The Sixth Lamentation
( Father Anslem - 1 )
William Brodrick
William Brodrick
The Sixth Lamentation
‘L’Occupation’
April’s tiny hands once captured Paris,
As you once captured me: infant Trojan
Fingers gently peeled away my resistance
To your charms. It was an epiphany;
I saw waving palms, rising dust, and yes,
I even heard the stones cry out your name,
Agnes.
And then the light fell short.
I made a pact with the Devil when the
‘Spring Wind’ came, when Priam’s son lay bleeding
On the ground. As morning broke the scattered
Stones whispered ‘God, what have you done?’ and yes,
I betrayed you both. Can you forgive me,
Agnes?
(August, 1942)
Translated from the French by Father Anselm Duffy,Feast of Saint Agnes,Larkwood Priory, 21st January 1998
Part One
‘Now is the time for the burning of the leaves’
(Laurence Binyon, The Burning of the Leaves’, 1942)
First Prologue
1
April 1995.
“‘Night and day I’ve lived among the tombs, cutting myself on stones”,’ replied Agnes quietly, searching her memory.
Doctor Scott’s eyes narrowed slightly. His East Lothian vowels had lilted over diagnosis and prognosis, gently breaking the news while Agnes gazed at a gleaming spring daffodil behind his head, rising alone from a rogue plant pot balanced on a shelf — a present from a patient, perhaps, or free with lots of petrol. Soon it would topple and fall.
She forgot the flower when those old words, unbidden, rumbled from her mouth. Agnes couldn’t place where they came from. Was it something Father Rochet had said, worse for wear, back in the forties? Something she’d read? It didn’t matter. They were hers now, coming like a gift to name the past: an autobiography.
Agnes glanced at her doctor. He was a nice fellow, at home with neurological catastrophe but less sure of himself with mangled quotation. He looked over-troubled on her account and she was touched by his confusion.
‘Do you mean to tell me that, after all I’ve been through, I’m going to die from a disease whose patron is the Duchess of York?’
‘I’m afraid so.
‘That’s not fair, Doctor.’ Agnes rose from her seat, still wearing her coat and holding her handbag.
‘Let me get you a taxi.’
‘No, no, I’d rather walk, thank you. While I can.’
‘Of course.’
He followed Agnes to the door and, turning, she said, ‘I’m not ready yet, Doctor.’
‘No, I’m sure you’re not. But who ever is?’
Agnes breathed in deeply A sudden unexpected relief turned her stomach, rising then sinking away She closed her eyes. Now she could go home, for good, to Arthur — and, funnily enough, to the knights of The Round Table. She’d never noticed that before.
Agnes had known there was something wrong when her speech became trapped in a slow drawl as if she’d had too much gin. She let it be. And then she started tripping in the street. She let that be. Like so many times before, Agnes only acted when pushed. She’d made an appointment to see a doctor only after Freddie had snapped.
They were walking through Cavendish Square towards the Wigmore Hall. A fine spray of March rain floated out of the night, softly lit from high windows and streetlamps. Freddie was a few impatient steps ahead and Agnes, trying to keep up, stumbled and fell, cutting her nose and splintering her glasses. Tears welled as she reached for her frames, not from pain, but because she knew Freddie’s embarrassment was greater than hers.
‘Mother, get up, please. Are you all right?’
Agnes pulled herself to her feet, helped by a passer-by. She wiped her hands upon her coat as Freddie produced a neatly folded handkerchief. His exasperation spilled over. ‘Look, if something’s wrong, see a doctor. You won’t say anything to me. Perhaps you’ll say something to him. But for God’s sake,’ he blurted out, ‘stop this bloody performance.’
Agnes knew he would berate himself for hurting her, as she berated herself for failing him. Neither of them spoke again, save to put in place essential courtesies.
‘No, you first, really.’
‘Thank you, Freddie.’
‘A programme?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Agnes felt unaccountably tired by the interval so he took her home. She saw Doctor Scott within the week and he made the referral. She saw a consultant. The results came back. Doctor Scott had given her a call, and now she knew
Leaving the doctor to a mother of five, Agnes ambled to her beloved home by the Thames where tall houses were cut from their gardens by a lane that ran to Hogarth’s tomb. Here was her refuge, among brindled masonry and odd round windows with the copper glint of light on old glass. On the way she passed a troop of children holding hands and singing, the teachers front and back armed with clipboards. Piercing voices dislodged stones in her memory, stirring sediment. Frowning heavily, she thought again of Madame Klein and Father Rochet, Jacques and Victor and Paris and… all that.
No green shoots of forgetfulness had grown. The memory remained freshly cut, known only to Arthur. And now she was to die, without any resolution of the past, with no memorial to the others. But how could it be otherwise?
Turning the corner past the newsagent, she came into view of the river. The breeze played upon the water, tousling a small boy pulling oars out of time. She slowed, caught short by the resilient disappointment that always struck like a sudden cramp when Agnes paid homage to brute circumstance.
‘Loose ends are only tied up in books,’ she said quietly, and she pushed aside, probably for the last time, the lingering, irrational hope that her life might yet be repaired by a caring author. Agnes stopped and laughed. She turned, walked back to the newsagent, and bought two school notebooks.
2
Freddie and Susan drove over from Kensington that evening, and Lucy took the tube from Brixton.
It was like a set piece of bad theatre: Freddie standing by the bay window, Susan fiddling with the kettle flex and Lucy, their daughter, the unacknowledged go-between, sitting slightly tensed in an armchair opposite Agnes, who was reluctantly centre stage.
‘It’s called motor neurone disease. ‘
No one said anything immediately Freddie continued to avert his eyes. Lucy watched her mother keeping still, the flex suspended in her hands.
‘Gran, did he say anything else?’ Lucy asked tentatively.
‘Yes. He expects it to advance on the quick side. At some point I won’t be able to walk or talk, but I never did…’
Freddie walked across the room and knelt by Agnes’ chair. He put his head on her lap and Agnes, a mother again, stroked his hair. Susan cried. Agnes wasn’t sure if it was for her or the sight of Freddie undone. It didn’t matter. Agnes continued ‘… I never did say much anyway, did I?’
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 sha
dows 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.
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