The Sixth Lamentation Read online

  ‘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.

  The received history was as follows: Agnes was half French, half English, and had lived in Paris during the Occupation. She was there when the black shroud from burning oil reserves hung over the city. She saw the German troops taking photos of ‘La Marseillaise’ on the Arc de Triomphe. She heard the thin, high voice of Marshal Pétain say he made a gift of himself to France, that he would seek an armistice with Hitler. About this period she was able to talk. It was the time after that had to be handled carefully, if at all. As a child, Lucy was small enough to inch under the fencing with her curiosity, moving from one month to the next, into the following years. But always the details from her grandmother became sparer, begrudging; her mood increasingly unsettled, her replies sharper, until Lucy learned she was approaching the place of shadows where she could go no further: where, as Freddie once spat out to his burning shame, Agnes became ‘La Muette’: the dumb one.

  Of course the family knew what lay beyond the wire. A town and a village: Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. As to the why and wherefore, that was a mystery. Susan often said that only Grandpa Arthur knew where she’d been and why, but Lucy, as usual, moved as close to the line as possible trying to find out.

  ‘No, I was never in the Resistance,’ Agnes said wearily to one of Lucy’s unremitting schoolgirl questions.

  ‘Did you know anyone who was?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘So you were involved with them?’

  ‘Not really I was just on the edge.’

  ‘Were they brave?’

  ‘Very brave. ‘

  ‘So you must have edged towards bravery?’

  Agnes became very still, distracted. ‘We were all so young, so very young.

  ‘So you did do something?’ pressed Lucy, eating chocolate.

  ‘Nothing much to write home about. Now, stop your questions.’

  That was usually where the probing ceased. But this time Lucy chanced her arm, pushed into the place of shadows: ‘You can’t have a big secret and not tell us what happened.’

  Agnes gave a low animal growl through bared teeth. ‘Enough.’

  It was Lucy’s first experience of atavistic fear. She became scared of her own grandmother. For Freddie, who was sitting in the corner, watching over a collapsed newspaper, it was simply another example of his mother’s hopelessly introspective temperament. But Lucy, aged fourteen, still possessed the awesome non-rational percipience of childhood, and was young enough to be acutely sensitive to something neither she nor anyone else could name or know It was that which made her shrink instinctively back: a smell on the wind.

  So the reason for arrest and what had happened during two and a hal
f years of incarceration lay out of reach.’ The narrative trail resumed, through Lucy’s persistence, at the moment of Agnes’ release, as if nothing had gone before: ‘A Russian soldier stood gawping at me. He was no more than a boy, and his gun looked like a battered toy He couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t speak.’ I was standing with children on either side. He cried.’ We just watched him.’ Eventually he said in English, “You’re free now.”‘

  Agnes wearily passed a blue-veined hand through her grey hair, rearranging a silver clip, and added, ‘I got out of Babylon, but there was no Zion. No promised land.’

  ‘What’s that, Gran?’ Lucy enquired, puzzled.

  ‘Just an old song about homesickness. And hope.’

  ‘By Boney M?’

  ‘A psalm.’

  It was an opaque exchange, and all the more peculiar because Agnes was not a religious woman.’

  After the war Agnes returned to Paris where she met Captain Arthur Embleton in a hospital. They were married within two months, staying on in France for the next couple of years, during which time they had twins: Freddie and Elodie. After leaving the army Grandpa Arthur brought the family back to a suburban existence in north London.’ He became a solicitor in a large London firm and their life was superficially comfortable and predictable, except for those who knew otherwise. After Lucy’s unnerving exchange with her grandmother, Freddie told Lucy about his own inexplicable childhood memories.

  At times Agnes was captivating and extrovert, Freddie explained, but could suddenly and for no apparent reason become swamped by abstraction.’ It was as if the apparatus of her personality shut down, like a vast generator losing its source of power. The life in her would drain away until all the lights blinked and flickered before going out. And then she was gone, even though she was still in the same room, and everyone else was left adrift and awkward, trying to make contact across the space left by her absence.

  This was the kind of thing Grandpa Arthur called ‘a tactical withdrawal from the field of conflict’, which was his thin attempt to joke with the children. But it also named a truth. Ordinary life was a battle for Agnes. Lucy’s father also remembered those frightening moments: when Agnes suddenly froze, as if gripped by vertigo, shaking and sweating, holding on to the rim of the sink, the edge of a table, the back of a chair, until talked down by Grandpa Arthur.

  Later, when Lucy’s relationship with her father became more complicated, her mother .passed on a little more history so that Lucy might better understand the man she had ceased to know in a simple way

  ‘Try to understand your father,’ Susan said appealingly. ‘It wasn’t easy for him as a child, even though Grandpa did his best.’

  Grandpa Arthur, she said, had tried to provide some consistency for Freddie and Elodie, giving them what he thought was a warm English upbringing, with lots of Gilbert and Sullivan, Wisden annuals (which Elodie loved) and regular tea at four o’clock. But he could not completely protect them. Where Agnes had been approachable and inviting one day, Freddie in particular would run towards her the next only to find her withdrawn. There had been one little incident that Freddie had never forgotten:

  ‘Mum, look what Alex gave me. It’s Excalibur. The sword pulled from a stone.’

  Freddie held out the plastic brand with both hands, holding tight, just in case anyone actually tried to take it. Agnes slowed for a moment, but carried on peeling carrots.

  ‘Mum, look, it’s Excalibur. Alex gave it to me.’

  Agnes continued roughly peeling off the skins, aware that Freddie was at her side, unaware he held out the toy he no longer wanted.

  And Susan continued: ‘You see, it wasn’t easy for your father. It wasn’t that bad for Elodie.’

  ‘Why?’ Lucy asked, and was granted more history.

  Part of the problem for Freddie was that Elodie did not need Agnes like he did.’ Ironically, that made relations between mother and daughter moderately relaxed. Elodie drew water from another well. She naturally gravitated towards her father, with their shared love of cricket, leaving Freddie behind, resentful. Batting averages held nothing for him and he vainly searched for something he could bring to his mother, but she gave no lead. So he found himself unable to reach his mother and jealous of his sister. When they grew up and left home, the distance between siblings was weakly bridged by Christmas cards and awkward phone calls, the most memorable of which was when Elodie rang to say she had cancer. Freddie didn’t know what to say and to his horror said nothing of consequence. He groped for the language they had once shared as children but that was long gone. He asked questions but could not remove the note of polite enquiry. He said goodbye as if nothing had really happened. The illness took its time, drawing Elodie down despite treatments, prescribed and otherwise. Curiously, as Freddie heard the details of decline he felt the need to talk to her. He rang spontaneously, often in the middle of the day, without knowing what he would say. More often than not conversation flowed easily, and something began to grow He paid a few visits, always arranging another. And then Elodie died, sedated and beyond the comfort of her family, aged thirty-two. He blamed himself for having become a stranger.’ And, somehow, Freddie blamed Agnes.

  And Susan said to Lucy, ‘So you see, it hasn’t been that easy for your father.’

  Lucy could remember her father still trying hard, despite his confusion. Grandpa Arthur had always said, proudly, that Agnes was a jolly good musician. So her father bought a piano. But Agnes never played it. He bought various records, but Agnes never listened to them. In that conventional period of family calm, after Sunday lunch, the piano and records became a silent accusation. The lid had not been lifted; the records were still wrapped in cellophane. It was Lucy who first pressed the keys and introduced ‘Chopsticks’ to the house. It was Lucy who scratched Fauré’s ‘Romance sans parole’, anxious because of the simmering politesse among the grown-ups. The scratching was a symbolic mishap, because the second of those three little piano pieces was her grandmother’s favourite melody. That was why Freddie bought it.

  It seemed to Lucy — not surprisingly — that her father’s attempts to reach his mother became more deliberate and dutiful, his need constrained by a thin skin of self-protection. And yet, simultaneously, as Agnes grew older her oscillations in mood were replaced by a more moderate inaccessibility. But by then it seemed to be too late for Freddie. He could not slough the skin. Lucy’s memory of Grandpa Arthur at this time was of a tired man, endlessly patient and exquisitely gentle with Agnes but a man who had learned to live more or less alone. He died quietly in his sleep one day, after a sudden stroke, as if he had slipped out of the back door in his slippers, unnoticed.

  Agnes was strangely composed until the funeral, when her grief broke out like a flood. Then it sank away like a stone beneath flattened water. However, she refused to stay in the family home and sold up within two months, moving to a spacious flat in Hammersmith, by the river.

  The loss of Grandpa Arthur left Freddie bereft. And Agnes, of all people, could not help him.’ The remaining links between them began to fragment, and Freddie’s anger at his mother began to break out. He snapped at her more frequently, his outbursts becoming less of a protest and more of an accusation: for being his reluctant mother.

  2

  Even as Lucy received and experienced the living history of her family she understood that her father’s problems had juddered wholesale into Susan, and embrangled her own most formative years.

  What should have been a playground for a child had turned out to be more of a No Man’s Land, strewn with adult debris. As she’d tried to romp around she’d snagged herself on unseen obstacles, until she’d learned by experience to locate and map out the specific danger spots between all her relations. By the age of fifteen Lucy had acquired the ability to move among her family with the supreme ease of a sophisticated adult. She became the deft one, prodding people away from plotted minefields. She seemed wise.

  It was this shining characteristic that led
her father to speak so unguardedly, and her mother to say more by way of further explanation. They didn’t mean any harm, but they said enough to take, inadvertently, the glow off Lucy’s innocence. Only Agnes and Grandpa Arthur left her alone.

  So, it was not surprising that, after Grandpa Arthur died, Agnes and Lucy were imperceptibly drawn to one another, without effort, decision or the swapping of inner wounds. They grew to enjoy each other’s company, neither of them placing demands upon the other. There was no weighted expectation. Long periods of silence could be shared, punctuated by clipped, comfortable conversation. It was obvious to anyone else in the same room that there was an alliance of sorts between them. But this only triggered a jealousy within her father that he could not bring himself to acknowledge, but could not stop himself from expressing, even when something far more serious was at stake.’ As he did when Lucy announced she was leaving home to live with a man:

  ‘A man?’

  ‘Yes.”

  ‘Could you be more specific?’

  ‘Tallish…’

  ‘Don’t be cheeky to your father,’ said her mother, flushed.

  ‘Have I met him?’ he pursued. ‘No. But Gran has.’

  ‘Gran has?’ said her father, incredulous, and lowered his head.

  ‘Only once, Freddie, by accident,’ said Agnes apologetically from her chair by the fire.

  ‘He’s called Darren and he’s thirty-seven.’

  ‘But you’re only twenty,’ Susan said, pale and desperate, smoothing her blouse. ‘Darren, you say?’