The Sixth Lamentation Part 12

Stung by her grandmother's remark, Lucy pushed the pan across the table. Agnes lifted a wavering spoon of salt from a bowl and let the grains spill into the water.

Lucy said, 'I've a small role to play in the trial. I will be there on your behalf.' She would say nothing of her intention to confront Brionne with what she now knew and compel him to enter the courtroom. Her grandmother would discover that in the happening.

Agnes nodded, unblinking, her mouth sloping to one side. It was a smile, against the will of failing muscle and the tiny, dying engines of the nerves. Then she breathed a sort of laugh, leaned back, her face averted, and said: 'Victor was no fool.'

Lucy boiled water, mesmerised by the rage becoming steam. It vanished in the air, to reappear upon the window, water once more, streaming down the pane, to be wiped away by Agnes.

2.

Anselm returned to a sunny day in England. The sight of Larkwood pierced him. In a flash he longed to hear the bells and find himself in the psalms that named everything when he could not. At the entrance to the Priory, Father Andrew said, 'Schwermann's grandson, Max, wants to see me tomorrow afternoon. I'd like you to be there.'

'Of course.

'Are you all right?' The Prior glanced briefly sideways.

'Yes, thanks.'

Funny, Anselm thought wistfully, watching the Prior's square back as he slipped through a side door, this is want I'd wanted all along, to be involved in the fray to be called upon, and now it's happening it has somehow lost its savour.

Max Nightingale was a painter. By which he meant, he said, someone who paints pictures that few people buy but who continues to forsake career and financial security in order to paint more pictures that might never be sold. He made regular money working as a waiter or, when things became unbearable, smiling over a cash till at McDonald's. Anselm placed him at about twenty-seven. He had close-cropped hair and held his head ever so slightly to one side, as if antic.i.p.ating a sudden slap. They were taking tea by Anselm's favoured spot on the south transept lawn. Warm sunshine fell over them. Max spoke as if language was a clumsy tool, hesitating occasionally, his eye on a mental image that defied representation in a sentence. But when he did name something it stood out starkly, because of the unexpected angle of his observation.

'I said to my grandfather - look, hundreds of thousands of Jews are being transported across Europe to a small village in Poland. They won't fit in.'

'What did he say to that?' asked Father Andrew 'He said, "Go to King's Cross. Stay there for an hour or two, watching the trains leave, one after the other. Then go outside and look at the people in the Street, buying their newspaper, getting a taxi. Do you think they know the ones on the trains will all be killed? Day after day?"' Max raised his hands as if there was nothing else to say, knowing the explanation was somehow wanting.

Anselm thought of London occupied by foreign troops, the city cordoned off into sections while one ethnic group was arrested, packed into requisitioned buses and taken to a railway station. What would he have thought in time of war, watching the trains pull away into the night, always to the same destination? A bee drifted lightly over untouched tea and sandwiches, while paper serviettes fluttered in the breeze: the lazy motions of peacetime.

Max said, 'I'm not suggesting he didn't know about the killing ... I just find it incredible, unimaginable.'

'The incredible has a habit of disrupting the parts of our lives to which we're most attached,' said Father Andrew simply, adding, almost under his breath, 'it's why I became a monk.'

'Did that make it credible?' asked Max.

'Not quite, but the old life became unimaginable.' Father Andrew took off his gla.s.ses, revealing small red footprints on the sides of his nose. He polished the lenses and put them back on. 'All I'm saying is this: you have to be very careful before you dismiss the unbelievable, if it taps you on the shoulder or kicks you in the face.'

Max beetled his brow and his eyes flickered. He said: 'I've asked to see you because he mentioned something else that I think you should know, which is all the more unimaginable. It's another kick in the face.'

He looked frankly at Father Andrew, having caught him with his own words. Involuntarily, Anselm saw the face of Monsignor Renaldi at the Cardinal's shoulder, expressionless, noncommittal, but waiting, eternally waiting.

'He says he did the opposite of what's alleged against him. But he won't say any more. He wants someone else to explain, someone who was there.'

'Who?' asked the Prior.

'A Frenchman called Victor Brionne, though he's now called something else. We've got a private detective on to it.' He glanced from monk to monk. 'Apparently it's fairly easy if you know the name. And we do ... it's Berkeley'

'Max,' said Anselm, confidentially, 'do you mind telling us if and when he's found? Anything touching on the conduct of your grandfather is likely to have an effect on the Priory in due course.'

'Yes... I'll let you know'

3.

Agnes and Lucy sat in the gathering dusk, two bowls lying empty upon the table.

'When will Wilma move in?' asked Lucy, sleepily 'When she's ready'

They could just about hear each other breathing if they cared to listen.

'How will she know when to come?'

'She'll just know People like Wilma have a very different sense of time. Appointments, arrangements don't mean anything. She doesn't follow clocks. She just lives in each day'

Lucy rose and cleared the table. Agnes spoke out of the shade: 'Forget Victor.'

'What do you mean?' asked Lucy stopping arid looking down at her.

'Nothing. It's all right.'

Lucy put out her arm and Agnes took it with both hands, as if it were a railing. With a nod she dismissed further help, making her way towards the bathroom to get ready for bed. She walked deliberately, touching now to the right and then to the left, finding objects placed in position for the purpose. Lucy remained in the kitchen, hearing the click of a switch and the faint run of water, simple noises that begin and end the day; and, presumably, a life.

Lucy looked up. Agnes stood motionless, like an apparition, framed by the doorway in a long dressing gown and red furry slippers, a hand on each jamb. Evening light, all but gone, traced out her nose, a parted lip; and to Lucy it was as though Agnes had died and this was a final, wilful resurgence of flesh, a last insistent request to see Lucy just one more time before she fluttered into memory.

At that moment the hall clock struck the hour. Bra.s.s wheels turned, meshing intricately Time, no longer suspended, seemed to ground itself and move. They looked at one another across a divide, hearing the slow, brutal counting from afar taking slices off all that remained between them. Lucy and Agnes stood helpless, waiting.

'Gran, please don't go,' said Lucy, in a voice from their quiet days in the back room when everyone else had left them to it.

'I have to, Lucy Death is like the past. We can't change either of them. We have to make friends with them both.'

Tears filled Lucy's eyes to overflowing. Thunder groaned far off to the east and the room darkened abruptly, as though a great hand had fallen over the sun.

4.

Storm clouds had quickly gathered over Larkwood and by late evening large drops of rain threw themselves in heavy s.n.a.t.c.hes upon its walls. A wind was gathering strength, threatening to wrestle old trees through the night.

Anselm and Father Andrew sat either side of a great round window overlooking the cloister. Anselm gave a precis of all he'd learned since departing for Rome, situating the nature of the task that had been entrusted to him - the finding of Victor Brionne. The Prior listened intently 'A pattern of sorts emerges,' said Anselm in conclusion. 'Monsignor Renaldi can only look to logic - the Priory must have known something of great importance, outweighing whatever Schwermann and Brionne may have done, otherwise they would never have helped them. And that is broadly supported by the oral tradition of the Priory, which remembers Schwermann was hidden because of some undisclosed n.o.ble conduct - something effectively repeated this afternoon by his grandson, who got it from the mouth of the person most intimately concerned: Father Andrew slowly repeated the troubling words, "'He risked his life in order to save life" ... it's a crafted phrase, a jingle ... it disguises as much as it displays.'

'At least it gives us some idea as to why the monks at Les Moineaux helped him escape,' said Anselm.

'But why does he want the secret brought out into the open by Victor Brionne? Why not speak up for himself?'

'The two of them belong together-'

'As if they are two parts of the same, torn ticket,' interjected the Prior. He added, 'That was quick footwork, by the way, to get Max Nightingale to tell us when they've found him.'

Anselm wasn't sure if that was a compliment. The Prior went on: 'So what do you do now - wait?'

'Not quite. A private detective can only open so many doors. Max's candour is just one string to my bow'

'You have another?'

'Yes. I think so.'

Father Andrew fell into an abstraction and said, 'Maybe one day they'll make you a Cardinal.'

Later that night Anselm heard the bells for which he had longed; he sang psalms that named the motions of his soul; but, to his faint alarm, he did not find himself in quite the same place that he had left. Or rather, a slightly different person had come back to Larkwood, not entirely known, even to himself, and he didn't know why

5.

Lucy sat in the warm darkness of her flat wrestling with two emotions, each getting stronger, each slipping out of control.

She was losing her grandmother: the foundations of grief were being hewn out of rock. But at the same time, in another part of her soul she was gaining something. The fundamentals were already in place and she hadn't noticed them in the making. Perhaps they'd been built years and years ago. But the result was that Lucy found herself intrinsically and terrifyingly receptive to Pascal Fougeres.

The phone rang. Reluctantly she lifted the receiver.

'It's me, Cathy'

'Hi...'

'Well, do you regret missing the Turkish bath?'

'No.'

'Ah.'

'Honestly, he's just an acquaintance. ''Where did you go?'

'For a meal.'

'Where?'

'In a crypt.'

'Sounds like my sort. How did you meet him?'

'I'm too tired to explain,' Lucy said, laughing for the first time that day 'I'll sweat it out of you. Give me a call.'

They said goodnight and Lucy put the phone down with a sigh. As with all misunderstandings, Cathy was on to something. Since meeting Pascal Lucy wasn't quite her old self, and she didn't fully recognise who she was becoming.

Chapter Nineteen.

1.

'Apollo adored the Sibyl so he offered her anything she wished,' said Pascal, turning a beer mat round in circles. A gathering of other conversations drifted from the debating room out to where they sat on the veranda. Putney Bridge lay black against a scattering of white and orange evening lights.

'And?' said Lucy 'She asked to live for as many years as she had grains of sand in her hand. He granted her wish but she refused to satisfy his pa.s.sion.'

'Sounds like a good deal to me.'

'Not entirely'

'Why?'

'She forgot to ask for health and youth.'

'Ah.'

'So she grew old and hideous and lived for hundreds of years.

'Doing what?'

'Her old job, writing riddles on leaves, left at the mouth of her cave.' He sipped his drink. 'That's the part of the myth I like, the fragility of what she had to say; words written on leaves, easily made incomprehensible if disturbed by a careless wind.'

Lucy could only think of Agnes, the sand all but gone. She said, 'I understand her, though, wanting to live so much.'