Adam Gould Read online

  ‘Am I a prig?’ Adam worries. Priggishness is the mark of the ‘spoiled’ priest or seminarian who, as they say here, flings his cassock in the nettles. A stinging image!

  In the courtyard the shadow duellist is still fighting. The male nurse with him is Baron who, though mild-tempered, has wide-spanned, capable hands, able, if need be, to overpower a violent patient.

  ‘I could take over,’ Adam offers. ‘I’ll take him in.’

  Baron grins doubtfully under his ticklish, barley bouquet of a moustache.

  ‘There’s coffee in the kitchen. And cook needs cheering up.’

  Baron leaves. Guy keeps counting.

  ‘Bang!’ says Adam. ‘Bravo. You’ve decimated your enemies. But the weapon that really flattens those swine is your pen. As they know! Even their attacks are a tribute. I see,’ nodding at an old newspaper in Guy’s pocket, ‘that you read the one in L’Écho de Paris.’ Why, he wonders, was the paper not taken from him?

  ‘One ... two ...’

  ‘Guy, you mustn’t keep rereading that. Here, give me your copy. Just listen to the envy: “The author of Notre Cœur used ether to quicken the ink in which his brain dissolved ...” ’

  ‘... three.’

  ‘Why not challenge the shit? Prove him wrong? Write something, and we’ll send it to the papers with today’s date on it, just to confound them, what do you say? Hm? Here, give me that gun.’

  Guy has no gun but lets himself be taken through a pantomime in which he hands one to Adam who breaks it open, swivels the drum, removes imaginary bullets, then puts gun and bullets into different pockets of an equally imaginary bag which he slings over his shoulder.

  ‘If your eyes are too bad for writing, you can dictate.’ Adam takes his arm. ‘If we’re to get you better, you’ve got to help. Making those bastards look silly will do you more good than any medicine. Are you listening, Guy?’

  As they walk into the house, Adam slips the copy of L’Écho de Paris inside his shirt.

  Back in his room, the patient flops on his bed. The pupils of his eyes strain in two directions. Strabismus is part of his condition. Strabismus and doubleness.

  Sitting by the convex window-grating – it stops patients getting near the glass – Adam leafs through a file of newspaper cuttings. ‘Look what I’ve got here, Guy, your occasional pieces. My favourite is about boating at Argenteuil. Watching the dawn. Remember? It describes frogs perching on water-lily leaves to cool their bellies, while a kingfisher slips through tall grass. It is a lovely piece of writing, and – do I imagine this? – thrums with sexual excitement when the grasses part for that sleek, flashing bird. You must have pleasured a thousand hankerers – sad dreamers like you’d been when you were stuck in an office living for your next chance to get out on the river. But what’s odd is that the piece then grows glum. Why, Guy? Here’s some paper. Can you write? Can you tell us why you followed your account of radiant, moonlit water with the complaint – these are your words: ‘this symbol of everlasting illusion was born for me on the foul water which sweeps the filth of Paris down to the sea.’ Am I misreading you? Maybe it’s not a complaint? Maybe you were glad of the filth-borne radiance? Maybe you were reflecting that we were all born in shit? As priests say: inter faeces nascimur so – Guy! Calm down! Don’t stab yourself! Here! Let me have the pen. That’s right! Easy now. Lie back and we’ll forget about writing. Just be glad that the radiance you described still thrills people! You can still turn pessimism on its head.’

  Silence. Guy breathes hard. His eyes fail to focus. Is he reflecting that, whatever the fate of his books, he himself is ending where he began! In the shit! Merde, thinks Adam. Why did I mention it?

  ‘Guy?’

  More silence.

  Adam moves closer. ‘Guy?’

  The patient doesn’t answer. His mouth sags, and saliva threads shine on his chin. His beard sprouts sideways like a ruff. Aged forty-two, he looks like a half-mummified and obsolete life-form.

  ***

  Elsewhere in the maison de santé the post had been distributed.

  Monseigneur de Belcastel received a parcel and slit it open with a gold paper-knife which, according to asylum rules, he should not have had in his possession. Naturally, those rules were sometimes bent a little – indeed, in his case, they were bent a lot for, after all, he wasn’t mad. However, from politeness, he usually kept the knife concealed.

  The parcel contained no letter, just a copy of Le Petit Journal, dated 17 February. In it was – but this was so unheard-of that he had trouble taking it in – an interview with the pope. In the popular press! The condescension was troubling, and the monsignor’s first impulse was disbelief. His next thought was that the newsprint must be counterfeit, a squib put out by some inky anarchist – or unhappy monarchist? – eager to imply that papal pronouncements were now much like those of the popular press. ‘A penny encyclical’! He could just hear Sauvigny’s drawl. ‘Une encyclique à un sou! Today’s Church, mon cher monseigneur, is ...’

  What? Time-serving? A heresy-shop? He blotted Sauvigny out.

  For of course the thing must be a sham. But reading on, he saw that it was not. He knew the tone: roundabout but firm. The Petrine Rock had found a voice and, astoundingly, it was that of a reporter called Ernest Judet in Le Petit Journal.

  Rome – here came the real shock – had pulled the rug from under monarchist feet!

  After so long! It must be a good fifteen months since the Algiers toast. And all that time the pope had kept disquietingly quiet! Were we to think that mists, only now lifted from his eyes, had blinded him to his temporal responsibilities? How could we when the main trust of Lavigerie’s – presumably ventriloquized? – speech had been that an authority which failed to hold things together lost legitimacy?

  Restlessly, the monsignor smoothed the newspaper back in its folds then laid his paper-knife flat and spun it like the spoke of a golden wheel. Round and round it spun. A molten dazzle. The implications of Lavigerie’s thinking – which, it now transpired, was actually Pope Leo’s – could lead far.

  For how legitimate by its gauge were kings-with-divine-right, or popes or divinities themselves, if they did not procure peace and goodwill? Whether or not God existed, faith in Him should surely be able to do that.

  Unnerved, Belcastel’s thought turned back in search of God, faith and safety. For God was glue, and doubt led to thinking for yourself, which could restart the cycle of revolution, retaliation and rage. But the pope, in the copy of Le Petit Journal once more unfurling on the monsignor’s desk, had told his interviewer, ‘I want France to be happy.’

  ‘Happy!’ Belcastel spoke the word aloud and tried to think no further.

  Not thinking, though, left a void and into this surged contradictory sensations. The first was shame over what he had done to Cardinal Lavigerie who had, now at long last, been vindicated. His Eminence had, after all – this interview proved it – been the pope’s stalking horse and scapegoat. He had been his apostle too, his John the Baptist, whose voice, valiantly crying its message to hundreds of ill-disposed French presbyteries, had prepared the way for Leo XIII’s public volte-face. For fifteen months the Vatican had left the sixty-seven-year-old Lavigerie to swing in the wind, a lone target for every kind of offensive abuse including – this had been reliably reported by the presbytery servants’ bush telegraph – anonymous letters smeared with excrement, sniping innuendos in the Catholic press and frontal attacks by former friends, among whom Belcastel had in all honesty to number himself. His strike had possibly been the most hurtful.

  Mortification reached the capillaries in his face. Feeling it burn, he guessed that his unblemished cheek must be as red as the scarred one.

  His paper-knife, having slowed and regained knifishness, had best be put away. Opening a desk drawer, he thrust it out of sight. As he did, his hand touched the box of monarchist mementoes which had accumulated during his stay in the maison de santé. Most had been gifts: offerings to the living martyr which
the more excitable party-supporters held him to be. The blue leather missal, for instance, with the gilt fleur-de-lys had been sent by the duchesse d’Uzès. He could hardly send it back.

  Returning to the paper, he found His Holiness taking the view that, since France badly needed a stable government, its citizens must accept the legality of the status quo. ‘Everyone,’ conceded the pontiff, ‘is entitled to his private preference, but, in practical terms, the only existing government is the one that France has chosen. A republic is as legitimate a form of government as any other ...’ An encyclical dealing with this matter at more length would, said Le Petit Journal, be published by the French Catholic press in four days’ time.

  The monsignor refolded his paper and sat staring into space.

  ***

  Guy’s remission was holding. Tassart was allowed to sit with him again, and tremulous foretastes of spring had been carried indoors in the form of potted narcissi. Sometimes, when the windows of the main part of the old house were open, shouts floated from the annexe where the writer was lodged.

  ‘Mère!’

  Tassart wrote bulletins to his master’s mother, assuring her that the women she had blacklisted were being refused access to her son. She herself couldn’t come, he told anyone who asked. She was too ill. Too delicate. Too old.

  ‘Too selfish!’ murmured the nurses, who were used to patients’ relatives.

  ‘Mère de ... merde, mère de Dieu.’

  Seeing his valet with a pen bewildered the writer. He accused Tassart of writing to God accusing him of having buggered a goat and a hen.

  ‘To whom I am writing,’ the valet told him, ‘is your mother. Madame Laure. And I haven’t stolen your ideas either!’

  ‘They were too salty. So was my wit!’

  ‘If you shout, I shall have to close the window.’

  ‘We are all pillars of salt. You too, François! You should stop writing. Never look backwards! Never turn round!’

  There was still no mention of him in the press, which had found other fish to fry. Cardinal Lavigerie had been right to warn of dangers threatening the country. The Panama Canal scandal was dragging through the courts; ruined investors suspected the government of corruption, and the labour movement was gathering strength.

  ‘People outside this place are all madder than we!’

  ‘You could be right.’

  ‘But there are more thieves in here. They stole my brain and my hair! They’ll be back. Do you hear them?’

  Shrieks rose from the exercise yard where the more dangerous cases were allowed to take the air.

  By contrast a cannon, which had lain in the asylum lawn since the Prussian invasion, twenty-two years before, had settled into the ground, acquired a tilt and a patina and looked as peaceful as the cows chewing the cud further down the hill. Paris seemed unimaginably distant when you stood here where dense groves gave an impression of great space, paths disappeared among them and tall trees hid the perimeter wall. Only the Eiffel Tower, rising above the highest branches, spoiled the pastoral effect. It was now three years since its official inauguration.

  In Dr Blanche’s drawing room a mild sloth prevailed, a readiness to sink into a deep divan and sigh. On a rug, a cat, flat as spilled gruel, meticulously stretched each limb. The doctor himself, plumply dignified in his skull cap, puffed at a pipe and delegated more and more practical decisions to Adam. His attention sometimes faltered now, succumbing to a haziness not unlike the morning mists which in this season masked views from the windows and swaddled the villa in threads of sieved sunlight. In a studio in the grounds his son, Jacques-Emile, led his own life, painting portraits and entertaining English friends.

  ***

  Another damp day. Fractured sunlight blazed, and sparrows, apparently mimicking pockmarks on the shine of a wet wall, could turn out to be real bullet holes surviving from the last time Paris tore itself apart. Cardinal Lavigerie’s warning about fresh slaughter and outrages should be borne in mind. The monsignor decided to make peace with His Eminence even if he had to abase himself.

  ***

  Dearest Guy,

  It was horrible to have to leave the other day without having a chance to explain why I came or to tell you how sweetly and often the three little ones ask about you. Lucien who, as you know, is now nine, is naturally anxious about his Papa’s disappearance from his life. I tell him you are in a hospital too far away for us to visit and that he will now have to be the father of our small family. This usually cheers him for a bit, though of course he still worries and misses your visits. His small sisters talk fondly of you too. They are all affectionate children and I had fancied that seeing them might have done you good. In fact it was to propose this that I came. I do see, though, that, as things are, bringing them would be unwise.

  I am hurt that you thought my visit self-serving, since I never asked for more than the security with which you generously provided us. The dream of a marriage – have you forgotten that it was once your dream too? – has long faded. Perhaps if we had been alone the other day, we might have taken a kind and even affectionate leave of each other. As it is, this letter will have to do. François Tassart, who was in a friendly mood, told me that you have good and bad moments. My poor, sweet darling, I do so wish I had seen you in a good one. Please save this letter to reread when the next of those comes and remember that both I and your children cherish memories of you at your best – which was dazzling! I feel like one of those mortals who had a quick fling with some god, then found the rest of the world forever dull. To be sure, I have my little demi-gods to prove that I didn’t dream it all. I do feel flayed though. I have to tell you that! Scarred and damaged. But I wouldn’t wish the past undone.

  With all my love,

  Joséphine

  ***

  ‘So why won’t he see me?’

  The vicomte had arrived unannounced. After all, he may have reasoned, Monseigneur de Belcastel could not go anywhere. And perhaps his aim had been to catch him unprepared? Doing what, Adam wondered? Entertaining Freemasons? Belcastel had said to say he was ill.

  ‘How ill?’ The vicomte, who was leaving town, claimed he needed urgently to see the monsignor before he did so. ‘What’s the matter with him? He was fit as a fiddle last time I came.’

  Adam improvised. ‘He gets migraine headaches,’ he decided. ‘Quite severe. Has to lie in the dark for a day or so.’ The one who had had migraine headaches was Adam’s mother. He had borrowed a detail from a lost life.

  ‘In the dark?’ The vicomte seemed to find this perverse. ‘Has he seen the Petit Journal?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  The vicomte had a copy. ‘Well, give him this,’ he instructed. ‘Can I trust you? You’re the ex-seminarist, aren’t you? No doubt you studied things priests don’t need to know instead of those they do? I’m not blaming you! That’s how it is now. Young clergy, I’m told, study the -isms: Kantism, Cartesianism and so forth. Well, we know what they produce – disloyalty! A few swift kicks in the backside would do some of our Reverend friends more good than any -ism. I am not talking of anyone we know, you understand, but of certain puffed-up personages who need bringing down to earth with a reminder of who butters their bread. The Count of Paris – this is what you’re to tell Monseigneur de Belcastel – has warned in private letters that if Catholics do badly in next year’s elections, persecution will start again. Then the clergy will see that they’ve backed the wrong horse! Can you remember that?’

  Adam said he could.

  ‘There’s something else.’ The vicomte worried. ‘It’s confidential. All right? Our agents have learned that, last winter, telegrams signed by a certain cardinal’s valet reached Rome warning confederates there to prevent French royalists being granted an audience. The confederates had a code. The nuncio was referred to as “a salesman”, the Church as “the business” and the pope as Petronillo.’ The vicomte grimaced. ‘Their metaphors betray them. Indeed, who is to say that they are metaphors at all?’ R
unning a hand over his bald head, he asked, ‘Are you taking this in? Do you even know who I’m talking about?’

  ‘Yes. You are talking of mad or vicious gulls, jokers, double-dealers and liars among the French clergy.’

  Sauvigny stared, then nodded. ‘That is exactly who I mean.’

  ***

  Dear Mademoiselle Litzelmann,

  I am writing on Monsieur de Maupassant’s behalf to say that, although he cannot write letters any more, yours was read to him during one of his remissions and moved him greatly. He asked me to tell you that, although it is too late for him to make any formal decisions about anything – his condition is volatile and, as you saw, we have to be careful not to get him agitated – he understands your distress, reproaches himself for failing to appreciate the generosity of your impulse in visiting and begs you to believe that, in moments when he is most fully himself, he remembers you and your precious Lucien, Lucienne and Marthe-Marguerite with warm affection. He wants you to know that what he feels for you all is unique in his life. He enjoyed domestic calm and closeness with nobody else. Not even in his own childhood. He trusts you to bring up the children better than he could have done. He too feels flayed and scarred, and perhaps the fact that you both suffer means that you have come closer to him than anyone else.

  He asks me to assure you of his affection and esteem.

  Signed (on his behalf): Adam Gould

  ***

  In the monsignor’s apartment, discomfort writhed, and new urgencies rasped visitors’ nerves. After the vicomte’s departure for Belgium, military-looking men of a certain age started to arrive by the carriage-load, closeted themselves with Belcastel and could be heard wrangling in lowered voices. When they left, he was ironic and prone to paradox, which, with him, was a sign of unease. He had rings under his eyes and was not quite his old affable self, although he still insisted on offering his guests Marsala and slightly stale cakes which stuck in their throats. Adam heard them coughing and was called more than once to bring jugs of drinking water. The monsignor did not lay out his monarchist regalia for these visits, and, after the second one, remarked that though a small dose of madness could generate energy and courage – consider the saints – it could not safely be given free rein.