‘That’s particularly true in politics and religion,’ he told Adam. ‘I hope I’m not shocking you. I am too worn out to curb my tongue. I have just spent two hours with some virtuous, but dangerously mad friends.’
‘Trying to curb them?’ Adam ventured.
‘Well, we have more than enough of that sort of thing right here, wouldn’t you say? Listen to that.’
‘Mer-de, de, de ...’ It was Maupassant’s hoarse, tense voice. ‘Dieu de merde! Merde de Dieu!’
***
To the Provincial of the White Fathers
My dear Father de Latour,
Presuming on the bonds between our families, I write to beg your intercession with Cardinal Lavigerie. Knowing his magnanimity, I am praying that he may see his way to forgiving the injury I did him. Your advocacy could tip the balance.
I have only just learned for whom he was speaking when I emulated his militancy and, having a weapon to hand, used it against him. Need I say that I am devastated and anxious to make any amends which, if I may quote his words, ‘honour and conscience permit’. As a young priest, I admired him intensely. Later this admiration led me to use his methods rather than to respect his person. Now that his calvary is over, mine has begun.
Can you, as a successful crusader – even Arab slavers acknowledge the White Fathers’ success – imagine my mental agony? I struck a blow against our own side! To say that the lines were camouflaged only aggravates my anguish. For why did God not enlighten me? Remorse corrodes, and a man in my plight can think the unthinkable. You see how I need His Eminence’s forbearance. Will you speak for me? Might you come here and let me explain myself? I cannot come to you – though this may change. Once the civil authorities are satisfied that we have indeed broken with the monarchists, charges against me could be dropped. Dare I ask if you might help with those too? I know the government values your order’s contribution to France’s civilizing and scientific mission. How could it fail to, since your missionaries so often go ahead of the fighting men? You once wrote to me from some wild outpost near Lake Tanganyika where a small group of you were – I quote from memory – ‘devoured by insects, living on stale hippopotamus meat and upholding the honour of the flag, while awaiting the day when France can take possession of these lands.’ A half joke? A true hope? It shows why, as the great Republican, Gambetta, told His Eminence ten years ago: ‘anticlericalism is not for export’. Today it is even less so. Thanks to men like yourself, France has so far outstripped all other missionary countries that – I read this in one of your pamphlets –75 per cent of those in the field are French. Bravo, mon Père! Can you use a scrap of your credit on my behalf so that I may leave here, serve the Church again and atone for my mistakes?
You have a right to know my (pained) opinion of the royalists, which is that we should distance ourselves from a party which, for all its conspiracies, has proven incapable of winning. Making it a point of honour to bury oneself in the folds of its vanquished flag is an indulgence which we owe it to the Church to forgo.
Please accept the expression of my respectful devotion,
Belcastel
***
A pale sun slides its arc across a swampy sky, and Adam has again been asked to talk to Guy, who could benefit from stimulus.
‘Never mind,’ say the doctors, ‘if you get no answer. Just keep trying.’
‘Do you remember my telling you,’ he asks the patient, ‘that I couldn’t bear to talk about my mother?’
Guy’s red, flaking eyelids quiver and pleat.
‘That,’ Adam decides, ‘was because at one time I’d talked about her too much. I kept telling about her suicide in confession in the hope that the priests would say she couldn’t have done it. She was pregnant when she died, and I needed to think that no Catholic woman would risk condemning two souls to hell, hers and her unborn child’s.’
‘My mother,’ Guy squinnies from a single eye, ‘suffers from goitre. The light makes her scream. Once it drove her to try and strangle herself with her hair and they had to cut it off. She mustn’t see me like this.’
‘We won’t let her come.’ Adam wonders if he should stop humouring Guy.
‘Tell me more about yours. Do you think she did kill herself?’
Adam pictures and tries to shrink his old pain. He sees it first as a brown cloud, then as blood soaking the front of his mother’s riding habit when she fell at a fence she should not have tried to jump.
Remembered voices mumble.
‘... while the balance of her mind ...’
‘Shush!’
Another wonders, ‘Did she not see the wire?’
‘Saw it too late, maybe. Maybe it jumped up after a horse ahead of her dislodged a stone!’
‘That rogue of a farmer shouldn’t have had wire there at all!’
Rags of memory gleam like blanks in a negative print. Or a stack of prints. Under that dark wetness must be whiteness, and under that more blood. And deep within, though he never saw it, the foetus. A male, he heard later. A brother.
How, some priests queried, could he have seen anything at all? Aged twelve? Wasn’t all this imaginary? Honestly now! And he, having encouraged their incredulity, wanted to agree but knew that she must have been taken from where she fell and that he must have followed. He would have been on his pony and she perhaps in a cart. Unless they rigged up some sort of stretcher. This bit is blank, so he can only guess. Taken, anyway, to a cabin where her clothes were cut open with a tailor’s scissors. Even now he can summon that sound of steel labouring through layered wool. Failing to cut, then cutting. After that, memories of confessionals and cabin get entangled because someone was praying in both. Reciting the Memorare, begging for a miracle. The next thing he remembers is her coffin.
‘I used to gabble the Confiteor,’ he tells Guy, ‘at top speed. Remember how it goes? “I confess to Almighty God, to Blessed Mary Ever Virgin, to Blessed Michael the Archangel, to ...” And so on, empanelling half of heaven. Busy priests like you skip the names, but I never would because I needed those authorities to reinforce the confessor’s opinion when he shot my story full of holes. I craved disbelief. It consoled me – but the odd thing,’ Adam confesses, ‘is that their disbelief in my story undermined my belief in the Christian one. So I ruined my own stratagem. My doubt spread like rain over a watercolour painting until ...’
His listener has fallen asleep. So Adam rings for one of the nurses to come and make up the fire and put him to bed properly, which is their task, not his. He walks into the garden and breathes in smells of sap and lichen, wet earth and mulch. The air is mild, for they are between seasons. Half daydreaming, he blots out what is in front of him and guesses that his mother used to do that too. A gambler, like Uncle Charles, she must have played with fate and taken the tricky fence while hoping to get safely over it. Praying as she did, perhaps? Saying the Memorare.
***
My dear Monseigneur,
Love, they say, is blind, but friendship rests on knowledge. So I, who know your staunch heart, am confident that our friendship will survive the present crisis. I plan to cement it, moreover, by bringing you a first instalment of the money with which you feel our Party should compensate the Church’s losses.
I wonder what you make of Pope Leo’s journalistic ventures. Rumour whispers that he wants us to enter the Republic so as to change it back to a monarchy – but would Republicans let us? He is badly advised and too politic. Also: saying one thing urbi et orbi and quite another in our private ear does not inspire confidence.
You should know that there is talk of freezing the money collected for his succour – St Peter’s Pence – and lodging it in a bank for the use of his successor. The funds I shall be bringing you are from quite another source. They are for royalist clergy, so any attempt to send them to Rome would be a breach of trust.
Bombs explode in the streets and scandals in parliament. Anarchy’s motto is ‘Neither God nor Master!’ And here we have its fruits!
&n
bsp; Don’t worry, old friend, I am not trying to persuade you! I trust you.
You may wonder why I am writing rather than visiting. It’s because I am in Belgium where some old comrades have gathered: ex-Zouaves. They have been in Africa helping to fight Arab slavers and scout out commercial opportunities in the ivory and rubber trades. I shall tell you more when we meet. What about Monday?
Yours, etc., Sauvigny
***
Monseigneur,
Indeed yes, we must get your talents back to work. His Eminence is only too eager to forget the past and will be glad to have you with us. He, as you surmised, has been suffering the torments of Job, for not only did he lose friends, he has material anxieties too. Donations to his charities and to our order – which he of course founded – have dried up. It is not at all sure when they will start to flow again.
In that connection, it will be better if you sever yours with Sauvigny. Our missionaries have picked up unsavoury rumours about the Congo Free State, where King Leopold’s troops allegedly force natives to provide him with great quantities of ivory. This would explain why Antwerp is now the greatest ivory market in the world. Do ex-Zouaves and the rest of his bullies take a percentage? If so, that particular royal connection may be more dishonourable than any Republican one.
I have some ideas for your future and am eager to visit and plan your rehabilitation. Would Monday be a good day?
Latour
***
Monseigneur,
I take the liberty of begging you to help me resolve a moral dilemma which confronts me. Though we have not met often, we are, as you know, distantly related and can trust each other.
It is hard to say more in a letter. My situation is delicate and I must therefore ask you not to mention this appeal to my uncle. He will not be back from Belgium until the middle of next week, so I could visit you on Monday without embarrassment. May I? Please let me know whether the date suits and, if it does not, whether you might consent to a visit at some other time.
Your devoted and obedient relative,
Danièle d’ Armaillé
***
Paris police discover a manufactory of bombs in a coach house in the St Denis quarter. Sixteen persons arrested.
***
‘Glass of wine?’ Belcastel sounded as if he himself might have had more than a glass. ‘Join me,’ he invited. ‘I am practising for my return to the world. Perhaps you would like to come with me? Be my secretary if my future post,’ he made a grimace, ‘is of an elevation to require one? I am endeavouring to keep overweening fantasies in check. Sit down and tell me about yourself. Do you like claret?’
Adam sipped. ‘I am learning to.’
‘Well,’ Belcastel admitted, ‘I may have to do the opposite, since who knows where I shall in fact be sent? I should not be raising our hopes.’ He wondered if he had become ambitious. Well, if ambition helped one do good, why not? Picking up the hem of his cassock, he ran a fingernail along its frayed edge, then scratched at a wriggle of tidemarks left by walks in the wet grounds while reading his breviary. There was a darn there too. Never mind! He might soon have new cassocks and they might be edged with purple piping now that he was to join the side which God seemed to have chosen. ‘God?’ he said aloud and marvelled at the word’s new shiftiness. Belief hadn’t faded. How could it? ‘God’ was a word – like ‘and’ – with which one could not dispense. But aspects of its meaning had flaked off. Belief, like images in run-down chapels, was now vulnerable to bad restoring practices. All the more reason for a disciplined obedience to Rome, he decided.
‘In unity lies strength,’ he told the refreshingly simple young Irishman who, though visibly taken aback by the suddenness of this remark, raised his glass in assent.
The monsignor’s room struck Adam as looking unusually shabby. On closer inspection, he saw that two curved swords which had hung on its walls had been removed, leaving bright silhouettes of themselves on the faded wallpaper. Most of this was pink, but the commemorative curves were a grinning crimson. What other changes had been made? Ah, the photographs of royal pretenders had gone, too.
The monsignor followed Adam’s gaze. ‘As you see, worldly glory has once again come a cropper. Always a painful business. By the way, lest I forget, I shall want you to send telegrams to several addresses. The message for all is the same: “Monday impossible. Letter follows, Belcastel”. More claret?’
***
Another dynamite outrage in Paris leads the police to arrest fifty persons.
Bribery alleged in Panama case.
***
It was the day of Madame d’Armaillé’s visit. Seeing her was a way of doing her uncle a favour and so dissipating some of Belcastel’s moral discomfort over his impending betrayal of that same uncle.
The discomfort was undeserved, for he was following his conscience. As always. What was new was having to do so alone and to rely on his inner lights. Like a Protestant! How arrogant one must become, it struck him, if one had to do this all the time. He, at least, was now conforming to the Roman line. It was a pity that that had not been made clear sooner – but then the pope too, poor man, had found it hard to embrace change. He had had to reconcile loyalty to his predecessors’ infallible judgement with – but best not become embroiled in such thoughts when a guest was due to arrive. Happily, her little feminine troubles were unlikely to be taxing. Belcastel found himself looking forward benevolently to supplying her with guidance.
***
The niece wore grey, had a hat with a thick veil and was in every way appropriately turned out. Unfortunately, Tassart’s account of his master’s last mistress, the prodigiously lustful ‘dame en gris’, had so echoed through the maison de santé that what that sober colour now evoked for its staff was lubricity. Watching the footman’s face as the guest was shown in, the monsignor judged that she might as well have had the words ‘priest’s whore’ emblazoned on her forehead.
‘I would offer you tea,’ he told her when they were alone, ‘but, since you asked for discretion, I arranged for Adam Gould, who normally gets it, to take some hours off. I don’t trust that footman’ – whipping open the door to make sure that the fellow had quite gone – ‘whom I suspect of thinking ill of clerics, but am not allowed into the kitchens myself. So sorry, no tea.’
They sat on either side of his fire and a filigree fireguard, which protected them from sparks. It was shaped like a peacock’s tail and may have reminded her of the grille in a confessional, for she said, ‘Monseigneur, though I have a confession to make it is not about a sin which has taken place but one which may be prevented. What I need is worldly advice as to how to do that.’
Wincing at the word ‘worldly’, he hoped she hadn’t heard he was precisely that.
‘It has,’ Madame d’Armaillé said carefully, ‘to do with my uncle, who – this is not easy to say – is aroused by me, though for now he hasn’t let himself know this.’ She seemed unable to go on.
Belcastel was unsure what to do next. A smile would be out of order. A glum face might silence her. Standing up, he presented her with his back and, with his head in a cupboard, called out, ‘I’m listening, but I have some wine here. Perhaps a little drink would make things easier?’ Affably, he emerged with a decanter and poured her a small glass of Sauterne.
She held, then put it down. ‘Thank you.’ Still tense. ‘This isn’t imaginary.’
‘No.’
‘Though nothing has happened. Yet.’ She stared at her yellow wine. ‘Only that my aunt – she’s a nun – went back to her convent. She was staying with us for the past year, and now my uncle claims that I don’t need a chaperone, though I disagree. You see his caresses are ... ambiguous. A goodnight kiss can become something else. One can’t finger the moment. It’s ...’
She must be waiting for a word of help. He chose not to supply it.
‘I don’t want to hurt him.’ Another pause. ‘Nor to name things, because that summons them, doesn’t it? But if I don’t, wha
t can I say?’
‘To him?’
‘Yes.’
This time the pause was a long one. Qualmish, thought Belcastel and wondered if the aunt was to blame. Qualms throve in convents. Desire disguised as repulsion? All this could be a fantasy. Perhaps the thought showed on his face, for his guest’s expression changed.
‘The truth is,’ she took up in a rush, ‘that when Uncle Hubert cuddles me, I like it. I’m tempted. I don’t want anything to happen, but if I stay in the house with him, it will.’
Feminine vapourings, thought the monsignor. They get bored and fanciful. He was about to tell her to pray when it struck him – growing fanciful himself? – that she might be the White Fathers’ pawn, sent to turn him more fully against his old ally, her uncle. But for that to happen she would have to be not merely corrupt but treacherous. So might she not simply be telling the truth? He asked: ‘You’re sure he’s susceptible?’
‘Quite sure. And there I am dangled, you might say, before him. At all hours. Just now he doesn’t see the danger because he’s upset – unbalanced by something else. He’s going through some trouble, a sort of despair. He has fits of fury when he reads the newspaper.’
Adam Gould Page 10
