Sauvigny screwed up his eyes and held the red circle so that it caught the sunlight that was now breaking through the rain.
‘I thought you’d like to know,’ said Adam. ‘You see, he and she were in the garden one day when the rain came on, so they took shelter in the loft. He had been telling her about the pope’s hope that all Frenchmen could be at peace. So, as the neckband was a memory of the guillotine ...’
‘A memory of our relatives’ martyrdom.’
‘And an incitement to revenge ...’
‘Did he say that?’
‘He said that making a cult of the wrongs done to us bred pugnacity and self-righteousness. His mind was full of the topic. You see, he was preparing to write some articles ...’
‘... for his newspaper?’ The vicomte nodded knowingly. ‘I heard about that.’
‘Well, it seems he was persuasive. So Madame d’Armaillé took off her neckband and ...’
‘Ah,’ said the vicomte, ‘I see! I see! You have set my mind at rest. I knew I shouldn’t pay the least attention to that base, disgusting letter.’
Adam pretended not to hear this. Instead, he went on talking about the dead man and, quite soon, both he and the vicomte were obliged to take out their handkerchiefs and flick away tears.
‘It was an accident,’ Sauvigny said abruptly. ‘Not planned. Not controlled. An accident. And of course it happened in the dark.’
‘Yes.’
‘We always thought we should control everything. It was why we wanted the king – and indeed the king pope, il papa re. But, well, there you are, everything ended in a muddle, and now we have a new, treacherous pope, so it’s just as well that he’s not a king, but is penned up like a lion in a zoo in his little toy leonine city, ha. That’s its name, did you know? And he’s Leo! I shouldn’t laugh. It’s a shame that poor Belcastel died violently. He was a man of peace.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I’m glad anyway that I learned the truth.’
‘Yes.’
‘I wish,’ said the now garrulous vicomte, ‘you weren’t leaving. Poor Danièle will need a friend.’
Neither man believed that he had been lied to, and each knew that his own lies had been benevolent. When they parted at the station, they embraced.
VIII
While watching the vicomte’s train steam from the station, Adam realized that he was free to miss his own. This thought so compelled him that, by the time the engine smoke dispersed, he had found the consigne, dropped off his bag and headed for the post office where he composed a telegram urging Danièle to send a reply care of Thady Quill.
Remembering Dr Meuriot’s warnings against lingering in France upset him briefly and he spoiled two telegraph forms. But seeing his message set out on official paper put him in good heart.
Some things were not yet out of his hands!
He would stay at Quill’s. She could meet him there or, if the place was distasteful to her, in a tearoom. Perhaps in the Bois? She could wear a hat with a veil thick as a bee-keeper’s, and who would know her? He imagined her muslin frock – green and pink – flowering under it. They could go where they liked, even boating on the river as Guy used to do – though it was now too cold for that.
Was his idea reckless?
By striking down Belcastel, death had made lesser risks look puny. Poor troubled Belcastel! Wincing, Adam crumpled the form, nibbled a hangnail and stared, for an unseeing moment, at a blotting-pad where traces of past urgencies cringed in mirror-image. Then he picked up the scratchy, post-office pen, rewrote his message – practice was improving it – and sent it off. If he and Danièle were to have a future, they must meet. Talk. Make plans! There was no need to leave today. There would be later trains. There would be trains next week!
He had some cash: his salary and a small amount belonging to the dead monsignor who would not have begrudged its use. It would do for now. He set off on foot for Thady Quill’s.
His step was buoyant and the air fresh. Street vendors were selling hot buckwheat pancakes and roasted chestnuts, and on a poster a red-gowned woman danced. Capering in parody, a bearded beggar raised imaginary petticoats, and for seconds was a woman too. Laughing, a real woman threw coins into his cap. Paris had never seemed so pleasingly protean! Adam, as he told Thady, whom he found mouldering drearily in his shop, felt as though he had emerged from a cocoon. It was maddening to have to leave, but he kept quiet about why he must. Thady – a gossip! – had best be given an edited account of his plight.
‘Arrah go on!’ was Thady’s puzzled response to this shifty rigmarole, followed by: ‘Breaking outa your cocoon is what you shoulda done years ago!’
Thady’s mood was fractious. His wife had scolded him in front of two of their employees, so to punish her he felt obliged to punish himself by refusing the lunch she had prepared as a peace-offering. No self-respecting husband could afford to be won over by a dish, however tasty, of blanquette de veau! Thady was proud of his wife who was shrewd, personable and worked hard. But in any partnership showing weakness was unwise. The upshot was that Adam too had to forgo the blanquette de veau and eat with Thady in a greasy gargote smelling of reboiled soup. The bench they sat on was bolted to the floor, so they had to stand up when other clients needed to squeeze past. There was a dead fly in the water-jug and the cloth had gravy stains.
When they were finally settled in front of a litre of gros bleu and wedges of greyish bread, Adam asked what had started the conjugal tiff.
‘Nothing. Next to nothing! But that,’ said the didactic Thady, ‘means everything, as you’d know yourself if you’d ever lived with anyone. Ah, but sure you’re the nestling that fell from the nest too soon to learn about families. Any news of your old man?’
‘He’s dying.’
‘Ah God, Adam, I’m sorry to hear that.’
Adam burst into tears. It was a nervous reaction. Mechanical. He had felt nothing until he saw Thady’s sympathy. Now he felt deceitful.
‘Ah Jesus! And he’s only how old? Fifty-five, is it now? Did you say he had a wasting disease? Ah God love him!’
The good side of Thady’s gossipiness was the interest he took in other people. ‘So that’s why you’re off to Ireland! I was wondering. Well, you’re doing the right thing! You’ll be a comfort to him now, and knowing that will be a comfort to you later. You’re like all the Irish! Good-hearted! All soul! Warm!’
Adam didn’t argue. He guessed that the ulterior aim of this praise was to set up a contrast between high-hearted Irish dash and the narrow views of Thady’s French wife. In the war museum of Thady’s mind, Adam – like one of the tailor’s dummies in Thady’s shop – was no doubt at this moment wearing a heroic and slightly battleworn uniform. Madame Thady, if represented in this same imagined space, would be wearing blinkers.
‘She’s a valiant woman,’ Thady acknowledged. ‘But unforgiving.’ He ordered two glasses of marc and, after downing one, was moved to claim that we Irish, due to our long acquaintance with grief, had achieved a spiritual development rarely found in others. As our bodies suffered, so our souls had thrived. Ergo, he argued, while absent-mindedly sipping Adam’s marc, we were less attached to property than the money-grubbing French, and wouldn’t kick up a huge fuss when someone made a small mistake and maybe lost a little family money. Despondently, he emptied the glass and stared at the wall.
Adam didn’t ask what mistake Thady had made, but was led by some injured muttering to connect it with a consignment of carefully mended dress uniforms which had not been rendered proof against moths. Had the oversight been Thady’s? The topic, clearly, was best left unprobed.
‘Look at you,’ Thady enthused sadly, ‘rushing to forgive your old man who, there’s no denying it, made a right balls of his and your affairs. The French say you can’t please the goat and the cabbage, but he did neither. If we say you were the goat – no disrespect intended – and his estate was the cabbage-patch, well ...’ Thady’s quick-snipping tailor’s fingers mimed havoc.
The goat had not been let near the cabbages. Yet where were they? His fingers sank limply, abandoning their mime.
‘You mean there’s nothing left?’ Adam had had hints in letters from Ireland that he might be his father’s heir. Heir to what, though? Debts? A thankless duty to come and maybe – oh God! – take responsibility for the widow? ‘How bad is it? Have you heard?’
Thady either hadn’t heard or wouldn’t say. But what, he challenged, sticking to his theme, did money matter when in the long run we’d all be dead? Charity, not blame, was the mortar that kept things together. A man like Adam’s father needed it more than most. ‘He’ll blame himself,’ said Thady. ‘He’ll be haunted at the end! But you’ll be there to comfort him and redeem the past!’
Fortified by another – then another – marc, he gloated grandly over Irish high-mindedness and so praised Adam’s good heart that Adam, who had not drunk at all, was fired by this vociferous approval.
It struck him, though, that Thady, being used to promoting moth-eaten goods, might be a poor judge of affection, and he began to pity his father, who perhaps deserved better than Adam had it in him to provide. He would have liked to love his defeated old progenitor but, remembering his trouble with Guy, feared unmanageable pity, and to cool things, reminded Thady that to err was human and to forgive divine.
‘I’m not a god yet.’
Thady grew worried. ‘You don’t hate him!’
‘My father? No, no!’
‘And will help him die in peace?’
‘I will. Of course! If what he wants is a ceremonial absolution, he shall have it! “Absolvo te, Papa! Die in peace.”’
Adam tried to say all this lightly. In his mind he hedged his promise between quotation marks and, like a man holding a bucket of burning pitch, did his best to keep its brimming heat at arm’s length. Touched, though, by Thady’s sentiment, he secretly melted.
After all, he saw he could do for his unhappy papa what nobody had been able to do for Belcastel. One should seize such opportunities.
And yet ...
Maybe he did hate him? Hatred was a horrid affliction. But could you have love without it? It was easy for Thady to talk about ‘redeeming the past’. That, in Adam’s mind, revolved around his mother.
***
After her accident, he had been so numbed by the rush of events that what he remembered later was fitful and overlaid by hearsay. One exception was his memory of how, at dinner that evening in Dr Keogh’s house, his vision had become distorted. It had not been like – or did not feel like – going blind.
‘You’d best stay with my family tonight,’ the doctor had insisted after twice seeing Adam turn his back on his father and refuse to speak to him. Adam had then rushed from the cabin and, a few discreet minutes later, Keogh came out after him and led him a little way off to make sure that they were not overheard. He was their family doctor, a robust, big-bummed, generously built, hunting man who had been out with the field that morning and was still in his riding boots. He had sons of his own. ‘I’ll drop you off at my place,’ he decided, ‘then come back here and explain to your pa where you are. It will be better to do that when you’re out of the way. Give you both a chance to simmer down. Wait a minute now, while I go back in and attend to a few things. I’ll meet you by my carriage.’
The doctor returned to the cabin where women were starting to lay out Adam’s mother’s body.
Earlier Adam had heard one of them ask, ‘Are they not taking her home?’
‘Careful, Bríd!’ another whispered. ‘Little pitchers! But no! Mr G. said no. He wants the corpse to stay here!’
‘Are you quite ...?’
‘Amn’t I telling you?’
After that the voices sank and Adam heard no more. But when his father returned and tried to talk to him, he turned away. His father had been shuttling back and forth between the cabin and outside where a few carriages were drawn up. There wasn’t room for any more people in the cabin. And perhaps some were afraid to intrude. The English guests might be, in any case. Some of the servants from home had been fetched, then Adam’s father had ridden off to get a priest and again to make who knew what arrangements.
Adam didn’t want to know. ‘Bundling her into the ground’, he thought furiously. ‘Keeping her out of the house even now!’ He felt something stony inside him and revelled in his anger, sensing that, once it passed, what followed would be unbearable. He had trouble catching his breath.
He prayed, ‘Let her not be dead.’ But had little hope, since God, though not bound by time, was unlikely to reverse things for those who were. Then: ‘Let her not have done it to herself.’
That prayer, since nobody knew whether she had or not, felt more hopeful, so he kept repeating it until the words meant nothing. They formed a kind of rope, though. ‘Not, not, not ...’ he repeated and felt the words change to ‘knot, knot’ as though he were threatened by a hurricane and the rope held him. He was still murmuring them when Dr Keogh appeared with his whiskey flask and persuaded him to swallow some to steady his nerves.
‘Ready then? Shall we go?’
‘Yes.’
The doctor drove at a smart trot to his own house by pony and trap. Dinner, when they got there, was already being served and a place was quickly set for Adam.
‘I’ll be back,’ the doctor told his family, ‘before you finish your fish.’ And left Adam to explain. But Adam was past explaining anything.
The fish was pink salmon served with a green cucumber sauce on blue-rimmed plates. But when Adam looked at his portion what he saw was a swirl without contours or consistency: a blur. He was dry-eyed, so this was odd. He kept staring, but what he saw didn’t change. The colours coiled and merged like pigments on a wet palette. Looking up, he half expected the room too to have dissolved. But no. There it all still was: chairs which were still load-bearing and still chairs, the doctor’s live wife ladling out sauce to family members who remained solidly intact, with their blood neatly packed inside their skin. They ate quietly, and spoke in lowered tones from respect for Adam’s loss. Only what was on his own plate swam smearily like the design on a spinning top. By an act of will, he focused on the smear until he had made it separate into its components, then, as these again began to mingle, forced them apart once more. He was reminded of stained-glass reflections and of vomit. Trying to focus stopped him dwelling on what had taken place when the doctor came out of the cabin for the second time and led the way to his carriage.
Then, too, Adam had been dazed and half-blind and had kept wanting to go back in to have a close look at his dead mother. Because of lagging behind the rest of the hunt, he had heard the news early, had been among the first to reach the cabin and had seen what now haunted him: her half-bare body when they used the tailor’s scissors to cut open her riding-habit. He thought he had seen the scissors pierce her flesh.
‘Adam, they didn’t,’ Dr Keogh had assured him. ‘I promise you that you imagined that.’
Adam knew that this must be true.
He had been taken outside as soon as someone noticed him looking, and when he was let come back his mother was covered by a sheet. They had put a handkerchief over her face, but he took it off and touched her hand and her grey forehead. Her eyes were closed. That time too he heard whispers. ‘Four months,’ he heard. ‘Four months gone. Mr Gould was over from London four months ago.’ Then there was shushing followed by a shocked silence. Unless that came later? The unpleasant incident did, anyway. It must have. It happened outside by the carriages.
When the doctor came out for the second time, carrying his bag, he produced a pocket flask, unscrewed the silver cup from the top, filled it with whiskey and offered it to Adam, saying that it would steady him. Adam, who was unused to the stuff, took a mouthful, which burned his throat and made him cough.
He was still coughing when someone stepped down from a carriage drawn up next to the doctor’s. It was Kate. Her mother, still inside, held the door open and seemed to be hissing at her
to get back in. But Kate ran forward. She was no longer wearing riding clothes, so more time than Adam guessed must have gone by since he saw her last. Hours? A whole day? He saw luggage strapped to the roof. The girl looked younger than he remembered. He thought: she is as helpless as I am. He wondered whether it had been to talk – perhaps argue? – with her mother that his father had been going back and forth. Bargaining?
‘Adam, I am deeply sorry. Truly! We all are. It was a terrible, unpredictable thing! They say the rider ahead of her displaced a stone which was holding down some barbed wire, and that it leaped up just as her horse jumped. We are deeply, deeply sorry.’
‘Sorry? How sorry can you be?’ he heard himself spit the words at her. ‘You thought she – my mother – was dead before, didn’t you? Well now she is. You should be happy! Your prayers have been answered. I hope this fits your plans.’
Her crumpled face reproached him, but her tone was steady. ‘Mama and I,’ she told him, ‘are leaving for England. We shall take the train this evening. The house is free of us. We shan’t be coming back. Tell your father he can bring her body home. Tell him we shall write. Goodbye, Adam.’
Later, he would wonder if she had produced the story of the wire – it was one sometimes told to visitors as a warning – so as to prevent him thinking that his mother had taken unnecessary or deliberate risks. She was clever, he thought, quick-witted and would have made a good friend. He wished he had not insulted her – and would have liked to embrace her. But that was impossible. He couldn’t embrace anyone lest he break down.
***
At dinner in Thady’s house, the blanquette de veau finally made its appearance and was as succulent as Thady had hoped. While he worked his way through two helpings, Madame Thady – her formal title was, of course, Madame Quill – plied Adam with friendly questions. As she did, she turned her body as fully towards him as if they had been dancing.
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