The Day of the Lie

by William Brodrick

  John gave the remaining exchanges without commentary. Anselm seemed to pause in a Hampstead corridor, listening hard.

  ‘Why now, Róża?’

  ‘Because sooner or later someone else will name the informer.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. There are files in Warsaw Lawyers are reading them.’ John paused to light another Sobranie, struggling with the matches. ‘If they’re named later, Brack might be dead. I have to act now’

  ‘Absolutely’

  ‘But the informer must know that I don’t seek to condemn them. That’s not my objective, it’s not what I want.’

  ‘That’s … generous, Róża.’

  ‘If they face the past, then I can, too. This is the only way to catch Otto Brack.’

  ‘Yes, I see that now’

  He leaned forward, feeling for an ashtray.

  ‘You once offered to walk through fire, John, do you remember?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Well, I’ve written something that’ll help you get to the other side.’

  ‘You better bring it round. We need to look each other in the eye.’

  Sitting back, it was as though John had put the phone down in London and returned to Larkwood’s calefactory, short of breath and vaguely agitated.

  ‘She obviously wanted me to find the informer, to reassure them and appeal to their conscience, prior to some sort of meeting … but she couldn’t see me of course, she didn’t know that I’m as blind as a bat, that all I could do was stumble in the dark.’

  ‘Did she come round?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I made roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.’

  ‘Any reference to that fire?’

  ‘No. We just talked about the old days. No mention of Otto Brack. Just a passing shot at the Shoemaker.’

  ‘What about whatever it was she’d written?’

  ‘Kept it to herself. Seems Braille didn’t get a look in.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘She left.’

  ‘Just like that? No proposal to meet at the Tate or the Festival Hall?’

  ‘She was too upset. Couldn’t see her, of course, but she held me by the arms once more and I knew she was leaving me as I’d left her the last time, a devastated woman. She realised I couldn’t help her, that Brack had won again.’

  He’d finished his whisky with an intake of breath and seemed to be waiting and listening, as he’d waited and listened to Róża on the phone. The resulting space in the conversation seemed to have Anselm’s shape, so he filled it.

  ‘John, what is it you want me to do? You said you needed a lawyer, someone to be your eyes and hands.’

  The wood had ceased to spit or hiss. Embers glowed, turning black and red. Outside the rain had stopped and a wind had begun to loosen the trees.

  ‘I want you to do what I can’t do,’ said John, resigned and tentative. ‘I want you to walk through fire. I want you to find out who betrayed Róża Mojeska in nineteen eighty-two. And once you’ve found them, I want you to coax them out of the dark. Failing that, bring them kicking and screaming into the light. Rough or smooth, give them a helping hand.’

  Chapter Eight

  Anselm went to his cell and threw open the window, wondering how he was going to tell John that life’s changes intervene. If John was blind, Anselm was lame. He was a monk, now, not a lawyer. He couldn’t go where he pleased, even for the sake of lost justice. The trees began to lift and sway in the darkness, restless and strong, fighting back. Looking towards the lights in the guesthouse, warm and comforting, like banked fires on a headland, he thought of other trees, and other storms, of first disclosures and the binding, unforgettable confessions of childhood.

  Anselm first met John at the school gates, shortly after his eleventh birthday His father had just driven off and tears were rising in a great wave of sadness, their force jamming in his throat. He was about to sob when he heard a twig crack among the rhododendrons that fenced off the woods which flanked the school entrance. Peering into the darkness Anselm saw a stained face, a stiff white shirt, and ruffled sandy hair.

  ‘What are you doing in there?’ asked Anselm.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure, to be honest,’ said the boy emerging with a trombone case in his hand. On his back was a leather satchel. He whistled nonchalantly and looked around, as if he often made irrational excursions into nearby woodland, instrument oiled for action just in case he came across a brass band. He, too, had been crying. Anselm understood at once. His parents had gone, and, unable to let anything else go, the boy had wandered about the school grounds clinging on to his music and his books as if they were someone’s hands, finally hiding in the trees when the weight of isolation grew too heavy, when the indignity of tears erupted into this grown up world of boys who didn’t cry, least of all for love of one’s family.

  ‘Are you new?’ asked the boy.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Good.’

  There was nothing else to be said for the moment. They’d each found their Man Friday They were going to survive. They shook hands and swapped names.

  Neither of them, in the true sense, had been abandoned, though from Anselm’s perspective there’d been an element of shipwreck. Two years earlier his mother, Zélie, had died of cancer, leaving her husband, Gilbert, bereft in his soul and all fingers and thumbs in the home. A chancery lawyer not gifted in the management of emotions, least of all those of other people, he’d been unable to handle the grief of his five children. They’d all started swearing in French with shocking ingenuity. There was no obvious link, but boarding school for the three oldest eventually surfaced like a message in a bottle, bobbing up and down on the waves of unchartered feeling.

  For Anselm the passage of bereavement had been smoothed by treachery. Gilbert, clumsily had instructed his children not to reveal that an operation to save their mother’s life had failed. ‘Let the end come like an unexpected guest,’ he’d said, like General Custer sighting the Indians. But within days of Zélie’s return home, Anselm broke rank. Handing her a cup of tea, he said, ‘You’re going to die.’ From that moment she was free — free to say goodbye. Free to look upon her family with the clarity of vision that comes from knowing the last grains of sand were falling fast through the egg timer. In public they kept up the pretence that she would survive while, as between themselves, there grew an excruciating pain, a liberating simplicity coming, on occasion, mysteriously close to joy They’d grieved while she was still alive — a gift lost on the others who’d taken refuge in the numbness of make-believe. In the two years that followed Zélie’s death, all that Gilbert had noticed, as he pondered what to do and how best to manage his own incipient breakdown, was that Anselm had sworn the least.

  ‘So that’s why he sent you here,’ said John, with a sigh.

  They were walking around the cricket square. In fact, they’d walked around it three times, ultimately missing one of the most savage displays of fast bowling attack the school had ever known. All John had done was to try and open up the territory between them by asking, off-hand, ‘Why did you come to Roper’s Hall?’ and Anselm had delivered what John later called a long and sparklingly honest confession. He’d evidently been scared off, since (Anselm surmised) most disclosures work on a quid quo pro basis and John hadn’t wanted to say anything beyond the commonplace. After all, there was a match on.

  ‘What about you?’ asked Anselm, vaguely hearing another cheer from the field.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Why Roper’s Hall?’

  ‘The price.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘No story such as yours,’ explained John, ruefully looking over Anselm’s shoulder. ‘My father just went for the cheapest prison he could find.’

  Of course, Anselm hadn’t sought any treaty by mutual revelation. He’d simply answered the question, but in so doing he deepened the contract of friendship between them. Regardless of John’s personal reticence, or being irk
ed at missing seven wickets in two overs, their alliance shifted level. They became blood brothers, even though Anselm was the only one who’d opened up his skin. They looked out for each other. They ambled round the school corridors, hands in pockets, planning dark mischief against the dorm prefects on the top floor.

  John’s quip had nonetheless intrigued Anselm, and did so for years. What John didn’t seem to realise was that holding back anything important from a friend always communicates something profound. It wasn’t that term ‘prison’ or the jibe at the cost. Rather it was the silence within the words. As life at Larkwood confirmed, silence has a shape and content, but even back then as a twelve year old Anselm sensed in John’s rejoinder something momentous and defining, another manner of shipwreck. Anselm didn’t find out what it was, or why John had come to Roper’s Hall, until they were about to leave it, some six years later.

  Final exams were approaching and, all classes being finished, John invited Anselm to his parents’ home in Cornwall, a large, white house that faced the sea at Bude Bay There, protected from the wind and soothed by Atlantic sunsets, they might revise by day and revel by night. The idea was to occupy the building without the benefit of adult interference, an objective happily guaranteed by John’s father’s diplomatic career. Without dropping any particular clangers, George Fielding had singularly failed to attract any major promotions, finding himself exiled to a basement office in the outskirts of Washington dedicated to trade and foreign licence agreements. ‘Not that happy a man,’ John had said. ‘He never found his way out of first gear, so now he’s just waiting to retire … prior to which the house is empty and available for our undisturbed occupation.’

  Except that things didn’t work out that way John’s American mother, Melanie, insisted on coming over to ‘cook, clean, and entertain’. It was the latter that took Anselm’s orderly — one might say restrained — life by storm.

  ‘Okay boys, you’ve been working too hard,’ she said on the first night before they’d even opened their books. ‘Time to play’

  ‘Mother, no,’ said John, closing his eyes.

  ‘C’mon, you old bore,’ she replied, winking at Anselm. ‘Follow me.

  She swept down a corridor, opened a door that led to a basement, and vanished down the stairs. Anselm tracked her descent, John groaning to God from behind. Entering a low, windowless room Anselm saw a pool table, centrally placed beneath a frame of harsh lights. Mel — as she insisted on being called — placed a cigarette into a long, black holder, flicked open a silver lighter and settled a hard stare upon the two friends. ‘Forget exams, degrees, and the ladder to high office. All that matters, for sure. But there’s something else you need to learn. Misery Sometimes called Alabama Eight-ball.’ After lighting up, she took a slow, deep draught and blew a stream of smoke towards the cue-rack. ‘Let’s go to school.’

  Moments later Mrs Fielding — Anselm couldn’t quite make it down the Mel route — crouched over the green felt, tossed back a fringe of brown hair and smacked the ball, her dazzling teeth biting the cigarette holder.

  ‘By the way’ she said, reaching for the blue chalk, ‘I play to win. In effect a tournament began which threatened to take over the object of coming to Cornwall. Each evening they played Misery, cracking open bottles of Budweiser, the day’s revision dramatically pushed into the background. Anselm would have enjoyed himself without equivocation — and not just because Mel played to lose, handing the victor’s mantle to Anselm — if he hadn’t noticed that John was three steps removed from the fun, that his smile was half forced, that he was — to use his mother’s term — an old bore. With the same puzzled eye Anselm also noted, very gradually that Mrs Fielding’s capering wasn’t so simple or spontaneous: that it had a target; that her verbal tricks were dealt towards John; that she was trying, desperately and unsuccessfully, to please him, to win him over. She was too much an extrovert to show her disappointment but, as Anselm’s French grandmother used to say, the skin speaks, too. And at the corners of Melanie Fielding’s eyes were fine lines of suffering, deepened by a ready laugh that they might be hidden. Anselm let the matter pass.

  It was John who raised it, two weeks later when they were back at school, drinking the remnants from a bottle of altar wine lifted from the school’s sacristy.

  ‘I just love her,’ said Anselm, pouring an inch into two mugs stained with coffee. They’d locked the door to their shared room facing the second floor showers.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your mother.’ Anselm shook his head at the memory of her face, the twang in her soft voice. ‘She’s clever, rude, funny and irrepressible. She’s good company She’s—’

  ‘Not my mother,’ inserted John.

  He walked over to the sink and poured the wine down the drain.

  ‘Too sweet,’ he said.

  Anselm waited for John to elaborate but, for a moment, he said nothing. He washed his mug, scouring the coffee stains with his toothbrush. When he’d turned off the tap and dried his hands on the curtain he came back and sat on the edge of his bed, looking at Anselm from some distant place, far from school and the recollection of Misery in Cornwall.

  ‘I’m not like you, Anselm,’ he said, almost regretfully ‘I can’t just open up and tell you what’s inside. I wasn’t made that way And, you know, sometimes, there are things you can’t talk about. They have to be left where you find them. Six years ago I found my birth certificate. That’s how I learned my mother’s name. You see, Anselm, the difference between me and you is this: I was the one that was lied to. I’m like your mother, only nobody sat down and told me the truth, not until I asked; and when I did … I preferred the lie.’

  John would have left it there, but he saw the question in Anselm’s face: his wanting to share the load.

  ‘She betrayed my father,’ he said, frowning, loathing the harsh atmosphere roused by the charge. ‘And I don’t appear to have featured on the balance sheet … at a time when I couldn’t eat unless she held out the spoon.’ Shuffling back on to the bed to lean against the wall, he looked at Anselm with undisguised envy, as if to say parental death has its compensations. ‘I came to Roper’s Hall not because my father thought it was cheap, but because I didn’t want to stay at home. I needed to break out of the make-believe. Find myself. You wouldn’t understand that.’

  Gazing out over Larkwood’s restive trees Anselm mused how these differing experiences of family trauma had shaped them both. Speaking for himself, the loss of his mother had opened a wound on to life itself — that the rich grass, soft to touch, rich to smell, withers too soon, an insight that had prompted a quest and helped illuminate the narrow path to monastic life. Rooted very much in this world, Anselm strived to see everything as a mirror on to the other side of the fence, where the pasture was a contrasting green, and unfading.

  As to John, the effect of the loss of his mother was a far more complex matter to gauge, not least because her great going had been voluntary She’d turned away from her son and husband, presumably for someone else and a new life weighed and checked as having far more appeal. But Anselm, remembering these ancient, nearly forgotten disclosures, now received a glimmer of understanding. In retrospect — and Anselm had never quite noticed this before — John had always been on the move, in search of something out of reach. Throughout his school days, as soon as he was able, he’d run after the big ideas — from Zeno to Marx, never quite finding satisfaction at the end of the book. He’d wrestled with theories of right and wrong, wanting a rational basis for why one should be moral at all, searching —Anselm thought — for some intellectual mechanism that might excuse if not explain his mother’s conduct. At university, he’d chased the reticent, colder girls, sometimes breaching their fragile defences, never staying with any of them for long. They’d thought him heartless. And his first job had been in East Berlin. The next in Warsaw He’d learned languages increasingly far from his own. If the accident hadn’t happened, he’d probably have ended up in Shanghai. In every way he
’d been on a quest, like Anselm, only he’d never arrived at a moment of stillness — a recollected, clear-sighted understanding of where he’d come from and where he was going. Seen like that, Anselm recognised another facet of John’s character. The man who searches is looking for something; and until it’s found, he’s waiting. That was John … a man who’d been left waiting ever since his mother turned away.

  Anselm shut the window, muffling the clamour of the trees and the great sighs of the wind. He was troubled by his unremitting failure to recognise the pikestaffs in his life. All these years he’d thought 1982 was the one subject they’d never spoken about, forgetting that this other, older crisis remained, for the greater part, unexplored. They were blood brothers, but John had kept two secrets beneath his skin, not one, The first had now been ventilated. Strange, really (thought Anselm, climbing into bed) that tonight he should think of the oldest. He’d forgotten all about it.

  Chapter Nine

  Anselm dreamed vividly receiving the special enlightenment that comes from the paradox of watching oneself in action. It was as though his psyche — exasperated once more with its host’s predilection to skate past the obvious — hit back, hurling into the sleeping mind something simple but significant about John’s motivation in coming to Larkwood. Something else he’d forgotten: Faithful to the facts, the drama unfolded like a black and white newsreel from a forgotten war.