Didier shook his head and began to read slowly, mouthing the words like a child. ‘Not a word about honour!’ he noted. ‘If he’s tricking anyone, it’s himself. What’s your answer?’ Opening his coat, he produced a writing case with pens and ink bottles and laid them on a convenient window sill. ‘Just write “I accept” at the bottom of the letter and sign. Or,’ insolently, ‘the opposite.’
Ah, thought Adam, he needs something on paper! He asked, ‘Are you contriving a plot against your mistress?’
The small eyes blinked. ‘No need, Monsieur. I saw what you and she were up to when you thought I had gone off on a fool’s errand.’
‘But you have no proof.’
‘Monsieur d’Armaillé asked for none. He knows what I saw.’
‘Then he knows too that by lingering to spy on us, you left him in such distress at his wife’s absence that he flung himself downstairs. You are to blame for his injury – and are clearly jealous of her. If she comes to harm ...’
‘Yes?’ The man’s tone was challenging.
‘The police will know who to blame.’
Adam retreated to the Quills’ flat.
***
‘You’re a magnet for madness. Do you think it’s because you’re so sane?’
In Thady Quill’s mouth, that word could mean ‘cowardly’ or, at best, ‘inert’.
It was now mid-July and Thady, having travelled to the seaside hotel where Adam had registered under a false name, was dispensing news. He had started with an account of Maupassant’s funeral and of the eulogy delivered by Monsieur Zola, which Tassart had described in tearful detail to the Quills. A pity, Thady thought, that the man whose life attracted such praise had not been allowed to choose when to end it.
‘“A bad passing”! Doesn’t his name mean something like that?’
Adam dismissed a fear that this was a taunt. Thady could not know that he had failed Guy and might now be failing Danièle. No! That couldn’t be true. After all, it was for her sake that he was lying low in Uncle Matthew’s old bolt-hole and refraining from either visiting or writing to her.
What, though, if the husband’s offer were sincere and Adam’s restraint misjudged?
Inert? Cowardly?
On impulse, he told Thady that he had an errand to run, then slipped out to the post office and sent a telegram. It consisted of one word and was unsigned. If d’Armaillé had been waiting for that word, he would know who sent it.
Back in the hotel, Adam marvelled that he had not done this sooner. Solitude must have softened his brain during his stay here, where his only visitor was Thady Quill. Thady brought him letters and news, which meant that on his visits the tempo of Adam’s life shifted from tedium to anxiety.
He didn’t mind tedium – welcomed it, in fact, having fled here from Paris when the ex-orderly was spotted, once too often, stalking him in the breezy dusk, coat-tails flapping like a malevolent bird. To cap that, a letter had come from Félicité saying, ‘While Monsieur is alive, Didier will do nothing daft!’ It was worrying to learn that d’Armaillé’s health was all that stood between daft dangers and Danièle. She did not write either, being watched too closely for letters to be smuggled out. Félicité had written hers in a post office in the nearest town. An admirer – Félicité could find one anywhere – had driven her there and back in his gig. Today again, there was a letter from her in Thady’s bag. It advised Adam to bide his time and consider the following: Monsieur d’Armaillé seemed to be waiting for something and was behaving like a man in a trance. Didier had returned. Danièle was suffering from melancholia and might be becoming addicted to morphine. She sometimes mentioned Adam but in a dreamy, inconclusive way. Perhaps the sight of her husband sitting stoically in his Bath-chair had paralysed her.
‘But you mustn’t come,’ emphasized Félicité, ‘anywhere near here. Not yet.’ She underlined the words so forcefully that her pen pierced the paper.
Paralysis. Hypnosis! It was like a spell! Well, for better or worse, Adam’s telegram would break it. Its single word was ‘Yes.’
***
‘Any move,’ Thady approved when told of this, ‘must be better than none. As it is, you’re like three sleeping beauties!’ And Thady, who had enjoyed a bottle of Saumur with his lunch, laughed with tipsy wisdom and poured himself some Calvados.
Next, fishing in his bag, he said he had letters from Ireland. ‘Tell me first,’ he paused, ‘which of your two women you really want. I think I should know.’
Adam grimaced. ‘Don’t torment me. I’m half dead with need for Danièle.’ Telling Thady that to lose her would be to lose a vital part of himself reminded him of how, when still ignorant of her husband’s plight, he had described this same feeling to her as an ‘amputation’ – then been perplexed by her anger. ‘May I?’ Picking up the glass of Calvados, he drank, then grimaced again when the alcohol blazed in his mouth. ‘The other day I stabbed my hand, just to feel something. See.’ He showed the scar.
‘What do you expect to be the result of your telegram?’
‘Who knows?’ Adam turned up his hands. ‘Perhaps a gun will go off. I don’t think Danièle will be the target. It’s more likely to be me. Or some bystander.’ With amusement, he saw Thady blench. ‘Here.’ He handed back the glass.
Thady raised it. ‘“May we be alive this time next year!” That’s a modest old toast. So now,’ he drained his glass, ‘for the Irish news. Cait.’
‘Oh God!’
Adam had managed – more or less – to put her from his mind, which was frantic with fears for Danièle. So how could he deal with Irish responsibilities? He could, perhaps, have mollified Cait by sending seaside postcards, but had feared that this must seem cavalier. Anything kinder, though, would fall into the dread category of ‘raising hopes’, a thing which, though he had never intended, he seemed repeatedly to have done. Cait was in some ways as baffling to him as a Congo native and as eager – guiltily he quashed the thought – to eat him. In their hinterland, where there were few people of her station, he must be the nearest she had come to finding her match. Unmatched, she risked becoming an outlandish figure, and children might soon be pelting her with stones.
‘How is she?’
‘She’s mounting a demonstration,’ Thady reported. ‘She has been visiting her mountainy clan and returned with a son whom she calls after your father, while hinting that he may, instead, be yours.’
‘How could she have a son?’
‘Well, I’m told she put on weight last year and was away a lot, supposedly to help nurse an aunt. It seems that he looks about fifteen months old, a big bouncing fellow like the Christ child in the Italian picture that Bishop Tobin brought back from one of his trips – too big for a nativity, as the mothers in the congregation often remarked, but perfect for Cait’s purposes. There’s a letter here from the bish himself, who is no doubt furious. I haven’t read it, but have sources of my own, as you may imagine. Brady for one.’
Adam felt reluctant to pick up either Tobin’s letter or the one from Con Keogh, which was now emerging from Thady’s bag.
Thady, noting this, informed him that Cait was back living in Keogh’s hospital and had the child with her. Gary Óg she called him. Young Gary.
‘Give me Keogh’s letter.’ Fumbling it open, Adam skimmed and took in its guess that Gary Óg could have been sired by one of Cait’s cousins. She might not even be its mother. In her mind though, Con insisted, the child was a claim made flesh: her claim on Adam and his father. To her this would seem perfectly logical. After all, one way or another, the boy – who looked like them both – was of their blood.
‘You’ve driven her mad, Adam,’ Keogh reproached. ‘And your friend the bishop is mad too. He thinks my charity to her is designed to disgrace his flock. The backwoods behaviour of Cait’s relatives was tolerated as long as it remained in the backwoods, but ...’
Adam put the letters in his pocket.
‘I sometimes think of her,’ he told Thady, ‘as a reinc
arnation of my mother.’
‘Adam, you’re mad! Cait is a ...’
‘Don’t say it.’
Adam felt his tongue swell. Anger, at words which might not have been in Thady’s mind at all, gagged him. ‘I must,’ he thought, ‘settle money on her.’ By now he could do this, for Belcastel’s funds had become available. ‘She needs ...’ He paused unhappily. What she needed was himself.
‘Hold your horses, Adam,’ Thady advised. ‘Best send no more telegrams.’
Adam blushed. It had not occurred to him to send one to Ireland. The code which came so promptly to Thady’s mind – his wife liked reading him sentimental novels – required that, gallantly and even at the cost of his own happiness, Adam should be Cait’s saviour.
Thady, who did not in fact hold with the code, supposed Adam to need rescuing from it. ‘I advise you,’ he urged, ‘to keep your feet on the ground. You must have other worldly friends. If you don’t trust me, think what they might advise.’
Guy’s name sprang to mind, and Adam wondered what he would have done. Given both women syphilis, perhaps?
Regretting the thought, he made an excuse and again slipped out to send a telegram. It was to Keogh, and its gist was that Keogh should calm any fears Cait might have of being abandoned. Adam, he should tell her, was coming to Ireland.
Back in the hotel, he and Thady talked late into the night, then staggered to their beds and slept till noon.
After lunch – a headachy affair, due to the previous evening’s drinking – they moved to a porch to restore themselves with coffee then, in the interests of further head-clearing, agreed to take a walk up the coast.
However, as they marshalled hats and sticks, Adam looked out, saw a priest descend from a trap and recognized the habit of the White Fathers. Latour, he remembered, had his address. But this was not Latour. It was a young priest.
Thady had just been warning that if Adam made Cait his housekeeper, he must beware lest her relatives move in and help themselves to his property. ‘Let her know,’ he finished harshly, ‘that if there’s any sign of that, she’ll be out on her ear, and themselves ahead of her.’
‘Poor Cait!’ The implacable hinterland voice roused pity.
‘Are you really going to Ireland?’
‘I must,’ Adam realized, ‘if only to let neighbours see that she has my moral support.’
***
Just then, however, the young priest walked in with news that changed everything.
He was Father Gérard, and Latour had sent him. Something appalling had happened to Monsieur d’Armaillé, so Latour himself had gone to comfort the widow.
‘Widow?’
As Thady discreetly tiptoed away, Father Gérard reported that, late yesterday afternoon, Madame d’Armaillé, her maid and a muscular footman who always accompanied them on walks, had happened on a chilling scene.
In one of the family’s favourite picnic spots, a rug had been spread, a trap drawn up and a pony tethered to a tree. On the rug was a wine-bucket with a half-full bottle of champagne, a picnic hamper, various oddments including cushions arranged to prop up the dead body of Monsieur d’Armaillé, the slumped, equally dead body of his ex-orderly, and a pistol. Each had been shot through the head: a clean, efficient job, said the priest, but, according to reports, there was no way of knowing which of the two had done it. No doubt the thing had been agreed between them, for they were close together and there was only one gun.
‘Tied to the champagne bottle was a telegram consisting of one word.’
‘Yes?’
‘That was the word.’ Father Gérard tripped over his tongue. ‘“Yes” was the message.’
‘Christ!’ Adam guessed that he must look alarmingly ill, for Thady, who had been hovering in the corridor, was now at his side, holding a glass of something strong to his lips and asking if there was anything he could do.
‘You could go to the post office,’ Adam told him, ‘and send a telegram begging Con to tell Cait that I can’t come after all. Tell him I’m sorry. He must look after her and if he is out of pocket, I’ll reimburse him.’
After that he sank into a state where he felt nothing. Perhaps the feelings he might have felt had cancelled each other out? Guilt? Hope? Rousing himself, he became aware that Father Gérard was speaking urgently, that the sky outside was red, and that a man who looked like Guy was looking in. But of course it was Thady back from his errand and probably wearing one of Guy’s overcoats.
Focusing on the priest’s words, Adam grasped that he was being asked to let a year elapse before marrying Danièle. In the meantime, they could meet discreetly in an apartment in the home for old officers to which d’Armaillé had once thought of retiring.
‘If he had,’ explained Father Gérard, ‘the plan would have been for his wife to visit him there whenever she chose, then slip upstairs to see you. Even now, we can make use of it. Appearances still need to be kept up. Father Latour is hoping to ensure that the double suicide can be presented as a mercy killing. That, of course, is a sin and a bad example to others, but the reality behind it is worse.’
‘It is?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
The real scandal, the priest explained, was not Adam’s passion for a married woman. No. It was her husband’s corrupt relations with his ex-orderly, which explained why the pair had gone to the Congo in the first place, then lingered there for so long.
‘Didn’t he have to go because of a duel? And didn’t your brothers in religion send reports of his enjoying relations there with Arab women?’
‘Pff!’ Father Gérard’s mournful exhalation blew away such smoke screens. ‘My brothers in religion were bamboozled! The “women” may not have been women, and the duel – I believe it ended more bloodily than intended – may have been designed to earn a remission from a marriage of convenience! Alas Monsieur, reality is trickier than one thinks.’ And, as the priest filled in his story, kaleidoscopes of strategies and devices fanned in his mind’s eye and transferred themselves to Adam’s. ‘The destructive passion,’ he insisted, ‘was neither the wronged wife’s nor yours. You were both victims.’
‘Of unfortunate encounters? Mauvais passants?’
The priest sighed. ‘We must pray that at the last they managed to repent.’
***
A year later Con Keogh, in Paris for Adam’s wedding, brought news of Cait. She had settled into the gate-lodge where Adam and his mother had stayed just before their lives fell apart. Cait liked it though. Keogh, using Adam’s money, had had it fixed up. He had had the big house fixed too and sent Cait to learn from one of the Earl of Sligo’s stewards how to run an estate so that she might one day run Adam’s. Within months, though, this hope foundered when the job proved beyond her. She hadn’t the head for it, wrote his lordship’s steward. Nor, perhaps, the heart.
‘Well, thanks to you,’ said Keogh, ‘she doesn’t need to work. When are you coming to visit us and see the improvements?’
Adam Gould Page 32