Free Adam Gould by Julia O'Faolain Page B

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