Adam Gould by Julia O'Faolain

Author:Julia O'Faolain
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846591082
Publisher: Telegram Books

***

The rain had thinned. Smells of rinsed greenery seeped in through a half-open door.

‘There’s something I’d better tell you.’ The monsignor closed his breviary. ‘Maupassant’s man, François Tassart, came to see me. Surprised? So was I. It seems he is at the end of his tether. His master won’t see him now at all. He says you have taken his place.’

‘But I’ve hardly seen Guy lately.’

‘Well,’ Belcastel pried a spoke of hay from the stuff of his sleeve, ‘Tassart says he has proof that you promised his master to help him do away with himself. I imagine he meant me to warn you.’ Belcastel fiddled with the clasps of his breviary.

‘I see!’ Standing up, Adam moved to the edge of the loft floor. It extended only halfway across the width of the storey below, before ending like a shelf. Squinting down at the door, he reported, ‘I think the rain is slackening.’

‘The director wouldn’t like talk of suicide.’

‘No.’ Adam raised a hand to steady himself against a rafter. There was no barrier to stop anyone falling off.

‘He was out when Tassart was here. Luckily.’

Adam asked: ‘Was this yesterday?’ He guessed it must have been because he had seen Tassart shortly after Guy’s lost ‘manuscript’ turned up. A maid, finding the dog-eared sheaf behind a cupboard in the billiard room, had recognized the foolscap on which the writer had spent his first days here scribbling, and brought it to Adam. Inky bladders, dark with afterthoughts, crammed its margins. One said: ‘I am flickering out like a lamp without oil.’ The smudged paper had been worn furry.

Finding Tassart posted outside Guy’s door, Adam pressed the sheaf into his hands.

The valet stared at its scribbles, read the words ‘I’m flickering out’, and said, ‘If this is a signal, he’s past meaning it. Leave him alone.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Tassart drew a strip of pasteboard the size of a bookmark from his pocket and held it up. ‘He called me “Adam” just now.’ Shrugging, ‘He mixes people up. Poor Monsieur! He knows that the doctors are doctors, but not which one is which. Ditto for the rest of us. “Don’t tell François,” he told me when asking me – whom he took for you – for some “help” which you seem to have promised. It’s not hard to guess what sort of help. “François,” he said, “stopped me last time and he’d do it again.” Well, I would. Read this.’

It was the strip of pasteboard. Stacked on it, one word above the other, like print on a sauce-bottle label, was the statement, ‘I refuse to survive myself.’

Tassart plucked it back from Adam’s fingers. ‘That’s two years old and was written in a black moment. He had a lot of those, poor Monsieur Guy! I sometimes thought that it was to keep his demons off as much as anything that he liked to have women around. Not that he wasn’t hot for them in between times. He cheered up after he’d written that, so when I found it I hid it.

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