pink, satiny crease studded with nodes no bigger than lettuce seeds or the beads in a baby’s necklace. ‘No use asking the doctors.’ He lifts an eyebrow. ‘Their oath, you see! The hypocritical, Hippocratic one!’
His smile pleads. Guy the seducer.
He means it, thinks Adam, then wonders: is there a ‘he’ there now? Dr Blanche’s notes on this case describe: ‘Acute disorder of the intellectual faculties characterized by melancholy ravings ...’
‘Gould?’
‘We’re hoping to get you better.’
‘What if you can’t?’
Adam can’t bring himself to say. After Guy’s last attempt his neck wound gaped like a split pomegranate.
‘Yes? No?’ The straying mind is back, focused by need. ‘Do you,’ Guy presses, ‘mean “maybe”?’ His hair has fallen out in handfuls, and he hates letting the barber trim his beard. Naturally, he cannot be allowed to trim it himself. ‘I know I don’t sound the way I used to.’ His once robust frame is a ruin. ‘Unfortunately, I can see how things are.’ He waits. ‘
Well
?’
Adam shakes then stops shaking his head. ‘Maybe,’ he says, then: ‘Let’s wait a little. The topic sharpens your mind wonderfully. Maybe you will cure yourself?’
Afterwards he can’t be sure whether he made a promise and whether, if so, it is binding. Now that he has decided – this was quite recent – against going back to the seminary, by what rules will he live? He wonders if Guy recognizes him as a rudderless man.
***
More damage by
Dynamitards
!! Anarchists attempt to destroy the barracks in the rue de Rivoli where the Garde Républicaine is quartered. No lives lost.
Adam is now the house press censor. Each morning, before patients receive their newspapers, he checks them for references to Guy, pen poised to ink them out. Happily, a series of outrages has diverted public attention and Guy is forgotten. This is a relief. Adam, when inking out his name, always felt a small, superstitious shiver.
Anarchist-Trial Judge
’
s residence bombed. Further attacks feared
.
Republicans are now thought to regret alienating so many Catholics. When trouble explodes on your left, you look the other way for friends. But the Right is skittish. Its organ,
L
’
Autorité
, has been printing a heated correspondence about a proposal by the bishops that their flocks should agree to respect the government. Readers – who may not be readers at all, but the editor in disguise – reject the notion. Insults like ‘morally defrocked’ scorch through letters from ‘An anxious Catholic from Saint-Malo’, ‘A troubled father’, ‘A loyal subscriber’ and many more. Most claim to be laymen, fear change, and are outraged to find it coming from their Church. ‘Any priest who supports the proposed compromise must,’ says ‘A betrayed and bewildered member of the faithful’, be ‘either mad, vicious, a gull, a joker, a double-dealer or a liar.’
Adam asks Blanche whether this fury could affect patients? ‘Should we stop their newspapers altogether?’
‘If we did,’ says Blanche, ‘how could we ever get them ready to return to the great madhouse outside? You too, Gould, may have trouble adapting to it! How come you’re so unlike your madcap uncle? He told me your papa was a bit of a wild man too.’
‘Maybe that’s why I’m cautious. I’m fearful of damaging people.’
‘Did you ever?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I won’t probe.’
***
Days go by. The thaw expands. Sap rises. Moisture glints.
‘ ... two ... three.’
In one of the exercise yards to the side of the old château a voice counts. It rattles with brusque precision through the kitchen window to where Adam and the cook are sitting at a deal table planning the week’s menu. Repeated scrubbings have so stripped the grain of the deal that its fibres feel to their fingertips like string. Adam thinks of Guy’s softened brain.
‘Calf’s head,’ licking her pencil, the cook writes greasily, ‘for Wednesday.
His smile pleads. Guy the seducer.
He means it, thinks Adam, then wonders: is there a ‘he’ there now? Dr Blanche’s notes on this case describe: ‘Acute disorder of the intellectual faculties characterized by melancholy ravings ...’
‘Gould?’
‘We’re hoping to get you better.’
‘What if you can’t?’
Adam can’t bring himself to say. After Guy’s last attempt his neck wound gaped like a split pomegranate.
‘Yes? No?’ The straying mind is back, focused by need. ‘Do you,’ Guy presses, ‘mean “maybe”?’ His hair has fallen out in handfuls, and he hates letting the barber trim his beard. Naturally, he cannot be allowed to trim it himself. ‘I know I don’t sound the way I used to.’ His once robust frame is a ruin. ‘Unfortunately, I can see how things are.’ He waits. ‘
Well
?’
Adam shakes then stops shaking his head. ‘Maybe,’ he says, then: ‘Let’s wait a little. The topic sharpens your mind wonderfully. Maybe you will cure yourself?’
Afterwards he can’t be sure whether he made a promise and whether, if so, it is binding. Now that he has decided – this was quite recent – against going back to the seminary, by what rules will he live? He wonders if Guy recognizes him as a rudderless man.
***
More damage by
Dynamitards
!! Anarchists attempt to destroy the barracks in the rue de Rivoli where the Garde Républicaine is quartered. No lives lost.
Adam is now the house press censor. Each morning, before patients receive their newspapers, he checks them for references to Guy, pen poised to ink them out. Happily, a series of outrages has diverted public attention and Guy is forgotten. This is a relief. Adam, when inking out his name, always felt a small, superstitious shiver.
Anarchist-Trial Judge
’
s residence bombed. Further attacks feared
.
Republicans are now thought to regret alienating so many Catholics. When trouble explodes on your left, you look the other way for friends. But the Right is skittish. Its organ,
L
’
Autorité
, has been printing a heated correspondence about a proposal by the bishops that their flocks should agree to respect the government. Readers – who may not be readers at all, but the editor in disguise – reject the notion. Insults like ‘morally defrocked’ scorch through letters from ‘An anxious Catholic from Saint-Malo’, ‘A troubled father’, ‘A loyal subscriber’ and many more. Most claim to be laymen, fear change, and are outraged to find it coming from their Church. ‘Any priest who supports the proposed compromise must,’ says ‘A betrayed and bewildered member of the faithful’, be ‘either mad, vicious, a gull, a joker, a double-dealer or a liar.’
Adam asks Blanche whether this fury could affect patients? ‘Should we stop their newspapers altogether?’
‘If we did,’ says Blanche, ‘how could we ever get them ready to return to the great madhouse outside? You too, Gould, may have trouble adapting to it! How come you’re so unlike your madcap uncle? He told me your papa was a bit of a wild man too.’
‘Maybe that’s why I’m cautious. I’m fearful of damaging people.’
‘Did you ever?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I won’t probe.’
***
Days go by. The thaw expands. Sap rises. Moisture glints.
‘ ... two ... three.’
In one of the exercise yards to the side of the old château a voice counts. It rattles with brusque precision through the kitchen window to where Adam and the cook are sitting at a deal table planning the week’s menu. Repeated scrubbings have so stripped the grain of the deal that its fibres feel to their fingertips like string. Adam thinks of Guy’s softened brain.
‘Calf’s head,’ licking her pencil, the cook writes greasily, ‘for Wednesday.
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