The Sixth Lamentation (20 page)

‘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. Brass 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 snatches 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 précis 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 noble 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
Fougères.

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 passion.’

‘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.’

‘Yes,
but life pushed on is always death pulled back. It comes. In a way there’s
something dismal about wanting to postpone what you can’t avoid.’

‘But it
can come too soon.

‘That’s
what the Sibyl thought.’

Lucy
admired his lack of complication — but with nostalgia: her own simplicity had
been mislaid. She had seen death at work, its industrious regard for detail,
and, like the men who dug up the roads, its preference for doing the job slowly

‘I
think you’d get on with my grandmother,’ she said.

They had met at Pascal’s
suggestion. He gave no reason; he just asked. So they sat down with no purpose
other than a shared inclination to know one another better. Leaving the Sibyl
behind, Lucy raised the key question:

‘What
do your family think of you dropping journalism for all this?’

‘Not
pleased at all.’

‘Do you
mind if I ask why?’ She had the sparkling enthusiasm of a specialist.

Settling
back, like a long-distance driver who knows the road, Pascal said, ‘It’s all
about guilt, really’ — he flipped the beer mat — ‘even though none of us were
around at the time. To put it bluntly, the whole family ran off to the south,
leaving my great-uncle Jacques behind in Paris. Okay it was his choice, but it’s
an unpleasant fact. If they’d stayed with him, maybe they could have done
something after he was arrested.’ He sipped his beer, thinking. ‘That’s
probably not true, but it’s one of those peculiar notions. Once thought, it won’t
go away They settled on the Swiss border and Jacques was deported to Mauthausen.
They survived. He didn’t. The lack of symmetry says it all. After the war they
made sure Jacques was remembered. It was all they could do. Schwermann and the
rest had vanished. So I grew up with a complex memory of remorse, pride and
what you might call unfinished business.’

But, as
Pascal explained, the family memory had become complicated by the political
career of his father, Etienne, and the complex mood in France during the 1960s.
Myths assembled after the war to smooth out the realities of Occupation —the
mix of resistance and cooperation — had come under attack. Heroes were
denounced, villains rehabilitated. And it was within this public struggle that
Pascal’s father had deftly trodden the political stage. He’d had considerable
ambition and a considerable problem: his father, Claude, had been a supporter of
Vichy and he couldn’t refer to Jacques’ exploits without placing a spotlight on
collaboration and plunging his name into the maelstrom of conflicting views
about the past. So while Pascal had grown up with a memory of stolen
retribution, the official family line on war crimes had become one of merciful
forgetfulness. Let the past bury itself. Thus, when Paul Touvier was arrested
in the late eighties, Etienne had been for understanding the moral complexity
of the time, but the high-minded Pascal, then seventeen, had advocated judicial
retribution. After all, he’d been a French servant of the Reich. That row had
caused no lasting harm. For his parents it had been just one of the more
extensive entries in the Register of Differences filled out by Pascal as he
defined himself against them, made colourful by adolescence and by that fact
destined to fade back into unanimity once he’d grown up and seen things as he
should.

Pascal
did grow up, and things did fade, but, as always happens, far less than his
parents expected. He became a political journalist with a side-interest in
Vichy, producing one or two scoops about notorious figures who had lived
comfortable lives in post-war France undisturbed by their past. This was closer
to the family bone, and, looking back, it was only a matter of time before
Pascal’s research touched upon Jacques’ life and, by default, upon his father’s
understanding of his prospects. It was Pascal’s career, however, that
flourished. Appointed as the Washington correspondent for
Le Monde,
he
moved to the United States, and that was when the door to his present life
opened. By chance he found the memo referring to Schwermann and Brionne. He
said, ‘After reading that I knew there was a good chance of finding them. It
was a moment of crisis, believe me.

That
moment took Pascal home to a bright Paris morning, the sort that could generate
a song. His mother was happily moving in and out of the salon, relieved to have
her boy at home again; father and son were enjoying the bashful pleasure of
shared manhood come too soon. Pascal spoke, knowing the coming cost, the loss
of amity: ‘I want to find him.’

Etienne
put down
Le Monde,
read with a new enthusiasm since his son’s elevation,
and stubbed out a cigar. Monique came in, buoyantly suggesting a walk in the park.
She withdrew, uneasily, at a signal from her husband.

‘You
can’t,’ he said.

That
command had a peculiar effect on Pascal, pushing him down the road. ‘I can.’

‘You
mustn’t.’

‘What
about must?’

Another
silence.

‘Pascal,
France has suffered enough.’

‘That’s
not the test.’

More
silence, with a chasm opening wide. Pascal’s father reached over, with both
hands: ‘I beg you,’ he said with barely suppressed panic, ‘look at things with
older eyes, just for a moment, with the wounds of those who endured the Occupation.
Why do you think de Gaulle, of all people, reprieved the death sentence on
Vasseur and Klaus Barbie in the sixties? Why do you think d’Estaing honoured
Pétain at Douaumont in the seventies? Why did Mitterrand shake Kohl’s hand at
Verdun in the eighties? Because sometimes we cannot make a synthesis of the
past, and there comes a time when we have to
forgive
what we can, when
it is
better
to forget what cannot be forgiven. Your generation is
obsessed with the failures of your forefathers. Let them judge themselves. You
wouldn’t have done any better.’