Adam Gould (25 page)

It is impossible to ask about this. Too painful. His pain for her – the knowledge is dawning in him – lurks in a tender, speechless part of himself which has intuited everything. Maybe it is what people call the heart? He distrusts it. If he were smaller, he would put his arms around her and console them both. As it is, fear of inflaming her hurt confuses him. He tiptoes away.

Later, though, she tells him that his father plans to ride over to the cousins’ place and spend a day with him just as soon as he can. Maybe early next week. He wants to have a long chat with him, man to man. About what? She claims not to know and, again, looks dangerously close to tears.

‘She’s ill,’ her maid warns Adam quietly. ‘She’s not herself. Don’t upset her.’

‘Ill how?’

‘Women’s troubles. She’ll live. She’s just feeling a bit low, so don’t keep questioning her.’

But who
can
he question? Or upset? Nobody. Father Tobin has, quite unprecedentedly, gone to visit
his
mother, and his parish duties have been taken over by a substitute priest.

As an amateur and a lady, Danièle’s status at the
maison de santé
meant that she made her own rules. She thought briefly of refusing the privileges granted her by Dr Blanche, then saw that she needed them if she and Adam were to have any time together. So, her room was in a different wing from the dormitories where the other nurses lived; her hours were short; she ate with Adam and the doctors and didn’t wear a uniform.

‘Which means that Dr Meuriot won’t take me seriously, I shall never earn a nurse’s diploma, and he’ll be rid of me the minute Blanche retires. See what I’m sacrificing!’

This was both a joke and not a joke, because the future was a taboo topic.

Rumours of further battles in the Upper Congo made any hopes that Adam and she might have of prolonging their love affair seem murderous. The usual promises were impossible. They could say ‘I love you’, but not ‘I shall be with you next year’. Being hedged into the present made their sense of it fragile and avid. They had to be furtive. They walked together in the grounds, but not too often. They made their separate, circuitous ways to hiding places – the apple loft, empty apartments, her room, his – then came back separately. This took time. They had not been out of the asylum grounds since her arrival. Gossip could so easily trickle back to Brussels. Shame heightened their need.

‘I hate skulking. I wish we could be together openly. Even for a bit. Nowhere’s safe though. Certainly not Passy village, let alone Paris. Watering towns are the worst. Spas. Watching for illicit couples is their prime sport.’

‘We could visit Ireland. Hire horses and gallop on a beach. Some are quite empty except for seals and gulls! If you’ve got the stamina you could swim in the very cold, very buoyant Atlantic.’

‘Could we pretend to be married?’

‘Maybe we could rent something. Play house. I haven’t lived in a private house since I was twelve.’

Sometimes they studied the papers, less now from interest in Guy, who was no longer news, than to see whether the world’s excitements might affect their own, and whether impropriety, being widespread, had become acceptable. They hated having to hide what felt like a state of steamy grace. Infringing a rule might have turned them into anarchists, if they hadn’t known the risks of thinking one’s own eye wiser than the world’s.

Falling foul of that gaze held menace.

‘We’d best be careful of Tassart. He was lurking outside Guy’s room when you were telling me about how he begged you to kill him before he got any worse. When I came out of the room Tassart gave me a murderous look.’

So Adam’s clothes are piled into a box and put into the dog-cart, and he and they are dropped off at his mother’s relatives, who live in a remote, highland farmhouse by a black, reedy lake which, until now, he has only visited on fishing expeditions or to bring medicine when someone was ill. The household consists of his grandmother, who in her old age has reverted to speaking exclusively in Gaelic and to whom he is therefore not required to speak, his cousins and their exhausted-looking Ma and Da. The da – his Uncle Patch – is his mother’s older brother but looks old enough to be her father, and the whole family has kippered skin and mottled shins from sitting too close to the turf fire.

The cousins are wiry and numerous. He forgets how numerous. Eleven? More? Two died. Some are girls. There is always a damp toddler and often a new baby. All have hair the colour of wet hay and none use handkerchiefs. Their eyelashes are transparent; their pale, blue-veined arms are dappled with freckles and dirt, and, as they wear each other’s hand-me-downs, it is easy to mistake one for another and give offence. Adam rarely sees and hardly knows them. Or rather he sees them regularly, but only in certain situations. They come to the house at Christmas to receive presents and at Hallowe’en to play the apple-games on which they impose their sly, clannish truculence. He greets them – sometimes warily and from afar – at races and fairs. He has on occasion caught lice from them. But till now he has never stayed in their farmhouse which is cramped, under-furnished and, somehow, accusing. Trying not to show that he feels this, he has often stood by the door in their dim kitchen or sat perched on an edge of its settle, smiling and answering questions about his parents’ health while willing himself to ignore the sour smells of mildewed thatch and dung. He has tried to think that the farm’s remoteness explains the uneasiness he feels in his cousins’ company; while fearing that this has less to do with miles than with pity and his discomfort at feeling it. He has squeamishly tried not to feel discomfited by their having neither running water nor a privy nor by the smells of pigswill in their clothes. The lines on their palms are etched with emphasis, as though fate’s soiled network held them tighter than it does him. Well, it does, doesn’t it? Once, as if in defiance of this, three of them forced him to watch them torture a cat, and though he has had nightmares about the incident for years – the cat’s tail was slowly and inefficiently hacked off with a blunt shearing knife – he has never felt able to tell anyone about it. There is plenty of brutality around his father’s stables too, but it is random and inexpressive compared to the cousins’ act, which seemed malevolently aimed at proving something to him. Proving what? Their strength? The opposite? He can’t work it out. Sometimes, in his nightmare, one of them is the cat, and he holds the shearing knife. All this is disturbing. Now, sleeping head to toe in the same bed with three of them, he is confronted by another conundrum.

‘You,’ says the one called Bat – short for Bartholomew – ‘don’t belong in the big house. You belong here.’

A test? How can he answer? Adam tries teasing, ‘Are you claiming me? Should I be flattered?’

But Bat is grave and not quite friendly. ‘I’m tellin’ you how things are. You don’t belong there. Ask yer da if you don’t believe us. You’re not one of them. You’re one of us. You’re a Gould, but you’re
our
kind of Gould!’

Fully aware now of malice – a familiar miasma – Adam, as a way of ignoring it, begins boisterously tickling a small, giggling cousin into near-hysteria, and, by dint of horseplay, hides his unease. He is afraid to answer, much less argue, lest there be some furtive and horrid truth to what Bat just said. He doesn’t believe there is. Not really, but – well, why did his mother cry? Why is he here? How many kinds of Gould are there? Don’t ask, he tells himself. Never look weak! This is animal instinct. He trusts it. And laughs cheerily aloud.

‘Your ma used to sleep in this bed.’

‘Not always alone neither!’

Meaning what? Again, don’t ask. At best the answer would be, ‘Nothing! But
you
thought it did!
You
’
ve
got a dirty mind!’

Has he?

To stop this baiting, Adam jumps onto Bat’s chest, puts a bolster over his face and holds it there until a bigger cousin joins in and – what
is
this one’s name? Owen? Dinny? – subdues Adam by painfully twisting his arms.

‘That’ll teach ya manners!’ pants Owen-or-Dinny, ‘since they didn’t do it in the big house! Teach ya not to come the nob with us!’

Has
he ‘come the nob’? When? How? His arms hurt. He wonders if his wrist is sprained.

‘Betcha don’t even remember my name,’ says Owen-or-Dinny. ‘Ya don’t, do ya? No more than if I was one of the dogs. Think yer Lord Muck, dontcha? Last time we met, ya said “Hullo Cathal.” My brother, Cathal, went to live in Cork two years ago. Well, what
is
my name then?’

Adam doesn’t risk a guess.

Later, after blowing out their candle, the cousins tell grisly ghost stories and, later still, when he has to go outside to relieve himself, someone hidden behind a windy holly bush makes would-be blood-chilling noises, and throws drops of what Adam hopes is water on his head. Well, if
that
’
s
their worst, he decides, let them do it! He, after all, may be the most challenging novelty to reach this bit of bog since the botched French invasion of nearly a hundred years ago. His bogmen cousins are touchy about being bogmen, and may, he guesses, feel obliged to show that they’re neither impressed nor awed by his big-house ways. All right, he decides,
all right
, he’ll allow for their need to take him down a peg. They find it hilarious that he wears pyjamas so, to avoid providing them with further amusement, he makes sure that they don’t see his slippers. They’re a smart pair in soft leather, which his father sent from London, but he wraps them round a stone and slides them into the lake.

Over the next two days, things go more smoothly, and his cousins seem to be observing a truce. Even so, when a groom delivers his pony along with a note from his mother, he is glad to get away on his own. So out he rides across the bog, canters about a bit, jumps a few fences and is wondering where to head next when he sees someone else practising jumps. At once the dull landscape acquires focus and he starts to watch. But his hovering must have unsettled the rider, whom he sees now is a woman, for her horse refuses a jump, stopping dead so suddenly that she looks like landing in it head first. While she’s righting herself – luckily, she grasped the mane – Adam rides towards her and recognizes Kate. She is wearing a smart riding habit and hails him cheerfully, calling out that he needn’t worry, a miss is as good as a mile. Then she asks where he has been and why he wasn’t at dinner last evening.

He can’t think of a lie. His mind freezes. Telling the truth would entail the mortifying admission that he may be the wrong sort of Gould and have to live from now on with smelly, ill-disposed cousins, so he bats back the query. What about her? What is she doing so far from the big house? Alone? As he hears his own questions, they worry him. Could she have heard gossip? And what if one of the cousins – say Owen-or-Dinny, whose actual name he still doesn’t know – were to pop like a leprechaun from behind a turf-stack and insist on inviting her to the farm for an insanitary cup of buttermilk? This is just what the cousins would love to do with a ‘
céad míle fáilte
’, in the name of Irish hospitality, from malign curiosity, the joy of embarrassing Adam and in the hope –
Oh God
! – of a tip. And she’d go! Of course she would! From politeness and – why not? – a touch of malign curiosity. And might even distribute small change.

At this point – ‘coming the nob’ inside his own head – he panics and becomes briefly convinced that he sees a composite cousin approach. This cousin is wearing a length of thick, hairy string around his waist to keep up his ridiculously low-forked, adaptable, hand-me-down clown’s pants and has a sack over his shoulders in lieu of a jacket. Not that Adam should care! Imaginary or not, the cousin is his blood relative, and Adam should not be snobbish about smells or lice or hairy string or even badly washed cups of buttermilk. ‘
Pauvreté n
’
est pas vice
,’ is what Father Tobin always says: ‘It’s no sin to be poor.’ Maybe not, but, as even Adam knows, poverty can bring shame and meanness, exasperation and a hardening of the heart. The reason Father T. coyly makes the claim in French is because he knows it too. (Like a demon sprinkled with holy water, the visionary cousin has now evaporated.)

Meanwhile, listening with half an ear, Adam has heard Kate explain that she is practising for her next riding lesson. She hopes to go out with the hunt, possibly even in the next day or so, but is wary of the double fences they have around here. ‘We didn’t ride much in my French school. I nearly came a cropper just now,’ she admits. ‘You saw me. What did I do wrong?’

‘Lean forward as you approach the bank,’ he tells her, ‘then lean back when your mount changes feet on top of it. Watch.’ And off he wheels, jumps a combined bank and ditch and, while he does so, makes a quick survey of the reassuringly empty bog. No cousins in sight! Not even a distant turf-cutter. Not a soul. He feels a guilty relief.

‘You’ve put your hair up,’ he notes, smiling, as he trots back. He can see, though, that it doesn’t suit her. Too severe.

Laughing at herself, she says she’s a young lady now. Seventeen! No more tippling behind haystacks! ‘I’ve put childish things behind me.’ This, it turns out, includes school. ‘I’m on the marriage market. My mama can’t keep me abroad for ever and, as motherly concern is definitely not her forte, we’ve agreed that she should arrange to marry me off as soon as we can find someone nice whom we both like. If I were clever or were a boy I might do something more challenging, but as I’m not ...’ Kate shrugs. ‘Maybe, if she fails, I’ll end up as a missionary nun? It’s the only career I can think of which combines adventure with propriety. Meanwhile I am trying to jump fences.’

‘Do you want to try a few more?’

‘Why not?’

So he gives her a lesson, after which, tired but pleased with themselves, they dismount, let the horses graze, spread out his mackintosh and sit on it eating sandwiches which she foresightedly brought with her. No wine this time, but above their heads the sun gilds a flicker of damp birch leaves which remind them both of coins. This prompts him, when they see a rainbow, to tell her about the crock of gold which is said to be buried at the end of it. ‘My family,’ he jokes, ‘could do with one of those. My papa is always saying so.’