Adam Gould

by Julia O'Faolain

  ‘What?’

  Goulds from the big house sleeping with girls – ‘and not only girls!’– from the tenements. Bastards being defiantly recognized (by fathers), foisted (by mothers) on unsuspecting spouses or (by both) stealthily farmed out. Comings and goings. Inbreeding. Face-saving. False entries made in parish records so that nobody knew who was kin to whom. Brothers, affirmed Owen, had been known to marry their half-sisters, because those who knew what was happening lacked the nerve to tell the priests.

  ‘You couldn’t tell a priest a thing like that! So people made their own arrangements.’

  ‘That’s why there was likely no real impediment to yer da marrying yer ma. She may be his cousin twice over in the flesh but if she’s not one on paper, the story of waiting for a dispensation could be all my eye. How – or why – would anyone explain the like of that to a canon lawyer beyond in Rome?’

  ‘Bat, you have it wrong. It was on paper. Ellen said so.’

  ‘The word was made flesh!’

  ‘ It’s what held them up.’

  ‘Did she, personally, check the parish records?’

  ‘Listen ...’

  ‘No, you listen!’

  Two cousins started to pummel each other and were separated with some violence by Owen-Dinny-Dan who wanted to get things straight.

  ‘If the gee-gees had still been making money, he’d a married her like a shot. He was mad for her at the start. First cousin or not!’

  ‘Ellen was a lovely girl.’

  ‘Still is.’

  ‘Ah, but the iron has to be hit while it’s hot! She’s afraid he’ll want to emigrate her to Canada now. A clean break.’

  ‘Maybe he will.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. That English girl is terrible plain. What if he picked a plain girl to make it easier to get Ellen to stay and accept some new arrangement?’

  ‘What sort of arrangement?’

  ‘Who knows? Foxy as he is, he’ll want to have his cake and eat it too. Two cakes if he’s let.’

  ‘Get away! Two on the one plate!’

  ‘Well, there’s Father Tobin gone to visit his mother. He never did that before. I wonder does he have a mother at all?’

  ‘There’s more going on than meets the eye.’

  ‘And some are hoping others will turn a blind one!’

  ‘Ellen won’t!’

  ‘Not yet!’

  ‘Maybe never.’

  ‘No. Ellen’s proud. The Lord between us and all harm, but she could easily do something dangerous!’

  ‘Listen, Adam,’ said a thoughtful Owen-Dinny-Dan, ‘yer ma’s already half out of her mind. When she hears that you and that English filly have been conniving she’ll be convinced that yer da plans to keep you here after emigrating her – which could be true. I wouldn’t put it past him to have sent the girl here today so as to encourage the pair of you to get friendly. Anyway, true or not, the danger is that Ellen will think it is. Just now she’ll be imagining the worst. Didn’t the girl say she asked one of the grooms how to find you? So by now the stables know, and that means the kitchen does, and how long can it be before yer ma hears it? So you’d best have a word with her at the hunt tomorrow. Soothe her down! Tell her you love her. Promise whatever she wants. Don’t worry. She’ll be there all right. Timmy who brought yer pony over said she would. She gave orders to get her mare ready.’

  ***

  At an alarmingly early hour Dr Blanche came to the monsignor’s room and woke him to a dawn slashed by gleams as half-hearted as the shine on a scuttleful of coal.

  ‘Forgive the intrusion.’ Closing the door, Blanche struck a match and lit a candle.

  Odd, thought Belcastel, not to have lit it before coming down the dark corridor. ‘Something’s the matter, isn’t it?’ He was anxiously alert.

  The doctor’s tone was brisk. ‘I had to see you before Adam did. It’s to do with Maupassant. Adam offered him poison.’

  ‘Ah!’ The monsignor who, though warned by Tassart, had failed to prevent this, felt more guilt than surprise.

  ‘Things could be worse,’ Blanche admitted. ‘The poison was spilled, though no thanks to Adam. However, there is likely to be gossip, so I am advising him to leave for Ireland, and hope you will support me. Later, he can either come back here or join you elsewhere, but for now he should be off the scene. My fear is that he may resist us. Hang around, draw reporters on himself. Lurk in some louche hotel.’

  ‘Because of ...?’

  ‘Her.’ The doctor’s shrug – it was more like a spasm – expressed weariness tempered by resolve.

  Ah, thought Belcastel again, and burned as though the indiscretion had been wholly his. They’ve guessed it, he saw! Got the scent and run it to ground! Love. Eros! The smell of musk. He – having sniffed it before they did – should have acted. Becoming eunuchs for the love of God was meant to make it easy for clerics to regulate other people’s conduct. His trouble was that carnal folly interested him about as much as tiddliwinks. But what if it were one’s duty to focus one’s mind on tiddliwinks? He told the doctor, ‘I am sorry I encouraged you to employ Madame d’Armaillé.’

  Blanche did not pretend to misunderstand. ‘We have both been careless.’

  The monsignor wondered whether his own guilt was misplaced. Maybe he should feel it instead over his failure to spring to the defence of his young protégé whose actions, after all, had clearly been motivated by a misguided charity. He suspected Adam of having lost his religious faith, which meant that he was adrift without rules. So, being sorry for poor, mad Guy, he had tried to succour him. He, Guy and Madame d’Armaillé needed some sober person’s help and protection. They needed a good Samaritan, but, dear lord, thought Belcastel, that role had never been easy. The priest who shirked it in the parable might have had other obligations – and so did he whose first duty was neither to lunatics nor lovers but to his superiors who had a right to expect him to steer clear of scandal. After all, the last time he stuck his neck out he ended up in here. Belonging, as he did, to a spiritual army, he could not risk being cashiered a second time.

  Nonetheless he put in a plea for leniency. ‘Adam’, he argued, ‘will be leaving with me soon. Couldn’t he stay here till then? We could both keep an eye on him.’

  But Blanche too had an institution to consider. ‘I’m afraid he must leave now, before the press comes nosing round. The thing could too easily be misrepresented.’ What had actually happened, he explained, was that the patient had again begged to be helped to die, whereupon Adam, who was in a susceptible state – ‘One forgets how young he is!’ – brought him an overdose of opium. No sooner had he done so, however, than the lunatic started to rave that Adam was his other self and must drink the poison. He then thrust it so fiercely at Adam’s mouth that the mug cut his lip. In the scuffle a table fell, and a brass vase went bouncing. This, said Blanche, was a piece of luck, for he, who had been patrolling the corridors, as he sometimes did when suffering from insomnia, heard it and rushed in. On tasting the spilled dregs, he guessed what had happened and made Adam confirm his guess. Baron, who arrived close on his heels, must have guessed too.

  ‘Will he talk?’

  The doctor’s face lengthened as flesh sank, like molten wax, to collect along his jaw. ‘If we keep our nerve, that needn’t matter. My colleagues, though displeased, will hold their tongues.’ In the grey light, the stubble on his cheeks was the colour of ash. ‘A scandal,’ he pointed out, ‘would do none of us any good, so I told Adam that I want him gone before others hear what happened. He has agreed and is now with Madame d’Armaillé. I had to let them have a moment together. I imagine you’ll want a word with him too?’

  Neurologist and priest exchanged nods. Both were used to soothing vehement frets.

  ‘He is a good young man,’ the doctor acknowledged. ‘I believe you offered him a position? So, once this blows over ...’ His hands levitated hopefully.

  ‘I shall still want his collaboration.’

  ‘And for now
? Perhaps you could advocate prudence?’

  ‘I shall write him a letter,’ decided the monsignor. ‘In the state he is likely to be in, he wouldn’t get the hang of anything not laid down in black and white.’

  Blanche left, and Belcastel, still in his dressing-gown, sat at his desk, laid blank sheets of paper on the blotter and stared at the mean mouth of the irreversible inkwell. It struck him that his own passions were as good as atrophied. For a man about to return to the world in the hope of wielding influence in it, this was a handicap. His whole training was a handicap. It had led him to avoid the kind of feelings he now needed to address – sudden, giddy ones of a sort that could unforeseeably affect conduct. He had had no truck with those. The story peddled by his enemies was false. On the night of the château fire, he had not been in a lady’s bedroom. On the contrary, he had been in her husband’s adjacent one, ensuring that papers which could compromise their group were put back in their box. Tact was second nature to him. He disliked sensationalism and feared that, like a huntsman who has no feel for his quarry, he might, when he began to run a newspaper, be unable to catch his readers’ interest, much less persuade them to do an emotional about-turn. A pity, perhaps, that the burn on his cheek had not been incurred during some gallant frolic? But just as well if rumour led the impressionable to take him for a bird of their own feather.

  The thought returned him to Adam, who was so good with the mad and whose impulsive sympathies he had hoped to enlist. How long, he wondered, would the boy be in Ireland? His leaving was badly timed.

  Adam, to be sure, claimed that, far from being impulsive, his method with the mad was as coolly controlled as the bird calls by which he sometimes entertained the monsignor during their walks. Imitating these was a skill, he had explained, a trick learned in boyhood. ‘You intrigue them, so they think you’re one of their sort and come close enough to be caught. We’ll do the same thing with our readers.’

  ‘Do you,’ Belcastel had asked suspiciously, ‘do it with me?’

  Adam hadn’t hesitated: ‘Oh, I do it with everyone. You see, I haven’t really lived much for a man my age and I have no trade. So I try out personae. Maybe journalism will suit me and I’ll settle. My father was a great man for politics and wrangling.’

  ‘We are to avoid both.’

  Their prospective paper would be pledged to promote unity and have no party affiliations. This was Father de Latour’s plan. Yet established Catholic journals had already taken umbrage at the news that a new one was even deemed necessary. A circular to the bishops of France aimed at raising funds had been promptly leaked. Episcopal palaces were sieves. Vanities had been hurt. Latour’s decision not to employ men compromised by old polemics had raised hackles. Preaching unity to them would not be easy. And, as more than one bishop had already warned, moderation did not attract readers.

  Glumly, the monsignor’s eyes slid to a stack of papers whose warring words he had underlined in blue ink for Republicans and purple for monarchists. La Gazette de France, L’Observateur français, La Croix, L’Univers, Le Monde and Le Gaulois bled like beetroot salad and pumped out bloated phrases such as ‘Both our Christian conscience and our honour as journalists oblige us to say’ or ‘We would rather break our pens than fail in our duty to tell ...’ And what they said and told was always very sour.

  He had been taken aback by their delirium. Hatred of the Republic to which he must persuade readers to rally was bred in the bone. Heartened by its troubles – anarchist bombs and so forth – conservatives argued that, since it was on the brink of collapse, rallying to it would be folly. Anyway, they hinted, the present pope must surely die soon. All we need do was sit tight and wait for one or both of these events to save us. L’Autorité’s latest blast, occasioned by the Panama scandal, described the French state as a ‘foul, swollen carcass’ which ‘had left its stink on the banks of the current which was now carrying it off’. Readers with a taste for such abuse would need to be frightened, even threatened and, only when thoroughly softened up, gently cajoled into considering their opponents’ arguments.

  Belcastel was planning a feature to be called – provisionally – Bogies and Bugbears, aimed at softening rigid views on topics such as divine right. This, he would boldly tell readers, was no more nor less than the mark of divine approval attaching to any legitimate authority.

  Could minds be changed, or were hearts more responsive? When doctrine failed, could these guide our sympathies? The monsignor was tempted to hope so, for his own shrivelled feelings had proven unexpectedly susceptible to the contagion of another man’s fervour. Adam had actually led him to admire writings by Maupassant, which he had expected to loathe. If this could happen to him, might not readers, who must surely be tiring of the old papers’ diet of spleen, be weaned from it?

  France, as Pope Leo hoped, might be the happier.

  ***

  The meet was closer to his cousins’ place than to his father’s, so Adam was able to get there early, then stay out of his father’s sight. He couldn’t bear to confront him and, anyway, needed to see his mother first. However, there was no sign of her, so he hung back when the hunt moved off and soon found himself with a group of stragglers who had backed away from an intimidating jump and were looking for a gap. Seeing Kate among them, he opened a gate for her, waited for her to ride through and tried to avoid conversation. She caught him, though, as he was securing the hasp.

  ‘Adam, I want you to know I’m not your enemy. I’m telling you this because it looks as though things may work out after all between me and your father. I spoke to him last night, and ...’

  ‘Kate, I don’t want to hear what he said. I can imagine it, anyway.’

  ‘Can you? He swears that what you denied yesterday is true.’

  What had he denied? He couldn’t remember having been sure enough to deny anything. He said, ‘I don’t want to talk. Enjoy your ride.’

  As he turned to ride off, he heard her voice behind him. ‘Adam, just remember: I want us to be friends.’ At the same moment he found himself within a yard of his mother who had clearly heard too and looked stunned. He saw her hand tighten on her reins.

  ‘Mama, wait. Please. I’ve something to tell you.’

  She had gone white and her lips were clamped firmly shut.

  ‘Mama!’

  Perhaps she couldn’t trust herself to unclamp them, for she didn’t answer his greeting, much less ask why he was here. Instead, she took off at a gallop, jumped two fences and disappeared over the brow of a hill in the wake of the main body of riders. Guessing that she would join his father, he decided not to follow.

  It was the last time he saw her alive.

  ***

  Belcastel dipped his pen and wrote very fast:

  Fili mi,

  I am not writing as a priest, but as a friend, so shall stick to things temporal. You will surely know that it is affection which leads me to warn that you are on the verge of scuppering our plans and your future.

  Since you must be in distress, I am putting a few thoughts down as clearly as I can. There is unlikely to be time to convey them to you any other way. The first is this: don’t brood or blame yourself too much!

  What has happened with poor Monsieur de Maupassant is regrettable but, after all, no harm was done since he is no worse off than before and a scandal can be avoided if you will only take the director’s advice and leave at once for Ireland. You will recall that I have always urged you to make peace with your father. Well, now there is a further reason for going. You are kind-hearted with others. Why not with him?

  Your place on The Rallying Cry will be waiting for you. So start thinking up clever ideas for it. Working together, we will each have a chance to make up for earlier errors – mine were more culpable than yours! – and to redeem ourselves by doing good. There will be time later to discuss all this. I only want for now to remind you that you have a worthwhile future.

  Allow me, meanwhile, to say that your impulse in trying to help the unf
ortunate Maupassant shows a generous nature and a lack of cool thought. You felt you had made a promise and had to keep it. Since you must by now see the rashness of this, I shan’t dwell on it. Instead I beg of you to make no promises at all for the next few months. Do not bind yourself or anyone else. That is all I ask. Is it too much?

  Dipping his pen back into his inkwell, Belcastel delicately shook off superfluous drops, held it poised, decided against mentioning Madame d’Armaillé, then signed off with a blessing and a flourish.

  Having sealed his letter, he quickly wrote another, then rang his bell and summoned two servants to witness his signature. This done, he inquired whether one of them would accompany him downstairs, since it was against the house rules that he go alone, and he didn’t want at this late stage of his residence to upset the doctors. Where, by the way, was Monsieur Gould?

  He had been seen, said the servants, walking in the potager. ‘Maybe half an hour ago? With Madame d’Armaillé.’ Neither knew where they were now.

  ‘Probably he came in,’ one guessed helpfully, ‘when it started to rain.’

  Rain! Belcastel had failed to notice it, but there it was, slyly licking his windowpanes. What had brought the word ‘sly’ to mind? Remembering the apple loft with its airborne hammock gave him his answer and, mindful of his duty to prevent further improprieties, he practically raced his ‘escort’ down the stairs. Midway, they were met by news that the vicomte de Sauvigny had arrived unexpectedly and begged a few moments of the monsignor’s time. He was between two trains. Had to turn around and leave in under an hour. He’d asked to talk to his niece too.

  ‘The gentleman’s in the morning room,’ said the maid who brought the message, ‘waiting’.

  He wasn’t, though.

  ‘Well, he was a minute ago! I left him right here, chatting with Monsieur Tassart.’

  ‘Tassart was here? Are you sure?’

  ‘Oh yes, Monseigneur. He was talking about having noticed Madame d’Armaillé’s neckband hanging in the apple loft. It’s where he stores his master’s tricycle, which is to go into an auction with the poor gentleman’s other things. That’s what he came for, but now he seems to have done a disappearing act too. I expect he went to the kitchens for coffee.’ She looked out of the window. ‘Why, there’s the vicomte now! In the potager! And look! He’s out in the rain without an umbrella!’