The Sixth Lamentation (2 page)

After a
cup of tea, Freddie and Susan left. There’d been a surprising ease between them
all and Freddie had said he’d come back tomorrow night. It felt like a family
Lucy stayed on.

Joined
by familiar silence, they sat at the scrubbed kitchen table preparing a mound
of green beans, nipping the tips between their nails. Eight minutes later they
curled up with bowls upon their knees, sucking butter from the prongs of their
forks.

Agnes didn’t watch
television very often but she did that night. After Lucy had left she waited
with the volume off for something interesting to appear. Images flickered on
the screen, throwing stark shadows across the walls, lighting her face and
blacking it out.

The telephone
rang. It was Lucy, checking up on her. As she put the receiver down, Agnes’
attention was suddenly seized by a grainy black and white newsreel of those
elegant avenues she’d known so well, the slender trees and the sweep of the
river. It was Paris before the war, almost sixty years ago.

‘No, it’s
not,’ she said, looking for the remote control. ‘It’s the Occupation. All those
damned flags.’
Merde! Where is it?

When
she glanced back at the screen, she saw him and lost her breath — a handsome
youth in sepia, with thick, sensual lips, for all the world a reliable prefect.
Agnes froze, her eyes locked on the flamboyant uniform. ‘My God, it’s him. It
must be him,’ she whispered. Then she saw a sombre monk shaking his head. The
item must have ended.

Agnes did
not move for an hour. Then, purposefully, she opened the drawer of her bureau
and took out one of the school notebooks she’d bought that morning. Not the
first time, Agnes was struck by that puzzling confluence of events which passed
for chance: that she should decide to commit the past to paper on the day
circumstance seemed to be forcing it out into the open.

Chapter One

1

‘Sanctuary.’

‘My
bottom!’

‘Honestly’

The
Prior, Father Andrew, was fond of diluting harsher well-known expressions for
monastic use, but the sentiment remained largely the same. He was an
unconverted Glaswegian tamed by excessive education, but shades of the street
fighter were apt to break out when grappling with the more unusual community
problems.

‘It was
abolished ages ago. He can’t be serious.

‘Well,
he is,’ said Anselm.

‘When
did he come out with that one?’

‘This
morning, when Wilf asked him to leave.’

The
Prior scowled. ‘I suppose he declined to oblige?’

‘Yes.
And he told Wilf there’s nowhere he can go.’

The two
monks were sitting on a wooden bench on the south transept lawn of the Old
Abbey ruin. It was Anselm’s favourite spot at Larkwood. Facing them, on the
South Walk cloister wall, were the remnants of the night stairs from the now
vanished dorter. Anselm liked to sit here and muse upon his thirteenth-century
ancestors, cowled and silent, making their way down for the night hours. The
lawn, eaten by moss, spread away, undulating towards the enclosure fencing and
beyond that to the bluebell path which led to the convent. It was a sharp
morning. The Prior had just come back from a trip to London, having managed to
miss the main item on all news bulletins. He’d returned home to find a gaggle
of reporters and television crews camped on his doorstep.

‘Give
it to me again, in order,’ said the Prior. He always insisted upon accurate
chronologies.

‘The
story broke in a local newspaper of all places. By the time the nationals got
to his home he was here, claiming the protection of the Church.’

‘What
did Wilf say?’

‘Words
to the effect that the police wouldn’t pay any heed to Clement III.’

‘Who
was Clement III?’

‘The
Pope who granted the Order the right of sanctuary ‘

‘Trust
Wilf to know that.’ Disconcerted, he added, ‘How did you know?’

‘I had
to ask as well:

‘That’s
all right then.’ He returned to his mental listing. ‘Go on, then what?’

‘Wilf
rang the police. The first I knew about anything was when the media were at the
gates. I had a few words with them, batting back daft questions.’

Father
Andrew examined his nails, flicking his thumb upon each finger. ‘But why claim
sanctuary? Where did he get the idea from?’

Anselm
shifted uncomfortably He would answer that question at the right moment, not
now It was one of the first lessons Anselm had learned after he’d placed
himself subject to Holy Obedience: there’s a time and a place for honesty, and
it is the privilege of the servant to choose the moment of abasement with his
master.

The
Prior stood and paced the ground, his arms concealed beneath his scapular. He
said, ‘We are on the two horns of one dilemma.’

‘Indeed.’

They
looked at each other, silently acknowledging the delicacy of the situation.
The Prior spoke for them both.

‘If he
goes, there’ll be international coverage of an old man protesting his innocence
being handed over to the police; if he stays we’ll be damned for supporting a
Nazi. Either way, to lapse into the vernacular, we’re shafted.’

‘Succinctly
put.’

The
Prior leaned on a sill beneath an open arcade in the south transept wall,
reflectively brushing loose lichen with the back of his hand. Anselm joined
him.

‘Father,
I think one horn is shorter than the other and more comfortably straddled.’

‘Go on.’

‘The
sooner he leaves the better. Otherwise we risk protracted public fascination
with why he came here in the first place.’

With a
tilt of the head the Prior drew Anselm away, leading him towards the stile gate
and the bluebell path. ‘I’m going to find out what the sisters think. They had
a Chapter this morning.’

As they
walked through the grass, wet with dew, Anselm pursued his point. ‘If he’s
forced to go now, any uproar will be short-lived. And there is an explanation
we can give in the future if we get hammered for throwing an innocent man on to
the street.’

‘Which
is?’

‘This
is a monastery, not a remand home for the elderly’ Anselm was pleased with the
phrase. It was pithy and rounded: a good sound bite … prepared earlier.

The
Prior nodded, mildly unimpressed. Anselm persevered, eyeing the Prior as he’d
often eyed judges in another life when trying to read their minds.

‘The
alternative is the other, longer horn. If he moves in, and that’s what it will
amount to, we’re in trouble. There could be a trial.’ Anselm paused. ‘Nothing
we say will convince anyone that we’re not on his side.’

They
reached the stile and the Prior climbed over on to the path, gathering his
black habit under one arm, the white scapular thrown over one shoulder. Anselm
sensed him drifting away, chasing private thoughts. ‘We’ll find out more
tomorrow night. Detective Superintendent Milby’s coming at six. I’d like you
and Wilf to be there. Then we’ll have a Special Chapter. Let everyone know,
will you?’

‘Yes,
of course.

Anselm
watched Father Andrew disappear along the path, across a haze of blue and
purple, his habit swaying in the breeze, his head bowed.

2

Anselm had met Detective
Superintendent Milby several times in the past. In those days Milby had been a
foot soldier with the drugs squad. He’d had long hair and dressed in jeans, but
had still managed to look like a policeman. Anselm had been a hack at the
London Bar and their meetings had been limited to the pro-forma
cross-examination about stitching up and excessive violence. Like all policemen
familiar with the courts,

Milby
had taken it in his stride. That was well over ten years ago and they’d both
moved on since then.

Leaning
against the stile gate, Anselm could almost smell the heavy scent of floor wax
from his old chambers, and hear again the raucous laughter of competing voices
in the coffee room. He smiled to himself, winsomely

When Anselm left the Bar
it caused a minor sensation, not least because it was such a wonderful Robing
Room yarn. Since it was endemic to the profession to treat such things with
private gravity and public levity, Anselm only heard the lowered voices of
shared empathy: ‘Tell me, old son, is it true? You’re off to a monastery? I can
say this to you; we’ve all got secret longings. The job’s not everything …’

Anselm
had knocked up ten years’ call but, unknown to his colleagues, had never fully
settled into harness. There was a restlessness that started to grow shortly
after he became a tenant. Imperceptibly he began to feel out of place, as if in
a foreign land. There was another language, rarely spoken, and he wanted to
learn it. Determined attempts to live a ‘normal’ life as a professional man
floundered at regular but unpredictable intervals. He could be waiting for a
taxi or heading off to court, doing anything ordinary, and he would suddenly
feel curiously alienated from his surroundings. It was a sort of homesickness,
usually mild, and occasionally acute. He later called these attacks by stealth ‘promptings’.
All Anselm knew at the time was that they were vaguely religious in origin. He
responded by purchasing various translations of the Bible and books on prayer,
as if the answer to the puzzle lay somewhere between the pages. On one occasion
he left a bookshop having ordered a thirty-eight volume edition of the
Early
Church Fathers.
They remained as they came, in three cardboard boxes
strapped with tape which he stacked in the corner of his living room and used
as an inelegant resting place for coffee cups and take-away detritus. Anselm
would then recover and continue his life at the Bar until ambushed by another
God-ward impulse. It was a sort of guerrilla war for which he was always
unprepared and ill-equipped. And all the while his book collection became
larger, more comprehensive and unread. Eventually he stopped buying books. He
realised one day while looking through a wide-angle lens that he wanted to become
a monk.

It was
a slightly odd experience. On leaving the Court of Appeal one late November
afternoon, he was stopped in his tracks by a Chinese tourist who never ceased
to smile. Several gesticulations later Anselm stood beneath the portal arch of
the Royal Courts of Justice looking into the camera of a total stranger.

Suddenly
he felt the urge to put the record straight, to say:

‘Look,
you’re mistaken. I’m not who or what you think I am; I’m a fraud.’ This happy
man from a faraway place had pushed an internal door ajar and Anselm knew at
once what was on the other side. He set off down the steps with incomprehensible
protestations ringing in his ears — from himself and from the tourist who’d
inadvertently nudged him away from the Bar. Taking the bus to Victoria, Anselm
walked past the bookshop and into Westminster Cathedral, where he sat down
beneath the dark interlocking bricks of the nave and prayed. It was to be the
only moment of near certainty in Anselm’s subsequent religious life. The
jostling between doubt and perseverance was to come later. But at that time he
understood, at last, what the underlying problem had been. It had been Larkwood
Priory all along.

Chapter Two

1

Lucy Embleton made a stab
at the washing-up and then took the tube to Brixton, knowing her grandmother
would do them again. They’d cleaned out all the beans and even squabbled over
the cold ones lying limp in the sieve. It was macabre, for Agnes would soon be
gone, and eating had suddenly become a singularly futile activity. Waving
goodbye, Lucy sensed every gesture now had another meaning that each of them
would recognise, but never articulate, shaped by the torpid proximity of death.
Her spirits sank into a chilling silence: a part of her past was almost
complete and she’d never even understood it.

Lucy was twenty-five years
old and had spent a large proportion of that time trying to understand her
family’s winning ways. She had never been able to locate any particular moment
of crisis within the family history that might account for the present
entanglement. It was more of a cumulative happening constructed out of tiny,
otherwise insignificant building blocks tightly pressed together and cemented
over time. As a child she asked penetrating questions borne of innocence; she
guarded the answers with such care that, when she was older, confidences
rained upon her — but never from Agnes or Arthur. Lucy became the one in whom
the different facets of the past had been consigned, as if she was the one to
bring them all together. And from that privileged position she concluded that
if there was a simple explanation for what her father called ‘the mess’, it lay
in the war years.