Adam Gould (3 page)

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 he 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.

Hope, too, could be destabilizing. Its trust in the power of human reason led to high-handedness. Look how parliament had banished God from the schools of France in just a few years! ‘Laicizing’! At the same time – a mean turn of the knife – it had made attendance obligatory! This in a country which had sixty-four million Catholics and hardly two million dissidents! Mad, thought Belcastel. Parliament, in the name of progress, was trampling the sensibilities of families who saw the new measures as a theft of their children’s souls. He had seen grown men shed tears of rage over this: fathers offended in their natural prerogatives, sons offended by the offence to their fathers. They felt martyred and murderous, and so did the nervously adamant deputies.

Faith and hope had turned poisonous. Charity was the rare, good virtue and, to the monsignor’s surprise, Dr Blanche had it.

To his further surprise, Belcastel relished his retreat from the irksome angers outside. It was not a total retreat of course. People visited.

The
maison de santé
was run as a blend of nursing home and private house. Patients, when well enough, ate with distinguished guests, and there were some whose status shuttled between the two. It was a fashionable place. Even during Belcastel’s stay, famous wits had come to dine, exchanging banter with the sick, and he had seen the verbal fireworks which can precede breakdowns dazzle visitors. This phenomenon, Dr Blanche explained, was called ‘the fastigium’. The coherence of lunatics’ visions could be startling.

The doctor had a wide circle of well-connected friends, and so had his son, Jacques-Emile, a successful painter, who had a studio in the grounds. So all sorts of people visited. Gentle and simple. When not at meals, the monsignor avoided them all. He arranged for his own guests to call in the afternoon, considering them to be a liability and best kept out of sight.

Ironically, he, the asylum inmate, was level-headed, while his visitors, many of them scions of inbred families, cherished hopes as obsolete as the beasts on their escutcheons. Hopes he could handle. What worried him were plots. Taking the blame for these had landed him in here, but when he complained, the plotters’ peace-offering was to elect him to be the spider at the heart of yet another web of madcap schemes.

‘Mad as hares,’ was what he thought of them all! ‘Dreamers and botchers to a man! Brave, yes, gallant, yes, but, oh dear!
Tous des exaltés
! Oh Lord,’ he prayed, when he had the heart to do so, ‘deliver me from loyalty to men of too much faith.’

Yet how
could
he refuse them? If they went elsewhere for advice, who knew what harm might be done? Just now, while laying out the ritual objects he kept for visits, he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. As he unwound its white wrapping from the portrait of the uncrowned King Henry V of France, alias the comte de Chambord, now dead these dozen years, he sighed for the meanings of white flags. The comte’s refusal to adulterate his notion of himself as God’s appointed and swap his royal white flag for the tricolour had driven supporters crazy. In the secrecy of their dreams and in safe company they might insult the flag – ‘
drapeau de mon cul
’ – threaten to wipe themselves on it and rage at their leader’s obstinacy. Publicly, they brought their keenest eloquence to the attempt to make him budge. ‘For your own sake, Sire,’ they had pleaded, ‘for your followers’ sake, for France and for the Church, will you not sacrifice the symbol and grasp the reality? To win votes? To take power?’ The word intoxicated them. ‘Power,’ they cajoled repetitively while imploring him to show some flexibility. ‘Wisdom! Statesmanship! Remember your great predecessor and namesake, Henry IV! Was
he
wrong to compromise? He wasn’t, was he? So follow his example! Help God to help us!’ But no. He wouldn’t – and lost at the ballot box. He, as he saw it, owed it to God not to alter one tittle of his prerogatives and was as ramrod stiff as – well, as today’s visitor. Recalled to what was going on at this very moment outside the asylum gate, Belcastel laughed at the neatness with which it summed up his dilemma.

‘With all due respect to the First Commandment,’ he told himself, ‘it is an omen!’

What had happened so far was this. His visitor, the vicomte de Sauvigny, had tried to climb the tall asylum gate and got stuck. It was a handsome, old, wrought-iron gate made up of curls and coils, and the toe of the vicomte’s boot had got caught in one of them. The foot inside this boot was on the outside of the gate, and by putting his weight on it, the vicomte had managed with some difficulty – he was forty-two and stiffer than he had supposed – to swing his other leg over the top, turn it and find a toe-hold on the inside. His two feet were now pointing in opposite directions, but he could liberate neither. He hadn’t the strength to swing back the foremost one, and his hind leg was held firmly in the coil of an iron curlicue. Possibly his enraged exertions had caused it to swell.