Adam Gould (16 page)

Sure enough, four years after he got there, the papal state and the pope’s role as a temporal monarch came to an end when the Italian army broke through the city wall and the pope, whose small force had no hope of winning, forbade it to put up more than a token resistance. This, to Sauvigny, felt like the end of the honour and religion he was there to defend, and the sight of the white flag fluttering from the cupola of St Peter’s sickened him. He slept that night with his fellow Zouaves under Bernini’s colonnade, and, next day, stood with them for the last time to cheer the pope as king. Then, still numb and only half alert to what was happening, he went to say goodbye to his mistress and found, to his alarm, that she had packed her bags. Shutters were being drawn and dust covers laid over furniture. She knew that the Zouaves had just been disbanded and that he was now free to travel wherever he chose. So, she informed him, was she. Switzerland, Canada ... The old world had just died. The new, modern one was their oyster. Reopening a shutter, she let in light, handed him a glass of champagne and proposed a toast to honesty.

‘We can go wherever you like, my darling,’ she cajoled, holding out the glass which, as she had demonstrated on more intimate occasions, fitted perfectly over each of her exquisitely shaped breasts.

He mumbled, sipped and wondered what to do. She was rich, and he had learned that rich mistresses could be masterful. Even now, he was only half taking in what she was saying. His senses felt as though dust covers had been laid on them too.

‘I’m coming with you.’ Her husband, she reminded him, had died some months before. Then, when he started to commiserate, ‘Wait! Do you know how he died? No? Of poison. Yes. You heard me. Poison. I fed it to him. Slowly. Just as you slowly poisoned me.’

He had no idea what she meant. He was still only twenty-one, and in the morning light she seemed ancient to him. Black did not suit her. He had been seeing less of her and would have broken off sooner if he hadn’t known that he would be leaving anyway. He saw now that their passion had been one-sided. Rome had been bad for him. He had come here to devote himself to the pope’s cause and instead had grown worldly. He was not the shy, generous boy who had been ready to die when he first came. He was vain and carnal, and aware that his mistress’s sallow skin had the unpleasant texture of a dried-out field-mushroom. He disliked himself for thinking this. Appearances and surfaces were now all he ever saw. He tried and failed to remember how the priest’s words went on Ash Wednesday when rubbing ash into people’s foreheads.
Quia pulvus sumus
, was it? Dust and dustcovers, he thought, is all any of us are. Noticing that she was wearing too much white powder, he had an impulse to laugh. Possibly lack of breakfast had made him lightheaded.

She was still talking.

‘You poisoned me with love,’ she accused. ‘Love dosed with indifference is a kind of torture. It’s what I got from you.’

‘
That
’
s
the poison I fed you?’ He remembered his friends’ warnings about Southerners and was disgusted. Her mind, he thought, is the ugliest thing about her and, as dislike of himself turned to dislike of her, absolved himself of blame.

‘You drove me into a fever of need. I couldn’t sleep or rest. You poisoned my dreams. That’s why I did what I did to poor, unsuspecting Massimo. I poisoned his body because you had poisoned my soul.’

He did not ask whether the two poisons were equally fanciful, but was informed that they were not. She had, she claimed, truly, physically and with her own hands administered arsenic to her husband over a long period in small, patient, imperceptible and continuous doses. This was a local art, often talked about, probably less often practised, but one which she, she swore, had used. Sauvigny affected to think – indeed did think – that her story was a trick or a metaphor, but was assured that it was not. He told her that, whatever the truth, he could not take her with him, whereupon she said that her pharmacist suspected her, and that she had to leave. The wretch claimed to have kept records of the amounts of arsenic supplied to her household. Her sister-in-law too had been snooping about, questioning the servants. And her nephew.

‘If I go, they will let things die down. I can buy them off. I may have to let them have this palazzo, even though it came from my family.’

He told her that there was no place for her in his life. She wept and said he must be in love with someone else. He denied this. She clung to him; he managed to remove her, but even then felt unfree. He was caught in a quicksand of nausea.

‘I’m sorry,
cara
, I am planning to become a missionary priest. I had it in mind to do that anyway and what you just told me has helped me decide. I would rather deal with pagans than with the corrupt. Everything which happened in this city in the last weeks appals me.’

She looked at him coldly. ‘That,’ she said with a contemptuous grimace, ‘is a base improvisation.’

‘Like your own?’

‘No.’

She said no more then, but sat slumped and silent in an upright, seventeenth-century chair which did not accommodate slumping. For perhaps a minute, he was tempted to wonder whether what she had said could, after all, be true. But no, she was more likely to be engaging in a kind of charade. All Rome was doing this. People’s feelings were so suffocating and unprecedented that they needed to devise ways to release them. Days ago the seventy-eight-year-old pope had climbed the Scala Santa on his knees; last night the Zouaves had slept under the Bernini colonnade; Sauvigny himself had just devised a fantasy to trump what he took to be another fantasy. His felt half true, for he did feel appalled and thought he
might
well renounce the world which would now be run by makeshift measures and shabby contrivance. The old moulds had broken. In the long run disarray would surely spread everywhere, and already here nobody knew how to behave. New roles would have to be learned, and meanwhile Romans were hiding indoors. This had been strikingly obvious yesterday and this morning on his way here. The invading Italians had been neither reviled nor welcomed and the usually demonstrative Roman crowd was as much at a loss as a theatre company which has lost its props. No doubt, Sauvigny thought sourly, they were wishing they could put on the masks behind which they so enjoyed hiding in carnival time, when men and women did things which they undoubtedly denied later even to themselves. Not that he was any better! He was in a self-lacerating mood, and memories of his own lucky and light-hearted adventures sickened him. News that the white flag raised over St Peter’s was a domestic bed sheet supplied at the last minute by the family of some minor Vatican employee seemed emblematic. He imagined imperfectly washed stains sunk deep in its weave. He imagined smells.

Play-actress, he thought, as his mistress again began to sob, then, overcome by shame at his eagerness to get away from her, began, almost involuntarily, to play-act himself. He asked: ‘Is there a foreign flag on your roof? I forgot to look. Prussian? English? So many of the palaces have them. The pope was making sour jokes about it. At the moment of his Gethsemane, palaces belonging to Rome’s greatest Catholic families are flying foreign flags and claiming protection from foreign embassies to ensure that they will not be looted by the invaders. Am I your foreign protector or have you others? France, as you must know, has just been defeated by Prussia, so I suggest you look to a stronger power.’

She said she didn’t know what he meant. He – revelling in the chance to move – jumped up, opened a casement, ran out onto a balcony, looked up and saw an Austrian flag on the front of her palace. He laughed. She slapped his face. He left. Some time later he heard that a police inquiry – conducted by the Italian police who now ran Rome – was under way and that she had been charged with murder. Only then did the full horror of his self-deception register. And his shame, for of course she must have loved him.

But what, now, could he do about that?

He did not become a priest, but neither did he marry or take another mistress. His half-measure matched the – possibly venal? – decision eventually reached by the Italian authorities that there was insufficient evidence to bring the suspected murderess to trial. Arsenic proved to be native to the soil of the graveyard where her husband was buried; the pharmacist had withdrawn his testimony, and this reduced the evidence against her to hearsay and speculation.

At tea-time on the day after her visit to Monseigneur de Belcastel, Danièle’s uncle surprised her in her dressing-gown. She and Félicité had been caught in a downpour earlier when walking with Lulu, whose fault it was that the two young women got drenched. The previously docile little cocker had revealed a reckless streak and would neither come to heel, nor – greatly mortifying them both – stop trying to mount and, failing that, sniff the
cul
of an unsuitably large mongrel bitch. In the end the bumptious Lulu, while defending his untenable position from rivals, all but lost one of his pretty, silken ears.

‘It’s not his fault. It’s nature. She’s on heat,’ Félicité whispered while resourcefully ogling a sturdy young bystander who obligingly, and bravely, broke up the fight, then, as it was starting to rain, and they couldn’t find a cab, carried the loser home in his arms. The footman was dispatched forthwith to take Lulu to have his ear sewn up, while Félicité led the rescuer into the kitchen, to have
eau de vie
dabbed on his bites and scrapes and receive a glass of the same cure-all to keep up his strength. Danièle was upstairs towelling her hair when she heard the front door open and, glancing over the bannisters, saw Uncle Hubert move unsteadily in, looking, for all the world, as though he too had been brawling. His head was bandaged.

‘Uncle, what’s happened?’ Seen from above, the bandage was alarming. Running down to embrace him, she recognized the young man – Mr Gould, wasn’t it? – from the
maison de santé
walking in behind and cried, ‘What have you done to him?’

‘Madame, he had a small accident and I was asked to bring him home.’

‘Not his fault, not his fault!’ intervened a genial Uncle Hubert. ‘A billiard ball went astray. Monsieur Gould is a Good Samaritan.’ Her uncle’s breath smelled richly of brandy and his hug disarranged the flimsy dressing-gown in which she would not have chosen to be seen by either man.

‘The doctors have seen to him, Madame. Doctors Grout and Blanche. There’s no need to worry.’

‘A billiard ball?’

‘It hardly grazed me. Calm down, little rabbit!’

Their guest’s smile at the endearment made her fear that what she had told Monseigneur de Belcastel had already become the subject of gossip. Provokingly, Uncle Hubert repeated ‘twitchy as a rabbit!’ and stroked her hair. Though of course the monsignor must have respected her confidences. As a gentleman. Besides, it had been a sort of confession. But the young man was still smiling. Perhaps he too had been drinking brandy? Didn’t rabbits have an unfortunate reputation?

‘Your uncle,’ he told her, ‘is not badly hurt. You may safely try out your nursing skills.’

Mention of those told her that they
had
been talking about her! What else had been said? When Uncle Hubert went to look for some book he wanted to show Monsieur Gould, she had to stop herself asking. Instead, mounting her high horse – a nervous habit which she
knew
she should break – she couldn’t help giving her uncle’s medical history with a silly loftiness. Ninny, she told herself. Be quiet!

But Adam, who was used to terms like ‘the tabernacle of honour’, saw no foolishness in her using it of the battle in which her uncle had got an early wound. He was, besides, feeling charmed by the domestic untidiness into which he had intruded. He had not known the like since leaving Ireland. It struck him as intriguingly unpredictable and, in that, quite unlike the institutions – seminary,
maison de santé
– in which he had spent the last dozen years. There was a sameness to those, a reliability and a lack of mystery about arrangements which made him relish the feeling here of improvisation and – was it tolerance or forgetfulness which juxtaposed a gaudy religious chromo with a delicate watercolour and jammed a matchbox under the unsteady leg of a fine ormolu table? The seaweedy scent of his hostess’s hair was pleasingly intimate. The hall was a jumble of hats, shawls and walking sticks, and the room into which she now led him was a forest of furniture through whose cosy murk there pulsed, like carp in pond-water, the vehement colours of several hectoring, historical paintings. These were so large that she, in her silk dressing-gown, could have just stepped from one of their frames. Of whom did she remind him? Lucretia? Susanna? Leda, perhaps? Cheeks flushed, hair rough from the towel, you could see in her any of the victim-heroines of antiquity, and it was reassuring to see that she, who had been so stiff when they met before, now seemed a little at a loss. Echoes from his school readers came to mind: ‘sweet disorder’ and ‘the tangles of Neæra’s hair’. He couldn’t voice them though. They were too delicately indelicate – and anyway not his! He had had no live experience of women. Humiliated at having a mind papered with other men’s dreams, he turned away his head.

Taking this for disapproval – the monsignor
must
have been indiscreet – she felt the need to explain that her tender devotion to her uncle was in part due to her hope that someone in faraway Africa would be as kind if her husband should ever find himself in need of a corporal work of mercy. Oh
zut
, she thought as soon as she’d said this. How priggish! And into her head shot the child’s word ‘pi’. It summed up her vexation. She had been pi!

Again little Lulu was to blame. Danièle had been unsettled by Félicité’s confidences during their walk home through the rain. While the wounded Lulu’s rescuer clumped behind, carrying him in his coat, mistress and maid had kept softly bumping umbrellas as Félicité leaned close to describe the erotomania of her last employer, a rich foreign widow now back in her own country. She, Félicité murmured, had said that, just as the cure for hunger was to eat, so the cure for uterine need was ... Danièle shushed her: a purely formal move since Félicité could not be shushed for long and in next to no time was again shocking them both by accounts of the widow’s views. The link, of course, was with the incident just now in the park. Males
knew
, Félicité asserted. They sensed female readiness and could not help but respond. Willy nilly! Nature took charge. There was no choice involved. Widows ... At this point Danièle, feeling a cold drip from her umbrella on the back of her neck, turned, saw that the fellow carrying Lulu had his ear cocked, told Félicité to hold her tongue, then marched testily ahead of her.