‘I hate skulking. I wish we could be together openly. Even for a bit. Nowhere’s safe though. Certainly not Passy village, let alone Paris. Watering towns are the worst. Spas. Watching for illicit couples is their prime sport.’
‘We could visit Ireland. Hire horses and gallop on a beach. Some are quite empty except for seals and gulls! If you’ve got the stamina you could swim in the very cold, very buoyant Atlantic.’
‘Could we pretend to be married?’
‘Maybe we could rent something. Play house. I haven’t lived in a private house since I was twelve.’
Sometimes they studied the papers, less now from interest in Guy, who was no longer news, than to see whether the world’s excitements might affect their own, and whether impropriety, being widespread, had become acceptable. They hated having to hide what felt like a state of steamy grace. Infringing a rule might have turned them into anarchists, if they hadn’t known the risks of thinking one’s own eye wiser than the world’s.
Falling foul of that gaze held menace.
‘We’d best be careful of Tassart. He was lurking outside Guy’s room when you were telling me about how he begged you to kill him before he got any worse. When I came out of the room Tassart gave me a murderous look.’
***
So Adam’s clothes are piled into a box and put into the dog-cart, and he and they are dropped off at his mother’s relatives, who live in a remote, highland farmhouse by a black, reedy lake which, until now, he has only visited on fishing expeditions or to bring medicine when someone was ill. The household consists of his grandmother, who in her old age has reverted to speaking exclusively in Gaelic and to whom he is therefore not required to speak, his cousins and their exhausted-looking Ma and Da. The da – his Uncle Patch – is his mother’s older brother but looks old enough to be her father, and the whole family has kippered skin and mottled shins from sitting too close to the turf fire.
The cousins are wiry and numerous. He forgets how numerous. Eleven? More? Two died. Some are girls. There is always a damp toddler and often a new baby. All have hair the colour of wet hay and none use handkerchiefs. Their eyelashes are transparent; their pale, blue-veined arms are dappled with freckles and dirt, and, as they wear each other’s hand-me-downs, it is easy to mistake one for another and give offence. Adam rarely sees and hardly knows them. Or rather he sees them regularly, but only in certain situations. They come to the house at Christmas to receive presents and at Hallowe’en to play the apple-games on which they impose their sly, clannish truculence. He greets them – sometimes warily and from afar – at races and fairs. He has on occasion caught lice from them. But till now he has never stayed in their farmhouse which is cramped, under-furnished and, somehow, accusing. Trying not to show that he feels this, he has often stood by the door in their dim kitchen or sat perched on an edge of its settle, smiling and answering questions about his parents’ health while willing himself to ignore the sour smells of mildewed thatch and dung. He has tried to think that the farm’s remoteness explains the uneasiness he feels in his cousins’ company; while fearing that this has less to do with miles than with pity and his discomfort at feeling it. He has squeamishly tried not to feel discomfited by their having neither running water nor a privy nor by the smells of pigswill in their clothes. The lines on their palms are etched with emphasis, as though fate’s soiled network held them tighter than it does him. Well, it does, doesn’t it? Once, as if in defiance of this, three of them forced him to watch them torture a cat, and though he has had nightmares about the incident for years – the cat’s tail was slowly and inefficiently hacked off with a blunt shearing knife – he has never felt able to tell anyone about it. There is plenty of brutality around his father’s stables too, but it is random and inexpressive compared to the cousins’ act, which seemed malevolently aimed at proving something to him. Proving what? Their strength? The opposite? He can’t work it out. Sometimes, in his nightmare, one of them is the cat, and he holds the shearing knife. All this is disturbing. Now, sleeping head to toe in the same bed with three of them, he is confronted by another conundrum.
‘You,’ says the one called Bat – short for Bartholomew – ‘don’t belong in the big house. You belong here.’
A test? How can he answer? Adam tries teasing, ‘Are you claiming me? Should I be flattered?’
But Bat is grave and not quite friendly. ‘I’m tellin’ you how things are. You don’t belong there. Ask yer da if you don’t believe us. You’re not one of them. You’re one of us. You’re a Gould, but you’re our kind of Gould!’
Fully aware now of malice – a familiar miasma – Adam, as a way of ignoring it, begins boisterously tickling a small, giggling cousin into near-hysteria, and, by dint of horseplay, hides his unease. He is afraid to answer, much less argue, lest there be some furtive and horrid truth to what Bat just said. He doesn’t believe there is. Not really, but – well, why did his mother cry? Why is he here? How many kinds of Gould are there? Don’t ask, he tells himself. Never look weak! This is animal instinct. He trusts it. And laughs cheerily aloud.
‘Your ma used to sleep in this bed.’
‘Not always alone neither!’
Meaning what? Again, don’t ask. At best the answer would be, ‘Nothing! But you thought it did! You’ve got a dirty mind!’
Has he?
To stop this baiting, Adam jumps onto Bat’s chest, puts a bolster over his face and holds it there until a bigger cousin joins in and – what is this one’s name? Owen? Dinny? – subdues Adam by painfully twisting his arms.
‘That’ll teach ya manners!’ pants Owen-or-Dinny, ‘since they didn’t do it in the big house! Teach ya not to come the nob with us!’
Has he ‘come the nob’? When? How? His arms hurt. He wonders if his wrist is sprained.
‘Betcha don’t even remember my name,’ says Owen-or-Dinny. ‘Ya don’t, do ya? No more than if I was one of the dogs. Think yer Lord Muck, dontcha? Last time we met, ya said “Hullo Cathal.” My brother, Cathal, went to live in Cork two years ago. Well, what is my name then?’
Adam doesn’t risk a guess.
Later, after blowing out their candle, the cousins tell grisly ghost stories and, later still, when he has to go outside to relieve himself, someone hidden behind a windy holly bush makes would-be blood-chilling noises, and throws drops of what Adam hopes is water on his head. Well, if that’s their worst, he decides, let them do it! He, after all, may be the most challenging novelty to reach this bit of bog since the botched French invasion of nearly a hundred years ago. His bogmen cousins are touchy about being bogmen, and may, he guesses, feel obliged to show that they’re neither impressed nor awed by his big-house ways. All right, he decides, all right, he’ll allow for their need to take him down a peg. They find it hilarious that he wears pyjamas so, to avoid providing them with further amusement, he makes sure that they don’t see his slippers. They’re a smart pair in soft leather, which his father sent from London, but he wraps them round a stone and slides them into the lake.
Over the next two days, things go more smoothly, and his cousins seem to be observing a truce. Even so, when a groom delivers his pony along with a note from his mother, he is glad to get away on his own. So out he rides across the bog, canters about a bit, jumps a few fences and is wondering where to head next when he sees someone else practising jumps. At once the dull landscape acquires focus and he starts to watch. But his hovering must have unsettled the rider, whom he sees now is a woman, for her horse refuses a jump, stopping dead so suddenly that she looks like landing in it head first. While she’s righting herself – luckily, she grasped the mane – Adam rides towards her and recognizes Kate. She is wearing a smart riding habit and hails him cheerfully, calling out that he needn’t worry, a miss is as good as a mile. Then she asks where he has been and why he wasn’t at dinner last evening.
He can’t think of a lie. His mind freezes. Telling the truth would entail the mortifying admission that he may be the wrong sort of Gould and h
ave to live from now on with smelly, ill-disposed cousins, so he bats back the query. What about her? What is she doing so far from the big house? Alone? As he hears his own questions, they worry him. Could she have heard gossip? And what if one of the cousins – say Owen-or-Dinny, whose actual name he still doesn’t know – were to pop like a leprechaun from behind a turf-stack and insist on inviting her to the farm for an insanitary cup of buttermilk? This is just what the cousins would love to do with a ‘céad míle fáilte’, in the name of Irish hospitality, from malign curiosity, the joy of embarrassing Adam and in the hope – Oh God! – of a tip. And she’d go! Of course she would! From politeness and – why not? – a touch of malign curiosity. And might even distribute small change.
At this point – ‘coming the nob’ inside his own head – he panics and becomes briefly convinced that he sees a composite cousin approach. This cousin is wearing a length of thick, hairy string around his waist to keep up his ridiculously low-forked, adaptable, hand-me-down clown’s pants and has a sack over his shoulders in lieu of a jacket. Not that Adam should care! Imaginary or not, the cousin is his blood relative, and Adam should not be snobbish about smells or lice or hairy string or even badly washed cups of buttermilk. ‘Pauvreté n’est pas vice,’ is what Father Tobin always says: ‘It’s no sin to be poor.’ Maybe not, but, as even Adam knows, poverty can bring shame and meanness, exasperation and a hardening of the heart. The reason Father T. coyly makes the claim in French is because he knows it too. (Like a demon sprinkled with holy water, the visionary cousin has now evaporated.)
Meanwhile, listening with half an ear, Adam has heard Kate explain that she is practising for her next riding lesson. She hopes to go out with the hunt, possibly even in the next day or so, but is wary of the double fences they have around here. ‘We didn’t ride much in my French school. I nearly came a cropper just now,’ she admits. ‘You saw me. What did I do wrong?’
‘Lean forward as you approach the bank,’ he tells her, ‘then lean back when your mount changes feet on top of it. Watch.’ And off he wheels, jumps a combined bank and ditch and, while he does so, makes a quick survey of the reassuringly empty bog. No cousins in sight! Not even a distant turf-cutter. Not a soul. He feels a guilty relief.
‘You’ve put your hair up,’ he notes, smiling, as he trots back. He can see, though, that it doesn’t suit her. Too severe.
Laughing at herself, she says she’s a young lady now. Seventeen! No more tippling behind haystacks! ‘I’ve put childish things behind me.’ This, it turns out, includes school. ‘I’m on the marriage market. My mama can’t keep me abroad for ever and, as motherly concern is definitely not her forte, we’ve agreed that she should arrange to marry me off as soon as we can find someone nice whom we both like. If I were clever or were a boy I might do something more challenging, but as I’m not ...’ Kate shrugs. ‘Maybe, if she fails, I’ll end up as a missionary nun? It’s the only career I can think of which combines adventure with propriety. Meanwhile I am trying to jump fences.’
‘Do you want to try a few more?’
‘Why not?’
So he gives her a lesson, after which, tired but pleased with themselves, they dismount, let the horses graze, spread out his mackintosh and sit on it eating sandwiches which she foresightedly brought with her. No wine this time, but above their heads the sun gilds a flicker of damp birch leaves which remind them both of coins. This prompts him, when they see a rainbow, to tell her about the crock of gold which is said to be buried at the end of it. ‘My family,’ he jokes, ‘could do with one of those. My papa is always saying so.’
Pulling off her riding hat which leaves a pink indentation on her forehead, Kate leans back on her elbows, arches, gazes at the breeze-blown birch leaves and says, luxuriating like a happy cat, ‘Remember I told you I had money? Maybe I’m your crock of gold.’
‘Why mine?’
‘Your family’s, then.’
‘Sorry, I’m being thick.’
‘Guess who else has been teaching me to jump fences. Your papa.’
‘My ...?’ Adam’s impulse is to sort this claim under the same heading as crocks of gold and spectral cousins-in-clown’s-trousers. Delusions! What else? How could a busy man who has not yet found time to ride a dozen miles to talk to his own son be teaching someone else’s daughter to jump fences?
***
To Monsieur le Vicomte Hubert de Sauvigny
Monsieur le Vicomte,
He who writes this note has been trained to know his place and would not divulge private information if the need were less urgent.
Your niece has fallen into dangerous company at Dr Blanche’s asylum where an Irish adventurer is taking unscrupulous advantage of her affections. Worse: he is just as unscrupulous in his treatment of the unfortunate inmates of that place and has been heard plotting to give a lethal dose of poison to the most distinguished of them, the writer Monsieur Guy de Maupassant. If there is a scandal, your niece risks being touched by it unless someone rescues her first.
A well-wisher
VII
It was twilight.
‘I’ve had an odd telegram.’ Danièle’s shiver was restless. ‘Uncle Hubert may be coming to say goodbye.’
‘In what way is that odd?’ Adam had been savouring the moment, telling himself, ‘We’re together now,’ then trying to make the ‘now’ last. It was a game children might play. ‘Because he’s in Brussels, and his ship sails from Antwerp.’ She shivered again. ‘Coming here is the wrong direction for him.’
Leafy reflections shone. In their radiance her limbs looked ready to escape human embraces. Her shiver had flicked the thought into his mind.
She said, ‘We don’t want Philibert hurt!’
‘Philibert?’ He took moments to understand. Then: ‘Are you afraid that if your uncle comes he will guess about us, then report to your husband? In Africa?’
She was watching his face. ‘You think I’m fanciful?’
They laughed, aware that without fancy, they could hardly have talked at all. So many topics were embargoed, among them his dream that one day she might get a divorce or – here it was his turn to shiver guiltily – be widowed. The sorest was their lack of funds. Backing from it, they returned, with relief, to their transgression. Desire was so obsessive that the stealth of their arrangements could seem the healthiest thing about them. At least, while deceiving other people, you gave them your attention. Surely that was better than spending your waking hours in a clammy smoke of lust?
‘If you do go to Ireland, could I join you there?’ A pause. ‘Discreetly.’
‘I don’t know.’ His mind slid between cunning and impulse. Both their minds were tossed coins turning in the air: heads, tails, heads ...
Solemn as bookies, they reckoned up their hopes. Her readiness to run off to the pastoral wilds of Ireland reminded him of how those wilds had failed love in his parents’ case.
He had had another letter from there, this time from His Grace John Joseph, who wrote,
I make this appeal on your father’s behalf. Have you got it in you to forgive him? In person? He’d die happier if you came. His marriage was not a good one and, though I can’t expect you to pity him, I do ask you to help him die in peace – especially as that might bring you peace too. You cannot be totally at ease over what you did.
Adam’s father, Tobin reminded him, had not in the end married the young English heiress – ‘you’ll remember why’ – but an older, less well-dowered neighbour who had proven barren. The estate, Tobin warned, was again encumbered and run down.
Mention of the heiress – Kate – brought back aspects of the story which Adam had managed to forget. Discomfort pricked. What had the dying man been saying?
The possibility that his father might think himself a victim was startling. But then, being a victim excused a lot, and the old man had a lot to excuse. Emerging from some sour cellar of memory rose a Gaelic jeer often flung at a loser: a mí-ádh. Gaels, being connoisseurs of loss, were
quick to deride misfortune’s stratagems, self-pity for one. Had Adam and his father, each in his own mind, played the mí-ádh?
Tobin seemed to take no position on the matter. Clearly, the years had taught him to sit on the fence.
Danièle, when shown his letter, took a cheerful view. Of course Adam must go to Ireland! For his father’s sake – but also for them!
‘Adam, how can you hesitate? One doesn’t pass up possible legacies. I’ll bet that the estate isn’t all that run down. What might you get?’
This, though he tried to think of it as candour, shocked him. Remembering talk of how King Leopold aimed to milk the Congo before handing it over to Belgium, he reflected that the wellborn were not brought up to be mealy-mouthed.
So where, he wondered, did we small folk get our prayerful dreaminess? Where but from an education tailored to suit the interests of the propertied! If we were to manage their affairs without bilking them, we needed scruples – and humility. Amused, but also a little sour, he recalled Sauvigny’s opinion that the lower clergy should be sent to eat in the kitchen. That for all his eccentric airs, Sauvigny was self-servingly shrewd, was an insight which Adam owed to his reading of poor Guy’s lucid and indignant tales.
So, if scrupulousness went with low birth, might not Adam, as his father’s son, have a streak of the opposite? Indeed, if he wished to prove himself a true chip off the old block, might filial piety consist in being callous? A thought to keep to oneself!
‘Could we live,’ Danièle was back in the embrace of fancy, ‘on your father’s estate?’
‘On it, but not off it,’ he told her, practising plain speaking. ‘The land is poor; the income, here or in London, wouldn’t be much. On the spot, though, you could have a great life.’
‘There’s no reward here or in heaven,’ she told him forthrightly, ‘for failing to claim your inheritance.’
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