Adam Gould (8 page)

‘Maybe, but la Litzelmann ...’

‘
Is
Monsieur de Maupassant the father of her children?’

‘Possibly.’ Tassart’s face was hard. ‘At all events he has provided for them. Think of it, Gould. She was just a girl in a spa, whose job was handing cups of water to the patients. What future had she? What security? She is better off now than when he met her.’

‘And she wants – what?’

‘Him to legitimize them. She wants respectability.’ Tassart shrugged. ‘His mother won’t have it. Madame Laure.’

Again Adam thought of
his
mother. ‘It seems hard!’ he ventured.

‘Gould, it is not our place to decide.’

‘What has place to do with it?’

‘Everything, surely. This is a nursing home. His health could suffer! I cannot think
how
you ...’

‘Oh, very well! I shall ask her to leave. Come with me, will you? She might make difficulties if I went alone.’

In the drawing room Mademoiselle Litzelmann’s eyelids were rosily swollen. She rubbed the back of a hand across them. Deftly, as though catching a moth, the other lady grasped and held the damp hand while hailing the two men.

‘Ah,’ she exclaimed, ‘here is François Tassart back with my uncle’s saviour! Monsieur Gould, yes?’

As if to imply that the weeping was to be ignored, she hid her companion’s hand in a scarf. ‘My uncle and the monsignor are conspiring,’ she told Adam affably, ‘so we have been excluded. I was wondering if we could impose on your hospitality. Mademoiselle Litzelmann came here on foot and is thirsty.’

‘She didn’t come in your carriage then?’

‘Only through the gate.’ Madame d’Armaillé was unembarrassed. ‘
Is
it possible to find her some refreshment? Barley water would do.’

Tassart, who seemed not to have heard, was staring at Adam’s coat collar. ‘May I,’ he stepped behind him, ‘see the garment in the light?’ As he murmured ‘It’s soiled,’ Mademoiselle Litzelmann retrieved her hand and blew her nose.

Soiled? Sold? Adam’s body was behaving in an unaccountable way. He felt feverish.

Fingers fumbled his neck. Was the valet trying to read the label? Adam prayed not to be embarrassed in front of the beautiful Madame d’Armaillé. He was unused to being touched.

‘We don’t want to inconvenience you,’ she claimed, but he guessed that doing so wouldn’t bother her at all. His skin was hot. He wondered if the valet noticed.

‘Do you want to take it off a moment? I could attend to it better.’

Adam, whose namesake had masked his nakedness with leaves, felt in need of some cover. Tassart’s fossicking hands tickled and Adam spun away from them in a cloud of powder. Might his jacket have been Maupassant’s?

‘Talc!’ Tassart was wielding a small brush. ‘I always carry this. The powder sinks into the velvet pile. I
thought
I noticed this earlier. Couldn’t be sure in the dark of that corridor.’ Peeling back Adam’s collar, he scrubbed, then, moving to the fireplace, shook his brush out over the grate. ‘It can look like dandruff.’

‘It’s from Dr Blanche’s gloves,’ Adam remembered with relief. ‘
Il m
’
a blanchi
!’

Madame d’Armaillé’s full-throated laugh at this weary joke was unexpected. She’s young, he remembered, and felt friendlier towards her. ‘Why don’t we all have some port,’ he suggested, ‘to raise our spirits. Or Marsala?’ He took decanters and glasses from a cupboard and put them on an intarsia table inlaid with festive motifs. ‘We’ll each drink a thimbleful, shall we? Then, though, I must ask Mademoiselle Litzelmann to leave. I have no choice. The director left precise instructions, and Monsieur Tassart may well get me into hot water over your being here at all. He is almost certainly about to say that it isn’t his place to drink in the drawing room. Perhaps it isn’t mine either, or Mademoiselle Litzelmann’s. But, in a house like this, places shift. And many have no idea where they belong.’

To Adam’s surprise, Tassart, when his turn came, accepted two glasses in quick succession and promptly drained both. They all drank, even Mademoiselle Litzelmann, who had stopped crying. Tassart looked as though he might be thinking of taking the floor.

‘Biscuits?’ Adam brought out a jar of
langues de chat
and handed them round. Soon there were sounds of delicate crunching and a scent of vanilla. Crumbs drifted and were brushed away.

‘I have no wish,’ the valet wiped his lips, ‘to cause pain. But, for her own sake, Mademoiselle Litzelmann should know how hopeless her endeavours are. I understand why she keeps on with them because for a long time I too refused to accept what was happening to my poor master. There were remissions, and with each our hopes would revive. A change of air, a trip in his yacht, even a visit to a spa could brighten his mood, and when it did, how could we – he and I – help thinking he was on the mend? In the end though – this was ten months ago – I had to admit to myself that our interests were no longer the same, and that if I didn’t ask him for a character reference soon I risked being unable to get employment when he was gone. Delicacy, you see, Gould, was beyond my means. Servants like me have a professional need to understand it but can rarely afford it. This is painful, and in my master’s case it forced me to cause him pain too. Just now you mentioned “my place”, and this reminded me that I cannot hope to find another one such as I had with him. He got me used to being treated like a man of feeling. That rarely happens to a servant. Do you mind if I take another glass of port? Thank you. Forgive me if I sound upset. I have been so for some time, you see. Not only on his account! On my own too. For nine years my life revolved around his. So did his mother’s, of course, though in a quite different way. He was hers. She called him “My son the great man!” whereas I was just
his
man – a small man. But, unlike her, I was
there
all the time. Close up. Nursing and sharing. I’m a bit overcome. I’ll try to be quick. I am hoping to make Mademoiselle Litzelmann see that those close to Monsieur have to give up their closeness. You’ll see what I mean if you imagine my dilemma ten months ago. To ask for a reference meant letting poor Monsieur know how desperate his case was. This could damage him, but, short of destroying myself, what could I do? There was no concealing my motive. No softening pretence would have worked. Not only had he, as a writer, trained himself to see through such camouflage, but two years before, he had seen his brother, Monsieur Hervé, go mad, be committed to an asylum and die. Indeed Monsieur Guy himself had had to commit him.’

Tassart put down the glass, which was again empty. ‘When I asked for the reference, he saw what was in my mind. I saw him see it. But instead of giving way to the terror I must have provoked, he took his pen, wrote out a generous
certificat
and gave it to me, and I ... well, all I had the nerve to do was sidle from the room. Just then the sane one was he, not I. Sane and gallant! I am telling you this, Mademoiselle, to let you know that I have been in your shoes. The difference is that in your case it is too late. The doctors have pronounced their verdict. No document he signed now would be legally valid. And as regards our own feelings, Mademoiselle, those of us who plan to live break faith with the dying. Allow me to walk you to the village.’

Tassart picked up the cloak which Mademoiselle Litzelmann had discarded on a chair, and put it around her.

She seemed about to make an appeal, then instead, drew herself up mutely, embraced Madame d’Armaillé, accepted her card, bowed, straightened her hat, and walked out followed by the valet. Both moved as though thwarted feelings were hampering the flow of their breath.

Madame d’Armaillé stared after them. ‘I wonder,’ she murmured, ‘if that man is telling the truth? He seems goodhearted.’ While she drank up the last of her port, Adam imagined the sweetness of it on her tongue, and his own tongue curled against his palate. ‘Well,’ she reflected, ‘I suppose that in a place like this you must all be used to strong emotions!’

He could think of nothing to say. He and she had been left together as abruptly as two chaperones whose charges have gone to dance. For an instant he imagined waltzing with her. Not that he knew how! The only dancing he had ever done was as a child in Ireland, when he had been let join in the romping that sometimes took place on late summer afternoons, to the scrape of a fiddle, at a crossroads. Small fry like himself had rarely done more than caper back and forth, but the skilled dancers’ fast footwork carried rhythms as deftly as the bow on the strings. They held their upper bodies rigid, and their motto ‘Death in the eyes and the devil in the heels!’ was as stern as the monastic one about keeping ‘custody of the eyes’! Adam’s eyes just now were in tight custody. He moved to the window.

‘Will she be all right?’ his companion wondered.

‘If you mean will she easily get back to Paris, the answer is “yes”. She can get a tram,’ he told her, ‘to the place de la Concorde. Or take the little train to St Lazare.’ He looked out to where grimy shadows had begun to sink and thicken like tea-dregs. This side of the château faced downhill towards the quai de Passy. Outside its windows, steps, railed in by fine ironwork, divided in two elegant volutes then, when these rejoined, continued a stately descent towards a tumble of bleak, wintry lawns. Far below, the Seine gave off the opaque gleam of a great, grey eel. Bare branches scribbled on a dimming sky. To the side of the steps, two people were planting something. ‘Oh,’ he exclaimed, ‘there’s Maupassant. With Baron. They must have seen the others leave or they would not have ventured out.’

‘May I see?’

Madame d’Armaillé stood behind him. Still as a birdwatcher, he sensed her shape in slight displacements of the air. The back of his neck, sensitized by the teasing of Tassart’s brush, felt as if tiny antennae were embedded in each pore. He recognized a situation with which he had been trained to deal. This young, married, well-born woman was triply tabooed! In the seminary, such cases had been discussed with precision. Temptation! It was one which his clerical classmates planned to face in their future parishes as zestfully as St George had confronted his dragon. A pleasure renounced, their teachers assured them, brought more complex satisfactions than carnal enjoyment. The mind, after all ...

Heliotrope!

He inhaled. It was the scent from her dress and the name for plants which turn towards the sun! He felt the warmth of her breath. His mother had worn heliotrope.

‘Which one,’ she wanted to know, ‘is Monsieur de Maupassant? Isn’t he famous? Will he be upset if he sees us looking? Which is he?’

‘The one with a beard. I’ll open this window a crack. Then we’ll hear what his mood is like.’

Cold air knifed in. Just yards away, the writer was too intent to notice them. Bending over a basket of whittled stakes, such as gardeners use for seedlings, he was trying to drive them into the frozen crust of a flowerbed. His voice floated hoarsely towards them.

‘See, Baron, next spring, there will be a crop of small Maupassants here. Each of these sticks will grow into a Maupassant. I’m not joking! Drive in your stick and out pops your greedy, little replacement which in no time at all will be big enough to shove
you
into the earth! Soil is dangerously fertile. La Litzelmann, for instance, was fertility itself! Stick it into her once and she began to puff up. The reproduction business is nauseatingly predictable and ...’

Anxiously, Adam tried to fasten the casement but, before he could, a hand slid from behind him and pulled it open. ‘Wait!’ Madame d’Armaillé murmured in his ear. ‘He is talking about Mademoiselle Litzelmann. We may learn something of use to the poor creature.’

She could not have understood. Just as well! But best close the window. A sheltered young woman of her sort would be appalled by what was likely to come next. ‘Smelly orifices’, Adam remembered with a shudder. He grasped the casement, but, when she held on, released it rather than wrestle with her. ‘You may be distressed,’ he warned. ‘He is delirious and apt to use coarse language.’

‘I am a married woman, Monsieur Gould.’

‘Exactly. I am sure your husband would not want ...’

‘Allow me to be the judge of that. My husband is in no way petty. He is a soldier. Fighting in the darkest wilds of Africa.’

‘Well, our wilds here are dark too!’ Adam was nettled by her assumption of superior – what? Knowledge? Worldliness? She couldn’t be more than eighteen.

The sick man was shouting. ‘Three she spawned: Maupassant, Maupassant and Maupassant. Sounds like an undertakers’ firm, doesn’t it? Three guides to the evil passage! The sour and slippery way, haha! Sexual reproduction leads to death. If we never reproduced, there would be room for us all, and we could live for ever. But no! God wouldn’t like that. He
enjoys
slaughter! He breeds us for it! It’s why he hates us to idealize women and ...’

Adam snapped the casement to. ‘You do not want to hear,’ he whispered firmly.

Even now, however, the voice remained audible. ‘God,’ came its cry through the glass, ‘cares no more for the fate of his creation than would some mindless, great fish spawning worlds in space! He has forgotten about us, Baron. You do know that, don’t you?’

Baron’s mumble did not reach the drawing room.

‘We’re nearing the end of our century! The end of our time! Doesn’t that frighten you? This is 1892!’

Mumble.

Straightening up, the patient turned a bleared face towards the house. His nose ran unchecked because of his fear that if he blew it his melting brain could fall through. A related dread was that the brain contained a salt-factory worked by flies! Managed perhaps by Beelzebub? A priest, Adam thought, might claim that sending these terrors was the creator’s way of calling back the lost lamb – or ‘ram’ as Guy had been respectfully nicknamed in deference to his well-attested sexual prowess.

Poor wet-nosed ram! Caught now in a thicket of folly! Poor wounded bull!

Wasn’t it likelier though that it was the writer who had chosen to summon the creator so as to turn him into a fictional character? This let him release rage at the way his shoddily created brain was letting him down. And putting God in his story gave it magnitude.