Adam Gould (5 page)

‘So tell me a story about someone you know. Not your own. My mother used to find incidents for me, kernels of narrative which I could develop. She was good at it. You find them in the oddest places.’

‘Like the pigeons pecking seeds out of dung?’

‘That’s it! Dung, sewers and I suppose madhouses are what people try
not
to see, but looking at them can be instructive and ...’

Adam laughed. ‘I’m not flattered then that you come to me for a story!’

The sick man produced his sanest smile. ‘My dear fellow ...’ But before their conversation could go any further a message arrived that Adam was wanted at the gate.

‘I’ll stay with Monsieur,’ said the man who brought it. ‘You’d best hurry,’ he warned Adam. ‘There could be an accident.’

So far nothing at all had happened at the gate on which Uncle Hubert was still stuck like one of those culled animals which gamekeepers hang on fences to prove their diligence. He must be frozen! Poor, dear, foolish uncle! No doubt someone would eventually bring a ladder and get him down. Meanwhile thank goodness he was wearing gloves. Inside the carriage Danièle too was cold. She kept shaking her hands to help the circulation and occupied her mind with its best memories which, in spite of everything, were of her marriage. She had happy childhood memories too, of course, but now that she was grown up, they seemed to belong to someone else.

Her husband’s name was Philibert d’Armaillé and they had met first at her mother’s funeral. A bony Belgian cavalry officer with knifing eyes, he condoled with an intensity which took her aback, for she was not feeling intense. Her mother’s decline had been punctuated by so many unconsummated deathbed scenes that the family’s grief was depleted long before she died, and Danièle’s mourning was to consist of willing herself to forget how sickness had winnowed away her mother’s character, leaving her as simple as a leech.

‘I am so sorry,’ the tall officer had said and stabbed her with his gaze. ‘I remember my own father’s end vividly.’

Then he named his father whom she recognized as the subject of one of Gisèle’s bits of choice gossip. He was, said Gisèle, a notorious groper and had been seen, bare bum, riding a parlour maid in a moonlit shrubbery. The inappropriate memory got in the way of Danièle’s response to Philibert. So did shame. Whose? This was unclear. A mould of it furred her mind. Perhaps it made her seem deceptively docile at the receptions which her brothers, once the mourning period was over, decided to arrange. Pliant – did he think her tender? – she may have seemed to lead d’Armaillé on.

‘You need taking out of yourself,’ said the brothers, who were surprised to find how long they had left her alone with their mother in that mausoleum of a house. Two years? Three? ‘We must make things up to you.’ But they, of course, had their own lives to lead. Both were bachelors and soldiers, and neither could have her with him.

I am a mole, she told herself. Dazzled. I have been living in the shadows and mustn’t leap to conclusions about anything.

‘You should get married,’ said the brothers. ‘Order new clothes. Try rubbing geranium petals into your cheeks.’

Later there was a squabble followed by a duel. A rumpus. An enemy insulted Philibert and was challenged. The cause was complex. It involved family honour, but since parts of it were not for her ears, she never got things straight and hesitated to judge.

‘Spiritually, we are all one family,’ said Philibert to her on the eve of his duel. Her younger brother agreed to be his second. The other disapproved and held aloof.

She feared he might be killed. Instead he killed his opponent whom he should not – it was, she learned, widely felt – have challenged since he himself was a crack shot. The press made a scandal of the thing, describing him as a murderer and the motives as risible. He then challenged a newspaper editor, whereupon his superiors let him know that they would have to court-martial him if he didn’t leave fast for the new Congo Free State where a ragtag force was fighting black Arab slave hunters. The Force Publique. No, Philibert, it was not the sort of outfit cavalry officers joined, but it was that or face a court martial. Seriously, said his well-wishers, you’d better forget horses. Sell yours. So he did and went. Frankly, he told Danièle, he wasn’t sorry to be leaving for a place where a man could test himself. Saving savages from slavers was a noble cause. And so was teaching them to work, which he understood to be part of the plan. On the eve of going he asked her to marry him and she, in a confusion of feelings, encouraged, it should be said, by a belief that her brothers wanted her settled, said ‘yes’. It was all very quick. The honeymoon was in France so as to get Philibert off Belgian soil.

She helped him prepare for his African journey, and together they studied maps on which vast areas were still blank. Philibert was to join an expedition which would fill in some of these. There were no roads. Only a web of rivers with great drumming names which ran through tangles of rain forest. Slidy syllables rippled on his tongue: Congo and Lualaba, Sankuru and Lomami. She came to think of her husband’s penetration of her body in terms of maps showing pale, virginal spaces, thinly streaked with black. Nestling under his shoulder, she felt him ride her dark rivers. Her Congo and Lualaba, her drumming conduits.

But she did not get to know him, for they had little time, and besides, she had neither standards of comparison nor any knowledge of men. ‘Teach me some bad words,’ she challenged. ‘When you and my brothers crack jokes, I feel a fool. Don’t you want me to be able to laugh with you?’

Indulgently, he gave her lessons,
un cours de polissonnerie
, which opened up a province of the mind where she must disport herself secretly, since she was not, he warned, to let anyone know what she knew. Be sure and remember that, Danièle. It’s our secret, private, just between us! Then he left.

And began sending her coltish letters. All about ambushes and skirmishes and swiftly built bridges which, as often as not, got swept away at once, toppling ‘our men’ into rivers from which there was no rescuing them. They were not, of course, Belgians but locally recruited tribesmen who fell like ninepins. Arms and legs could be seen swirling past in the boiling current. Enemies’ heads were delivered in baskets. Bodies with ‘steaks cut from their thighs and upper arms’ strewed pathways and Philibert’s prose. She guessed that he was using her as a witness and his letters as a diary. She must not, he admonished, throw them away. They were also, she understood, an effort to continue their bedroom intimacies, a purging of his own horror, an attempt to keep her close. He was expanding the
cours de polissonnerie
, sharing – but the traffic was too much one way, and what had she to tell in return? Nothing. Nothing comparable. She couldn’t even bring herself to comment, since the hot confidences had cooled when they reached her. They were months old and, for all she knew, came from a dead man. Dead and maybe chopped into steaks? So she read them uneasily, searching for the man behind the playmate whom she knew. It was surely too late now for play? His airy irresponsibility upset her badly. Why couldn’t they build proper bridges? Did he feel no concern for ‘our men’ when they fell off them? Or for the ‘friendlies’ or ‘faithfuls’ whose fate seemed still more precarious and whose habit of eating each other when fate struck he recorded with a shock which came close to gusto. How reconcile all this with his enthusiasm for ‘our civilizing mission’?

Once – no, several times! – she dreamed that he was eating her, and woke up shaking. In the dark this seemed more memory than dream. By the time she had found matches and struck them, it had grown less compelling but still hung, like a shadow, in her mind. She had been brought up with rigid propriety, then given a playful
cours de polissonneri
e. The forbidden had become a joke. And now there were these letters. So was anything truly taboo? Even her religious practices now seemed strange, even the Eucharist, that pallid, paper-thin and ‘tran-substantiated’ substance. What old, sly, bowdlerized lore did it really commemorate?

Shocked to find herself thinking such thoughts, Danièle began to fear that the time spent nursing her mother had spoiled her for matrimony, and that almost three years of taking decisions had quite banished her readiness to let a husband think for her. Her docile airs had misled Philibert who, sooner or later, was in for a bad surprise. Meanwhile, so was she.

For the scandal of the duel did not go away and the newspapers which continued to air the thing claimed that Philibert had wilfully provoked his opponent. Baited and run him down as if practising a blood sport, wrote the indignant journalists. The words ‘bloodthirsty’ and ‘barbarian’ left her shaken. Moreover – she only saw this now – the
cours de polissonnerie
had left her unenlightened as to what it – what Philibert? – was all about.

Was it love that she felt for this man, she wondered? Or fear or pity? Her doubts were licensed by knowing that he might not come back. Mortality was high – his letters made this clear – in the swamps where hostile natives waited up to their necks, heads hidden behind some tuft or tree until the Belgian-led column appeared, its men holding their guns above their heads to keep them dry and offering a perfect target to spears. Small, insidious irritations could be lethal too: hookworm, mosquitoes, boils that never healed and the constant hot humidity which caused belts and boots to mould. The odds against his survival seemed greater by the day. It was even possible that she was by now a widow!

Shocked by the wily stealth of her own resignation, she shook herself into action and began, first, to say prayers for him, then, so as to reinforce the prayers’ protection, to invent benign superstitions. She would
will
his safe return. By sheer attentiveness and concern, she would magic him back. One of her practices was to try visualizing his entire face precisely and all at once. This was difficult, for her memory’s straining made the face shimmer like a reflection in water, so that some parts shone too brightly and others blurred or disappeared. It was as if moths had nibbled holes in it. Or leprosy! Oh dear! Oh Philibert! In flurries of pity, she moved her would-be remedial scrutiny over his poor pocked image, trying to heal each wounded section as it steadied. She was engaged in doing this, when someone knocked at her window. On the street side of the carriage, hidden from the group at the gate, a small woman wearing a hat with a grey veil was trying to attract her attention. Danièle opened the window and the woman raised the veil. Her hands were shaking. She looked about thirty.

‘Madame,’ she begged in a low, furtive voice, ‘forgive my importuning you. I wouldn’t if I weren’t desperate. Will you let me into your carriage for a few minutes? Please. I need to get inside the villa to see my husband, but the doctors won’t let me. He is a patient. I need to talk to him for a moment. Just a tiny moment! If he is as mad as they say he is, I shall leave. I cannot get past the servants on foot, but if I were with you ...’ Gloved fingers pressed the cold window and the woman’s breath was white.

She talked on, and Danièle thought, ‘No!’ Then: ‘Why no? She is not mad. She is not an inmate here, or if she is, she is trying to get in, not out!’ Then, ‘Be careful!’ Then, ‘What can she do to me with all these people within earshot?’ By now she had opened the door.

The woman stepped in quickly, closed it, then, flattening herself against the carriage upholstery, shrank as unobtrusively as she could, into the corner furthest from Danièle. She was respectably dressed, pretty, a little faded, decent, but clearly neither a lady nor a Bad Woman. Danièle felt exhilarated by her own daring and soon found her exhilaration turning to benevolence. The woman began to talk of her three children, of how it was for their sake that she had been so forward, and of how God would reward Danièle for her charity.

Danièle’s benevolence flinched a little. Talk of God’s rewards was apt to herald further requests, but, when none forthcame, it struck her that she was performing a corporal work of mercy and laying up divine indulgence for her own and Philibert’s needs. This was a spiritual investment and insurance against possible ill fortune. Good, she thought, good, and graciously introduced herself. She was Madame d’Armaillé.

Her guest said she was Joséphine Litzelmann and that the man she aimed to see was her children’s father, Monsieur Guy de Maupassant who, to be quite honest, Madame, was not precisely her husband. This revelation was made in a low and breathy tone and only half caught Danièle’s attention, for something was at last happening outside, where the servants, who had been stamping about and slapping themselves to keep warm, were now gathered close to the gate. A tall young man, who had just arrived from the villa, had climbed up it and, with the porter’s help, managed to disentangle Uncle Hubert, ease his foreleg back over the crest of the gate and get him first halfway down, then all the way. Moments later Danièle’s uncle and his rescuer were in the carriage, taking up most of the room, smelling of mud, rubber and damp trousers, exclaiming, rubbing cold hands – Uncle Hubert’s were quite blue – and describing with zest how they had managed the descent. Neither took exception to Joséphine Litzelmann’s presence. If they noticed it at all, the young man, who introduced himself as Adam Gould, probably took her for a member of Uncle Hubert’s party, while Uncle Hubert must think she worked here. They tapped a message to the coachman: drive on in. So in he drove them through the opened iron gates, spattering crisp, confetti-like gusts of ice flakes from under the carriage wheels and smuggling the anxious little woman into the villa. She had again lowered her veil and, as the carriage drew up to let them out, Danièle felt a cold, cotton-gloved hand clutch her own in a tight, nervous grasp.

Monsieur Guy’s manservant saw them arrive. He was again watching from a corridor window, for Monsieur Guy would not let him into his room and seemed to feel no gratitude for the years of care François had lavished on his health – all those lovingly prepared eggnogs, purées and feather-light custards, all the concern and vigilance seemed forgotten. Well, if he must. François could put up with that. He could put up with anything if only his patience would help cure his master, who was a man in a thousand: a great, good, generous, amusing man whose needs François understood! As he had told Dr Blanche, his master’s mother agreed that her son would be better off if only they could get him home.