The Silent Ones

by William Brodrick

  ‘Justin used to tell the most wonderful stories. You couldn’t work out where fact began and fiction took over. Even when he was very small, he was away with his imagination. I remember once driving the car and I nearly had a crash because I could see Justin in the rear-view mirror, with his hands in the air, sort of pulling at something, and I asked him what he was doing, and do you know what he said? He said he was in the jungle. He was climbing a creeper after a monkey. Isn’t that extraordinary?’

  Anselm said it was. Maisie thought for a moment.

  ‘He always looked after his brother. I remember once when Justin nearly lost an eye. He’d fired an arrow straight into the air and then looked up as it came down. Missed his eye by an inch. There was blood all over his face but do you know what he was doing? He was comforting Dominic, because Dominic was in such a state. He just didn’t think of himself. We named Dominic after Father Tabley. Did you know that?’

  Anselm said he did. Maisie seemed to step back.

  ‘Justin once dressed up with his sword and shield and made himself some sandwiches. He spent ages looking for his gloves and then he went upstairs and walked inside the wardrobe. He was desperate to go to Narnia. Absolutely desperate. Inconsolable when I told him he couldn’t get there. Can you imagine that?’

  Anselm said he could. He’d tried himself.

  ‘The thing I can’t get over is this: Justin came to me. He began to tell me what had happened and I stopped him. I just wouldn’t listen. I think I put the kettle on. I remember it now. I thought he’d reached the age when boys start exploring this sort of thing, you know, and Justin being Justin, he’d let his mind go where it shouldn’t. And do you know something, Father? He never mentioned the subject again. Not once.’

  Taking Maisie at her word, Anselm could only pity her. If she’d entertained any fears, they’d have been smoothed away by the passing weeks and months. Because if there was any truth to Justin’s story, then he’d have returned – and he hadn’t done. Taking Maisie at her word, she’d missed her one opportunity. It had come and gone before she even reached the kettle.

  But Anselm hadn’t taken Maisie at her word. Her son had said things no parent would dare to leave unexplored. And she had done. Because she loved Tabley? Partly. Because she didn’t want to believe Justin? Probably. Because Tabley’s ‘system’ – to quote Edmund – was bewitching? Almost certainly.

  ‘I share the blame,’ she said, as if reading out loud. ‘Dominic is right. I should be ashamed of myself.’

  Her guilt was mechanical, and not because she didn’t care; in fact, it was probably because she cared beyond measure; but like Justin she was cut off from her deepest reactions. Like Justin, she daren’t reach into herself. The cost of doing so was incalculable. She, too, needed help.

  ‘We get older but we don’t get any wiser, do we?’ she said, moving to another stone.

  Anselm agreed.

  ‘I said to Harry that I was prepared to believe him as long as he told the truth. Isn’t that an odd thing to say?’

  Anselm’s sympathy was without qualification. Deciding in advance what you’re prepared to believe was a distinctively human foible. Lord Denning had made a similar mistake when dismissing an appeal by the Birmingham Six. Faced with a cover-up of unthinkable proportions – alleged police brutality, perjury, involuntary confessions and erroneous convictions – he’d considered the vista so appalling that he thought it couldn’t possibly be true. In his own way, he, too, had put the kettle on.

  ‘He made Justin think he was interested in his brother,’ said Maisie, scratching lichen off the table with a beautifully rounded nail. ‘That was all nonsense. He picked Justin because he told tall stories. It wasn’t a mistake, something that happened on impulse. It was a calculated decision. Awful, isn’t it?’

  Anselm said it was; but he watched Maisie carefully now, because her nail was sinking into the soft wood of the table. There’d been no confession so far, he realised, feeling ill at ease. Maisie was crossing to another stepping stone. She had the air of someone who might lose her balance and fall.

  ‘I slept with him, you know,’ she said, quietly, frowning at her broken nail. ‘Only once. That’s why he said he was going to Newcastle. Isn’t this absolutely dreadful, but until very recently, I’ve never regretted it. I felt guilty of course. I knew it was wrong. But it happened so … naturally; so accidentally. It was difficult to feel entirely bad about it; I didn’t want to feel bad about it.’ She pulled at the split nail with her teeth. ‘It had been important to me.’

  Maisie stopped there. With a tissue she wiped the blood from where the quick had been torn. She, like Anselm, was thinking about Dominic Tabley. Had he loved Maisie, too, and made a serious mistake? Or had he been smoothing over his departure from Justin’s broken life, tying Maisie down with secret, shared sin? Dark chocolate; the kind that’s eaten in silence? When Dominic Tabley had driven his gleaming, classic Triumph to Newcastle, he must have been fairly sure Maisie wouldn’t be mentioning his name too often.

  ‘I’ve never told that to anyone before, Father,’ said Maisie. ‘But I wanted you to know. I wanted you to understand how I could have failed Justin so completely.’

  Anselm had barely spoken so far, and when he opened his mouth, now, Maisie stood up, still preoccupied with that damaged nail. She wrapped the tissue around the end of her finger, wincing at the pain.

  ‘I won’t be wanting absolution, Father,’ she said, rather like a shopper at the market. ‘And it’s not because I don’t think I need it … or need something, anyway. The problem is, I don’t know what I need at the moment. I wouldn’t mind a new life. Have you got one of those on the shelf?’

  Maisie began the walk out of the garden and back to Larkwood. Anselm kept to her side, not presuming to deal with her last question. When they reached the monastery car park – a stretch of gravel beneath plum trees – Martin opened the door to their gleaming Rover. Like Martin it was silvery and conspicuously clean. He reached for Maisie’s seatbelt, clipped the buckle into position and checked she was comfortable. Then, after shaking Anselm’s hand, he quickly occupied the driver’s seat as if he didn’t want to leave his wife alone too long. Seeing Anselm’s unease, Maisie pressed a button and the window came down.

  ‘He’s not what it’s all about, Maisie,’ said Anselm, stumbling for some kind of blanket response to the many painful questions.

  ‘Oh, you’re wrong there, Father,’ she replied, eyes shining with childlike confusion. ‘He’s exactly what it’s all about. Because he changed. He really did. Didn’t you know that? He said sorry with absolute sincerity. And that means he gets a clean slate in the eyes of God. He might even be a saint. I’m not sure I can accept that. What do you think, Father?’

  She kept those eyes on Anselm as the window moved slowly up its groove. The engine began to purr and then the vehicle moved away, swinging towards the monastery gates. Instinctively – and almost recoiling – Anselm recalled Dominic Tabley in his Watsonian sidecar, the bottle of oxygen between his legs. He’d nodded and waved in a bubble of blissful ignorance.

  But something else was bothering him. And it was only much later in the absolute silence of the night that Anselm had an appalling thought. He was so struck with conviction that he had to get up. After pacing his room, he threw open the window, seeking the companionship of a sound in the trees.

  At the Bar, Anselm had always had a problem deciphering his rushed notes of evidence. Fortunately, his memory seemed to select seemingly unimportant details and put them to one side for later consideration. And there were four such items that now came to mind: Edmund’s father, when traced, hadn’t liked his son’s Boston accent. Father Tabley hadn’t liked it either. Anselm shuddered because, during Edmund’s presentation to the community, he’d stated something that Anselm had found ever so slightly unconvincing, and this was the third item: he’d said that his understanding of why he’d come to England had been transformed when Carrington pointed out that Edmund wa
s fortunate not to have been one of Tabley’s victims. It had been a good point. A rousing point. But not a point that would explain what subsequently happened: Edmund’s single-minded attempt to expose his mother’s one-time friend and guide. After his arrest, he’d been the object of widespread loathing. How had he survived the ordeal? Through anger? Hate? Love betrayed?

  Anselm listened to Larkwood’s owl. In all his years at the monastery he’d never actually seen it. Yet each of them knew the other was there. Rather like Edmund and Dominic Tabley.

  It hadn’t always been thus. Tabley had once warmed bottles for Edmund and fed him. In those days he’d been part of the family, a very young family that would shortly be sundered by divorce … Anselm could scarcely believe the conclusion to which he’d been drawn. But it seemed unavoidable because, speaking to Anselm as John Joe Collins, Edmund had let slip an important truth that he’d shared with no one else, not even Dominic Tabley. And that was the fourth item on the shelf: he’d crossed the Atlantic to find his father.

  55

  If it was remarkable that the accused had chosen to stay alive, it was outright astonishing that his adversary, Dunstan, refused to die. As if to scorn medical authority, he simply wouldn’t go. The consultant had never seen anything like it. The old man was hanging on for the trial. Only, towards the end of Lent, he finally began to lose his grip. The Prior, being generous, said he was like Moses. He was going to die without having reached the Promised Land, though why Tabley’s appointment with a court should have so preoccupied him remained a mystery. Anselm paid frequent unwanted visits, only to be bitten or bruised, because Dunstan’s spleen wasn’t simply intact, it was expanding. Only his body was shrinking. A mysteriously unhappy man would shortly steal away and everyone would breathe an open sigh of relief. Things turned suddenly for the worse on a Friday night. Brother Aelred, the Infirmarian, knocked on Anselm’s door.

  ‘He wants to see you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Just go, will you? Or he’ll throw the bedpan at me.’

  Anselm strode quickly to the infirmary where he found Dunstan propped up in bed. Electric light hurt his eyes, so a plate of candles had been lit. The soft glow gave a yellowy sheen to his skin. He was withered, now. The bones in his arms were visible, his cheeks scooped hollow. Determined to die in style, he’d chosen a lime-green cravat.

  ‘You’ve never quite taken me seriously, have you?’ opined Dunstan, as Anselm sat down. ‘You think I’m all mouth and no trousers.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Spare a dying man false pity. All I want is your attention.’

  Dunstan angled himself towards Anselm and then, in a surprising gesture of submission, he removed his glasses. The lights of his eyes were barely flickering, but all at once they grew strong, as when wax spills and the flame eats the exposed wick.

  ‘Immediately after the war I was sent to Lower Saxony. Drab place. No jeunes filles. Absolute hole. I felt like eine Scheiße passing through …’

  An official in Whitehall had prepared a file of photographs to help Dunstan and his peers find monsters masquerading as nobodies. At the top of the list was ‘Hitler, A.’ After a couple of months he got bored to death. Everyone he interviewed had been picked up because they looked like Goebbels – ‘and he was already dead’ – or Goering, ‘who’d already been arrested’. A lot of people were imprisoned because of mistakes and grudges. Files were mislaid. The photographs weren’t always linked to names. Allegations floated free, anchored to neither a name nor a face, and the damned Americans weren’t cooperating. Running their own show in Berlin. One day a young woman was brought to Dunstan’s office. There was no file, no allegation and no photo. The paperwork was ‘on its way’ from some Urinflasche in Hamburg. The woman had asked to be interviewed.

  ‘She was tearful. Awfully polite. Couldn’t explain why the brute had thrown her in the back of his van, and all I could say was that there are no brutes in the British Army. Couldn’t trace the bugger anyway. No damned paperwork. She was Bavarian … and that’s where it all began … with an accent. They have a way of talking, you know …’

  Dunstan had wondered what she was doing in the far north-west, when she came from the far south-east. Nursing, she said, pointing at her uniform, with more tears. All she wanted to do was go back home … to a place near Grassau in the mountains.

  ‘A farm or something with a mill and a brook,’ recalled Dunstan, his breathing becoming shallow. He grimaced and pushed on. ‘You know, milk churns and national dress. She was the lovely maid of the mill. Have you read Müller? Don’t bother. Well, it was the world she’d loved and lost, and all because of Wagner. I hummed some Schubert. A song about a brook … War es also gemeint, mein rauschender Freund? But then she sang it and I almost blacked out. I could hear the damned river talking. This was the language before the Nazis used it for shouting. Couldn’t take the sound. The beauty. I had to send her back to prison.’

  Dunstan didn’t speak for a while. He closed his eyes and his chest rose and fell slowly. Then, just when Anselm thought he might have drifted off, he swore and said, ‘I couldn’t get her out of my mind.’

  But without a file, he had no questions. Without questions he had no reason to see her. So he summoned her anyway and they talked. She’d wanted to go to the Staatliche Akademie der Tonkunst in Munich. But then the war happened.

  ‘And I’d wanted to be a poet. Only I couldn’t blame the Reich. I’d no talent.’ They talked of those twin dashed hopes, encouraging one another to have another go. ‘Nothing brings two people together better than disappointment. I just didn’t see what was happening. When I called the guard it felt like I was ordering a war crime.’

  Dunstan had been haunted by her face and voice.

  ‘I found reasons to see her. Apologised for the delay. The conditions. I lent her books. And then, one morning, I woke up and I was changed. Felt like I’d been floored. Took me a while to find out what the hell was wrong but then I worked it out. Love’s like that, don’t you think? Hides itself in the making and then takes you down when it’s too late to get out of the way. Clever girl. Patient girl. All she’d done was sing a song.’

  In the absence of the file and no prospect of its appearing, Dunstan made a bold decision.

  ‘Do you see this typewriter?’

  Anselm said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘I used it to write to that halfwit Sambourne.’

  ‘He’s not a halfwit.’

  ‘Well, I was, because I also used it to authorise her release. She promised to write and send a photograph. I must have been crazy … I actually imagined a life in the mountains. A family. Kinder. Milk, fresh from the churn.’ Dunstan’s face creased and his chest made a soft rattle. ‘I’d even practised the Schuhplattler.’

  Anselm asked: ‘Did she write?’

  ‘No. The file arrived instead. A beige thing with a green tag at the corner.’

  On opening it, Dunstan discovered that the girl who’d loved Schubert had never been a nurse. She’d never helped the sick or wounded. In fact, obtaining witness statements from the sick and wounded had been the primary explanation for the delay in obtaining the file. Evidence had only hardened into sustainable allegations with their recovery.

  ‘She’d been a camp guard. Belsen. Not much poetry there; not much music.’

  Dunstan sighed as if he’d come to a plateau. His head fell to one side, and Anselm wondered if he ought to call Aelred, but then Dunstan reached towards him. A cold bony hand hooked itself into the sleeve of his habit.

  ‘She was never caught,’ he whispered. ‘She got away. Maybe she’s still alive. Propped up in bed. Someone will think she’s wonderful. A nice old lady. Backbone to the church choir. And they’ll be right. But they’ll be wrong too, because you can’t just drive round the corner and change your clothes. I was there, Anselm. I went into Belsen. April the fifteenth, 1945. There were bodies everywhere … everywhere’ – Dunstan covered his face with his other hand, speaking hoarsely
through his fingers – ‘I let her go. I’d seen the bodies and I let her go.’

  Dunstan’s mouth fell open and a soft gust of air came out.

  ‘I’ll get the Prior.’

  ‘No, stay with me. Don’t go. I’m frightened, Anselm. I don’t want to die.’

  Dunstan’s grip on his arm had suddenly weakened. But he didn’t pull away. Anselm took his hand.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ murmured Dunstan. ‘I don’t want any last-minute crap.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Just don’t let go.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Oh God, I’m scared. What if there’s nothing?’

  ‘There’s something.’

  ‘How the hell do you know? Tell everyone I’m sorry for being such a bastard.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘You can have my typewriter.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Dunstan frowned in pain. ‘I don’t want to meet her victims. I daren’t see her victims. What do I say? That I loved her?’

  Anselm didn’t make any suggestions because Dunstan made another soft, low exhalation and then his hand lost its tremble. Suddenly, he raised his head and turned to Anselm looking strangely surprised, as if he’d just woken from a bad dream. Then he smiled, sank back, and the faint light in his eyes disappeared behind the rising mist.

  Anselm didn’t move for a long time. He kept hold of Dunstan’s hand, not wanting to lay it flat on the tartan blanket, wanting to keep something that it might contain, something offered, but it was empty. And then, quite suddenly, he was ambushed by a depth of affection that he could never have believed was there. A candle guttered and spat; then its flame grew tall.

  56

  The received wisdom is that difficult people must have a background story which explains the rudeness, the hard edges, the outbursts of temper. Something appropriately dramatic. The only question is whether we ever find it out. On that basis, Anselm felt he now understood Dunstan’s fractured character. However, after meeting his brother, Evelyn, Anselm realised a more sophisticated theory would have to be framed, because he was as objectionable and quick-tempered as the firstborn of the Hartley-Wilkinson line. The rest of the family weren’t that different. Their redeeming feature was a certain eccentricity, because Evelyn, irrevocably English but kilted with the vanity of Rob Roy, insisted on playing the bagpipes by the graveside. Warned in advance by the Prior, Anselm thought the spectacle would be utterly excruciating. In fact, it was deeply moving. The low drone gripped his throat and then ‘Amazing Grace’ emerged, echoing through the trees; for Larkwood’s dead lie in a grove of aspens. When Evelyn had finished, everyone drifted away, picking their way towards the sunlight.