Adam Gould (35 page)

Paris, 10 March 1893

My dear Adam
,

I am back in Passy. The bank, on learning of the deception practised on it, informed the police, who have been interrogating me and would like to interrogate you. I have tried to discover what will happen next, and believe the answer may be: nothing. In this election year a ‘Belcastel case’ would profit no one, since the government (weakened by bombs and bribes) needs Catholic support. Police zeal is being discouraged
.

Nonetheless, you and I could be charged with professional misconduct – especially as a will has turned up whereby the monsignor left the money in the account to you. The question arises: was he of sound mind? If it is decided that he was, you may inherit and I be in trouble, since why was a sane man under my care at all? If he was not, you risk being accused of abusing your position
.

So our interests diverge. You had better come for a visit. We need to talk
.

So the doctor was back in Passy – and might have news of Danièle. Curbing his hopes and anxieties, Adam packed his bags, paid a promised visit to Bishop Tobin, then started the slow trek back across a chilly Ireland, England and northern France to the
maison de santé
where his first encounter was with a monitory letter.

Mayo, 18 March 1893

My dear Adam
,

Do not be alarmed to receive this letter
.

You need to know something which I meant to tell you at the station then funked. Did you wonder why I raced your train down the platform? I had been planning to speak just as it left, but saw, as it picked up speed, that I would have had to shout out news which should only be whispered
.

Unfortunately, even now, there is no way to be tactful
.

The matter, as you will have guessed, is delicate, and I am afraid that learning it is bound to upset you, but there is no help for that, since you ought to know what other people think they know. This is that Cait, from when she was not quite sixteen, was reputed to be your father’s woman. The story is that he hoped to have a child by her and, if he had succeeded, would have cut you out. People said – forgive my telling you this – that he wanted a legitimate heir. You mustn’t hold it against either of them. After all, Adam, you never wrote. The thing is that you should settle something on her. From discretion he chose not to do so in his will. But she is tainted in the minds of possible suitors, and it will take a dowry to efface the taint. He would have wanted you to arrange that
.

I know cash is short, but our hospital, when up and running, may provide a solution. Cait might find a salaried position there as good as a dowry
.

Hurry back and help me deal with priests who don’t like the ‘Protestant doctor’ butting in on their territory. Did you know that they warn their flock against me, and that the flock, when sick, slinks in here after dark?

You and I must stick together
.

Adam pictured his friend raging at the indelicacy of their situation and steaming with philanthropy. This, though due to his being a generous Protestant in a place where Protestants were privileged, could seem meddlesome – as, to be sure, was this letter.

Cait?

How to link her with what he had seen on his father’s deathbed? How could she have got close – how close? – to the mouth Adam had seen simmer like bubbling gruel as it made a last, desperate gulp for life? Gary Gould had died as he lived: reaching for more than his due. With angry pity Adam imagined her lying next to the
macchabée
.

Had she really done that though? Almost certainly. Gould Senior would have grabbed her, just as the Cretan Minotaur had grabbed adolescents. That tale had all the air of a truth that could not be plainly told. For surely it must have been old, frightened men who gave the Greeks the idea for it in the first place? Needy patriarchs, caught in time’s labyrinth and gulping for the breath of youth!

Had she offered herself from pity?

Adam tried to expel her from his mind. Emigrate her, he thought wryly, and crumpled the letter, which had reached France before he did, due to his having broken his journey to visit Bishop Tobin.

It had been waiting for him at the
maison de santé
when he got out of the
fiacre
and learned that Dr Blanche, though out, would soon be back and looked forward to seeing Adam at dinner.

He left his bag with the porter, a new man who didn’t know him.

‘And here is a letter for Monsieur.’

At first he had thought that it might be a summons from the police to come to tell them about Belcastel. Instead, here was this news from another grave.

He took it into Passy village where sitting in a small, smoky café returned him so effectively to his time here that he imagined he saw Danièle drive past in a cab, wearing her blue hat! The one with osprey feathers! Her cheek was palely pressed against the glass. But she was in Belgium, so it could not be she. He had painted her features on to another face.

Why, with his mind so full of Cait, had he not imagined
her
? Poor Cait! Too bad Keogh had shirked telling her story to Adam’s face. His presence would have been soothing. His healer’s flair for drawing a sting was deft, and his assessing eye almost eccentrically cool.

‘You,’ he had told Adam once, ‘think of girls as people with whom you might, but mustn’t, go to bed. That thought breeds trouble.’

He himself, Keogh claimed, thought of them as likely to be more or less helpful with raffles and first aid. ‘When you’ve played hide-and-seek with your sisters’ friends from the age of six, you take a practical approach.’

Adam asked whether hide-and-seek had not led to the odd fumble? ‘Where did you hide? In the schoolroom cupboard?’

‘Fumbles are healthy. They teach you that girls are as manageable as your pony. When I’m ready I shall marry one who is neither a biter nor a bolter and has a little tin.’

‘And – love?’

Keogh had shrugged. ‘Think small, Adam. Even in politics quite small reforms can break cycles of outrage and despair. There’s a big thought, so don’t say I lack vision. Anyway I know you’re really a practical chap. You ran Dr Blanche’s hospital. Help us with ours.’

Which was how Adam had come to find himself teaching Cait and a straggle of other girls thought to be promising and recommended by their parish priests. ‘We’ll take things slowly,’ Keogh had decided, and warned against expecting too much since, with regard to hygiene, the girls could have been living in the year dot. ‘People who have had to carry water from the well are thrifty with it. They can’t get used to the tap.’

This reminded Adam of the great water barrels which in his childhood had been carted from a nearby stream and on bright days leaked a silvery trail. The house now did have a tap and a water closet, but still no bathroom, only portable tubs which could be set up wherever one liked – preferably near a fire – and filled with water boiled on the kitchen range. Labour was cheap.

‘Accuracy isn’t Cait’s strong point either,’ Keogh went on. ‘She measures medicines by the pinch.’

When asked why local ladies – those good at organizing raffles – could not have taught her these things, he hedged. ‘I suppose,’ he admitted in the end, ‘the quick way of saying it is that Cait has a bad name.’

Well, Adam now knew why.

Unknown to himself, Keogh’s own name wasn’t too good. Neighbours were unsettled by the energy he put into raising funds to start a fish-canning plant or organize co-operative creameries. Change, to owners of mouldering and encumbered estates, could mean only collapse.

‘So you,’ one of these had challenged, buttonholing Adam in the village street, ‘work with the doctor? I’m told he thinks sharing in egg-production will teach us brotherly love.
Fraternité
, the French call it, don’t they? Much good it did
them
!’ And cackled at the century-old irony.

Adam was moved to wonder how much fraternity he would have found in the French parish he had once hoped to run. An old classmate, visiting him in Passy some time before, had amused the table with tales of the Breton one where he, as its
curé
, had had to take on the duties of a sage. Last winter, when the midwife broke her leg, he had been called upon to deliver a baby. How, Dr Blanche asked with professional interest, did that go? Not too badly, said the
curé
, thanks to advice from the local vet. Advice only, mark! Letting the vet do the job himself might have troubled his parishioners’ faith.

‘So what have
you
been up to?’ he asked Adam who, being loath to say that he had possibly damaged two women, denied having been up to anything.

The question bothered him though. How, while in love with Danièle, had he become entangled with Cait? To be fair, the entangling had been mostly her doing – and Cait in hot pursuit was hard to thwart. At Christmas, for instance, when Keogh invited people in, engaged a fiddler and had bunting strung through what would soon be the women’s ward in the new hospital, she had an avid gleam to her eye and kept pressing Adam to dance.

‘People wouldn’t like it,’ he had to remind her, ‘I am in mourning.’

‘Ah yes!’ She blushed.

She herself could not presume to mourn. That would have been an insult to Mrs Gould whose bid to make off with the piano must, since Keogh’s disclosures, be seen in a different light.

Smoothing feathers ruffled in that wrangle had led Adam into a dalliance with Cait, and this, in turn, to some pique when he failed to follow it up. She had clearly thought he would when she turned up on his doorstep bearing a house-warming gift.

‘Congratulations! You’re in possession! Piano still here? Alleluia!’ Then, seeing a photograph of his mother which he had hung in the drawing room, she had cried with mock aggression, ‘At last! A friendly face!’

It was, both knew, remarkably like her own, and the perception, vivid with innuendo, made Adam wary. From then on he discouraged visits.

Then, just before leaving for Paris, he gave a dinner for a few neighbours and invited her. He did this on impulse, telling himself that there was safety in numbers and saw too late that the other guests – gentry and carriage folk – were surprised to see her sitting at table instead of waiting at it. Perhaps to discomfit them, she wore a startlingly elegant silk gown which was too low-cut for the occasion.

After dinner, her singing drew tributes. As she preened in her unsuitable dress, he recognized it as the one his mother was wearing in the photograph. Mrs Ross’s husband – a boozy colonel – cried ‘
brava
!’ and mumbled something about ‘old Gary’s fillies’. Cait was singing an encore when Keogh, who had driven her there, whispered to Adam that he had been called to a sick patient and must leave.

‘Can you see Cait home?’

‘Of course.’

But when the other guests had left, and Adam was making for the stables, she murmured, ‘I could stay.’

‘What about the maids?’

‘I’ll leave at first light.’

Naive? Or practised? He was tempted. ‘Let’s have a last brandy,’ he compromised, ‘for the road, then I’ll drive you back. You’re a lovely girl, but I can’t promise you anything.’

After which disclaimer, he let the drink ‘for the road’ prevent their taking it. She had, after all, been warned.

‘No need for promises,’ she murmured. ‘It’s a safe time.’

How much, Adam now wondered, had become known about this? During Adam’s visit, Bishop Tobin had seemed remarkably conversant with his affairs.

‘I hear that you and Con Keogh,’ Tobin had challenged, ‘ran a nurses’ training course! Busy bees the pair of ye! News travels fast in the wilds!’ Delight at welcoming Adam had to be tempered by teasing. ‘What do you think of my episcopal palace then?’

Smiling in self-mockery. The ‘palace’ was a roomy but shabby place which smelled of old, dampened tea-leaves – used for sweeping the floors – and equally damp red setter dogs. The dominant colour was mahogany. Tobin fussed pleasurably with wine, decanted two bottles, then asked whether Adam would keep pace with him if he opened a third or – why not? – a fourth? The occasion deserved to be toasted lavishly since, to a celibate, an old pupil’s return could be like that of a lost son.

‘So tell me about Keogh. I’d bet it was his idea that you charge trainees a fee! Six girls signed up, I’m told, whereas you’ll need only the one or maybe two for your little hospital. But the scandal that might attach to a man teaching one woman would not attach to his teaching seven! Hence the training course! Very practical and Protestant! Thrifty too! Isn’t it an odd thing that, though the sale of indulgences is said to have sparked off the Reformation, commerce is a Protestant speciality!’

‘What have you against Keogh?’ Adam asked.

‘Ask what
he
has against us!
He
says we infect our flocks with Mohammedan fatalism. But
I
say he’s the one fighting a holy war. Fear of Home Rule for Ireland puts the wind up chaps like him. They’re afraid we’ll take over. Hence the good works. Mark my words, when the Prods start those, it’s war by other means. Onward Christian soldiers! It’s good to have a Catholic like yourself working with him. Stake our claim!’

Talk had then turned to other things –
la douce France
and Tobin’s scrambled memories of Latin love verse which, he claimed, Adam used to take from his shelves and read on the sly. Since Adam had no such recollection, they argued agreeably, quoted inaccurately and sat up so late that the warming pan in Adam’s bed was stone-cold by the time he reached it, and the dawn chorus had begun. He shivered his way towards sleep and, on waking, found that the starched lace on his pillowcase had rubbed his neck raw, leaving marks which looked like love bites. He wondered if the ascetic bishop went around with these and unknowingly gave scandal to Protestants?