Latour murmured in Adam’s ear that the story about the rubber-collectors was probably true. His own guess was that, to force the baby’s parents to provide more rubber, they had threatened to kill it without at all intending to do so. Then, as if the threat had poisoned their minds, they carried it out.
Wondering whether his mind too was poisoned, Adam produced a parable. Imagine, he begged, a young woman in d’Armaillé’s wife’s situation. Suppose a man were in love with her. Would he be justified in rescuing her from a life of conjugal drudgery and the sins it must surely, in the long run, make her commit?
The dilemma failed to engage the priests’ interest. Their attention had turned to the coming elections in which, Latour warned, the idea that Catholics should accept the Republic would split the conservative vote.
‘The ralliement?’ Adam was amazed. ‘But surely you ...’
Latour raised a supplicatory hand.
‘Weren’t you its great supporter? Didn’t you found a newspaper to promote it?’
Yes, the priest admitted. He had, but unwinnable struggles should not be pursued. ‘That is why,’ bending still closer to Adam’s ear, ‘the proper course for the man you mentioned is to stop tormenting Madame d’Armaillé and vanish from her life.’
***
Adam hated departures. In his seminary, it had been a truism that exile earned a special grace for French missionaries. Who, after all, would mind leaving some smut-blackened English town smelling of piss and herrings? Enterprising people left such places all the time to seek fortunes elsewhere, so how could the missionaries among them claim merit? But leaving France, and above all Paris, was like casting oneself from Eden.
He prolonged his goodbyes over several evenings: garrulous ones with Thady Quill, a glum one with old seminary friends, and a last, painful one with the Blanches, which began with a visit to a now chillingly ‘animalized’ Guy whose gaze met Adam’s with wavering recognition and flashes of that false hope which can sometimes gleam in the eyes of neglected dogs. The day ended with Adam getting funereally drunk.
By then it was May. Paris was a carnival of sounds and smells; convivial chairs had been hauled onto pavements, and here he was, reluctantly heading home to where tricky duties awaited him. To prepare himself he pondered the ambiguities festering between Cait and himself and was still fretting over them while he sat in the mail-boat wondering whether he had taken advantage of her who, clearly, trusted people too easily.
‘You don’t owe me a thing,’ she had said that last, rash evening, then stretched out on the hearthrug like a cat to show off the gown which she said his mother had given her when she was too pregnant to wear it and guessed that she would not have another chance to do so. It was too fine to throw away, so Cait’s mother had wrapped it optimistically in tissue paper and kept it for Cait, who at the time must have been four years old and playing with mud pies. ‘I’ve never worn it till now.’ Proudly, she pressed his fingers against the silky stuff which slid like skin over her meek, muscular limbs.
‘It is a lovely dress,’ he admitted, ‘it looks lovely on you.’
Then he had stoked up the fire and let himself be half seduced, in spite of being in love with someone else, while his mother’s photograph reflected flames and glinted like an icon. Later, he heard himself murmur endearments in his sleep. Cait, he realized, was what the French described as a demi-vierge.
When he awoke she was gone, the fire dead and the room freezing. She must have walked down the long muddy avenue in her silk dress. What if someone had seen her? Was she – he disliked himself for thinking this – aiming to ‘set her cap’ at him? The kitchen diction surfaced from his childhood and horrified by its meanness. Anyway, she must surely have been wearing a coat.
She had left a note saying – as if predicting his thought – that she would see him for supper that evening, ‘with Keogh to chaperone us’.
He smiled, slid the note into his pocket and began inspecting the house’s dilapidation, which yesterday’s attempts to hide had made worse. Greenery had been recklessly nailed over damp patches, and removing it brought down plaster. Wondering whether the state of the roof would soak up all his cash, he scrambled onto it, found the slates slick with algae, and by the time he had had a bath prepared and washed off the muck collected up there, was too tired to join Cait and Keogh for dinner, so ate some left-overs and went to bed.
Next day Keogh took him aside. Cait, he said, felt crushed. She had roasted some lamb and asked him to bring wine, then the two had waited for Adam until the food was ruined. ‘This may sound mad, but she thinks that on the evening before, when your guests had gone, you pretended to be asleep so as to make declarations of love to her. I’m not asking what you got up to, Adam, but she’s very upset. Your guests snubbed her.’
Discomfited, Adam complained of her lack of judgement, and was told that if anyone lacked it, it was he. ‘She’s seven years younger than you and has never been further than Westport. You shouldn’t have exposed her to gossip. Why ever did you invite her?’
‘I didn’t tell her to come wearing a ball gown and shock the county!’
‘Did it occur to you,’ Keogh’s voice was cold, ‘that she might have no other gown apart from what she wears for everyday? She didn’t want to look like one of the parlourmaids.’
‘I see.’
‘She thinks of you as Frenchified and free. I wouldn’t want the responsibility myself.’ And Keogh, who always had many things in hand, raced off.
Meanwhile Cait was not at the hospital. She had, Adam was told, taken three days off to go to a funeral. Three? Yes, it was on an island and the tides were tricky. On asking whose the funeral was, he learned that it was that of a distant cousin of hers – who must, he supposed, be even more distantly related to himself. Living here was like wading through seaweed. Connections caught you in their toils.
The next day he left as he had always planned to do for Bishop J J’s, and after that for Paris.
Now, returning after less than a month, he stood on the mail-boat deck, and sniffed air which smelled rustily of winter. Coming west felt like turning back the clock.
***
Kingstown by dusk. The scene was like a smudged pencil-drawing of waves, rocks, spray, greying palm trees and a teeming jetty. A jostle of nuns pressed down the gangway, followed by foreign visitors whose glossy riding boots hung like fruit from the vigorous stalk of a porter’s arm. Home?
He thought of being brought here when small to greet his papa on returns from Westminster, then of the masses which His Grace John Joseph Tobin hoped would shorten the same papa’s time in purgatory. When Adam, on his recent visit to Tobin, made a light remark about his father having a lot to purge, the bishop had pulled him up short. Gary Gould, he stated sternly, had been a good man, landlord and father.
‘Good?’ Adam was indignant. ‘He threw me out.’
‘No! He wanted you to stay. He even asked Kate, the English girl, to persuade you. Surely you remember?’
Adam didn’t.
Wearied by his botched examination of conscience, he dozed off in the train and dreamed he was looking into the garden where Danièle’s manservant had hidden to spy. On waking up, he remembered that he too, just before leaving Paris, had gone to stare up at her dark windows and been challenged by Félicité who opened one a crack.
‘Oh it’s Monsieur Adam. Neither Monsieur nor Madame are here. Wait, though, and I’ll come down.’
Shivering in the kitchen, she stirred up embers, warmed cocoa and confirmed that on the night of Adam’s visit Didier had indeed lingered to snoop instead of speeding to reassure his master.
‘So I did see him?’
Yes, she confirmed, and if the master, on being left without news, had thrown himself into the stairwell, who but the ex-orderly was to blame? Not that Didier saw it like that. He believed it to be his duty to let d’Armaillé know what he had discovered about Madame! Félicité had tried to persuade him that this would further destroy th
e crippled man. But the orderly was prone to accesses of fury when there was no reasoning with him. So Adam had better keep away.
***
‘It’s hush-money. I don’t believe Gary meant me to have it.’ Cait clapped a hand to her mouth. She should not have called him ‘Gary’ – perhaps never had till now except in bed? ‘Why wasn’t it in the will, if what you say is true?’
Adam turned away his face. ‘It is true,’ he prevaricated. ‘My Uncle Matthew has died’ – this bit was true – ‘his remittances cease forthwith, and the capital goes to you. My father’s will has a provision which now takes effect. You’ll have enough to live on, but only just. The family was never generous with Matthew because of his gambling. Anyway, money’s tight.’
‘You’re pensioning me off!’
‘Pensioning? How old are you, Cait? Nineteen?’ He laughed, then choked the laugh as he saw that the supposed bequest would nail her to the cross of her bad reputation. He had bungled his offer.
‘It is Uncle Matthew’s money.’
‘But your father didn’t leave it to me.’
‘No,’ Adam admitted. He asked: ‘Did you hate him? Is that why you don’t want the money?’
‘Hate him? No! He was always a gentleman. I was fond of him.’
Adam had come straight from the train station to the hospital, where he found a note pinned to the door saying, ‘Closed. Doctor away’. Keogh, Cait told him when she finally opened it, would be back in a week. She looked at him coldly. ‘You never came to supper – or said goodbye.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Let me explain.’
But to explain would have involved tedious chat about roofs and funerals, so instead he found himself recklessly telling her about Danièle. To his surprise, this softened her, and in no time she was comforting him with tea as black as stout and saying that his friend was doing the right thing in sticking by her husband. Adam thought this conclusion hasty, but, remembering how saintly Cait had been with his appalling old father, supposed she had a right to her view.
After a while, she went out to the hospital hen-house, brought back eggs, soft-boiled them and made toast which she cut into ‘soldiers’ for dipping in the yolks.
‘There’s nothing else. Being alone, I didn’t bother to buy in food.’
‘It’s a nursery meal,’ he exclaimed, adding that his mother – her Cousin Ellen – used to feed it to him.
It was as her slow smile blossomed and expanded that, in his eagerness to make peace, he upset her all over again by inventing a legacy. Patching things up drew them, first into each other’s arms, then into one of the ward beds, where they spent the night after she had put a fresh note on the outer door saying ‘Repairs in progress.’ He kept well back from the windows when she, whose presence here, unlike his, would not excite comment, went to buy provisions. Once a patient pounded so hard on the door that she had to open it and hand out the laudanum the fellow claimed to need for pain.
Coming back to bed, she slid cold hands into Adam’s armpits and explained, ‘If anyone is gravely ill, there’s a doctor in the next town who’d help in a pinch. Otherwise, Dr Keogh says we’re to carry on.’
‘Does he now?’
‘I don’t think he meant what you mean.’
They laughed, though neither did Adam mean quite what she did, for he resisted her attempts to get him, as she put it, ‘to go all the way’ in his love-making. Had his father? He didn’t want to find out. Perhaps the old man had been past it?
***
As though inventing a false legacy had conjured up a real one, a letter came from Belcastel’s lawyers.
When Adam returned to his own house the next day, he picked the envelope from the hall table, then quickly put it down. On impulse and to put off knowing what it said, he told the manservant, Brady, whose eye struck him as quizzical, that he had just come from the station, had chosen to walk and would pick up his luggage later.
‘It’s such a lovely day,’ he claimed, ‘that I decided to enjoy it. I even picked some bluebells. See.’ And he handed them over as though they might certify the truth of his lie which was triply inept since, as both the station master and the jarvey who had driven him to the hospital knew his movements, Brady must too. Adam remembered too late that, in places like this, all comings and goings were news – and lies about them ranked as a sensation. Cait’s bad name could soon be as black as pitch.
The lawyer’s letter informed Adam Aloysius Gould that he, unless a by now improbable challenge were to arise, would on a given date be entitled to the money held in the account opened in his name some time before. It was the equivalent of £30,000, a considerable sum, though once intended as a mere instalment of the far greater one needed to buy back Church property confiscated by the Italian State. French monarchists had hoped that this move would win papal support for their cause. But the cause was now moribund and, as Adam reminded himself, Belcastel had left word that the funds should be used for private purposes. Like Keogh’s, his message was, ‘Think small!’
To Adam though, the sum was vast. The roof, he thought! A decent carriage! A bathroom of the sort Guy would have liked! He burst out laughing, for the money’s potential outstripped fancy! It would allow him, for instance, to engage a reliable steward, leave the task of running this place to him, then settle near where Danièle now lived and lay siege to her heart. He could rent, no buy a place deep in the Belgian woods – there must be woods! But this, he saw, was a fancy of the sort that poisoned minds. Think small, he scolded himself. Remember that the crippled Monsieur d’Armaillé has a right to his domestic peace. But the prospect of money coming elated him.
Ashamed of this covetousness, he tried to give it a gloss. Yesterday Cait had – pointedly? – mentioned a woman, distantly related to herself who, when the man whose concubine she had been died intestate, ended up working for his heirs for £12 a year! The heirs, Cait noted tartly, thought they were being charitable. Adam could change that woman’s life without noticing the difference.
He could restart his father’s racing stable and give his winnings to Keogh to do good with. Belcastel might even have approved, for ‘social sins’ – a newish term – had begun to interest him.
And of course something must be done for Cait.
Meanwhile the thought of stables sent Adam to inspect them properly as he had not yet done. They were in a depressing state, and one section looked as though tinkers had camped there. Clearly, Brady had been careless. There were signs of a fire having ravaged a couple of stalls. But maybe the damage went back years? Returning to the front of the house, Adam was taken aback on being greeted with martial music. The piano! Glimpsing Mrs Gould through the drawing room window, he saw that fun was being poked at him. Wasn’t that the tune of Ritorna vincitor? He greeted her and when she noted that ‘instruments need to be played’, wondered for a stunned moment if the remark had an erotic thrust. Of course not! No! What a mad notion! It reminded him though that Cait, for all her professed eagerness to study the piano, had done nothing about it. Her whims were lazy – but how, having no social model at all, could she be anything else?
After drinking a glass of Madeira with Mrs Gould, he went upstairs and, to settle his nerves, brushed his hair with his father’s ivory hairbrushes – Congo ivory? – then went to the wine cellar to find some claret to take back to Cait who was expecting him for supper. The wine must have been put down in a year when his father’s horses were winning.
***
‘Do you know where Keogh really is?’ Cait was cooking blood pudding in an over-heated pan. On the windowsill a jar of flowers matched the yellow flare as grease briefly caught fire. ‘Doing good works, didn’t you say?’
She tipped food onto plates. Fumes alerted the hospital cat, which slid under her skirt, wound its soft self around her ankles and let its tail flick in and out of sight. ‘He’s staying with the Earl and Countess of Sligo with whom he is secretly in love. They do good works together. That, he told me, is why he may
remain a bachelor.’ Cait paused. ‘I had been telling him about us, so he wanted me to know that he understood about men and women.’
‘Us?’ Adam speared some half-burnt black pudding, cut the slightly repulsive object into roundels and smuggled them down to the cat. ‘Am I,’ he asked, ‘to learn what you told him? And,’ wiping grease from his hands, ‘why?’
‘Because he’s a doctor.’ she exhaled nervously. ‘And I needed to know if you could have made me pregnant. This was in February.’ A pause. ‘After that first time, remember? What was frightening was that you were avoiding me. Then, when you invited me to that dinner, I risked it again – and of course he knew.’
‘Knew?’
‘Guessed that I was afraid.’
‘Can’t we be friends, Cait? Trust each other?’
She looked away. ‘You’re upset,’ she informed the yellow flowers, ‘because I told Keogh about us? But if I had turned to you instead, you’d have thought I was seeking more than friendship. And,’ she turned and held his gaze, ‘I knew there must be an impediment to that. As it turns out,’ dropping a wry curtsy, ‘the impediment is a married French woman.’
It was a day for reproaches.
He put his head in his hands, raised it, then silently and thoughtfully, drank two comforting glasses of claret. Was she an innocent, he wondered, or sly? Rural folk, he remembered, liked to juggle these roles. He had been careful not to make her pregnant. Indeed, for all he knew to the contrary, her hymen could be intact and what she feared was a virgin birth.
Neither of them spoke.
The poor girl, he realized, hoped I’d marry her. He had not eaten, and the wine was going to his head. Keogh’s letter clearly carried more coded warnings than he had picked up. The prospect of tackling the meat she had put before him became intolerable.
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