Adam Gould (18 page)

Lavigerie, whose great white beard was shaped like the letter W, cried out, ‘The slavers kill ten natives for every one they catch. And then they kill the weak ones and the children if we don’t buy them off them. Yes, dearly beloved, I said “kill”.’ He paused before adding in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘That’s where your money goes. These,’ he waved at the small black altar boys, ‘will be tomorrow’s Christians.’

A smear of colour from stained-glass fell across the pew, reddening tears in Madame d’Armaillé’s eye, and Adam, shocked to find he was still smiling, blushed.

‘Oh,’ he heard her murmur, ‘I left my purse with Gisèle!’

‘There are places today,’ shouted the cardinal, ‘where you can buy several women for a goat, and a child for a packet of salt.’

Someone shook a collection plate in front of Adam, who put down more than he could afford, enough maybe for half a goat, then saw that his motive was vanity and a desire to impress Madame d’Armaillé. Never mind! Amounts, not motives were what mattered. Perhaps he should empty his pockets? But he needed what he had left to bring him to his next pay day. Oh God! Were children being eaten because he needed to ride the omnibus? He owed Thady Quill too for some shirts. Well, Thady would wait. It was all right to bilk one’s tailor, and, anyway, Thady was not so much his tailor as an impossible mix of mentor, vassal and possible future employer who, sooner or later, would get his money’s worth.

‘In the wilder parts,’ the cardinal was telling the congregation, ‘humans, not cowrie shells, are the preferred currency for making small purchases. I leave you to guess the ultimate fate of those we fail to buy.’

‘I can’t listen to this.’ Madame d’Armaillé stood up, grasped her skirts and stepped with nimble energy past the knees and feet of those in her way. ‘Excuse me. Sorry, but I might be sick. It’s nausea, morning sickness, you’ve got to let me pass.’

‘
Is
it really?’ Adam had followed her nervously.

‘Of course not,’ she whispered. ‘How could I have morning sickness? I haven’t seen my husband in a year. He’s with the Force Publique in one of those awful places. I’m here to ask if anyone has heard anything about its officers. Some of these missionaries might have.’

‘
I
’
m
here to deliver a letter to one of them, Father de Latour. Maybe he can tell you something.’

But Father de Latour, when found in the sacristy, had no news. A bony, pale-eyed, sandy-haired man, he seemed to be run off his feet. Pocketing the letter Adam had brought from Monseigneur de Belcastel, he explained that he would have to wait until later to read it and that, as he was kept busy nowadays running the White Fathers’ House here in Paris, he no longer travelled to Africa. However, on seeing Madame d’Armaillé’s distress, he remembered that there
were
priests here who had recently returned from Boma at the mouth of the River Congo. They might have heard something.

‘I’ll send for them,’ he told her and dispatched several black children through the crowd to seek them out. ‘Meanwhile, Madame, you had better sit down. You don’t look at all well.’

The first man to appear was one of those who had earlier been weeping into a shared handkerchief. Father de Latour left him and two younger priests to sit in the sacristy with Adam and Madame d’Armaillé who had grown pale and kept pressing a handkerchief to her lips. The weepy priest, Father Augier, did all the talking, and it was soon clear that his gabbling was nervous and his nerves shot to bits. Shaking and shrugging, he said that when he left Boma there had been no news for months of the men in the Force Publique, and that they might well have come to grief, since the average Belgian – most
FP
officers were Belgian – lacked the stamina to make long treks. Back home they had been softened by the introduction of the tramway, so how could they survive in Africa? Piqued, Madame d’Armaillé protested that her husband
had
stamina, which prompted one of Augier’s companions to murmur audibly in his ear that he should not distress her. But Augier had the bit between his teeth. ‘Europeans,’ he rattled on, ‘die there like flies. They succumb to disease, drink, women and’ – here the companion gave him a visible kick – ‘manic rage! The
furor africanus
!’

The other priest now tried to intervene, but Augier, talking him down, raised his voice to list further risks, including the use of native soldiers. He was talking,
bien entendu
, of the rank and file. ‘The
FP
, sadly, has no choice. It relies on volunteers and impressment. Wives tag along, and so do attendants and dependants who of course pillage and ...’

‘I don’t think,
mon père
, that Madame wants to hear ...’

‘... orgies of cannibalism after every battle. The moral degradation is contagious.’

Madame d’Armaillé looked about to faint.

‘Some witnesses say the Belgians are now worse than the natives. You hear of women’s hands being chopped off ...’

Adam stood up.

‘... to get the gold bangles.’

‘Stop! Silence!’ Adam used a dog-trainer’s voice which was surprisingly effective. ‘You’d better get him away,’ he whispered to the other two, thinking that they and he might have been dealing with one of Dr Blanche’s patients. And perhaps the thought showed in his manner, for they did as he said. One furtively touched his forehead.

‘Our poor friend,’ he murmured, ‘has had appalling experiences.’

‘I understand!’ Adam turned back to tell Madame d’Armaillé, ‘I’ll see if I can find a cab and take you home.’ However, he was unsure about leaving her even briefly and felt relieved when Father de Latour reappeared to offer a loan of a carriage and promise to reassure Madame’s cousin and friend if they should happen to come looking for her.

At the church door, Adam and Madame d’Armaillé caught a last glimpse of Father Augier. He was dictating names to a seminarist who was writing them on a blackboard: ‘The Reverend Father Xavier Le Blanc,’ intoned Augier, who was too absorbed to notice them. ‘The Reverend Father Jacques Georgel, Father Louis Lebrice ...’ After each priest’s name, instead of a prayer for eternal light to shine on him, came the words: ‘killed and eaten, killed and eaten, killed and eaten’. Each time he said them, Father Augier’s lower teeth shot forward and bit the air. They were neat, yellowed teeth and reminded Adam of the ivory hair combs which had been appearing more frequently in shop windows since the interior of Africa had opened up. ‘
Tués et mangés
!’ the priest repeated, and his lips closed like a noose around the ‘u’ of ‘
tués
’.

Perhaps the seminarist saw Adam’s surprise, for he turned from the blackboard to ask, ‘Should I write “martyred” as well, Father?’

Augier’s head jerked upwards, ‘Yes. By all means do. They were all doubly martyred! Just going to that place is a martyrdom. Going there is a martyrdom and coming back is a miracle. Have you any red chalk?’

‘Red, father?’

‘Yes,
fili mi
, the liturgical colour for martyrs.’

Madame d’Armaillé’s face was still frozen, and Adam couldn’t tell whether she had heard. He felt relieved when they came out into the winter daylight. In its shine, her forehead had the clarity of mother of pearl.

After they had settled in the carriage and told the coachman where to go, her expression remained congealed, and he didn’t know whether to be as reticent as she. On impulse, he decided to break the silence. ‘Madame ...’

She managed a twist of a smile. ‘Oh, I think you can call me Danièle. Formality, after what we’ve just heard ...’ She waved it away.

‘Very well, and my name, as you know, is Adam.’

‘Adam!’ A spurt of nervous laughter ran out of power. ‘What a pity I have no apple to tempt you! Yet here we are in a carriage which must be the modern equivalent of sitting under the tree of knowledge.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘It’s just that carriage-rides are seen as great occasions of sin, are they not, since the one in
Madame Bovary
by poor Maupassant’s friend? I imagine poor Mademoiselle Litzelmann – oh dear, why do I keep saying “poor”?’ She shivered, and he saw that the effort to make conversation was too much for her.

To soothe her, he said, ‘That priest wasn’t reliable.’

‘The Congo is a terrible place.’

‘But there are miracles.’

She said drearily. ‘I don’t think
he
believes in them, do you? His faith is full of holes.’ She fell silent for moments, then said thoughtfully, ‘So is mine. After all, my husband may have become morally degraded, as le Père Augier would say, or his body may have been divided among the Bantu.’

He was unsure what to say to this and, though raw with sympathy, feared to make her anguish worse. He would have liked to put an arm around her, but didn’t dare. He felt his hands open, then close. Being invited to call her Danièle was not, he guessed, an encouragement to make advances. On the contrary, it granted him a brotherly status, which in itself was a sort of taboo.

‘If someone ate his flesh ...’

Seeing his shock, she stopped, then, after perhaps a minute, added, ‘It’s all quite mad, isn’t it? Grotesque!’ Her tone was cooler now, and before he could speak, she said, ‘Wait, let me get my thought clear. You were in a seminary, yes? Someone said so. Then tell me: if we’re all to rise glorious and immortal on the last day,
bodily
, as we learned in the catechism, but someone has eaten Philibert’s flesh, who gets it on the last day? Do the Bantu have to cough it up?’

‘Madame ...’

‘Danièle!’

‘Danièle! Stop. You’re hurting yourself.’

‘Well,’ she said steadily, ‘if I had been tied up with a rope and wriggled out of it I would chafe my flesh, but then I’d be free. My mind is in a tangle, so I
have
to hurt myself.’

He thought: she’s telling herself that if she imagines the worst, it needn’t happen! To let her know he had guessed, he said: ‘You prefer magic to miracles? I remember when I did.’

‘When you were a child?’

‘Yes.’

‘When I was one I didn’t think about either,’ she told him. ‘Until three years ago I was in boarding school where everything was quite sensible and predictable and things were controlled. Then they decided I knew enough and sent me home. But being an adult is not how I thought it would be. Nothing is predictable at all.’ Her laughter lasted a little too long.

Hysteria? He wondered whether morphine might have helped. If they had been in the
maison de santé
, he could have asked one of the doctors. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said humbly, ‘that you’re unhappy! I wish I could do something.’ This sounded pathetically weak. ‘Oh,’ he raged, ‘that sounds weak! And evasive!’

‘Is it?’

‘Maybe. But you must see that I daren’t take any initiative with you. And what can I do about your husband? If there
were
something I could do, I would. Yet it sounds like bombast to say so.’

‘Why are you timid?’ She turned to look fully at him, and her face now was flecked with red patches which contrasted with the polleny whiteness of her neck. Wondering if she was angry reminded him of Maupassant. He thought: if she is, the anger is a distraction. It’s to keep her from going to pieces.

‘Are you asking me,’ it occurred to him, ‘to help distract you? Tell me how?’

‘You
are
timid, aren’t you? Is it because you were too long in a seminary? Did they breed your instincts out of you?’

Controlling his own anger, he said, ‘So tell me what to do.’ He thought her pitiful, beautiful and infuriating.

‘Instincts, Adam! Summon them. Wake them up.’

‘I don’t have to. They’re as rampant as the Bantu’s but ...’

‘What?’

‘You came here to find out about your husband ...’

‘Don’t think about him.
I
’
ve
thought too hard about him. So now I want to paint over his image in my memory as painters paint over images when they change their minds. Is that called
pentimento
? Or is it the other way round? Is that when you scrape away one to find another underneath?’

Pentimento
? Contrition? For what? Was she taunting him again about his time in the seminary? Wondering whether he had ‘made himself a eunuch for the love of God’? Shouldn’t he stop being touchy about such things? After all, the
pentimento
was hers. Her unhappiness was so palpable that he imagined he could take hold of it. He imagined grasping its head as he would a shot pigeon’s and wringing its iridescent neck.

‘Which is it?’ she insisted. ‘A painting over or a scraping away?’

‘I don’t know.’ How should he know how painters used the word? Anger, like flame, had now definitely passed from her to him. Unsure whether he was being enticed or warned off, he felt his lips tighten and resolved not to speak again. What right had she to mock him? Her pain? Well, did she think she had a monopoly of that? As he fumed, Carmen’s challenge to Don José danced into memory. ‘
Et si tu m
’
aimes, prends garde à toi
.’ Last year, Thady Quill, on finding himself with a spare ticket, had taken Adam to hear the opera, and those words had stayed in his head. Alluring! Dangerous! Surely Madame d’Armaillé – Danièle – could be neither? But the carriage-wheels took up the beat:
Et si tu m
’
aimes, tralà lalà
!
Et si ..
.

It had stopped. Opening the window, he leaned out and saw that they were stuck in traffic. A crowd had gathered on the street ahead. People were running. Someone screamed, and he thought: an anarchist bomb! Two had been thrown in the Paris streets last week. His sight blurred and he thought of the red chalk Father Augier had wanted. The singer playing Carmen had worn a rippling red dress. An ominous cascade of a dress. What if the horses were to panic? Rear? Bolt? I could die, he thought, right here, in the next minute, and never have kissed a woman. Turning back from the window, he closed it and asked: ‘Are you teasing me? Taunting?’ He drew breath, then risked: ‘Encouraging?’ A shudder passed through him.

She smiled.

‘Why would you pick me?’