The Sixth Lamentation (34 page)

Max was
self-conscious but seemed pleased to bring Lucy and Mr Lachaise into his
private place. He glanced easily at the walls as if they represented a quiet
gathering of his silent family, not one of whom had the capacity to cause acute
embarrassment.

Mr
Lachaise walked slowly past each canvas, his glasses off, his face peering at
the fluid marks of the brush, once wet, now caught glistening in time. He took
several steps back, replacing his glasses. ‘Quite wonderful,’ he said, almost
to himself.

Max had
withdrawn to one end where an easel was angled against the light, beside a
table with jars and saucers huddled by a battered box. He kept away from Lucy,
though not obviously, rearranging brushes and tubes of paint. Turning round
she saw a painting hung upon the back of the door.

The
picture described the hint of a face, perhaps an open mouth crying out, amongst
swathes of gorgeous yellow and orange, breaking down in places to smatterings
of diaphanous brown and gold, lifted up, as it were, like tiny hands. It was
more a study in colour than shape, but the coincidence of lines suggested such
a fragile purpose that the viewer was compelled to impose a reading upon it.
Lucy understood its mood and wanted to run her fingers along the frail ridges
of paint.

She
said, ‘Does it have a title?’

“‘Sibyl’s
Cave”.’

Lucy
surveyed the vibrant, tragic beauty, unable to detach herself from its
activity.

‘Would
you like it?’ asked Max.

In her
taut mind she clutched at a refusal, but she wanted it. Lucy nodded quickly,
keeping her eyes on what she had seen.

3

Anselm rose at 5 a.m.,
having been unable to ‘sleep. He tried to say Lauds but a strong, invasive
melancholy scattered his powers of concentration. And yet his mind was deeply
attuned to the important task of the day He would neither eat nor drink nor
rest until it was over.

Conroy
emerged cheerily for breakfast, eating everything that was brought forth from
the kitchen. His irrepressible gathering in of all life’s moments — even
eating — raised Anselm’s spirits. The Prior had been right all along. It was a
good idea to show Conroy the North Country … for Anselm’s sake. He decided
to bring his companion with him for the confrontation, as long as the great
oaf didn’t tell any jokes.

Shortly
after ten, Anselm pushed open the gate to ‘Pilgrim’s Rest’. Conroy followed him
to the stone porch. The door was ajar. Voices drifted warmly from an unseen
room. Anselm immediately imagined a coffee pot, loaves of bread, jars and pots
upon a table, mingled morning greetings, children opening the fridge. He
knocked. A moment later the door swung back in the hands of a little girl with
large, enquiring eyes. And then Robert Brownlow appeared.

‘Ah,’
he said lamely, the colour draining from his face. ‘You’ve made it for my wife’s
birthday’

Inside, they were
introduced to Maggie, Robert’s wife; and then two of their five children,
Francis and Jenny (with their respective spouses); and then the three
grandchildren. But not Victor. He was not in the room. Anselm and Conroy were
described as friends of Robert, who, throughout the entire charade, masked his
anxiety with near complete success. Only Maggie, with her tight folded arms,
betrayed a suspicion of insight. Then Robert led his guests to an upstairs room
and knocked on the door.

Is this
what a major war criminal looks like? thought Anselm. He wore various shades of
respectable green, with a tartan tie, the unmistakable appearance of good but
ill-fitting finds from tatty high street charity shops. His shoes were well
worn but neatly polished. Robert stood behind the armchair that swallowed up
the runaway

Now
that he’d found him, Anselm had no idea what to say Whatever enquiry Cardinal
Vincenzi expected Anselm to undertake, and whatever insinuated pressure
Renaldi hoped he would exert, was not going to happen. The meeting had its own
agenda. Anselm introduced himself and said:

‘Schwermann
couldn’t hide for ever and neither can you. The police already know that you’re
here. Even if you say nothing to them, and Schwermann’s convicted, he’ll begin
an appeal. His legal representatives were looking for you and they’ll not let
you go once they know that you’ve been found. So if you’re going to hide, it’s
for the rest of your life. Is that what you want?’

The
gentle clunking of a trowel upon the rim of a plant pot rang from the garden.
Anselm glanced out of the window Maggie was helping one of the children plant a
flower.

‘Victor,’
said Anselm, ‘I don’t know what happened in 1942 or 1944. Nobody does, except
Eduard Schwermann and you.’

He was
standing upon a worn rug, uncomfortably aware his calling in life transformed
any public reflection into a sort of sermon. He stepped off the thread
pedestal, saying, ‘There’s a jury empanelled in London to make a decision. They
sit there, day in day out, hearing evidence, mostly from people who weren’t
there. It’s a journey into memory with stumbling guides doing their best. But
you, Victor, are different. You know the answers. Schwermann believes that if
you enter the witness box, he’ll be acquitted. There are others who believe the
opposite; that you, and only you, can prove he is guilty. Only one side can be
right. I’m afraid I’m going to sound like a priest now, but the truth will out.
Hasn’t the time come to give the past a proper burial?’

Victor
Brionne’s face became mobile but his lips did not part. Deep down, thought
Anselm, he’s holding tightly on to something. Anselm wrote down DI Armstrong’s
name and number and placed it upon a sideboard. As he reached the door he
turned instinctively and said:

‘You
knew Jacques Fougères?’

‘Yes.’
It was the only word he had spoken. His voice, in that one brief sound, disclosed
a grave, enduring ache.

‘You
know he had a blood relative, Pascal Fougères?’

He
nodded.

‘A
young man who did everything possible to bring Schwermann to trial. Do you know
he wanted .to find you?’

There
was no response. Robert looked down upon Victor.

‘Do you
know why?’ Anselm pleaded. ‘Not to expose you, or blame you. But because he had
faith in the love of old friends. He believed that you would tell the truth.’

Victor
closed his eyes, averting his head from Anselm’s unrelenting words.

‘He
died on the very night he met some friends to discuss your importance. Not for
himself, not for his own family, but for all those whose memories are being
scattered to the wind.’ Anselm opened the door, his voice suddenly raised,
indignant and accusing: ‘Did Pascal die for nothing … absolutely
nothing
at all?’

The house was empty when
they got downstairs. Walking down the path they could see the family way ahead,
ambling towards Lindisfarne Castle. Robert joined Anselm and Conroy at the
gate. He said, trembling, ‘Father, I meant what I said when we first met.
Victor Brionne died in 1945 as far as I’m concerned. Is it right to dismantle
their world?’ He nodded over the wall, anxiously, at three generations becoming
specks in the distance.

‘Is it
right to leave other lives in pieces?’ replied Anselm. ‘I don’t pretend to have
the answer, Robert. I doubt whether your father knows. But he’s the one who has
to choose.’

Chapter Thirty-Five

1

Lucy took ‘Sibyl’s Cave’
home with her and placed it over the mantelpiece. For the rest of the weekend
she kept re—entering the room to look at it. In that hint of a face drawn by
the sweeping paint she saw Agnes, young and old, transcendent, aloft her
disappointment.

When
Lucy met Max and Mr Lachaise at court on Monday morning they all shook hands.
Something like ease was growing between them. This was all the more remarkable
because she (and presumably Max) had no idea as to who Mr Lachaise, their
convener, might be. There was a disarming quality to his simplicity, like dealing
with a child. Only he was nothing of the kind. He seemed older than anyone Lucy
had ever known. And she recognised in his every move a type of empathy,
something indefinable, that he held in common with her grandmother. She would
have liked them to have met.

As was now common
practice, the three of them sat in a row listening intently to the evidence
presented before the court. For the next couple of days Mr Penshaw called a
hotchpotch of witnesses to describe the nuts and bolts of organised murder. Mr
Bartlett asked few questions, confining himself to small errors of detail.

‘In
fact, the first deportation from Le Bourget-Drancy comprised standard
third—class railway carriages, did it not?’

‘Yes, I’m
sorry, you’re quite right. If it matters. ‘

‘Precision
always matters,’ said Mr Bartlett kindly

Bartlett
very occasionally gave a brief smile to the jury. After all, they’d been seeing
each other every day, listening to the same witnesses. Lucy felt an atmosphere
was developing between them. They were in this together, doing their level
best. One or two had begun to smile back at him. Was it courtesy or empathy?

Lucy
struggled to name a growing sensation. By some alchemy, Schwermann was almost
detached from the proceedings. The link between the young SS officer and the
elderly Defendant before them was peculiarly slender, the actions and
attributes of fifty years ago having to be fixed on an older, much changed and
hence different man. The passage of time itself had blurred not only the edges
of responsibility but the consequences of the crime. Several newspapers had
begun to question the propriety of the trial ‘so long after the events in
question’, those being the fleshiness of killing, the smell of filth and the
sound of fear. The younger man who’d been there was slipping out of reach; the
older chap seemed crucially disconnected from his own past.

One
radio programme debated ‘the age-old problem of Personal Identity’. If
Schwermann at seventy-six was not the
same
man he had been at
twenty-three could he be punished at all? Several newspapers explored the reach
of ethics within the law, proper and improper. And many perfectly reasonable
people from both sides of the fence appeared on
Newsnight
and within ten
minutes were fairly evenly savaged for their trouble. The Defendant had become
a ‘philosophico-legal’ problem, as well as an alleged killer. Lucy absorbed all
the words, admiring the careful scrutiny of educated minds, but thinking all
the time of leaves … thousands upon thousands of them, wafted helplessly
into the air, no one knowing from where they had come or where they would go.

Watching
Mr Bartlett at work, Lucy thought that someone had to bring the
SS-Unterscharführer back into the present, through the tangle of reasonable civilised
arguments, and put him in the dock — someone who had known him at the time.
And, apart from Agnes, there was only one person left.

2

Anselm and Conroy got back
to Larkwood late on Saturday night. They spoke in snatches on the way down,
each of them preoccupied by a vision of what would soon befall the Brownlow
family No wonder the prophets were such a miserable lot, said Conroy Glimpsing
the fulfilment of history, even a tiny flowering of righteousness; was not a
pleasant sight. It wasn’t all slaked thirst, free corn, oil and new wine. And,
unfortunately, getting the balance right between today’s children and the
wrongs of their parents was a task that went well beyond the remit of the Crown
Court.

Anselm
retired to his room on Sunday afternoon to write a report for Cardinal
Vincenzi. The text he produced was brief to the point of insolence. He set down
the facts: Brionne had been found; he might give evidence; its substance had
not been revealed. The whole was extended modestly with a few connecting
phrases. With a flourish of respectful obedience, Anselm signed his name.

Anselm
went down to the Bursar’s office, his report in hand. A fax machine and
photocopier stood side by side. On an opposite wall was a grid of pigeonholes,
one for each monk, a private depository for mail and handouts. Anselm faxed his
letter directly to Cardinal Vincenzi in Rome and the Papal Nuncio in London. He
had been instructed not to send a hard copy, so he placed the actual text in a
folder addressed to Father Andrew — for eventual lodging in the Priory
archives.

Turning
to leave, Anselm checked his mail. There was one envelope. It must have been
put there in the last hour or so for the pigeonhole had been empty after lunch.
Opening it, Anselm withdrew the report from Father Chambray. An attached note
from the author said he had gone to London en route to Paris that night. He
urged Anselm to visit him the next time he was in France. That was a welcome
gesture from a man on the boundary of things, a man who had once slammed a door
in his face.

It was
a flimsy text, a carbon copy on tracing paper. Anselm sat and read. It was all
as Chambray had recounted. The last page, however, went rather further than
their previous discussion.