The Sixth Lamentation fa-1

by William Brodrick

  ‘What did he say to that?’ asked Father Andrew

  ‘He said, “Go to King’s Cross. Stay there for an hour or two, watching the trains leave, one after the other. Then go outside and look at the people in the Street, buying their newspaper, getting a taxi. Do you think they know the ones on the trains will all be killed? Day after day?”’ Max raised his hands as if there was nothing else to say, knowing the explanation was somehow wanting.

  Anselm thought of London occupied by foreign troops, the city cordoned off into sections while one ethnic group was arrested, packed into requisitioned buses and taken to a railway station. What would he have thought in time of war, watching the trains pull away into the night, always to the same destination? A bee drifted lightly over untouched tea and sandwiches, while paper serviettes fluttered in the breeze: the lazy motions of peacetime.

  Max said, ‘I’m not suggesting he didn’t know about the killing… I just find it incredible, unimaginable.’

  ‘The incredible has a habit of disrupting the parts of our lives to which we’re most attached,’ said Father Andrew simply, adding, almost under his breath, ‘it’s why I became a monk.’

  ‘Did that make it credible?’ asked Max.

  ‘Not quite, but the old life became unimaginable.’ Father Andrew took off his glasses, revealing small red footprints on the sides of his nose. He polished the lenses and put them back on. ‘All I’m saying is this: you have to be very careful before you dismiss the unbelievable, if it taps you on the shoulder or kicks you in the face.’

  Max beetled his brow and his eyes flickered. He said: ‘I’ve asked to see you because he mentioned something else that I think you should know, which is all the more unimaginable. It’s another kick in the face.’

  He looked frankly at Father Andrew, having caught him with his own words. Involuntarily, Anselm saw the face of Monsignor Renaldi at the Cardinal’s shoulder, expressionless, noncommittal, but waiting, eternally waiting.

  ‘He says he did the opposite of what’s alleged against him. But he won’t say any more. He wants someone else to explain, someone who was there.’

  ‘Who?’ asked the Prior.

  ‘A Frenchman called Victor Brionne, though he’s now called something else. We’ve got a private detective on to it.’ He glanced from monk to monk. ‘Apparently it’s fairly easy if you know the name. And we do… it’s Berkeley’

  ‘Max,’ said Anselm, confidentially, ‘do you mind telling us if and when he’s found? Anything touching on the conduct of your grandfather is likely to have an effect on the Priory in due course.’

  ‘Yes… I’ll let you know’

  3

  Agnes and Lucy sat in the gathering dusk, two bowls lying empty upon the table.

  ‘When will Wilma move in?’ asked Lucy, sleepily

  ‘When she’s ready’

  They could just about hear each other breathing if they cared to listen.

  ‘How will she know when to come?’

  ‘She’ll just know People like Wilma have a very different sense of time. Appointments, arrangements don’t mean anything. She doesn’t follow clocks. She just lives in each day’

  Lucy rose and cleared the table. Agnes spoke out of the shade:

  ‘Forget Victor.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Lucy stopping arid looking down at her.

  ‘Nothing. It’s all right.’

  Lucy put out her arm and Agnes took it with both hands, as if it were a railing. With a nod she dismissed further help, making her way towards the bathroom to get ready for bed. She walked deliberately, touching now to the right and then to the left, finding objects placed in position for the purpose. Lucy remained in the kitchen, hearing the click of a switch and the faint run of water, simple noises that begin and end the day; and, presumably, a life.

  Lucy looked up. Agnes stood motionless, like an apparition, framed by the doorway in a long dressing gown and red furry slippers, a hand on each jamb. Evening light, all but gone, traced out her nose, a parted lip; and to Lucy it was as though Agnes had died and this was a final, wilful resurgence of flesh, a last insistent request to see Lucy just one more time before she fluttered into memory.

  At that moment the hall clock struck the hour. Brass wheels turned, meshing intricately Time, no longer suspended, seemed to ground itself and move. They looked at one another across a divide, hearing the slow, brutal counting from afar taking slices off all that remained between them. Lucy and Agnes stood helpless, waiting.

  ‘Gran, please don’t go,’ said Lucy, in a voice from their quiet days in the back room when everyone else had left them to it.

  ‘I have to, Lucy Death is like the past. We can’t change either of them. We have to make friends with them both.’

  Tears filled Lucy’s eyes to overflowing. Thunder groaned far off to the east and the room darkened abruptly, as though a great hand had fallen over the sun.

  4

  Storm clouds had quickly gathered over Larkwood and by late evening large drops of rain threw themselves in heavy snatches upon its walls. A wind was gathering strength, threatening to wrestle old trees through the night.

  Anselm and Father Andrew sat either side of a great round window overlooking the cloister. Anselm gave a precis of all he’d learned since departing for Rome, situating the nature of the task that had been entrusted to him — the finding of Victor Brionne. The Prior listened intently

  ‘A pattern of sorts emerges,’ said Anselm in conclusion. ‘Monsignor Renaldi can only look to logic — the Priory must have known something of great importance, outweighing whatever Schwermann and Brionne may have done, otherwise they would never have helped them. And that is broadly supported by the oral tradition of the Priory, which remembers Schwermann was hidden because of some undisclosed noble conduct — something effectively repeated this afternoon by his grandson, who got it from the mouth of the person most intimately concerned: Father Andrew slowly repeated the troubling words, “‘He risked his life in order to save life”… it’s a crafted phrase, a jingle… it disguises as much as it displays.’

  ‘At least it gives us some idea as to why the monks at Les Moineaux helped him escape,’ said Anselm.

  ‘But why does he want the secret brought out into the open by Victor Brionne? Why not speak up for himself?’

  ‘The two of them belong together-’

  ‘As if they are two parts of the same, torn ticket,’ interjected the Prior. He added, ‘That was quick footwork, by the way, to get Max Nightingale to tell us when they’ve found him.’

  Anselm wasn’t sure if that was a compliment. The Prior went on: ‘So what do you do now — wait?’

  ‘Not quite. A private detective can only open so many doors. Max’s candour is just one string to my bow’

  ‘You have another?’

  ‘Yes. I think so.’

  Father Andrew fell into an abstraction and said, ‘Maybe one day they’ll make you a Cardinal.’

  Later that night Anselm heard the bells for which he had longed; he sang psalms that named the motions of his soul; but, to his faint alarm, he did not find himself in quite the same place that he had left. Or rather, a slightly different person had come back to Larkwood, not entirely known, even to himself, and he didn’t know why

  5

  Lucy sat in the warm darkness of her flat wrestling with two emotions, each getting stronger, each slipping out of control.

  She was losing her grandmother: the foundations of grief were being hewn out of rock. But at the same time, in another part of her soul she was gaining something. The fundamentals were already in place and she hadn’t noticed them in the making. Perhaps they’d been built years and years ago. But the result was that Lucy found herself intrinsically and terrifyingly receptive to Pascal Fougeres.

  The phone rang. Reluctantly she lifted the receiver.

  ‘It’s me, Cathy’

  ‘Hi…’

  ‘Well, do you regret missing the Turkish bath?’

&n
bsp; ‘No.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Honestly, he’s just an acquaintance. ‘‘Where did you go?’

  ‘For a meal.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In a crypt.’

  ‘Sounds like my sort. How did you meet him?’

  ‘I’m too tired to explain,’ Lucy said, laughing for the first time that day

  ‘I’ll sweat it out of you. Give me a call.’

  They said goodnight and Lucy put the phone down with a sigh. As with all misunderstandings, Cathy was on to something. Since meeting Pascal Lucy wasn’t quite her old self, and she didn’t fully recognise who she was becoming.

  Chapter Nineteen

  1

  ‘Apollo adored the Sibyl so he offered her anything she wished,’ said Pascal, turning a beer mat round in circles. A gathering of other conversations drifted from the debating room out to where they sat on the veranda. Putney Bridge lay black against a scattering of white and orange evening lights.

  ‘And?’ said Lucy

  ‘She asked to live for as many years as she had grains of sand in her hand. He granted her wish but she refused to satisfy his passion.’

  ‘Sounds like a good deal to me.’

  ‘Not entirely’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She forgot to ask for health and youth.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘So she grew old and hideous and lived for hundreds of years.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Her old job, writing riddles on leaves, left at the mouth of her cave.’ He sipped his drink. ‘That’s the part of the myth I like, the fragility of what she had to say; words written on leaves, easily made incomprehensible if disturbed by a careless wind.’

  Lucy could only think of Agnes, the sand all but gone. She said, ‘I understand her, though, wanting to live so much.’

  ‘Yes, but life pushed on is always death pulled back. It comes. In a way there’s something dismal about wanting to postpone what you can’t avoid.’

  ‘But it can come too soon.

  ‘That’s what the Sibyl thought.’

  Lucy admired his lack of complication — but with nostalgia: her own simplicity had been mislaid. She had seen death at work, its industrious regard for detail, and, like the men who dug up the roads, its preference for doing the job slowly

  ‘I think you’d get on with my grandmother,’ she said.

  They had met at Pascal’s suggestion. He gave no reason; he just asked. So they sat down with no purpose other than a shared inclination to know one another better. Leaving the Sibyl behind, Lucy raised the key question:

  ‘What do your family think of you dropping journalism for all this?’

  ‘Not pleased at all.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask why?’ She had the sparkling enthusiasm of a specialist.

  Settling back, like a long-distance driver who knows the road, Pascal said, ‘It’s all about guilt, really’ — he flipped the beer mat — ‘even though none of us were around at the time. To put it bluntly, the whole family ran off to the south, leaving my great-uncle Jacques behind in Paris. Okay it was his choice, but it’s an unpleasant fact. If they’d stayed with him, maybe they could have done something after he was arrested.’ He sipped his beer, thinking. ‘That’s probably not true, but it’s one of those peculiar notions. Once thought, it won’t go away They settled on the Swiss border and Jacques was deported to Mauthausen. They survived. He didn’t. The lack of symmetry says it all. After the war they made sure Jacques was remembered. It was all they could do. Schwermann and the rest had vanished. So I grew up with a complex memory of remorse, pride and what you might call unfinished business.’

  But, as Pascal explained, the family memory had become complicated by the political career of his father, Etienne, and the complex mood in France during the 1960s. Myths assembled after the war to smooth out the realities of Occupation — the mix of resistance and cooperation — had come under attack. Heroes were denounced, villains rehabilitated. And it was within this public struggle that Pascal’s father had deftly trodden the political stage. He’d had considerable ambition and a considerable problem: his father, Claude, had been a supporter of Vichy and he couldn’t refer to Jacques’ exploits without placing a spotlight on collaboration and plunging his name into the maelstrom of conflicting views about the past. So while Pascal had grown up with a memory of stolen retribution, the official family line on war crimes had become one of merciful forgetfulness. Let the past bury itself. Thus, when Paul Touvier was arrested in the late eighties, Etienne had been for understanding the moral complexity of the time, but the high-minded Pascal, then seventeen, had advocated judicial retribution. After all, he’d been a French servant of the Reich. That row had caused no lasting harm. For his parents it had been just one of the more extensive entries in the Register of Differences filled out by Pascal as he defined himself against them, made colourful by adolescence and by that fact destined to fade back into unanimity once he’d grown up and seen things as he should.

  Pascal did grow up, and things did fade, but, as always happens, far less than his parents expected. He became a political journalist with a side-interest in Vichy, producing one or two scoops about notorious figures who had lived comfortable lives in post-war France undisturbed by their past. This was closer to the family bone, and, looking back, it was only a matter of time before Pascal’s research touched upon Jacques’ life and, by default, upon his father’s understanding of his prospects. It was Pascal’s career, however, that flourished. Appointed as the Washington correspondent for Le Monde, he moved to the United States, and that was when the door to his present life opened. By chance he found the memo referring to Schwermann and Brionne. He said, ‘After reading that I knew there was a good chance of finding them. It was a moment of crisis, believe me.

  That moment took Pascal home to a bright Paris morning, the sort that could generate a song. His mother was happily moving in and out of the salon, relieved to have her boy at home again; father and son were enjoying the bashful pleasure of shared manhood come too soon. Pascal spoke, knowing the coming cost, the loss of amity: ‘I want to find him.’

  Etienne put down Le Monde, read with a new enthusiasm since his son’s elevation, and stubbed out a cigar. Monique came in, buoyantly suggesting a walk in the park. She withdrew, uneasily, at a signal from her husband.

  ‘You can’t,’ he said.

  That command had a peculiar effect on Pascal, pushing him down the road. ‘I can.’

  ‘You mustn’t.’

  ‘What about must?’

  Another silence.

  ‘Pascal, France has suffered enough.’

  ‘That’s not the test.’

  More silence, with a chasm opening wide. Pascal’s father reached over, with both hands: ‘I beg you,’ he said with barely suppressed panic, ‘look at things with older eyes, just for a moment, with the wounds of those who endured the Occupation. Why do you think de Gaulle, of all people, reprieved the death sentence on Vasseur and Klaus Barbie in the sixties? Why do you think d’Estaing honoured Petain at Douaumont in the seventies? Why did Mitterrand shake Kohl’s hand at Verdun in the eighties? Because sometimes we cannot make a synthesis of the past, and there comes a time when we have to forgive what we can, when it is better to forget what cannot be forgiven. Your generation is obsessed with the failures of your forefathers. Let them judge themselves. You wouldn’t have done any better.’

  ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t, but that’s why an obligation rests on the next generation — to expose the past for what it was. This is not just about Jacques. It’s about history. Getting it right. The same year Barbie was convicted, Le Pen said the gas chambers were a minor detail of the war. There’s a kind of forgetting we have to stop.’

  His father, exasperated, said: ‘Pascal, I’m asking you to leave it be. Leave the past alone.’ Etienne went angrily to his study without waiting for a reply as if parental censure was sufficient to deflect a disobedient son.

 
; As with most adult passions, they are born in childhood. The strength of Pascal’s conviction had not come from his family as such but from their butler, Mr Snyman. He’d known Jacques and had told Pascal all about The Round Table. For Pascal he was a patriarch, the only survivor of the times. After his father left the room, Mr Snyman slipped in.

  ‘Did you hear all of that?’ asked Pascal.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What would you do?’

  ‘It’s not what I’d do that matters; it’s what Jacques would do. If he could.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  Mr Snyman took a step closer, his hands raised as if what he had to say was so fragile it might break if not physically handed over. ‘He’d hunt him down. Schwermann is one of those few people responsible for something that lies on the other side of forgiveness. ‘

  Pascal went upstairs and knocked on the study door.

  ‘Papa, I’m sorry. I have to do this.’

  ‘You’ll regret ignoring my advice.’ His father stood with his back to his son. With profound disappointment he said, ‘You care more for the dead than the living.’

  Monique stood at the door, wavering between husband and son. She was crying.

  Then Pascal said something untrue, something he did not mean and which he bitterly regretted afterwards. But it sounded good. ‘And you care more for political preferment than the truth.’

  They had, of course, spoken since; and Pascal had said sorry, and his father had said it didn’t matter, and his mother had run out to the patisserie. But it was too late. Certain things, once said, can change at a stroke the interior workings of love, leaving the outside architecture untouched. Perhaps, thought Lucy, that was why Agnes had taken such deep refuge in silence.

  Pascal made contact with Jewish groups and Resistance organisations in Paris who formed a consortium: the laborious process of gathering evidence began. The anxiety of the investigators was that Schwermann had kept a low profile as far as the paperwork was concerned. His name rarely appeared in print even though sources demonstrated he must have been at certain meetings and received particular memos. And no one knew the name under which he was hiding. Then Pascal received an anonymous letter posted from Paris. He said, ‘It contained one line: “The name you seek is Nightingale.” I thought it was a hoax but I passed it on.