Adam Gould (32 page)

‘Nasty night!’ The man seemed eager for company. ‘Whiskey?’ he suggested. ‘Settles the stomach. Can I get you one?’ His soft tongue changed ‘get’ to ‘guess’. That, Adam remembered now, was how people ‘at home’ talked. Engaging dubiously with consonants, their breath hovered as though hesitancy were a form of politeness. ‘Yes?’

‘Thanks, but I’m not sure enough of my sea legs.’

The fuzzy-looking man – he had a pepper of stubble on cheeks and chin – raised an eyebrow at the headline in Adam’s paper. ‘Still risky, eh, to be a French politician? How long is it – a century? – since they were sending each other in tumbrels to the guillotine! Now I’m told they go in carriages to the courtroom!’

An old joke. The floor lurched, and the other man’s drink drenched Adam’s chest. Amidst apologetic moppings, names were exchanged.

‘Gould?’ The drinker was a Blake. His tone now was businesslike. ‘You,’ he scrutinized Adam, ‘must be one of the Goulds from ...?’

A lie shot from Adam’s mouth. It was as if he were dodging himself. ‘I have no relatives here,’ he blurted, aware that what he
was
dodging was a despotic tribal gaze that turned you into what it chose. He had seen Thady mesmerize fellow-Irishmen with this in Paris and seen them do it to him.

Cannibal-like, the tribal eye reduced you to matter for absorbing or spitting out. Adam had been spat out before. Maybe – as must have happened to his young father – it was worse to be swallowed?

‘I,’ he improvised, ‘come from Canada.’

It could have been true. His tribe had planned to ‘emigrate’ him there.

Blake’s scrutiny sharpened. Seeking a resemblance? Adam did not think he would find it. He couldn’t believe he looked like Gary Gould who, he had come to think, must always have been coltish and immature. It was the kindest view: an irresponsible, aging child! Even his father’s blithe monicker suggested this. It was a buck’s name. A rosy-faced sportsman’s name, it hinted at ‘score’ and ‘galore’ and hopes of more and more unearned luck!

Which, by all accounts, had run out.

Again the boat heaved.

‘Are you all right?’ asked his companion. Then, hopefully: ‘Staying in Kingstown this evening?’

‘No.’ Adam said something vague about a train. Not vague enough, though, for Blake guessed that it must be the one for the west.

‘God help us, the Wild Irish West!’ He listed its troubles: a recurrence of potato blight and the Congested Districts Board’s efforts to get landlords to sell. ‘Land purchase,’ he sneered. ‘Helping tenants to buy. They call it “giving them a stake in the land”. The crowd beyond in Westminster aim to kill Home Rule with kindness! But sure once you give land to pooreens, what do you think will happen? It’ll be let go to thistles and ragweed.’ Blake ordered another whiskey. ‘You won’t join me?’

Adam shook his head.

‘Sure? The worst is behind us. The barman says they’ve sighted the Bailey light. You can be glad, anyway, that you’re not one of those Goulds I was thinking of. They’re a rackety lot.’ Blake sipped irritably. ‘I should know. My first cousin married one, and,’ he lowered his voice, ‘it looks as though I may end up with her on my hands! Between yourself and myself, it’s why I’m here. I’ve been summoned to give support. But it’ll be a poor lookout if I have to take her home. My wife can’t stand her.’ Sobered, he stared glumly at his glass. ‘The cousin’s a difficult woman. Bitter. She had no children,’ he confided, ‘so there’s a strong chance that her husband, who’s at his last gasp, may have made a will leaving their place – which is badly encumbered anyway – to a by-child he had years before he married her by some ...’

‘Stop! Don’t say it!’

Blake stared.

Adam’s face was burning. ‘Sorry! I had to stop you! I
am
one of those Goulds. I’m the by-child.’ A ‘pooreen’, he thought, a bringer of thistles! Practically a thistle himself! Had his father thought so? But now what Blake had said about
him
began to register. ‘Is he,’ Adam asked, ‘Gary Gould – it
is
him you meant, isn’t it? – is he really at his last gasp? Close to dying?’

‘You ... Oh Lord ... Listen now, Mr Gould, I’m truly sorry if ... I meant no offence. You mustn’t take it to heart.’

‘Is he?’

The other man gabbled on, as upset at having given offence as Adam could ever be at taking it.

Not that Adam had! He shook his head. ‘My fault! I shouldn’t have misled you. Will you have a drink with me?’

‘I will. Of course. A large Irish, please.’

‘Two,’ Adam told the barman, ‘neat,’ and when the liquid blazed in his throat felt a quiver of relief. The tribe, after all, was divided within itself. Not compact at all.

‘Now you must have one with me? Another large one?’

‘Thanks.’

‘
Sláinte
.’

By the time they had drained their glasses, the gangways were in place. They joined the passengers crowding down them, and, on leaving the jetty, Adam felt the land of his fathers underfoot.

The ‘auld sod’, he thought, and in his ear the words had Thady’s self-mocking lilt. Feeling an abrupt and painful onset of cramp in his foot, he flexed it hard, raised the toe until his calf hurt, lowered the heel and got rid of the sensation. Maybe it had never been there?

Waking, hours later, somewhere in the flatlands of middle Ireland, he looked out of the train window at a mare with her tail up racing through mist. It brought to mind the stories of fairy horses –‘pookas’ – which his mother used to tell. Wild as fate, these challenged travellers to climb on their backs, then carried them off to a timeless land. Had the thought come to mind as a cypher for something? Love? Mourning? Encumbered legacies? He closed, then opened his eyes and this time saw a sheep so deep in sedge that it looked like sedge itself. Grazing nearby, a pony had a coat as rough as grass. Next to it Adam’s father lay on his back and stared at the sky. He didn’t blink when the pony – somehow Adam was now on
its
back – raised a hoof and held it poised over his face. There were no reins. In a panic, Adam seized the creature’s mane, jerked it to one side and kicked its opposite flank. This had no effect. As the hoof descended, there was a splintering of bone. His fingernails, when he opened his eyes, had pierced the skin of his palms.

He wondered if his father had just died. Or whether the dream had mixed the dead Monseigneur de Belcastel with an image of the young Gary Gould.

For of course it had been a dream, a guilt-and-worry dream, touched off by what Blake had told him. Remembering his promise to forgive his father, he felt relief at the prospect. Perhaps, after all, the tribe’s embrace need not shrivel a man’s sense of himself? Perhaps it could expand it?

Thinking of Blake made him wonder whether there hadn’t been something odd about him, even a little mendacious. Was it possible that the estate was
not
encumbered? He imagined Blake seated in a Kingstown hotel, eating hot buttered scones and jam, while wondering how effectively he had frightened off the by-child.

Gazing vaguely out at the mesmeric bog, Adam saw his mother. She was mounted on a chestnut stallion.

This was not a dream. His eyes were open. She was there. As she galloped along beside the train, he saw her from quite close then, more completely, from further off. It was she! And not a day older! Neatly dressed in her familiar riding habit, she wheeled away and began jumping fences. Her hair, as always, was in a bun and her riding hat pulled low on her forehead.

Adam, who had paid little attention when psycho-physical phenomena were discussed at the
maison de santé
, now wondered if he was about to witness a re-enactment of the old disaster – the one he had not seen but had endlessly imagined? Thinking, half credulously, of the belief that bad events could leave their mark like a photograph on a place, he began to brace himself for the accident and felt an access of mounting battle fever. Surely it must soon happen, then be over. Now? No,
now
! But not at all. Easily and efficiently, the
amazone
– the whimsical French word domesticated her – cleared her fences. Then her hair came loose. She paused, pulled off her hat, twisted a new bun in place, secured it with a few salvaged hairpins and jammed the hat back on. Her nose must have started to run, for she wiped it lavishly with the back of her hand. Surely no ghost would do that? After a while, the train left her behind and, although he continued staring out at the boggy flatlands, he had no more visions.

How odd that he had had none while in Passy and two now! Maybe, after all, dealing with the mad kept one sane? And making too much of the past might do the opposite? Turning his mind to the here and now, he hoped his father’s doctor had got Madame Thady’s telegram and would meet the train.

‘It is Adam, isn’t it?’

The doctor, a chatty, quick-moving young man of about Adam’s own age, smelled of tweed and cloves. His rust-coloured hair jutted in crinkly sprigs from under his hat and tickled Adam’s ear when they embraced.

Almost at once, as if dissatisfied by the slackness of Adam’s hug, he pushed him away, held him at arm’s length and looked him reproachfully in the eye. ‘Adam, I’m Conor Keogh!
Con
! You haven’t forgotten me surely? We poached a salmon together one time that was nearly as big as – well, nearly half as big as one of us. We were about eleven years old and it was a huge bugger! Or so we told everyone, though there’s no way of knowing now. We sold it to the parson’s wife. She cheated us of course.’

Adam stared.

‘We raced ponies!’ Keogh could not believe he had been wiped from his old confederate’s mind. ‘Snared rabbits. Nearly burned down a barn.’ A bonding life of petty crime seemed to lie behind them.

Then Adam remembered: ‘But of course! Con the Bad Influence! Father T. used to say you got me into bad ways. I suppose it was because you were a Protestant.’

‘Not at all,’ Keogh told him. ‘He told my mother that with your heritage you had to be kept on a tight rein. It was all right for me to be a bit wild, but not you!’

‘What a foxy old cleric!’

They laughed and hugged again.

‘Hop in,’ Keogh invited, as they reached his horse and trap. ‘Put your bag there. We’ll go straight to your father’s just in case he might be in good form and recognize you. Don’t be disappointed if he doesn’t. He’s in a coma a lot of the time. In and out. Sometimes he raves and thinks he’s a boy again and back in school. Bad memories there it seems! One of my nieces is sitting with him.’

‘Tell me,’ seizing his chance to get a word in, as Keogh clicked his tongue and the horse took off, Adam asked, ‘is there a woman living somewhere around here who looks just the way my mother used to? Her exact image?’

‘Dozens!’ Keogh told him. ‘There’s a local face. Well, there are several. But there’s one rather beautiful one. That’s the face your mother had. Why do you ask?’

‘I think I saw her from the train.’

The trap jolted them past squat cabins fuzzed with mist: a wizened world. These looked as though they had half emerged from the soil but, like wormcasts, were attached to it still. Men standing in the low-lintelled doorways had something earthy about them too. Like serfs
adscripti glebae
! Adam shuddered. Here was a surviving bit of the old regime whose lost sweetness – ‘
la douceur de la vie
’! – haunted Sauvigny and his friends. Would they find this sweet?

‘Your Mama’s double?’

Adam described what he had seen from the train. ‘It could have been her ghost!’

‘It could have been Cait,’ Keogh guessed. ‘Your stepmother banished her. She won’t have her in the sickroom, so she – Cait – went riding. That’s why my nieces are relaying each other by the bedside. I wanted
her
there. I’ve been training her, so she’s a better nurse than either of them, but no point having rows.’

‘Is ... Cait a cousin?’

‘Yes.’ Keogh added, ‘I daren’t leave your stepmother alone with your father – I mean alone without someone I trust. Many’s the dead man’s signature was witnessed by a legatee’s friends, and his will could be changed in two flicks of a lamb’s tail. Not, mind, that I know for sure what’s in the present one, though I did try to use my influence in your favour.’

‘Isn’t that improper?’

‘Like poaching salmon?’

‘I suppose.’

‘Recognize this?’ As Keogh turned in a long, unadorned drive, they faced a distant granite box of a house that could have been built to imprison murderers. Bleak, bare, barracks-like and domineering – was this Adam’s childhood home? His memory had softened it.

‘So you think they ... her side of the family ...?’

‘... could – would – concoct a will to suit themselves? Yes.’

‘Even if he’s in a coma?’

‘Oh, they’re great ones for mobilizing corpses – not that your papa is a corpse yet, but ...’

While Keogh talked about the law’s intricacies, Adam looked around at cows and a muddy lake. Dry stone walls ran hither and yon, made, he remembered, more to clear the stony land than for any positive purpose. Ragged thorn trees leaned away from what must be the prevailing wind. A gate sagged. The land, he heard Keogh urge, needed attention.

‘And I need help with the co-operative creamery we’re planning. We need you, Adam. We are about to set up a cottage hospital too. It’d be great to have a landlord here pulling his weight, which he hasn’t been up to doing this long while, and Mrs Gould never would.’

Adam wondered who hadn’t been pulling his weight? Ah: his father. Mrs Gould of course was his father’s wife and the cousin of the man on the mail-boat. Keeping track of all this was like learning positions in cricket: short slip, silly mid-on ... All he remembered about this stepmother was that when he was small, she had been one of the Miss Blakes and reputed to have a face like a pike – the fish not the weapon. Some of the second meaning clung though: pugnacity, stealth. Pikes were the weapons favoured by moonlighters.

In a late gleam from the wintry sun, the house’s windows turned a fluid white. One thought of a pack of dogs with pearly cataracts.

‘This young woman,’ he persisted, ‘looked exactly ...’