The Sixth Lamentation (25 page)

‘Then
let me oblige,’ and rather too quickly he said: ‘My thesis is that getting hold
of the truth requires us to distinguish different kinds of narrative — symbol,
allegory, parable and the like. Now, one of the main problems is when one form
of discourse pretends to be another … myth or fable masquerading as fact.
Story dressed up as history. ‘

Max
Nightingale looked deeply bored.

The
stranger said, ‘Have any of you read the Narnia books?’

While
Pascal and Max Nightingale seemed irritated at the interruption, Lucy was
relieved. It was an interlude in a difficult meeting, that was all. Pascal
could ask about Brionne’s name after the discussion was over. There was no
rush. She said, ‘I’ve read them, several times. ‘

He
smiled winningly and cried, ‘But you haven’t tried talking to a lion, have you?
It’s just a myth about good and evil and the lion wins.

Lucy
noticed Pascal’s face darkening with a sort of expectation.

The
stranger said, ‘There’s no difficulty in that instance because there are no
facts, it’s just fiction. But what happens when fact and fiction mix?’ He
raised his glass. ‘Let’s take the Holocaust, for example.’

Lucy
shivered at his serene manner, the use of charged language without reverence.

He
smiled, saying, ‘How much is fact and how much is fiction?’

‘Let’s
go,’ said Pascal, standing up.

‘Am I
the voice of temptation in your wilderness?’ he pouted.

Lucy
glanced at Max. He had paled and seemed unable to respond. She rose, picking up
her coat. The straps of her rucksack were tangled round her feet. Her purse
fell out, coins rolling under the table. A number of people close to them
turned at the noise. An old man nearby grimaced and pulled himself up, his head
inclined towards Pascal and his tormentor.

‘Come
on,’ snapped Pascal.

‘Let’s
take the Schwermann trial, said The Don, supremely relaxed. ‘He might be
convicted. But who’ll question the old fairy tales?’

‘Lucy,
please, come on,’ said Pascal.

The old
man lumbered over and grabbed the Don’s shoulder, tugging at the cloth. He
shouted, ‘.I’ve had enough of you, clear off. Go on, get out. ‘

The Don
stumbled to his feet, his smile suddenly twisted with suppressed rage. ‘Get
your hands off me, you ignorant—’

‘I’m
not scared of y-your sort,’ the old man stuttered, raising a shaking fist.

From
the other side of the room someone yelled, ‘Dad? What the hell … ?’

Max and
Pascal rose quickly, moving round the table. The old man pulled harder, his
fist drawing back. Suddenly, with a look of ecstasy, The Don swung his arm in a
sweeping, imperious arc and struck the old man across the face. At the same
time Pascal lunged forward, trying to come between the two men. Then Lucy
gasped. Pascal slipped and tumbled over. He spun to one side, falling. His left
arm caught the edge of a table, his body twisted and there was a sickening
thud. Pascal groaned, like one asleep, rolling his head from side to side. Both
arms lay limp upon the floor. Lucy covered her face, staring at him through
shaking fingers. A thin wail broke out of her that wouldn’t stop. She could
only see one of Pascal’s feet, the rest of him now surrounded by people on
their knees while others pushed tables and chairs to one side.

An
ambulance came. All Lucy could remember afterwards were the colours. Green
sheets, a red blanket, shiny chrome bars on the stretcher, yellow jackets and
pale, white faces. Someone took her hand. An arm went around her shoulder.
There was no sound any more, either from her or all around. It was as though
she was wrapped in great puffs of cotton wool, and she floated in a vacuum,
deep inside her head.

The
last thing she saw before being led outside into the night air was the place
where Pascal’s head had come to rest. A small but thick smudge of blood shone
at the base of a rather vulgar table leg, ornate metalwork curving down to a
small iron globe.

Lucy was brought home by a
woman police officer at three in the morning. Alone in her flat, still
surrounded by a heavy, numbing insulation, she saw a flashing light on her
answer machine. Her body moved towards it and pressed a button.

‘It’s
me, Cathy,’ drawled a voice into the darkness. ‘I tried you on your mobile
without success and I now confidently entertain certain suspicions. So, what
did you do this time? Bell-ringing? Call me sometime.’

4

Morning light danced
across the hills around Larkwood. Captivated, Anselm opened the windows of his
cell. He sat quietly, preparing himself for Lectio Divina, but started at a
distraction: footsteps moved swiftly on the corridor outside, growing louder.
It was peculiar because monastic comportment for bade anything that might
disturb the spirit of recollection, and it was unheard of at that hour, even in
the breach. A knock struck his door. Anselm rose, turning the handle with apprehension.

Brother
Jerome had a clutch of newspapers under his arm. It was his task to read
diverse reports and opinions from Left and Right and distil them into a
balanced news bulletin to be read out during lunch. He had evidently just
collected the papers from reception. Without saying anything he pointed to a
passage on the front page of a national. Pascal Fougères had been taken to
Charing Cross Hospital, Hammersmith. He had died shortly afterwards from a
brain haemorrhage sustained during a fall. The accident had occurred, it
seemed, when he intervened in a quarrel about the last war. Police sources said
an investigation was under way

Anselm
shut his door and slumped on to a chair. With his mind’s eye he described
Leviathan rising out of a boiling sea, arching high into a red sky dripping
water like rain.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The cottage on Holy Island
was more of a manor, having many rooms and a large, windswept garden leading
down to a stone wall built by hands that knew a craft fast becoming scarce.
Immediately beyond lay an intimate, curved shoreline of green and black
boulders, some round but others angulated despite the endless blandishments of
the sea. From the bathroom Victor could see the deep pink sandstone ruins of a
Priory, hollowed by wind and rain; from where he slept he looked out upon
Lindisfarne Castle, cut against a pale sky joined as one to the high crag from
which it rose, reaching out to the Northern Lights. Beyond lay Broad Stones
and, further, Plough Rock, and then the bare, flat, silent sea.

‘You
should be safe here,’ said Robert. They had walked to the north end of the
island, overlooking Emmanuel Head.

Victor
nodded.

‘I told
him what you told me, that Victor Brionne died after the war; and I told him
what I told you, that someone else married my mother. I told him the truth. If
anyone comes asking questions about you, they’ll be told you’re dead.’

Victor
stood once more upon the lip of an abyss. There could be no further discussion.
It would have been better if Robert had not gone to the Priory, for he had
become a tiny link between Victor and whoever might still want to find him. But
he was trying to help his father and that was all that mattered. Robert wasn’t
to know that Victor had changed his name a second time. No one knew that, so
the chances of anyone looking for Victor Berkeley being led to Victor Brownlow
were remote. Perhaps he had been precipitate in disclosing anything to Robert
at all. Maybe he should have taken the risk and carried on as if nothing had
happened, living his life on the ground he’d laid over the past. But with
Schwermann unmasked, the desire to hide had been irresistible; and, despite the
burden of secrecy, he’d wanted to tell Robert at least who he had been, to let
Robert in, ever so slightly, on the scourge that had laid waste to his father.

Brownlow:
Victor liked the name and always had done. It had been an inspired choice.

They
turned and walked back, arm in arm, to ‘Pilgrim’s Rest’, Robert’s holiday
cottage. A cold sea wind, wet with spray hustled them along. And, with a
sadness first born when he was a boy Victor thought of Jacques, and now Pascal
Fougères, whom he had never met and who had wanted to find him. They should
have been able to meet as friends and bridge the years, but a great gulf had
been fixed between them. Victor followed Robert through the garden gate and
thought angrily:

I could
never have helped Pascal Fougères, even if he’d found me — that would only have
been possible if Agnes was alive. But she’s dead, as if by my own hand.

Part Three

‘Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,

Time
for the burning of days ended and done …’

(Laurence Binyon, ‘The Burning of the Leaves’, 1942)

Third Prologue

6th
January 1996.

The slow, physical
destruction was matched by an increased mental clarity, a loosening between
flesh and spirit. Agnes often felt a fluttering in her stomach, as though
something roped to a ground peg was trying to take off. She wondered if she was
going to be sick.

Agnes
had lain day after day and night after night upon her back, or on one side and
them the other, Wilma doing the dutiful, turning her this way and that. And
then came the ointment, and the jokes, for the bedsores. The job done, she was
left alone.

Agnes
never realised there was so much to contemplate in one room: the paint lifting
ever so slightly on the window frame, soon to be a soft curl pulling away from
the wood; the pattern of faint shadows changing imperceptibly with the movement
of the cloud, lighting little things with a barely noticeable difference. But
once Agnes had seen all there was to see she got very bored. And then, for no
apparent reason, she remembered how Merlin had taught Wart, the future King
Arthur, the art of seeing — by changing him into another animal. So Agnes
imagined herself as a bird, looking down from on high at the intricate mingling
of things, like a hunting kestrel afloat on a bearing wind.

She saw
the boat upon the Channel, bound for France, and her father staring anxiously
out to sea with a little girl by his side — a beautiful girl, standing on the
first rail, her hair adrift and her red coat about to be thrown leeward before
he could stop her or see the abandon upon her face. She saw Father Rochet
holding her boy in a parlour, just after the baptism, staring bravely through
those infant eyes to another place and another child. She saw Madame Klein by
the split boards of a cattle truck, pushing other mouths away from a thin
stream of air, standing on a fallen, wheezing mound. Agnes turned into her
pillow with a low moan and rose higher still, above the gathering wind. Through
the first swirls of evening mist she saw a light upon the Champs-Elysées and a
young man behind a desk, checking address lists and the timings of the next day’s
work. His face was set hard. Down she swooped, faster and faster, over the
chestnut trees heavy with leaves, and into the room, through the slate-blue
iris and into his shivering optic nerve.

And
Agnes understood. She finally saw into Victor Brionne, the traitor. Slowly she
raised her hands, frail fingers extended and shaking. She could not speak. It
was too late to write anything now And she could no longer dictate.

Wilma
bustled through the door with a cup of ice cubes, a saucer and a teaspoon.

Chapter Twenty-Six

1

The trial of Eduard Walter
Schwermann opened on a warm morning in the second week after Easter. Queues for
the public gallery stretched from the Old Bailey towards Ludgate. The Body
Public sat on canvas chairs nibbling sandwiches. Flasks of tea stood like
skittles on the pavement. Many in due course would be turned away when the
Porters informed them there were no storage facilities for their hampers.
Anselm, on his way to meet Roddy, was forced off the kerb. He crossed the
street and looked back at the noble inscription high upon the court wall: ‘Defend
the children of the poor and punish the wrongdoer.’ Anselm gazed upon the
crowds and moved on, discomposed by the faint hint of carnival always
attendant upon the airing of other people’s tragedy

Two
weeks beforehand, Schwermann had moved out of Larkwood at six in the morning,
hidden among a loud convoy of vehicles and motorbikes. He would be held on
remand for the duration, Milby had said with yawning indifference. Schwermann’s
stay at the Priory had lasted a year. That same afternoon, Anselm and Salomon
Lachaise met at The Hermitage for a glass of port over a game of chess.
Reviewing their many matches, Anselm had been judged the overall winner,
although that did not reflect the distribution of talent between them. Luck, it
seemed, had played the better part. The ensuing match was a draw, each not
truly wanting to win. Salomon Lachaise had left the next day for London. He would
be staying in a small flat above Anselm’s former chambers, overlooking the main
square of Gray’s Inn and a short walking distance from the Old Bailey The offer
had come from Roddy on his last visit to Larkwood (while he didn’t believe in
God, he often came to the Priory just to ‘peep over the rim’). Such an offer,
from the old rogue’s mouth, meant no expenses would accrue. And thus the
subject of remuneration, always delicate for the recipient of kindness, was
quietly and happily dismissed.