Adam Gould (19 page)

‘Because rules can seem pointless, don’t you think? They’re part of a game which we only choose to play.
And
you’re a handsome fellow!
Un joli garçon
– and, better still, you don’t know it! Take my hand. Do you feel feverish?’

‘Yes.’

‘Pull down the window blinds. Take me in your arms.’

He did, felt unfamiliar sensations, and forgot his pride. Her smile lingered, and he saw that the thought of bombs hadn’t entered her head. Good! Protectively, he pressed himself around her, and the force of their connection made him think of magnets hurtling. Or meteorites! His surge of feeling amazed him as did an absurd sense of empowerment. Like courting animals which showily swell and expand, he felt as if he had grown proof against bombs. His soul had magnified itself. His boundaries seemed to melt. It was as if he and this woman had no skin and their bloodstreams had run together. Salmon, a fisherman back in Mayo had told him once, turn crimson and bloat when they are about to spawn and soon afterwards die. A myth?

She nuzzled his neck. ‘Not angry any more? Open your mouth and close your eyes.’

His nerves shuddered. He thought: it’s the bomb! It’s fear. Or maybe fear, releasing some volcanic smoulder in himself, had found sensations in his body which had never come alive till now. He felt a tingle in the arches of his feet. Baptism by fire, he thought, I’m a new man.

When they paused she touched her forehead to his and said, ‘Good, isn’t it? Here, put your hand here. That’s right! Move over a bit and let me ... That’s it! Do you know what this is called? No? Or this? Ah, Adam my sweet, I can see I’m going to have to give you a quick little
cours de polissonnerie
.’

In his excitement he hadn’t noticed that the carriage had set off again, and that whatever had been holding them up no longer did. There was no bomb. No thunderbolt! Hooves and wheels whirring through frills of mud had found a new, triumphant jingle. It whispered, fizzed and caressed the air.
Gaudeamus
, he thought and the hooves took up that rhythm too.

She challenged: ‘Say something saucy!’

‘We’re not going to die!’ he told her. And wondered why she was laughing.

After dropping her off at home, he heard nothing from her for weeks.

May brought a plump softness to the air; fibres relaxed and Dr Blanche wore a protective fez in all weathers and began to show his age. His attention was apt to falter, as though blurred by the morning haze which often muted the garden’s gaudiness and bound it in threads of sieved sunlight. By noon, heat had usually burned it off and was shrivelling this year’s first foam of blossoms. Already pinks had turned brown, and chestnut candles speckled the ground.

As windows stayed open longer, Maupassant’s shouts grew harder to ignore. He had had no remissions for a while; his personal habits had grown repulsive, and the other day Dr Blanche had shocked the staff by murmuring, ‘He’s turning into an animal.
Il s
’
animalise
.’ This, applied to the prince of lovers, a man from the doctor’s own social circle and that of the late emperor’s cousin, the princesse Mathilde, brought mortality disagreeably close. Worse, it put paid to the buoyant trust in progress which doctors and the tired century itself had once enjoyed.

Adam, coming from where he did, had never enjoyed this, nor had Belcastel who, when told of the incident, wondered whether Blanche himself was growing brutal. Of Guy he said, ‘He’s trapped in a story no crueller than those he wrote. You’ve read them, I suppose? They cut us down to size.’ Delicately, Belcastel touched a finger to his scarred cheek. A joke? ‘Sadly,’ he told Adam, ‘he knows his France. It is the one that Pope Leo wants us to accept, and Sauvigny can’t. When I read Monsieur de Maupassant’s views of it I don’t want to accept it either. What, I ask you, have the great stories which console humanity in common? A recognition, I say, of our divided nature. Of our aspirations as well as our failures. In
his
stories, though, what triumphs is a clever meanness.’ As if breath were failing him, Belcastel sighed and shook himself, while a change of feeling seeped across his face. ‘Well ...’, he grunted, ‘maybe that
is
what we must cope with? Now? In the Third Republic! Maybe we are
more
necessary to our flocks than ever?’

At first Adam was so full of his adventure with Danièle that when she failed to contact him he felt no impatience and even relished the chance to relive their carriage-ride in solitary daydreams. Daringly expanded, the memory grew radiant. After a while, though, he began to worry at it and pull it apart until, like a sundered onion, it sprayed bitterness. And hurt. For where was she? He couldn’t go to her, could he? No. Nor write? Nor hang about near her door? Doing any of those things could compromise her, upset her uncle and provoke a humiliating rejection. He daren’t even send her one of those Parisian telegrams which the monsignor now received quite often. A
petit bleu
! She, though, could have sent one to him. Why didn’t she? Tenderly, he imagined himself opening it. She was to have started working here. What had happened? The monsignor didn’t know, and the director, taking to his bed with influenza, had left Adam overworked and with nobody to tell him what was happening. Did she want to avoid him? Or did she not even think of him? Was he foolish to have hoped she might?

Supposing he were to send her flowers? Anonymously. Would
that
be indiscreet?

Probably.

White flowers or red?

What a torment hope was! That and lack of information! No wonder religion made so much of both. Doubt. Clouds of unknowing. All those prayers had been a camouflage. While thinking he was learning to renounce the world and the flesh, he had, he saw, been preparing to embrace both – if they would have him. Would they? Would she? Shame confused him. Had he been used? Treated – his thought punished itself – as a temporary convenience like one of those menials who, if gossip was to be trusted, serviced their mistresses in all ways: sweaty stable-boys who were transformed by folktale into frogs which, if kissed – and no doubt washed – grew princely? Translation: the mistress might marry and raise them up so that they got her property and with it leisure to evolve the souls they lacked. Dr Blanche’s clinical aside about Guy –‘
il s
’
animalise
!’ – must have touched off the thought, but it went back, too, to Adam’s childhood and the shock that ended it. Old susceptibilities throbbed like a wound beneath a scar.

Was he – had he become – a frog?

In his early experience of hierarchy there had been the base and the proud and little in between: stable boys on the bottom rung, landowners on top. (The middle was empty but for the odd priest or rural usurer.) Rarely – scandalously – extremes might mate. The frog could leap, the high-perched spinster lose footing. Disparagement was hard to conceal. That was how it had been in County Mayo, and why Guy’s fictions intrigued Adam. They showed how much more slyly the French jostled up and down their ladder, and he read them as reports from real places: beds, ports, railway coaches, streets, boats, private rooms in restaurants, newspaper-offices and barracks, watering-places, dance-halls, rooming houses, drawing rooms and, of course, brothels. There was even an account of a lunatic asylum in North Africa.

Adam had rarely put foot in any of these, but Guy had sized them up zestily, and what he had had to say was a corrective to daydreams.

Reading him supplied Adam with the smell of jaded distaste as figured by shucked oyster-shells in stuffy rooms, careless lies, hastily cast-off breeches, champagne left uncorked to go flat in its bottle and the cold pleasures of revenge. More cheeringly, it conveyed a sense of urban savvy, and of contrivances unimaginable in Mayo. Bourgeois resourcefulness despised by Guy – in this, oddly at one with the squeamish Monseigneur de Belcastel – seemed wonderful to Adam who shrank, anyway, from harsh judgements. They or the fear of them had, in his opinion, killed his mother. So he made none and hoped to avoid incurring any either. To be alert was to forestall, as his mother clearly had not done. Love was a dangerous business. Even friendship – surely an apprenticeship for love? – was something Adam had hardly known. Who were his friends? Guy? The monsignor? Thady Quill? At a distance, Father Tobin? He, over the years, had sent the occasional letter from Ireland with news which was by now more outlandish to Adam than Guy’s fictions. Dutifully, Adam had replied, sometimes sending along a cutting from a Paris newspaper to assuage Tobin’s provincial greed for news. But he had not got close to another human being since he was twelve. He lacked instinct. Not only had he no carnal knowledge of others, he had little of himself. Was he, as Danièle had said, a pretty fellow? Assessing the glances women shot at him in the streets of Auteuil and Passy, he guessed he was. He had milky skin, blue veins, dark eyelashes and a supple figure, so perhaps he could count on his looks. But inexperience left him vulnerable. ‘I might as well,’ he saw, ‘have been raised as a wolfboy.’ Reminded of Tassart, he told himself, ‘It’s not that I don’t know my place. I don’t
have
one.’

Suddenly light-hearted, the good side of this struck him: ‘I can be what I like. I can soar. First though, I must learn the
earthy
things.’ As that word took on colour in his mind, he caught the erotic drift of Guy’s account of pigeons pecking seeds from dung. Guy’s thinking had been, in some ways, like that of a medieval monk. And now, the poor wretch, imagining he had diamonds in his belly, was afraid to shit. And – there were those yells again! – in pain.

‘I should help him,’ Adam reproached himself, ‘to put an end to his agony.’

Oddly, he felt no religious scruples about the idea, but feared that putting it into practice could be terrible. Besides, if there were to be pain – for Guy – in the process, what would be the point? It would be easier for everyone if the unfortunate simply died in his sleep. How much morphine would be needed?

Meanwhile the conjunction of shit and diamonds returned him to more personal uncertainties. He wondered whether women – decent ones – acknowledged having thoughts about such things? Remembering his own fiercely fastidious adolescence, he guessed that they hid them from themselves and managed to ignore how animal we all were. How then could a man ever fully open himself to a woman without fear of horrifying her? Mentally? Physically?

Danièle had not seemed shy.

Remembering Guy’s love of water and hydrotherapy, his mind turned to hygiene and he wondered if he had smelled on the day of the kiss. Might she have a taste for abasement? Women weren’t often – were they? – as forward as she had been with him. He thought of consulting Thady Quill about this, but knew the brave Thady would fail to see the dilemma. Adam could just imagine Quill’s cheerily quoting – as he often did quote – Little Bo Peep: ‘Lave her alóane/And she’ll come hóam/ And carry her tail, haha, behind her!’ Thady would be a useless guide to feminine caprice.

It would be better to consult a woman, but the only one with whom Adam was on easy terms was the cook. A lady was what he needed, but few sane ones, apart from Dr Blanche’s wife and Guy’s childhood playmate Caroline de Commanville, lodged here or visited at all regularly. Even Madame de Commanville now came rarely, for she had moved to Antibes.

When, therefore, on a sunshot late May morning, he came on these two chatting on the terrace, he seized his chance.

‘What,’ he asked, ‘would you ladies say was the secret of Maupassant’s charm for women? I have been reading
Bel-Ami
whose hero’s amorous success is both amazing and persuasive. The author must have known something like it.’

The ladies agreed that, by all accounts, Guy had.

They were seated on garden chairs, flicking through newspapers, while waiting for lunch. Sunlight, filtering through the elder lady’s sunshade, threw rippling reflections on the pages. ‘Attentiveness,’ she decided thoughtfully, ‘was a great part of his appeal. He shared his fun with women. That is rarer than you might think. And what men might call cheek. He seized his opportunities.’ The old lady smiled with the tolerance of a spectator at a play.

‘Yes,’ said the other lady surprisingly, ‘he made us laugh.’ Madame de Commanville, whose bearing was ramrod stiff, had endured an unhappy marriage – her husband’s business failures had ruined her uncle – and didn’t laugh easily, which could be why she liked remembering occasions when she had. ‘He was a lively talker,’ she recalled. ‘Though one often found that he had been trying out things he meant to write up. He loved organizing parties and was vain even when he was small. He liked people to say he had a Roman emperor’s profile! But I agree about seizing opportunities. The parties, of course, created them.’

Dr Grout, who now joined their group, began to tease her about her enjoyment of such worldliness, and for a while Maupassant was forgotten.

‘
Some
of the events he got up,’ said Madame Blanche, who must have been pondering the topic, ‘were said to be quite depraved. The few society women who attended enjoyed condoning this. I believe Princess Mathilde had to be dissuaded from putting on a mask and going to a private cabaret in which he and other male writers appeared dressed as naked women. They wore skin-coloured
maillots
with obscene embellishments which – well, I leave you to imagine! Seeing what should not be seen can be piquant.’

Adam saw that the thought amused her, even though she herself was impeccably proper and went regularly to mass.

Madame de Commanville noted that her uncle, Gustave Flaubert, had been almost as outrageous as Guy, and that the two were so devoted that when her uncle died Guy laid out his body with his own hands. ‘Poor Uncle had put on a great deal of weight, so of course Guy had help. But he did most of the job himself. Wrestled his flesh into his clothes. Combed his hair and fluffed up his moustache! He had a good heart. Poor Guy! To think he used to be so athletic! I remember someone sneering that he didn’t look like a gentleman at all because he lifted weights and had muscles like a coal-heaver. And look at him now. When I saw him I had to hide my tears.’ And possibly to hide more tears, she launched into a distracting little anecdote about Guy’s encounter at the age of sixteen with an English poet called Swinburne. Something to do with an ape. The story started nobly with Guy’s rescuing the Englishman from drowning, then grew increasingly disturbing as the poet bestowed a flayed human hand on his rescuer and invited him to a lunch which involved near-cannibalism and other odd practices. Just what happened could not, it seemed, be rendered intelligible without violating decency.