Adam Gould Read online

  It was the press which used to provide him with raw material, with work – he often produced so much of it that he’d have to sign his stories with different names – and, of course, with fame. His novel Bel-Ami was about a journalist and, just as the book showed up the newspaper world, that world has now started sinking its claws into him. With his own eyes, François has seen newsmen hanging about the village of Passy, asking questions and buying drinks for locals. Vultures! He has warned Dr Blanche, who says he’ll take measures. Given half a chance, François himself would like to wring their prying necks.

  L’Intransigeant

  12 January 1892

  Is there really no better way to stop Guy de Maupassant taking ether and opium than by handing him over to the three-star doctor who is getting enormous publicity from all this? Won’t any benefit the writer gains from sobering up be undone by the shock of finding himself interned in a well-known lunatic asylum?

  The press went to town on the thing. Perhaps it amuses Monsieur Guy’s confrères to use his own weapon against him? It is a fiction to call him a drug addict. His use of ether was medicinal! He took it for his headaches.

  ***

  This morning Dr Blanche called a staff meeting. It was attended by his assistants, Drs Meuriot and Grout, along with a warder called Baron who looked after Maupassant, and by Adam Gould who, thanks to two years’ diligence and the goodwill inherited from Uncle Charles, was fast becoming the aging neurologist’s right-hand man.

  The director was indignant. Something must be done about the press. Here. Read that. He laid a bundle of papers on the table: Le Gaulois, Gil Blas, Le Figaro, L’Écho de Paris ... Flicking through them, he said he was less bothered by the lies than by the accurate bits. Some unnamed doctor – who? – had clearly discussed our new patient with unbuttoned candour to the hacks. Here, listen to what was picked up by L’Écho de la semaine. ‘He keeps asking for his thoughts,’ the leech had told the Écho, ‘and rummaging for them as one might for a handkerchief. “My thoughts,” he begs. “Has no one seen them?” They have escaped him and fly about like butterflies whose flight he cannot track.’

  ‘That,’ said Blanche, ‘is more or less exactly what Maupassant is saying. He talks about butterflies and the difficulty of pinning them to the page. Someone from here must have leaked gossip. I don’t for a moment believe that it was anyone in this room. It could be a gardener or a chambermaid or, although I hope not, it could be one of the warders. But talking to the press has to stop. Is that clear? Yes? Well, until further notice, nobody is to go in or out without good reason, and the gates must be kept locked. It would do our patient no good at all to read this sort of thing in the papers. And we can’t refuse to let him see them. Other patients get them, so how keep them from him? I’ve been wondering whether we should appeal to the editors to show more discretion? And sympathy? After all Maupassant did good work for them!’

  Dr Meuriot had a wry smile for this. As Dr Blanche’s second-in-command, he made a point of not being a yes-man. Indeed, he exuded authority, for his face, already enlarged by a fuzz of mutton-chop whiskers, was gaining height as his hair receded. ‘I,’ he said, ‘favour lying low. A row could bring this establishment into disrepute.’ He dismissed Dr Blanche’s idea of printing a statement to the effect that Maupassant was well enough to read what was written about him. ‘Our good-hearted director underestimates the scribblers’ venom,’ he opined. ‘Not everyone is as open-minded as he. We could easily get their backs up.’

  ‘No reproach need be implied,’ said Blanche, ‘if we print it as a news item. We needn’t make a direct appeal. Just say he reads the papers. You don’t think they’d twig?’

  ‘Oh, I do think they’d twig,’ cried Meuriot, ‘and feel challenged and reply, and what good would that do us?’ He sighed, then lowered his voice to say he hoped the director would take in good part what he felt obliged to say now, which was that friends could be the source of the leak. Dr Blanche frequented drawing rooms, did he not, where old acquaintances of Maupassant’s asked him for news? Unsuspecting as he was, he probably supplied it. ‘That could be where the papers got their facts.’

  There was an embarrassed pause.

  Then Dr Blanche said, yes, he too must be more careful, and Dr Meuriot made appeasing hand gestures while the others looked at their feet and said nothing, being in doubt as to who exactly was in charge. Dr Blanche, like his father before him, was the nursing home’s director. Distinguished but unworldly, he had never bothered to buy the premises in which his family and patients were housed, then one day found to his shock that, behind his back, Dr Meuriot had done so ‘for a song’. That was some time ago; the shock had faded, and the two managed to jog along, collaborating more or less amicably, but moments like this put a strain on their goodwill.

  Employees too felt the strain. Adam especially, since he had no particular training and knew that once the director retired there would be no place here for him. And Dr Blanche was seventy-two.

  As they left the meeting Dr Blanche drew Adam aside and asked him to spend time with Maupassant, who was in a black despair and needed company.

  ‘You’re young and that’s in your favour. Try your charm on him. Soothe. Joke. Tell him stories. Have you read any of his books? You have? Jolly good! Praise them. We’re trying to give him fewer sedatives. Monseigneur de Belcastel is expecting a visitor this afternoon, so you’ll be free. A vicomte de Sauvigny.’

  ***

  By now Adam was used to the monsignor’s ways. The prelate – lean and handsome despite his scar – must once have been gregarious. Even now he received visits, often from men who looked like ex-officers and no doubt shared a common allegiance since, when they were expected, a scatter of objects was apt to transform his room. A silken-tasselled, showily scabbarded sword, inscribed in one of the less familiar dead languages, would be lying conspicuously about, while on his prie-dieu a missal bound in blue and stamped with royal lilies invariably spilled a stream of devotional pictures no bigger than playing cards; a crown of thorns embraced the royal arms of France; the limbs of a crucifix sprouted further lilies; portraits of the last – now dead – legitimist Pretender and of the live, but less loved, Orleanist one flanked those of a weeping Virgin and bleeding Sacred Heart. Seen through the bars of a cage, the late pope, portrayed as a prisoner of the Italians, figured among the suffering. After each visit, the props would disappear.

  Belcastel did not hide these, but neither did he want help with their arrangement. His ritual was private.

  It interested Adam, for, in his Irish childhood, politics and religion had blended in just this way. Back then, sprigs of withered ‘palm’ – actually spruce – locks of hair and the like had been as apt to commemorate patriots as saints, and so the monsignor’s display revived memories as cosy as old toys. Some were a touch sardonic, for Adam’s papa, a pugnacious man who had sat as an MP in the Westminster Parliament, had been prone to mock the glorification of failure – and here it was again.

  This father had been an impressive figure in his son’s early years. He was fearless on racetrack and hunting field, and, when electioneering, could discomfit most hecklers. Inured to long odds, he tried during the land war, which broke out in 1879, to speak both for his fellow landlords and their increasingly desperate and turbulent tenants. Neither group trusted him of course. Mating nags and thoroughbreds, mocked indignant friends, might get short-term results when breeding horseflesh, but in politics it amounted to disloyalty. He remained unabashed.

  Naturally the small Adam coveted his approval and tried to be like him. He inherited his bent for mockery, then – oh horrid irony! – found cause to turn it on his papa himself. Their most aching failures were with each other. Thoughts about this were unmanning, and Adam sometimes felt as if he were walking on ice, while, deep below, intractable memories lurked. He dared not confront them lest they make him want to bang his head on the ground and behave like the more hopeless inmates of this place.

  So h
e held in his mockery when looking at Monseigneur de Belcastel’s exhibits and, although his practised eye picked up the – surely spurious? – implication that the uncrowned King Henry V of France was a Catholic martyr, the sham struck him as harmless. It was certainly less harmful than the claims of samplers praising Home Sweet Home. Or so it seemed to him, given what could happen to homes and had to his. His mother had embroidered charming samplers in her day. One featured a Gaelic motto to the effect that there’s no hearth like your own. Not long after she finished it, Adam’s father informed her that his hearth was no longer to be hers, and a few months later, she was dead and Adam in exile.

  He could see the green, silky Gaelic words in his mind’s eye: ni’l aon teinteán mar do theinteán féin.

  Best thrust that memory back under the ice.

  He did not believe that the monsignor or his associates had started the fire in that château two years ago.

  ‘Never worry,’ he remembered his father saying, ‘about the man who sings loudest about Ireland’s ancient wrongs. Ten to one, that’s all he’ll do. It’s the fellow who tips his cap to you who’s apt to take a potshot from behind a hedge and agitate for the confiscation of your property.’

  ‘Just as the affectionate father,’ Adam sometimes answered in his mind, ‘is the one who’ll unexpectedly disinherit you.’

  ***

  Belcastel never wanted Adam to be present when he had a visit, and today, as usual, chose to receive his guest alone. So Adam went to see the new patient.

  Maupassant, a red-eyed, stubbly-bearded, wasted-looking man, was standing in front of a mirror examining a scar on his neck. He did not turn when Adam came in, but addressed their joint images in the mirror.

  ‘Sometimes there’s no reflection. Have you ever looked in a mirror and seen no one? Just emptiness. Silvery. Like a pond. I can’t be sure if it’s my eye trouble.’ He touched a finger to the glass. ‘That isn’t me. That,’ pointing to Adam’s face which had appeared behind his shoulder, ‘is!’ He grinned, then grimaced. ‘But it’s defying me. See! When I laugh, it doesn’t! Maybe you’ve taken my face. You look the way I used to: young, raw, a bit coarse, but pleasing. Women always liked my face. Give it back.’

  ‘It’s the mirror,’ Adam told him. ‘It’s a bad mirror. We’ll get Baron to take it away. Meanwhile,’ he took off his jacket and put it over the glass, ‘let’s cover it.’

  ‘My moustache,’ said the patient, ‘used to be as light as foam on my lip. Airy as beer foam and the colour of beer! I always brushed it up and back against the grain. Women loved it. And my hair, which is now falling out in handfuls, was as thick as a hedge. Curly! Hard to get a comb through! A bit vulgar according to the Goncourt brothers, who couldn’t bear my success. Do you know them?’

  ‘I don’t need to,’ Adam drew the patient across the room. ‘Come and sit by the fire. I know about mean remarks. I have been called a half-peasant, and my hair is like a furze bush.’

  The patient pushed a finger into Adam’s quiff. ‘Mmm. It is dense. I had a she-cat once, a tabby, whose fur I used to comb backwards with a fine comb I had bought in Italy. Sometimes she would squeal and purr with pure pleasure and sometimes she would run away. Her pleasure became so acute it was like pain! She didn’t know what she felt and that reminded me of me! I am a bit feline myself. Contradictory. Mixed. Like a bastard! I wrote a lot about bastards, yet, do you know, it was only quite recently that I understood why. It was because my mother kept hinting that I was one.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘Oh most insistently. And it is not true. These things are easily checked. She is not a liar, you understand. It’s more that she arranges things to look a certain way. She would like people to think I am poor Gustave Flaubert’s son, but the truth is she slept with Jesus Christ. So I am his: the bastard’s bastard.’ Maupassant’s gaze locked on to Adam’s. ‘God,’ he told him, ‘is to make an announcement about this from the top of the Eiffel Tower. I am the only begotten son of the only begotten son!’ For moments his gaze hardened, then he burst out laughing. ‘You’re not sure how mad I am or if I mean it! True?’

  Adam said, ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘I’m not sure either. But what is sure and certain is that my mama has ideas above her station. The Eiffel Tower is quite close to here, but I haven’t been out lately to look at it. Is it still standing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It is a monstrosity and should be pulled down. Some of us protested when it was put up, you know. It is like a gigantic, rotted phallus! A dildo! Or the skeleton of a giraffe! Ugly, ugly, ugly!’ Suddenly worried, he asked, ‘Did I say all that before? I mean just now. You must stop me if I repeat things.’

  ‘Shall I make us some tisane? To get warm?’

  ‘No, just sit with me here. Put on another log. Stay close. If I feel I’m losing control and ask for a strait waistcoat, you must bring it fast. I am worried sick about my mother. Poor woman, she has had a hard life. I was supposed to make everything up to her and now look where I am!’ He shivered. The fire didn’t seem to warm him.

  Adam put on a log, blew until the flame caught, closed the fireguard safely and asked, ‘Why were you to make things up to her?’

  The sick man looked vague. ‘How do ideas get going? Maybe this one started as an excuse? A fig leaf and reason for not getting tied up with other women? Yes. Other women!’ Now, as though he had slid onto a familiar track, he was speaking in a rush. ‘It’s hard to stay free, as you’ll discover! Show tenderness and you’re done for. Women cling, the race works through them, and its will to endure makes us sniff around their smelly orifices. Like dogs. The God who created sex is a cynic. Am I depressing you?’

  Adam shook his head. ‘My father,’ he said, ‘has a racing-stable, so muck doesn’t disgust me the way it does you. I remember a cunning story of yours, an amazingly brilliant feat in a way, because ...’ He paused with some cunning of his own, to see if the writer was enjoying this praise. But Maupassant’s attention seemed to have lapsed. Best perhaps to plod on. ‘The end of this story of yours had me in tears,’ Adam told him hopefully, ‘even though, earlier on, it had seemed icy with disgust and rage. It starts with an account of pigeons pecking seeds from dung.’ He waited for a sign of pleasure, but his flattery seemed to have fallen flat. ‘Do you remember,’ he coaxed, ‘which of your stories starts that way?’

  ‘How?’

  By now Adam too was losing the thread. ‘With seeds,’ he reminded them both. ‘In dung.’

  ‘Dung?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Minutes passed. The patient’s breathing grew heavy. His head sank to his chest, then suddenly rose.

  ‘Seeds in dung,’ he exclaimed as if he had all along been pondering this. ‘That’s it. That is how our mothers had to take our fathers’ seed, and why mine tries to pretend I’m a bastard. All our mothers – yours too, Gould, depend upon it – would like us to suppose that the Holy Spirit visited them. My mentor, Flaubert – a truly great man by the way – was the nearest mine could come to imagining a spirit. I don’t blame her. Telling stories is a comfort. Did I tell you that I don’t drink? Nothing but water. Thinking up stories is what I do instead. I don’t read much. I look. I like to see things with my own eyes. I try to see quite small, ordinary things precisely and coldly and find a significance in them that nobody else has seen. That’s the way to write.’

  ‘Things like seeds in dung?’

  ‘Yes. If I could still do it I might recover my wits. But François has stolen my manuscript with all my ideas, so how can I?’

  ‘Don’t you mean that he took your bullets?’

  ‘Do I?’ The patient looked puzzled. ‘Maybe I do,’ he admitted. ‘Poor old François.’

  The two stared a while into the fire’s smoulder. Aerated by the bellows, it had settled to hollowing dry logs into flights of tiny, red arcades which, now and then, flared up, then collapsed in smothers of pallid ash. Adam hoped the writer wasn’t seeing bad omens here.


  ***

  Monsignor de Belcastel’s mind was on omens. Belief in these was forbidden by the First Commandment, and very wise too! His opinion had been confirmed by seeing how fellow inmates were driven to scrutinize imaginary signs and meanings. These could be anywhere. Anywhere at all. In chicken entrails, their own shit, or the postman’s failure to arrive. Faith in creation’s concern for us turned the world into an animated hoarding, pulsing with tip-offs. Excess of faith was, Belcastel had come to think, the bane of our time. He fought the idea, though, for it smacked of apostasy. Words like Turncoat and Mason came to mind. Anarchist! And, to be sure, the great argument for the true faith was that it kept false ones in check. Even it, though, could become unstable.