Adam Gould (41 page)

‘Adam, you’re mad! Cait is a ...’

‘Don’t say it.’

Adam felt his tongue swell. Anger, at words which might not have been in Thady’s mind at all, gagged him. ‘I must,’ he thought, ‘settle money on her.’ By now he could do this, for Belcastel’s funds had become available. ‘She needs ...’ He paused unhappily. What she needed was himself.

‘Hold your horses, Adam,’ Thady advised. ‘Best send no more telegrams.’

Adam blushed. It had not occurred to him to send one to Ireland. The code which came so promptly to Thady’s mind – his wife liked reading him sentimental novels – required that, gallantly and even at the cost of his own happiness, Adam should be Cait’s saviour.

Thady, who did not in fact hold with the code, supposed Adam to need rescuing from it. ‘I advise you,’ he urged, ‘to keep your feet on the ground. You must have other worldly friends. If you don’t trust me, think what they might advise.’

Guy’s name sprang to mind, and Adam wondered what
he
would have done. Given both women syphilis, perhaps?

Regretting the thought, he made an excuse and again slipped out to send a telegram. It was to Keogh, and its gist was that Keogh should calm any fears Cait might have of being abandoned. Adam, he should tell her, was coming to Ireland.

Back in the hotel, he and Thady talked late into the night, then staggered to their beds and slept till noon.

After lunch – a headachy affair, due to the previous evening’s drinking – they moved to a porch to restore themselves with coffee then, in the interests of further head-clearing, agreed to take a walk up the coast.

However, as they marshalled hats and sticks, Adam looked out, saw a priest descend from a trap and recognized the habit of the White Fathers. Latour, he remembered, had his address. But this was not Latour. It was a young priest.

Thady had just been warning that if Adam made Cait his housekeeper, he must beware lest her relatives move in and help themselves to his property. ‘Let her know,’ he finished harshly, ‘that if there’s any sign of that, she’ll be out on her ear, and themselves ahead of her.’

‘Poor Cait!’ The implacable hinterland voice roused pity.

‘Are you really going to Ireland?’

‘I must,’ Adam realized, ‘if only to let neighbours see that she has my moral support.’

Just then, however, the young priest walked in with news that changed everything.

He was Father Gérard, and Latour had sent him. Something appalling had happened to Monsieur d’Armaillé, so Latour himself had gone to comfort the widow.

‘Widow?’

As Thady discreetly tiptoed away, Father Gérard reported that, late yesterday afternoon, Madame d’Armaillé, her maid and a muscular footman who always accompanied them on walks, had happened on a chilling scene.

In one of the family’s favourite picnic spots, a rug had been spread, a trap drawn up and a pony tethered to a tree. On the rug was a wine-bucket with a half-full bottle of champagne, a picnic hamper, various oddments including cushions arranged to prop up the dead body of Monsieur d’Armaillé, the slumped, equally dead body of his ex-orderly, and a pistol. Each had been shot through the head: a clean, efficient job, said the priest, but, according to reports, there was no way of knowing which of the two had done it. No doubt the thing had been agreed between them, for they were close together and there was only one gun.

‘Tied to the champagne bottle was a telegram consisting of one word.’

‘Yes?’

‘That was the word.’ Father Gérard tripped over his tongue. ‘“Yes” was the message.’

‘Christ!’ Adam guessed that he must look alarmingly ill, for Thady, who had been hovering in the corridor, was now at his side, holding a glass of something strong to his lips and asking if there was anything he could do.

‘You could go to the post office,’ Adam told him, ‘and send a telegram begging Con to tell Cait that I can’t come after all. Tell him I’m sorry. He must look after her and if he is out of pocket, I’ll reimburse him.’

After that he sank into a state where he felt nothing. Perhaps the feelings he might have felt had cancelled each other out? Guilt? Hope? Rousing himself, he became aware that Father Gérard was speaking urgently, that the sky outside was red, and that a man who looked like Guy was looking in. But of course it was Thady back from his errand and probably wearing one of Guy’s overcoats.

Focusing on the priest’s words, Adam grasped that he was being asked to let a year elapse before marrying Danièle. In the meantime, they could meet discreetly in an apartment in the home for old officers to which d’Armaillé had once thought of retiring.

‘If he had,’ explained Father Gérard, ‘the plan would have been for his wife to visit him there whenever she chose, then slip upstairs to see you. Even now, we can make use of it. Appearances still need to be kept up. Father Latour is hoping to ensure that the double suicide can be presented as a mercy killing. That, of course, is a sin and a bad example to others, but the reality behind it is worse.’

‘It
is
?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

The real scandal, the priest explained, was not Adam’s passion for a married woman. No. It was her husband’s corrupt relations with his ex-orderly, which explained why the pair had gone to the Congo in the first place, then lingered there for so long.

‘Didn’t he have to go because of a duel? And didn’t your brothers in religion send reports of his enjoying relations there with Arab women?’

‘Pff!’ Father Gérard’s mournful exhalation blew away such smoke screens. ‘My brothers in religion were bamboozled! The “women” may not have been women, and the duel – I believe it ended more bloodily than intended – may have been designed to earn a remission from a marriage of convenience! Alas Monsieur, reality is trickier than one thinks.’ And, as the priest filled in his story, kaleidoscopes of strategies and devices fanned in his mind’s eye and transferred themselves to Adam’s. ‘The destructive passion,’ he insisted, ‘was neither the wronged wife’s nor yours. You were both victims.’

‘Of unfortunate encounters?
Mauvais passants
?’

The priest sighed. ‘We must pray that at the last they managed to repent.’

A year later Con Keogh, in Paris for Adam’s wedding, brought news of Cait. She had settled into the gate-lodge where Adam and his mother had stayed just before their lives fell apart. Cait liked it though. Keogh, using Adam’s money, had had it fixed up. He had had the big house fixed too and sent Cait to learn from one of the Earl of Sligo’s stewards how to run an estate so that she might one day run Adam’s. Within months, though, this hope foundered when the job proved beyond her. She hadn’t the head for it, wrote his lordship’s steward. Nor, perhaps, the heart.

‘Well, thanks to you,’ said Keogh, ‘she doesn’t need to work. When are you coming to visit us and see the improvements?’