Adam Gould

by Julia O'Faolain

  The manoeuvre was almost certainly designed to allow Thady – who liked to slurp his food as though from a nosebag – to do so behind her back. Adam knew from Thady himself that she deplored his table manners. This evening though, he was clearly to have carte blanche to savour her meat as he chose. Adam saw the concession as proof that the tiff had been a mere conjugal readjustment.

  Thady’s ‘tendre moitié’ – it was odd to hear him talk French – had a neat, no-nonsense chic. Her grey eyes were clever, her eyebrows finely arched, her dress well cut – which, since she was a dressmaker and an ex-lady’s maid, should be no surprise. Her upswept hair rose from a strong neck in an elegant curve. Socially she must have been several cuts above Thady, but perhaps did not know this, since Ireland would be as strange to her as the Congo was to the White Fathers. Adam remembered one of them talking approvingly of an ex-Zouave officer who had settled down with a Bantu wife and ‘raised her to his level’. Not that Thady would see himself as being like a Bantu! Or if he did, he would – no doubt like the Bantu themselves – feel cheerfully confident of his worth.

  Come to think of it, Thady had been prized in Adam’s father’s racing stables for his hands which could gentle even the most skittish horse or mare. He had his own kind of subtlety which la tendre moitié must have divined. Adam, who had spent his childhood observing a doomed domestic union, was cheered to see a promising one. He smiled at Madame Quill.

  ‘So why,’ she quizzed, ‘are you leaving us?’

  Behind her, Thady’s bony head dived like a cormorant for his plate. He made munching sounds.

  She ignored them. ‘How long,’ she asked Adam, ‘will you be in Ireland?’

  With measured candour, he told some of his story and of how, after being obliged – ordered! – to leave the maison de santé, he had sent a telegram to a friend, asking that an answer should be sent here. Madame Quill agreed to deal with this and expressed sympathy over the monsignor’s accident, which she described as ‘a piece of appallingly bad luck’. This view, by turning the death into a fluke, shrank Adam’s responsibility.

  Thady’s feeding sounds stopped. Running bread over his plate, he marvelled, ‘Jaysus, Adam, you’re a dark horse!’ He had lapsed into Hibernian English, and his and Adam’s attempts to translate this for Madame Thady were hopeless.

  In what way, she inquired patiently, if Adam was to be a horse, was this horse ‘ténébreux’? Was the expression droll?

  The men had to admit that any drollery there might be was elusive, having to do with parody and exile. Indeed, now that they thought of it, drollery itself was ‘a dark horse’, something which somehow brought the distant close and made the here and now feel strange. Did she twig? Non? They laughed, and she looked mildly riled.

  Wait, though! Was there not, she remembered, a brand-new song, ‘Twiggez-vous?’ Sung by Marie Lloyd? ‘Nous twiggons,’ she sang, and the men applauded: ‘Elle pige!’

  Thady in French was only half his Irish self – and this helped Adam to shed his caginess.

  ‘You eat,’ Madame Quill had encouraged her husband when they first sat down, ‘and let me talk to Monsieur Gould.’ Which was why, freed from the mockery with which an English-speaking Thady would have greeted Adam’s revelations, Adam had felt able to make them.

  Wondering if she guessed at the slyly defensive, volatile element in which her husband’s mind moved, he considered warning her – then saw there was no need. Thady’s agility of mood, like his ex-jockey’s bandiness, had survived its usefulness. Both were adaptations to circumstances which would not recur.

  Adam, by contrast, should sharpen his defences before heading back to their tribal and waspish province. For now though, the bed-time tenderness which he felt rise like steam between his hosts made him envious and he wondered wistfully whether, before he left, Danièle and he might manage to be together for a few bonding, private, frolicsome days. His telegram had begged her to turn her mind to this.

  ***

  Next morning, when he rose at an impatiently early hour, there his answer was: a telegram.

  YOUR MESSAGE JUST FORWARDED STOP MEETING IMPOSSIBLE STOP AM WITH DR AND MADAME BLANCHE IN NORMANDY STOP BEST WISHES D’ARMAILLE

  Gone from Paris then! Was the formality discretion? ‘D’Armaillé’! All those stops, then ‘best wishes’. Of course it was! It must be! He himself had warned her of how telegraph employees had been known to copy messages that passed through their hands. Some of Cardinal Lavigerie’s prudently encoded telegrams to Rome had been intercepted by monarchists.

  ***

  ‘I’ll be in the post office later. Shall I send a telegram for you to someone in Ireland? To say when you’ll arrive?’

  Madame Quill and Adam were dunking stale bread in their café au lait, which did not taste of coffee at all but of toasted barley. He welcomed the revelation of how the married lived: fine food for company in the evening, then, when one penetrated behind the scenes, thrift.

  ‘That would be kind.’

  He gave her the address of his father’s doctor.

  ***

  Panama Affair: Trial Starts in Paris. Senators and Deputies Indicted.

  The saloon of the Irish mail-boat was almost deserted. Adam, too restless to stay in his berth, gripped a rail and flicked through newspapers bought in Holyhead. He had already checked the foreign news and found nothing about Belcastel. Looking up, he locked glances with the only other man in the bar.

  ‘Nasty night!’ The man seemed eager for company. ‘Whiskey?’ he suggested. ‘Settles the stomach. Can I get you one?’ His soft tongue changed ‘get’ to ‘guess’. That, Adam remembered now, was how people ‘at home’ talked. Engaging dubiously with consonants, their breath hovered as though hesitancy were a form of politeness. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Thanks, but I’m not sure enough of my sea legs.’

  The fuzzy-looking man – he had a pepper of stubble on cheeks and chin – raised an eyebrow at the headline in Adam’s paper. ‘Still risky, eh, to be a French politician? How long is it – a century? – since they were sending each other in tumbrels to the guillotine! Now I’m told they go in carriages to the courtroom!’

  An old joke. The floor lurched, and the other man’s drink drenched Adam’s chest. Amidst apologetic moppings, names were exchanged.

  ‘Gould?’ The drinker was a Blake. His tone now was businesslike. ‘You,’ he scrutinized Adam, ‘must be one of the Goulds from ...?’

  A lie shot from Adam’s mouth. It was as if he were dodging himself. ‘I have no relatives here,’ he blurted, aware that what he was dodging was a despotic tribal gaze that turned you into what it chose. He had seen Thady mesmerize fellow-Irishmen with this in Paris and seen them do it to him.

  Cannibal-like, the tribal eye reduced you to matter for absorbing or spitting out. Adam had been spat out before. Maybe – as must have happened to his young father – it was worse to be swallowed?

  ‘I,’ he improvised, ‘come from Canada.’

  It could have been true. His tribe had planned to ‘emigrate’ him there.

  Blake’s scrutiny sharpened. Seeking a resemblance? Adam did not think he would find it. He couldn’t believe he looked like Gary Gould who, he had come to think, must always have been coltish and immature. It was the kindest view: an irresponsible, aging child! Even his father’s blithe monicker suggested this. It was a buck’s name. A rosy-faced sportsman’s name, it hinted at ‘score’ and ‘galore’ and hopes of more and more unearned luck!

  Which, by all accounts, had run out.

  Again the boat heaved.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked his companion. Then, hopefully: ‘Staying in Kingstown this evening?’

  ‘No.’ Adam said something vague about a train. Not vague enough, though, for Blake guessed that it must be the one for the west.

  ‘God help us, the Wild Irish West!’ He listed its troubles: a recurrence of potato blight and the Congested Districts Board’s efforts to get landlords to sell. ‘Land purchase,�
� he sneered. ‘Helping tenants to buy. They call it “giving them a stake in the land”. The crowd beyond in Westminster aim to kill Home Rule with kindness! But sure once you give land to pooreens, what do you think will happen? It’ll be let go to thistles and ragweed.’ Blake ordered another whiskey. ‘You won’t join me?’

  Adam shook his head.

  ‘Sure? The worst is behind us. The barman says they’ve sighted the Bailey light. You can be glad, anyway, that you’re not one of those Goulds I was thinking of. They’re a rackety lot.’ Blake sipped irritably. ‘I should know. My first cousin married one, and,’ he lowered his voice, ‘it looks as though I may end up with her on my hands! Between yourself and myself, it’s why I’m here. I’ve been summoned to give support. But it’ll be a poor lookout if I have to take her home. My wife can’t stand her.’ Sobered, he stared glumly at his glass. ‘The cousin’s a difficult woman. Bitter. She had no children,’ he confided, ‘so there’s a strong chance that her husband, who’s at his last gasp, may have made a will leaving their place – which is badly encumbered anyway – to a by-child he had years before he married her by some ...’

  ‘Stop! Don’t say it!’

  Blake stared.

  Adam’s face was burning. ‘Sorry! I had to stop you! I am one of those Goulds. I’m the by-child.’ A ‘pooreen’, he thought, a bringer of thistles! Practically a thistle himself! Had his father thought so? But now what Blake had said about him began to register. ‘Is he,’ Adam asked, ‘Gary Gould – it is him you meant, isn’t it? – is he really at his last gasp? Close to dying?’

  ‘You ... Oh Lord ... Listen now, Mr Gould, I’m truly sorry if ... I meant no offence. You mustn’t take it to heart.’

  ‘Is he?’

  The other man gabbled on, as upset at having given offence as Adam could ever be at taking it.

  Not that Adam had! He shook his head. ‘My fault! I shouldn’t have misled you. Will you have a drink with me?’

  ‘I will. Of course. A large Irish, please.’

  ‘Two,’ Adam told the barman, ‘neat,’ and when the liquid blazed in his throat felt a quiver of relief. The tribe, after all, was divided within itself. Not compact at all.

  ‘Now you must have one with me? Another large one?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Sláinte.’

  By the time they had drained their glasses, the gangways were in place. They joined the passengers crowding down them, and, on leaving the jetty, Adam felt the land of his fathers underfoot.

  The ‘auld sod’, he thought, and in his ear the words had Thady’s self-mocking lilt. Feeling an abrupt and painful onset of cramp in his foot, he flexed it hard, raised the toe until his calf hurt, lowered the heel and got rid of the sensation. Maybe it had never been there?

  ***

  Waking, hours later, somewhere in the flatlands of middle Ireland, he looked out of the train window at a mare with her tail up racing through mist. It brought to mind the stories of fairy horses –‘pookas’ – which his mother used to tell. Wild as fate, these challenged travellers to climb on their backs, then carried them off to a timeless land. Had the thought come to mind as a cypher for something? Love? Mourning? Encumbered legacies? He closed, then opened his eyes and this time saw a sheep so deep in sedge that it looked like sedge itself. Grazing nearby, a pony had a coat as rough as grass. Next to it Adam’s father lay on his back and stared at the sky. He didn’t blink when the pony – somehow Adam was now on its back – raised a hoof and held it poised over his face. There were no reins. In a panic, Adam seized the creature’s mane, jerked it to one side and kicked its opposite flank. This had no effect. As the hoof descended, there was a splintering of bone. His fingernails, when he opened his eyes, had pierced the skin of his palms.

  He wondered if his father had just died. Or whether the dream had mixed the dead Monseigneur de Belcastel with an image of the young Gary Gould.

  For of course it had been a dream, a guilt-and-worry dream, touched off by what Blake had told him. Remembering his promise to forgive his father, he felt relief at the prospect. Perhaps, after all, the tribe’s embrace need not shrivel a man’s sense of himself? Perhaps it could expand it?

  Thinking of Blake made him wonder whether there hadn’t been something odd about him, even a little mendacious. Was it possible that the estate was not encumbered? He imagined Blake seated in a Kingstown hotel, eating hot buttered scones and jam, while wondering how effectively he had frightened off the by-child.

  Gazing vaguely out at the mesmeric bog, Adam saw his mother. She was mounted on a chestnut stallion.

  This was not a dream. His eyes were open. She was there. As she galloped along beside the train, he saw her from quite close then, more completely, from further off. It was she! And not a day older! Neatly dressed in her familiar riding habit, she wheeled away and began jumping fences. Her hair, as always, was in a bun and her riding hat pulled low on her forehead.

  Adam, who had paid little attention when psycho-physical phenomena were discussed at the maison de santé, now wondered if he was about to witness a re-enactment of the old disaster – the one he had not seen but had endlessly imagined? Thinking, half credulously, of the belief that bad events could leave their mark like a photograph on a place, he began to brace himself for the accident and felt an access of mounting battle fever. Surely it must soon happen, then be over. Now? No, now! But not at all. Easily and efficiently, the amazone – the whimsical French word domesticated her – cleared her fences. Then her hair came loose. She paused, pulled off her hat, twisted a new bun in place, secured it with a few salvaged hairpins and jammed the hat back on. Her nose must have started to run, for she wiped it lavishly with the back of her hand. Surely no ghost would do that? After a while, the train left her behind and, although he continued staring out at the boggy flatlands, he had no more visions.

  How odd that he had had none while in Passy and two now! Maybe, after all, dealing with the mad kept one sane? And making too much of the past might do the opposite? Turning his mind to the here and now, he hoped his father’s doctor had got Madame Thady’s telegram and would meet the train.

  ***

  ‘It is Adam, isn’t it?’

  The doctor, a chatty, quick-moving young man of about Adam’s own age, smelled of tweed and cloves. His rust-coloured hair jutted in crinkly sprigs from under his hat and tickled Adam’s ear when they embraced.

  Almost at once, as if dissatisfied by the slackness of Adam’s hug, he pushed him away, held him at arm’s length and looked him reproachfully in the eye. ‘Adam, I’m Conor Keogh! Con! You haven’t forgotten me surely? We poached a salmon together one time that was nearly as big as – well, nearly half as big as one of us. We were about eleven years old and it was a huge bugger! Or so we told everyone, though there’s no way of knowing now. We sold it to the parson’s wife. She cheated us of course.’

  Adam stared.

  ‘We raced ponies!’ Keogh could not believe he had been wiped from his old confederate’s mind. ‘Snared rabbits. Nearly burned down a barn.’ A bonding life of petty crime seemed to lie behind them.

  Then Adam remembered: ‘But of course! Con the Bad Influence! Father T. used to say you got me into bad ways. I suppose it was because you were a Protestant.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Keogh told him. ‘He told my mother that with your heritage you had to be kept on a tight rein. It was all right for me to be a bit wild, but not you!’

  ‘What a foxy old cleric!’

  They laughed and hugged again.

  ‘Hop in,’ Keogh invited, as they reached his horse and trap. ‘Put your bag there. We’ll go straight to your father’s just in case he might be in good form and recognize you. Don’t be disappointed if he doesn’t. He’s in a coma a lot of the time. In and out. Sometimes he raves and thinks he’s a boy again and back in school. Bad memories there it seems! One of my nieces is sitting with him.’

  ‘Tell me,’ seizing his chance to get a word in, as Keogh clicked his tongue a
nd the horse took off, Adam asked, ‘is there a woman living somewhere around here who looks just the way my mother used to? Her exact image?’

  ‘Dozens!’ Keogh told him. ‘There’s a local face. Well, there are several. But there’s one rather beautiful one. That’s the face your mother had. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I think I saw her from the train.’

  The trap jolted them past squat cabins fuzzed with mist: a wizened world. These looked as though they had half emerged from the soil but, like wormcasts, were attached to it still. Men standing in the low-lintelled doorways had something earthy about them too. Like serfs adscripti glebae! Adam shuddered. Here was a surviving bit of the old regime whose lost sweetness – ‘la douceur de la vie’! – haunted Sauvigny and his friends. Would they find this sweet?

  ‘Your Mama’s double?’

  Adam described what he had seen from the train. ‘It could have been her ghost!’

  ‘It could have been Cait,’ Keogh guessed. ‘Your stepmother banished her. She won’t have her in the sickroom, so she – Cait – went riding. That’s why my nieces are relaying each other by the bedside. I wanted her there. I’ve been training her, so she’s a better nurse than either of them, but no point having rows.’

  ‘Is ... Cait a cousin?’

  ‘Yes.’ Keogh added, ‘I daren’t leave your stepmother alone with your father – I mean alone without someone I trust. Many’s the dead man’s signature was witnessed by a legatee’s friends, and his will could be changed in two flicks of a lamb’s tail. Not, mind, that I know for sure what’s in the present one, though I did try to use my influence in your favour.’

  ‘Isn’t that improper?’

  ‘Like poaching salmon?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Recognize this?’ As Keogh turned in a long, unadorned drive, they faced a distant granite box of a house that could have been built to imprison murderers. Bleak, bare, barracks-like and domineering – was this Adam’s childhood home? His memory had softened it.