’t – have you – fallen in love with his niece? Surely you haven’t had time? Traitor though I be, I’d rather the vicomte didn’t see me as something worse. All this bears out my belief in the need for order. He’s unhinged now and may well charge over here like a rogue elephant before leaving for the Dark Continent. Father de Latour, who makes it his business to know everything, knew that there was some bee in the Sauvigny bonnet, but didn’t guess that there might be two! Mind you, Latour sends good news as well. We can soon leave this place. He has found premises for our newspaper, which is to be called – provisionally – The Rallying Cry. Be careful, meanwhile, what you say to Sauvigny’s niece. I shan’t preach morality to you, Adam, but I do preach prudence. For my sake as well as your own. Above all, don’t mention the money her uncle brought.’
They walked for a while in silence, then Belcastel said, ‘Forgive my asking but, sooner or later, everything here reaches one’s ears and it has reached mine that you’ve heard from Ireland. I’ve been wondering whether you would like to make a quick visit there? I could advance you the money. You can take it from the account held in your name.’
Adam thanked him, but said no. It was true, he conceded, that he had had a letter telling him that his father was ill of a wasting disease and had expressed a desire to see him. The letter was from his father’s doctor. It would be the Christian thing, the doctor had written, to let bygones be bygones and visit the sick man. There was an implication that it would be in Adam’s interest to come, and this – plus the fact that his father did not himself write – made him recoil. He could imagine the gathering of his father’s barren wife’s clan and the sort of looks they would give him: falsely welcoming, anxious and – in the case of his old tutor, Father, now Bishop, Tobin – timidly congratulatory. No!
Why, he had wondered, did the doctor write? Was there some hidden motive or – surprising him, the language he had heard murmured in kitchens and pantries as a child erupted in his memory with the needed phrase – uisce fá thalamh, underground water? Meaning an intrigue? Whoa, Adam! Halt there! Suspicion dries the soul.
‘Thank you, but no,’ he told the monsignor. ‘I feel more filial affection for you than I have felt for a long time for my blood father.’
Though this was true, his mind drifted away from the monsignor’s gratified reply. For the spurned summons had upset him and was almost certainly why he kept dreaming and daydreaming of his sad, disabling past.
***
‘Do you want to lay another bet? On my father’s horse?’
‘Will it win?’
‘It’s young, so we’re not sure. You’d be betting on him really. He can ride anything. He usually wins.’
‘All right then. Put it on for me. Wait though. Have one of these.’ She produced peppermints. ‘So they won’t smell the drink from you. I’m afraid I’ve been leading you into bad ways. Can you walk straight? I hope you won’t start falling about and embarrassing me?’
‘You drank most of the bottle,’ he told her. ‘Besides, I’m used to drinking altar wine.’
‘Is it awful?’
‘No, Father Tobin buys his own. I think he knows I help myself and feels it’s educational for me to drink good stuff.’
‘He sounds all right.’
‘He is.’
Kate was all right too. When she asked him how old he was, he lied. When they said goodbye, they agreed that they might meet again next year – meaning now.
***
‘Why do we have to stay in the lodge? Are we to take our meals up at the house? Some of our meals?’
‘That’s what I was going to tell you,’ his mother answers. ‘The plans have changed. You are to stay with your cousins instead. Beyond in the valley. Your papa’s is to be a working holiday, you see, and the London guests are political allies. English ones. He wants them to meet his friends here and work out how best to deal with the land agitation. It will be confidential.’ She says all this as if she had learned it by rote. She even closes her eyes. ‘He won’t,’ she finishes quickly, ‘want to be distracted during the discussions.’
‘Will those be going on even at lunch and dinner? Every day?’
‘Yes. While his guests are here. The work is pressing.’
‘But are their wives not coming? Will there be no children? I could help with them.’ He is thinking about croquet games and race meetings, but doesn’t ask about Kate.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You must know, Mama, if they’re going to need all that space. Are you going to be staying here? Where will you have your meals?’
His mother turns away. She has begun to cry.
It is impossible to ask about this. Too painful. His pain for her – the knowledge is dawning in him – lurks in a tender, speechless part of himself which has intuited everything. Maybe it is what people call the heart? He distrusts it. If he were smaller, he would put his arms around her and console them both. As it is, fear of inflaming her hurt confuses him. He tiptoes away.
Later, though, she tells him that his father plans to ride over to the cousins’ place and spend a day with
him just as soon as he can. Maybe early next week. He wants to have a long chat with him, man to man. About what? She claims not to know and, again, looks dangerously close to tears.
‘She’s ill,’ her maid warns Adam quietly. ‘She’s not herself. Don’t upset her.’
‘Ill how?’
‘Women’s troubles. She’ll live. She’s just feeling a bit low, so don’t keep questioning her.’
But who can he question? Or upset? Nobody. Father Tobin has, quite unprecedentedly, gone to visit his mother, and his parish duties have been taken over by a substitute priest.
***
As an amateur and a lady, Danièle’s status at the maison de santé meant that she made her own rules. She thought briefly of refusing the privileges granted her by Dr Blanche, then saw that she needed them if she and Adam were to have any time together. So, her room was in a different wing from the dormitories where the other nurses lived; her hours were short; she ate with Adam and the doctors and didn’t wear a uniform.
‘Which means that Dr Meuriot won’t take me seriously, I shall never earn a nurse’s diploma, and he’ll be rid of me the minute Blanche retires. See what I’m sacrificing!’
This was both a joke and not a joke, because the future was a taboo topic.
Rumours of further battles in the Upper Congo made any hopes that Adam and she might have of prolonging their love affair seem murderous. The usual promises were impossible. They could say ‘I love you’, but not ‘I shall be with you next year’. Being hedged into the present made their sense of it fragile and avid. They had to be furtive. They walked together in the grounds, but not too often. They made their separate, circuitous ways to hiding places – the apple loft, empty apartments, her room, his – then came back separately. This took time. They had not been out of the asylum grounds since her arrival. Gossip could so easily trickle back to Brussels. Shame heightened their need.
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