The Sixth Lamentation (12 page)

But then we both got a big surprise, way beyond her suspicions and
my expectations. I became pregnant.

1st May.

My generation
doesn’t talk about this sort of thing. Things got out of hand. It only happened
once but, as you will appreciate, that’s all it takes.

Jacques displayed his Catholic entrails, as Father Rochet put it,
offering to marry me within the week, As he spoke I all of a sudden saw him
dressed in a respectable black uniform, safely behind the rail of a huge ship,
throwing me one of those circular life rings. Standing over his shoulder was a
severe captain, his eyes concealed by shadow Then he was just earnest Jacques
again, alone with me by the windmill in Montmartre. I said no, not yet. I’ve
never been that good at giving explanations so I described my picture. He
couldn’t see what I was trying to say I said, ‘Give it time.’

Jacques’ family were the best kind of Catholic — principles never
interfered with practice. They welcomed me and our child for what we were —
part of their fold. Madame Fougères was very pleased: she already had one
grandchild from Claude, a boy named Etienne. One day she said, they’d play
together.

I suppose it was a very modern arrangement. I lived overlooking Parc
Monceau and Jacques was a stone s throw away on the Boulevard de Courcelles.
Our infant was happily tossed between the two households. So I think we would
have married, eventually In all that matters he was an utterly devoted father,
but he clung to wilful ignorance when faced with the more unpleasant chores of
parenting — like most men I have known (including Freddie) .

Notwithstanding the ‘Not yet’ to marriage, I did agree to a baptism,
if only because I wanted Father Rochet to place his hands upon my boy All I
remember about the ceremony is sticking my head around the parlour door
afterwards and seeing him alone with my baby I instantly thought of that story
by Maupassant, ‘Le Baptême’, about the lonely priest caught crying over an
infant. That was 21st April 1941.

I have said nothing about Victor. He found out about Jacques and me
by chance. And it was ironic that he should stumble upon us in the way he did.
I said in passing to Father Rochet that an anti-Semitic exhibition had just
opened in Paris,’ Le Juif et la France’. He told me to keep well away from such
filth. But Jacques and I decided to go anyway On the day, Victor suggested
going over to Saint-Germain-des-Prés to hobnob with the intellectuals solving
the problems of France in a café. Jacques and I made our different excuses, met
up secretly and headed off. Who did we meet at the exhibition? Victor. And for
reasons best known to himself, Father Rochet had urged him to go.

After that I have only two or three other memories of Victor. When I
told him I was pregnant, it was as though I had struck him across the face with
the flat of my hand. I didn’t see much of him from then on and neither did
Jacques. He withdrew, as if betrayed, and only came forward to witness the
consequences of his revenge. For come it did.

Chapter Twelve

1

Left to his own devices,
Anselm would have preferred to walk — a long, irreverent ramble through the
vineyards of France, blistering his feet on the Alps, drinking too much wine
and then descending, light-headed and a boy again, through the landscape of
frescoes on to Rome. Instead, he did as he was told and took the 12.15 p.m.
flight from Heathrow to Fiumicino. He was to stay with a community of friars at
San Giovanni’s, an international house of studies incongruously situated
between two restaurants near Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, beneath the Janiculum
Hill. A priest would collect him.

Anselm
was standing in the arrivals area in his long black habit, beginning to feel
the heat, when he was greeted from behind by a back-slapping friar in cut-off
shorts and a T-shirt:

‘Hello
there, I’m Brandon Conroy But call me Con.’

He had
the build of a shaven ox with hands like pit shovels. But the most startling
feature was his eyes, china blue, elfin and glittering, deeply set beneath a
brow of heavy bone.

‘I knew
it was you from your outfit,’ said Conroy ‘Here, give us your bag,’ and off he
went, whistling, while Anselm trailed behind, all pores opening.

Conroy
compressed himself into a flaming red Fiat Punto, with Anselm at his side, and
took the autostrada to the city.

Crossing
the
Grande Raccordo Anulare
and accelerating towards the west bank of
the Tiber, Anselm sensed a gradual disintegration in conventional road
positioning. A slanging match of horns, bewildered voices and Latin passion
tumbled through the open window, while Conroy made various offensive hand
signals to right and left. There seemed to be a wide digital vocabulary the
sophistication of which had completely escaped Anselm’s well-informed
schooldays. The whole mêlée was thrashed out under the blessed heat of the sun
and a cloudless cobalt sky

‘Been
here a month now and I’m beginning to get the hang of it,’ said Conroy, his
gesturing arm at rest on the doorsill. ‘I thought Rio was bad, sure. But here
you’ve got to play
to kill.
No arsing around, you know, or they’ll have
your
cojones
on pasta.

Anselm
didn’t quite know how to respond. It wasn’t the usual language of recreation at
Larkwood. He kept a firm grip on the door handle while Conroy clattered on.

‘I’m
brushing up my theology. Then back to Paula and the kids.’

Paula?
Kids?
Anselm had to reply He’d start with the children.

‘Kids?’

‘Yep.’

‘How
many?’

‘Too
many’ Conroy waved his first and little finger at a priest on a bike.

Anselm’s
eyes widened involuntarily ‘I see,’ he observed, politely sympathetic but
resolved now to make no further enquiry about Father Brandon Conroy’s domestic
arrangements. Each took a side—glance at the other.

‘Loosen
up, Father, I’m only having a laugh,’ chuckled Conroy his hands off the wheel
while he scratched his shoulders. ‘Street kids. The homeless. São Paulo. I’ve
been at it thirty—five years.

Anselm
laughed. Small buttons flew off some carefully ironed garment of childhood
restraint. He’d never met anyone like Conroy in his life, except perhaps Roddy:
they both gave copiously from the wine of themselves. The Punto weaved its way
into the narrow streets of Trastevere and Conroy, tired of rambling, turned to
enquiry:

‘Anyway,
what brings you to Bernini’s twisted columns?’

‘My
Prior received a fax asking me to attend a meeting at four o’clock tomorrow ‘

‘Sounds
serious.’

‘It is.
We’ve just had a Nazi land on us claiming “sanctuary”.’

‘My
arse.’

‘Funnily
enough, that’s what my Prior said:

‘Really?’
asked Conroy, surprised, gesturing in response to an attack of horns.

‘Not in
quite the same terms.’

‘Thought
not.’

They
drove on. Conroy was thoughtful. He’d slowed down his driving and the roads
were somehow all the quieter for it. He said, ‘Who’s your meeting with?’

‘Cardinal
Vincenzi.’

Conroy
chewed his bottom lip. ‘There’s only one other higher than your man, and that’s
Himself.’ The jester was no longer at the wheel. With the earnestness of
experience he asked, ‘But why you?’

‘I used
to be a lawyer and I speak French. Our visitor was based in Paris during the
war. That’s all I can think of.’

‘Father,
let me give you some advice, all right? I know this place.’

‘What
do you mean?’

‘Let’s
just say I’ve had my little run-ins. If you’re going to get dragged into Church
politics, you’re entering one of those tents at the circus packed with curved
mirrors, twisting and pulling things out of shape. Be careful. Don’t go by
appearances. Nothing’s what it seems here.’

The car
came to an abrupt halt and they walked into San Giovanni’s, Conroy restored to
his former self, shouting out for peaches, Anselm trailing behind, subdued.

2

Beniamino Cardinal
Vincenzi, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, welcomed Anselm as if he were an
old friend from whom he had been separated by cruel misfortune. He had a
disarming warmth wholly Italian in its excess, which almost concealed his formal
identity — that of a highly polished diplomat more familiar with crisis than
tranquillity. He was short and round with dark olive skin, the burden of his
office carried by gleaming eyes that lured condolence as he spoke. He drew
Anselm to one of three elegant chairs forming an intimate triangle at the
furthest end of the room. One chair was already occupied by a priest in a neat
black soutane, a red sash draped across one knee. He was introduced as
Monsignor Renaldi. Of paler skin than his master, he conveyed a similar warmth,
its expression subdued by an air of professional competence. He had the happy
sheen of a recently appointed Recorder. Anselm took his seat by a small, highly
polished table with legs like a dancer on tiptoe. A green cardboard folder lay
upon it. Bright sunshine flooded through graceful windows on to paintings of
sober men dressed in scarlet. They watched with old, expressionless eyes,
keeping their own secrets.

Cardinal
Vincenzi said, ‘Father, I must give you some delicate information, the sort
that is never printed. What you are about to be told you must not repeat, save
to your Prior. You must appreciate that with an institution like the Church one
cannot always allow the complete truth to meet the stream of public enquiry.
There’s a place and a time. Occasionally that moment never arrives. It can be
very difficult, keeping silent about what you know That burden of silence will
now be placed upon you.

Monsignor
Renaldi smiled at Anselm encouragingly, as though it were a burden that had its
rewards.

The
Cardinal said, ‘I have sought your help because of the arrival of Eduard
Schwermann at your Priory.’

Flattered
and slightly inflated, Anselm nodded with self-conscious gravity.

‘A
great deal is already known about him, but we know a little bit more, something
that would greatly compromise the Church if ever it were made public: He was a
man of expansive gestures, but his arms lay still, as if wearied. ‘Monsignor
Renaldi will explain.’

‘Let me
give you the stark outline of the problem we face.’ The Monsignor spoke
confidentially like a calm doctor before a specialist operation. Anselm noted
the reddish tint to the cheeks, a morning inflammation caused by shaving close
enough to draw blood. ‘Immediately after the fall of France, Eduard Schwermann
was posted to Paris. He was only twenty-two. He served as an
SS-Unterscharführer in the Jewish Affairs Service of the Gestapo and his duties
involved supervising the deportation of Jews to the death camps. A French
policeman of roughly the same age, Victor Brionne, was assigned to the same
department. They were, shall we say colleagues. So, we have two young men, a
low-ranking German officer and a collaborator, both involved in grave crimes
against humanity:

Monsignor
Renaldi paused, widening his warm eyes slightly. ‘Let me now take you from
Paris to Notre-Dame des Moineaux, a Gilbertine Priory in Burgundy It is at the
centre of a smuggling operation to hide Jewish children, as a result of which
its Prior, Father Morel, is shot against the monastery wall in July 1942.’

Anselm
felt the burdened eyes of the Cardinal upon him. Monsignor Renaldi patiently
smoothed an eyebrow with a delicate finger and continued, ‘Now we come to our
problem. We don’t know what evidence has been presented to the police in
England but
we
in Rome are certain of this: the Allied forces broke out
of Normandy at the end of July 1944. The war was over. Schwermann and Brionne
fled Paris together and arrived at Les Moineaux on the twentieth of August
1944. De Gaulle marched into Paris a week later. Both men lay concealed until
December 1944. They left with forged identity papers. As far as we know,
neither of them was seem again.

A
charged, heavy silence fell. Sensing an invitation to speak, Anselm said, ‘That’s
inexplicable.’

‘We
have been thinking about these facts longer than you, but our conclusion is
much the same,’ replied the Cardinal.

‘Are
there any monks left from that time?’

Monsignor
Renaldi said, ‘Only one is alive, a Father Chambray, but he returned to the
world shortly after the war. We’ve already approached him, but unfortunately he
was not entirely cooperative.’ Moving on rather too quickly he said, ‘We are
lucky enough, however, to have a report that was written by the Prior in early
1945.’ He reached for the green folder on the table and withdrew several sheets
of pale yellow paper.

‘Before
you read this,’ he said, ‘I want to say something about the author. It was
written by Father Pleyon, a man who quietly acquired a great reputation for
wisdom and holiness. He came from a distinguished family with extensive
political and diplomatic connections and would in all probability have
followed the path of his forefathers into government service had the Lord not
called him to the hidden life. But as you no doubt know, certain lights cannot
be concealed. He became a confessor to those who carried the responsibilities
he might have borne, individuals who often have no guide competent enough to
understand the peculiar problems that come with worldly authority. It was this
man who became Prior after the execution of Father Morel, and it was this man
who presided over the escape of the two men with whom we are now concerned.’