Adam Gould (7 page)

Well, why not? After all, Hachette’s railway-station stalls sold Monsieur Guy’s books.

Oh?

Yes indeed! His vogue was wide! He had caught a mood. It was canny and in tune with the times. Reading of how the brazen
Bel-Ami
used love to leapfrog past his betters wasn’t just fun. No, because the city was full of men like that who would walk across your face to get what they wanted. The book showed the dangers of hope. And most readers nowadays greeted that with a shrug: especially the hope of people bettering themselves! Before, whenever the barricades went up, expectancy had blazed – then choked. Like an unriddled stove! That had provided people with a ‘forced education’ all right! Maybe not the sort the monsignor meant, but it explained why the kitchen made a receptive audience when Tassart agreed to read from his master’s work and defended its scepticism and taste for scandal. Tassart himself might not have chosen to reveal that taste, but, once the press did, he grasped the nettle.

The
maison de santé
was a gossip-shop, so Adam knew just which questions had been put to the valet. One was about a flayed and withered human hand which his master was said to own, but when a maid asked if he had it here, she was told to pipe down. And what about the
macchabées
– corpses – he had fished from the Marne? On his boating trips? Ten, was it? Some had been in the water so long that – but at this point the women listening would refuse to hear more.

‘Stop! That’s horrible!’

‘I’m only telling you what he said himself!’

A footman, who had worked in a house which the writer used to visit, had heard him with his own ears describe the state to which these corpses were often reduced: a kind of swollen mush like papier mâché. The descriptions, of course, were designed to frighten ladies, to make them shriek and pretend ...

‘Why “pretend”?’ cut in the cook.

‘Because,’ smirked the footman, ‘they were more titillated than upset. Some high-born ladies have appetites that might surprise you.’

‘Yes, well, we’ll have less of your double meanings in this kitchen, if you don’t mind!’

When asked about the
macchabées
, Tassart snapped that his master was prouder of the
live
people he had managed to save. The footman, though, refused to drop the subject. He was sure he had heard that ‘the Macchabées’ was also the name of a group which met in a certain fashionable lady’s drawing room to indulge in odd practices. ‘Macabre ones!’ Murmuring behind his hand, ‘They say Monsieur Guy was the life and soul – or should we say the death and soul of ...’

‘What?
Who
says? How do they know?’

A shrug. The footman’s grin was insolent. ‘They send away the servants.’ Savouring his calvados, ‘That in itself ...’

‘What?’

‘Sets minds racing.’

Hurt and indignant, Tassart spoke again of Monsieur’s saving men from drowning and of how, by rights, he should have had a life-saver’s medal. But the topic of contagion would not go away. A warder claimed to know that, when he had his health, Monsieur de Maupassant had attended Dr Charcot’s displays of hypnosis at the Salpêtrière Hospital where the mad were put on show, and gentlemen could watch the most painful frenzies being calmed. There was even a rumour that one of the female patients – a former lady’s maid – had been infected with the pox by none other than himself and that that was what had triggered her folly. This time gossip had gone too far. Tassart was upset and though the warder said that he had meant no disrespect to anyone, an all-out row was only just avoided.

‘
If
my master did go there,’ Tassart declared, ‘it would not have been in an idle spirit, but for his research. He liked to see things for himself. Always. He was scrupulous that way.’

Aha, thought his listeners. Contagion! And felt unnerved. Later, they would exchange bracing jokes which, from kindness, they refrained from voicing in Tassart’s hearing. He – ‘Monsieur’ Tassart to the kitchen – shone with sanified reflections of his master’s raffish glory, and was treated with a pitying respect. Did it rankle that that master now refused to see him? Adam, who had taken Tassart’s place today, would have liked to placate him. Guessing that he had a soft heart, he too pitied it as he might some delicate invertebrate – a sea anemone, say – which lay stranded in a drying rock pool.

Adam had, as it happened, a private reason for being wary of valets. It was clothes. Two years ago when he first left the seminary and had nothing to wear but cassocks or the cast-offs which the bursar was likely to supply, he had gone in search of a man called Thady Quill who had tended Uncle Charles in the days before this uncle went, all too literally, to the dogs and the card tables where he lost his shirt, his social standing and all need of a valet.

Thady Quill had been an apprentice jockey in Adam’s father’s stables, until he grew too heavy and was put instead to the trade of manservant. This was a crushing comedown for a young fellow whose sights had been set on winning the Chester Cup and other trophies. Indeed, so glum and peevish did Thady become that, as Adam heard the story later, he got on everyone’s nerves, which was why, when Uncle Charles, then aged eighteen and hoping to be a painter, insisted on leaving for France, Thady was sent with him. Neither youth was to return, though for a while both wrote home. A decade later, when Adam, who was by then nearly twelve years old, found a foxed and cobwebby bundle of Thady’s letters hidden in the butler’s pantry, he squirrelled it off to a hideyhole of his own where he fingered his way through accounts of adventures which bemused and inflamed him. Quill’s bulletins, having been intended for a fellow servant’s eyes, were hard to make out, being ink-blotched, shadowy with innuendo and ablaze with the timorous amazement of a cage-born creature newly released in the wild. Thady Quill’s France – Adam perceived in a stunned dazzle – was part Garden of Eden, part den of vice. As mapped by Thady – who, at the time, could not have had more than fifty words of French and whose English was half-Gaelic – it was a Kingdom of Adulthood, a predatory lottery where women were apt to be easy but poxy, brandy cost two francs a bottle and life was spirited and rash. The French he described were princely connoisseurs of the flesh, fearless, easygoing, freedom-loving and fun! Some of what he saw, Thady admitted, he had neither words nor nerve to describe and made no claim to understand. His account of it all was baffled but intrigued, tempted, yet fearful. Had people here, he marvelled, no fear of Judgement Day and getting their deserts? Had they not heard of Sodom and Gomorrah? ‘Sometimes,’ his letters confided, ‘you’d have to wonder whether French Catholics are Christians at all!’ This contradictory picture matched and expanded one with which Adam was already familiar. It was the impetuous France of Irish songs: the gallant ally which might yet help us boot out the dull, oppressive Saxon – ‘Oh the French are on the say/ They’ll be here without delay ...’ – but also the sharp-minded nation, ‘on the say’ in more ways than one, which had retained membership in the Roman Catholic family while keeping its priests firmly in check. Adam, as one who longed both to be free and to belong, found that feat heartening and remembered it when, shortly after reading the letters, his own small world fell apart. It cracked open with alarming suddenness, like an eggshell around a nestling and he, the nestling vacillating on an Atlantic cliff-edge, had to think of taking flight. To where though? The first proposal was Canada. So far? Adam’s shivering mind raced like windblown clouds over a cold ocean. Then quailed. No, he thought.
No
! His mother had by now been buried, and he and his father had bitterly fallen out. As his cousins were either too shocked by this scandal or too scandalous themselves to be of help, the only family left to Adam seemed to be the Church. But, though agreeing with his tutor, Father Tobin, that yes, very well, Father, maybe he’d as well go into a seminary to get himself an education, he stipulated that the seminary should be French.

By then, unknown to Adam, the Paris which Thady Quill had discovered in the wake of Uncle Charles, was quite gone. Quill’s wild prediction that a storm could be brewing and the metropolis going the way of Sodom had proven sound. The Prussian invasion intervened between the writing of his dispatches and Adam’s arrival in the cold corridors of his
petit seminaire
, and so had the massacres of Parisians by Parisians. Having been pent up by the Prussian siege and reduced to eating rats, they later behaved
like
rats and vented their fury on each other. How many perished? Twenty thousand? Forty? Reports varied, but agreed that the Seine had run red. Many more were transported or gaoled or fled into exile with the result that now, twenty years on, an appetite for revenge was once again biding its time. Meanwhile, Uncle Charles too had fallen on bad days and was eking out a diminished income in a cheap spa town. He had become an unlucky gambler and, even when peace and normality returned, did not recover.

Thady Quill, though, when Adam finally found him, was portly and friendly, had a French wife, spoke an eloquent, if eccentric lingua franca and was a father of three. He was prospering and kept a discreetly curtained, upstairs shop where strong smells like
essence de térébenthine
and pomander balls succeeded most of the time in drowning out less salubrious ones. His merchandise was second-hand apparel of a superior sort which gentlemen’s valets and ladies’ maids brought to sell when their employers fell ill, died, moved to North Africa, grew suddenly fat, came out of mourning or for some other reason, whether compelling or frivolous, wished to get rid of their wardrobe. His wife, a former lady’s maid, could cut and sew, had a network of connections and had introduced him to the trade. He welcomed Adam warmly and rigged him out on tick, providing well-cut outfits with which to present himself to Dr Blanche and enable him to put his days as a seminarian firmly behind him. It was like a carnival: the speed, the choice, the faint sense of illegitimacy and impersonation. Real gentlemen would have had their tailor measure their inner calf and other specifics, which would then be carefully recorded for future use. It was unusual to buy garments which one could don forthwith or, after some shifting of hems or buttons, have delivered next day. Were Quill’s customers all escapists and contrivers? Adam didn’t ask.

Though pleased with his nearly-new, snuff-brown velvet jacket, striped trousers, curly-brimmed hat and fine frock-coat, he was slightly uneasy at the thought of coming face to face with their original owner – or, worse, with that owner’s valet whose eye would be sharper and who, anyway, would be the man who had ripped out the label bearing the owner’s and tailor’s names before selling the garment on to Quill. When fashionable gentlemen came to Dr Blanche’s luncheons, Adam found himself checking the width of their shoulders – his own were broad – and, since noting that Maupassant’s girth must once have been close to his, felt nervous of Tassart. At any moment the manservant could exclaim: ‘Ah, so
you
’
re
the one who bought the jacket! Not too many would have the right athletic build! Bought it from Monsieur Quill then, did you?’ Not that he ever would! A valet’s prime qualification was a well-buttoned lip. Nervous fancies, though, were deaf to reason.

Adam knew that, in the grand scheme of things, neither clothes nor vanity mattered a jot. But then private perspectives were rarely grand. Just now, for instance, he found himself idly staring down the dim corridor to where the two ladies still sat in each other’s embrace and in that of a sunset brightness flooding pinkly from a source he couldn’t see, so that, like figures in religious paintings, they seemed to generate it themselves. Dreamily, he imagined sliding into it too and actually experienced waves of a mounting pleasure which dissolved his thoughts in its glow. On becoming conscious of what was happening, he found that it was his body, not his clothes, which was likely to embarrass him.

A raised voice interrupted this reverie.

As if thinking of him had conjured him up, the valet stood framed in the drawing room doorway, at the far end of the corridor, where he paused, then turned to launch some words over his shoulder. ‘It is not my place to criticize, Madame, but, speaking with respect, you tricked me.
Si, si
, Madame, you deliberately kept me talking while Mademoiselle Litzelmann slipped behind my back and upset my poor master. As for the “love” she likes to talk about,’ Tassart allowed himself a sneer, ‘I don’t think she has shown much. Love cherishes, Madame. It gives life and helps preserve it. But Mademoiselle Litzelmann has put poor Monsieur’s health at risk. If he does not recover, the fault will be partly hers!’

What attachment he feels, Adam marvelled, then surprised himself by thinking ‘it seems almost motherly’. Though he had lived in an all-male world in his seminary, this sort of closeness had not been possible.

Tassart now walked in Adam’s direction. His lean lips were clamped in anger. He was, Adam noticed for the first time, younger than his master. As he drew level, he murmured, ‘I can’t think how those vampires got in! Who was in charge, Gould? You? If my master had come home with me, they would never have got near him. He would have been safe in our neighbourhood, where people are fond of him. Our tradesmen keep asking for him. They all agree that he should come home.’

Stung, Adam tried mounting a defensive attack. ‘So,’ he teased, ‘you and your butcher and baker have been gossiping. Maybe you started the stories which reached the newspapers.’

Tassart said quietly, ‘All any newsmonger could have learned from us was that my master was a straight, kind, decent man and that we are devoted to him.’ He turned away, leaving Adam feeling neither straight nor decent, and just a bit embarrassed.

But already the valet was back. ‘
They
shouldn’t be here.’ Nodding towards the drawing room. ‘Mademoiselle Litzelmann’s name is on the list of people who shouldn’t be let in. It probably tops that list. You must get her out.’

Adam did not want to expel the anxious young woman whose plight was not unlike the one in which
his
mother had found herself at the end. She too must have hoped – but he couldn’t bear to dwell on that. He said, ‘The other lady seems to have taken her under her wing. Madame d’Armaillé. And she
is
a guest here.’