Adam Gould (6 page)

‘Not home to her,’ he had spelled it out for the doctor when they spoke this morning, ‘home to me. She is far too far away. In Nice. And she’s not well herself. But our flat in the rue Boccador is restful. I have it spick and span now – more so than when Monsieur Guy was there, for he lived like a tornado, wet towels everywhere, stacks of papers all over the place. Now that I have it ready and welcoming, it would surely soothe his spirit to be among his own things, poor gentleman.’

The doctor shook his head. ‘My poor François, he needs constant supervision. Else he might try suicide again. That wouldn’t help his mother’s health, now would it?’

François detected a reproach: he, for all his devotion, had not been able to keep a constant watch.

‘Of course,’ a warder confided later, while he and François drank their mid-morning bowls of milky coffee in the kitchen, ‘suicide is the doctor’s great bogy. Especially by famous patients. Those journalists out there are on the watch for just that. A good story ...’

‘Good?’

‘Well,’ the warder removed the skin from his
café au lait
and laid it in a shrivelled puddle on his plate, ‘your master wrote stories, didn’t he? For money? Some, it seems, were about people he’d read about in the papers. So if he were now to be
in
one, it would be a case of the biter bitten, wouldn’t you say?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

François grimaced. He could not think of Monsieur Guy as a biter. He thought of dogs. He thought of a pony biting the one in front of it –
gnyam
! Full in the buttocks. Rolling back its wicked lip and snapping wasp-yellow teeth. Those were biters, not Monsieur Guy whose high spirits shed – well, used to shed – radiance on whatever he touched. Whether he was showing you how to prepare for a boat-trip, make lead bullets for pistol-practice, exercise his pretty gun dog, or restock the aviary in his Norman garden, the task became a pleasure. ‘It’s fun, you’ll see!’ was how he would introduce a new one. And, sure enough, you often found yourself enjoying it. Life brightened around him. Everyone said so. Even the tradesmen who supplied his food read his stories. Even the butcher. Why, last week when this man heard the news about poor Monsieur, he’d had to dry his eyes, while his wife marvelled, ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen him cry.’ As for the stories, François himself had had a finger in several. He’d learned how to reconnoitre and ferret out facts about an interesting household and had heard Monsieur Guy tell his mother how useful he found his valet’s powers of observation. Did that make François a biter too? Did it? Irritably, turning from the warder, François smeared honey on a heel of bread, dipped it in coffee and bit into it.
Gnyam
! Golden honey-eyes floated in the bowl. It was his own honey. Intending it for Monsieur Guy, he had made a special trip to the market to find the girl who brought it up from Provence. Monsieur always used to say that eating it brought back the fragrance of thyme and fennel and the high times he enjoyed whenever he moored his yacht near Cannes, and society ladies came to visit. Today though he had screamed that he couldn’t eat the honey because the bees had gathered it from digitalis: foxglove, a poisoned source.

‘François wants me dead,’ he had screamed. ‘Get him out.’

Wanted
him ... Flinching, the manservant’s attention swerved to the scene below his window where two women had now stepped from the carriage. One looked familiar. He tried to place her, then gave up as the memory of his master’s ravings rang in his ears and distracted him. Back and forth his mind flickered, and he shook his head to empty it of hurt. For how could he hold poor Monsieur Guy’s rages against him? That they were mad rages was plain from his gentleness with others, while only François got the rough side of his tongue. Maybe this was because Monsieur knew he could rely on him no matter what? In some part of his moithered mind, he surely knew that. It was possible too that he meant the opposite of what he said. He had always been a great one for reversals and practical jokes, as François should know, for
he
had often had to set them up. Nine years François had been with him. He had cooked for him, travelled with him, helped him move house a number of times, organized decorators – Monsieur’s taste was opulent – nursed him with massages and cold showers and fallen in with all his whims. Some of these could be embarrassing. On one occasion, François had been required to deliver a covered basket of live frogs to a society lady and, on another, a container full of jacks-in-the-box. There had been other japes. With Monsieur Guy you had – though not everyone twigged this – to stay on the qui vive. When he flattered the titled ladies who visited his yacht, it was his valet, not they, who saw the irony behind his charm. He could be quite brusque too, and women who tried to breach his privacy got short shrift. Perhaps – it struck François as he stared out at that veiled lady whom he had better head off – in the end he himself had got too close to Monsieur Guy, one of whose fears was of meeting his double? Better think about that.

First things first though. Who were those two women? And how had they got in? No question but that
they
needed brusque treatment. François started for the stairs.

The to-do at the gate had been due to the director’s absence. Blanche, before taking off for a taste of the salon life he so loved, had told Adam, ‘Now is your chance to make amends.’

The amends were for an incident just after their staff meeting when Adam, still hot with indignation at fate, life, self, the press and the sleek Dr Meuriot, went to answer the bell at the gate and found himself confronting a reporter from
L’Écho de la semaine
– who offered him money, and whom he knocked down. Ah well. He could hardly knock himself down, could he? Or fate? Or Dr Meuriot?

He had never done such a thing before and, to his shock, relished the sensation. Till now, as he had been trained to do, he had kept his feelings in a shell. But this now seemed to have cracked, for he had to be pulled off the journalist by the porter who should have answered the bell in the first place and who, on seeing whom he was throttling, apologized. They were by now outside the gate in the rue Berton, where the man seemed to feel that anarchy should be allowed some play.

‘
Désolé
, Monsieur Gould. Here. Smash the fellow’s glasses.’ Invitingly, he liberated Adam. ‘Better still,’ he advised, ‘give him a swift kick in the gut! It hurts and doesn’t show.’

But by then the journalist had fled.

‘He,’ said the porter in a satisfied voice, ‘will think twice before coming back to snoop!’

This spite, so alien to the entente usually prevailing in the
maison de santé
, came from feeling besieged. So did the director’s eagerness to breathe happier air.

‘So you’ll hold the fort here, Gould?’ he had cajoled, then, sealing the bargain, flicked Adam’s shoulder with a white glove which released talcum powder in airy puffs. ‘
Zut
! Sorry! Get them to brush that off.’

Chin-wagging in self-reproof, Blanche stepped into his carriage. Though plump, he was light on his feet and, dressed in tails and topper, was already mentally savouring the pleasures of Princess Mathilde’s soirée where he was resolved, he confided with a friendliness clearly intended to make up for the spilled talc, not to let himself be pumped by Maupassant’s malicious friends. Gossip, he murmured from the carriage window, was causing half our troubles. ‘So:
motus
! Mum’s the word!’ He mimed the act of turning a key in the lock of his own mouth, then called to the porter – but did the man take this in? – that the key to this gate was from now on to be kept in his desk drawer. In his study. Understood? Only the vicomte should be let in. The doctor then sank back in his carriage and, as it clattered down the rue Berton, could be imagined drawing a happy sigh. He had delegated duties which were getting onerous for a man of seventy-two.

Adam locked the gate and put the key in the desk, but not until the vicomte’s plight grew alarming would anyone remember this arrangement. Seeing to everything in a household, as François Tassart had done for Maupassant, might be feasible when working for one man. Here the chain of command was as prone to fray as a piece of bright cord kept for playing with a kitten. The trouble was that Adam’s role had expanded. Blanche was visibly aging and fading, and the other doctors were not always available. So Adam did the practical things: organized washerwomen and ordered supplies, kept accounts and was turning into a male Martha without whom all might founder. Tacitly, it was understood that he might, when need be, play doctor.

‘More trouble, Monsieur!’ The servant who had called for his help earlier was here again. With the glum relish of a man reporting trouble for which he cannot be blamed, he murmured, ‘Those ladies ...’

‘The ones with the vicomte?’

‘That’s just it. It seems that they’re
not
with him – or only one is. He says he never set eyes on the other until you got him down from the gate and he found her in the carriage talking to his niece. He thought she must be a nurse here.’

‘You mean that she just stepped into the carriage while it was held up?’

The man shrugged.

An intruder! And Adam had as good as escorted her in! How
could
he have been so careless? And now, said the servant, Monsieur Maupassant’s man, Tassart, was beside himself and almost in tears!

‘You see, Monsieur, he blames himself.’

‘For what? What happened?’

‘Well it seems he asked one of the ladies who she was – confronted her like, and while he did, the other ...’

‘What? Spit it out, man!’

The servant sighed. The fat was in the fire. ‘She slipped into Monsieur de Maupassant’s room and started carrying on. Wept! Tried to coax and cajole him. Threw herself at him! Fell or maybe was pushed off, and the upshot was that the patient began to have a fit. He gets these now, and they terrify him. The doctors say it’s a false epilepsy, which is neither here nor there because
his
great fear is that if he gets agitated his brain will melt and flow away through his nose. Anyway
he
was yelling that he needed to stay calm, and
she
was wailing that he should think of her children’s future – she said they were
his
children – so in the end Baron rushed in and had to shove her out the door. Bodily! He says she fought like a cat. And even while she fought, she was shouting that she loved Monsieur Guy. She was scratching at Baron’s hands and calling, ‘Guy, do you remember when you took me driving by moonlight? In the mountains. Do you remember what you said?’

The man began to snigger, stopped and, as though struck by something in Adam’s face, said kindly, ‘It’s all in the day’s work here, Monsieur. You have to harden your heart.’

The voice coming from Maupassant’s room could have been filtered through wet wool. It breathed panic and wheezed. ‘Quick,’ it quavered. ‘Get this woman out. I’m done with women. I know what Mademoiselle Litzelmann wants, but it’s not up to me to let her have it. My poor mother ...’ – here the voice strangled – ‘has had enough troubles. Why should she have to put up with entanglements like this at the end of her life? My lawyer has made provision for Mademoiselle Litzelmann’s children. They won’t starve. Is that not enough for her? Then get her out! Out!
Foutez-la dehors
! Don’t come back, Joséphine.’ There followed a resonant and repeated thud as though some empty vessel, possibly a tin jug, had hit the floor with such vigour that it bounced. ‘Out!’

But Joséphine was already out. Even while the sick man struggled with his perplexities, she was being comforted.

Looking in through the door of a drawing room at the end of a long corridor, Adam saw the ladies sitting with their arms around each other. Which was Maupassant’s visitor? The high-coloured one in the grey mantle or the willowy girl whose face reflected an elusive radiance? Come to think of it, there was a shine to them both. Tears? Wintry light shed a chill on their embrace. They were – you could see – forming an alliance. For no reason on which he could have put a finger, Adam thought of his childhood, of smells of frosty earth, straw, fungus and steaming animals, and of dawdling home through glinty northern twilight – to be seized at last with scolding tenderness in brisk, protective arms. The longer that moment was put off, the better it was.

He felt a nip of loneliness.

Perhaps he was feeling frail? Dereliction hung like a miasma in the air! It could explain the doctor’s sloping off so early, the vicomte’s impetuosity and the ladies’ gall. Even Adam’s behaviour could be due to a contagion. He was amused to recognize the source of this thought in a debate which had been rambling on in the asylum kitchens where someone had raised the fear that people dealing with the mad risked going mad themselves.

‘Nonsense,’ the doctors had insisted when consulted about this. ‘Susceptible patients have to be kept isolated, but that’s not why. Hysterics can
mimic
epileptics. There’s no contagion.’

The staff, though, having often heard these same doctors offer mendacious comfort to the hopeless, were hard to convince. Anyway, what, they asked each other, about Monsieur de Maupassant? He had lately developed epileptic symptoms, hadn’t he? Those didn’t look like mimicry? Shuttling between worry and titillation, maids and menservants chewed over the question. Monsieur Guy’s case was of more interest than most because, thanks to what Monseigneur de Belcastel called the ‘forced education of the poor’, several were keen readers; those who couldn’t read could listen, and all enjoyed chatting about the shocking Monsieur Guy and his stories in the drowsy hour after supper over a glass of
gros rouge
or calvados.

‘Just how long,’ chambermaids challenged each other, ‘would
you
have resisted the seducer in Monsieur Guy’s novel,
Bel-Ami
? How hard would he have had to try with you?’

‘How hard or how long?’

Titters touched off shy bursts of teasing. Just like drawing room folk.