The Discourtesy of Death (Father Anselm Novels) (18 page)

‘I was filling in for a hospital chaplain. She was in for some routine tests. A nurse suggested I drop by. I did.’

‘You met Peter?’

‘No.’

Anselm hadn’t stayed long because it was late. ‘She told me she had cancer. What can you say?’

And Anselm, sipping his soda water, told Mitch how cancer had eaten into his mother’s life and those of her husband and children. No one had been equipped to deal with the strain. The illness had shown up everybody’s failings; placed them under pressure and helped them fail one another. There’d been a lot of confusion because no one had been prepared to accept the future. Anselm, however, had tried and been surprised.

‘I was nine, very young, like Timothy. I didn’t resist. Helped her go, if you like. We talked about life, how
good
it was, how each morning was
mysterious
and
wonderful
… but that now it was evening and the succession of days would come to an end. Because we were honest with each other, we survived. I was shattered and she was shattered. But she didn’t try to hold onto life and I didn’t ask her to stay. Each remaining moment became charged with meaning … there were even times of
ecstasy
, impossible to anticipate … they just came like a hot flush … which is why I feel for Timothy. We’ve both stood by a bed wondering what to make of death, wondering what to make of the confusion downstairs…’

Mitch was turning his glass in circles on a beer mat. He smiled sadness and gratitude for having been trusted. But there was a focus to his stare, something objective and dispassionate.

‘You can’t make this investigation into Jenny Henderson’s death an attempt to reproduce your own history.’ Mitch waited, letting his words sink in. ‘You can’t save this other family by … imposing your understanding of what it is to face a crisis. Maybe Jenny saw things differently to your mother. Maybe she wanted to help Timothy differently.’

Anselm sipped some water. He knew there was more to come; and he knew already what Mitch was going to say. The musician had come full circle, arriving at the point he’d wanted to make when suggesting they meet ‘on his patch’.

‘Anselm, I have to be honest. I think the investigation should stop right now. I’ll stay on board for as long as I can. However … if Vincent Cooper’s story is broadly confirmed, then I’m off. You’re on your own. You see, I, too, feel for Timothy. I, too, have stood by a hospital bed. I, too, know about accidents. And I’m not going to destroy the peace that was achieved just because it rests upon a crime, committed because the law didn’t recognise the scale of the predicament. I’m not going to help you make a criminal out of someone who did what you’d never dream of doing … just because you once discovered ecstasy when they’d only found despair.’

Mitch pulled into Larkwood just as the bell for Lauds was ringing. They’d been up all night. Curiously – perhaps because each had spoken their mind – they were very much at ease with one another, even though their working relationship was now tenuous. So when Anselm said he proposed to meet Doctor Ingleby alone, Mitch knew there was no cloaked rebuff. Handling Peter Henderson’s alleged accomplice would be a delicate matter and two onto one could only be confrontational.

As Anselm got out of the Land Rover, Mitch said: ‘There’s just one thing that puzzles me about you.’

‘Is that all?’

‘You’re reluctant to accept Cooper’s evidence that Jenny wanted to die, even though we’ve got the Exit Mask … and yet you believe what he says about Peter … that he was involved in killing her. Why? Why not reject Cooper’s story altogether? Why not drop Peter from the frame and forget the letter to your Prior? What about Michael?’

Anselm wrapped his cloak around his shoulders, considering the matter. It was a good point. There was, indeed, a glaring inconsistency in his position.

‘Instinct, I suppose,’ he replied, aware that his explanation was on the thin side. ‘I just can’t imagine a father killing his daughter. It’s … unnatural. And anyway, he adored her. It’s inconceivable.’

The thought remained with Anselm as he shuffled into his stall. The bells fell silent, leaving a deep echo to swim through the nave and over the fields, linking the Priory to the world with a fading call to rise from sleep. Into the emerging silence, Father Jerome’s hesitant voice intoned the ancient words that greeted every dawn at Larkwood:

‘Deus in adjutorium meum intende.’

O God, come to my aid.
After the communal response, the rest was in English, but Anselm didn’t get that far. He was no longer that which in days of old moved earth and heaven (to quote Tennyson). He’d lost his stamina. Before the short refrain was even complete, Anselm had dropped oars and fallen fast asleep.

Michael could feel the capped trader watch him with interest. The old man sidled from behind the counter, coming closer to see if he could believe his eyes. The customer was checking the sprouts; pressing them with a thumb to see if they were soft inside, like a ripe melon.

‘They’re all nice and firm,’ he said, confidently.

‘I can feel that,’ replied Michael, sinking a nail into the skin.

How much can someone take before he tells you what you want to hear?
Michael was thinking of Eugene.
How much pressure is necessary before a man begs you to kill him? Before he chooses death?

‘Did I tell you about my supplier in Bramfield?’ asked the trader. ‘He talks to ’em. Swears it makes a difference. Can’t see the point.’

‘Me neither.’

‘They’ll never answer back.’

‘No, they won’t.’

‘And if they did, what would they say? “Please don’t eat me.” That would make life very complicated … for him, for me, for you. Best thing would be not to listen, but then you wouldn’t feel right when you threw ’em in a pan of cold water. Turned the heat on.’

‘You sure wouldn’t.’

‘Best thing is not to think about it. What you don’t know can’t harm you. Of course, if you
do
think about it, a sprout
looks
like a brain, a very small one, but that’s as far as it goes. You can talk till the cows come home and it won’t understand a thing. Mind you, it just shows you how important appearances can be. My Christine, she can’t eat ’em. Can you guess why?’

‘They look like brains.’

‘Exactly. Can’t shove her fork in without saying “Ouch”.’

Michael picked two sprouts and dropped them in a brown paper bag.

‘The IRA didn’t like them either,’ he said, in a far-away voice.

‘What?’

‘Brussels sprouts.’

The old man took off his tweedy cap and wiped his brow, thinking hard.

‘The Irish Republican Army hated sprouts?’

‘Yes.’

‘What … the whole lot of ’em? All those bombers and gunmen?’

‘Without exception.’

The old trader slapped his thigh with his cap, knitting his brows in consternation. Christine had
nothing
in common with Irish terrorists. She was from Cardiff. So a sprout having the appearance of a brain had nothing to do with it. Then he had a flash of English imperial insight: the Irish … they weren’t that clever.

‘Because they thought sprouts might talk back?’ he suggested, not too sure of himself.

Michael moved along the trestle to a crate of large green cabbages. He glanced back at the old man, pitying his confusion, charmed and wounded by his simplicity.

‘I think we’re beginning to understand one another, you and I,’ said Michael, envying his innocence. ‘“Brussels sprouts” was rhyming slang for “touts”. Informers. People who fed intelligence to the British Security Services. When the IRA caught them they weren’t very nice about it. Tied them up and told them to talk. If they confessed, they were shot; if they kept quiet, they were tortured to death. Not much of a choice.’

‘That’s what I call hot water.’

‘No, cold, actually.’

Michael handed the cabbage to the trader, along with the two sprouts in the paper bag.

‘In fairness, sometimes they made an exception. They’d let someone go … a kid for example. But you’d need a pretty convincing story. How much for the veg?’

The old man’s face showed his fresh bewilderment at his customer’s latest bout of mysterious words and strange choices; the growing enigma of a man he’d thought to be one of the remaining Few: a simple Englishman.

‘Anything for the back?’

‘No thanks.’ Michael paused. ‘You won’t be seeing me again.’

‘You’re off?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where to?’

‘The continent.’

The old man nodded as if he should have known all along.

‘The cabbage is forty-five pence,’ he said. ‘As for the sprouts, you can ’ave ’em.’

Michael put the vegetables in the boot of his Citroën and then took the A12 towards Ipswich, crossing the River Orwell south of the city. He then made for Pin Mill, the riverside hamlet where Arthur Ransome had situated
We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea
and where Jenny had calmly asked Michael to kill her. Having parked the car by a pub, he went to the exact spot where the conversation had taken place: an isolated grassy bank overlooking the salty, winding river. Then, as now, the tide was out. The Orwell had withdrawn. A group of barges with brick-red sails, all huddled together, had been lowered onto the soft bed of ochre sand. Ragged sheets of green algae lay around them like skins, sloughed off by some strange sea creature. Michael listened to the breeze: Jenny was speaking again.

‘Seeing them there, tied together, ropes hanging in the sand … makes you wonder if the tide will ever come back.’ She was pointing at the barges, sitting in her wheelchair. ‘Or will they stay like that, waiting, waiting, waiting, sinking slowly into the sand, slowly falling apart.’

‘The tide will come in, Jenny,’ said Michael, eyes squeezed tight shut.

He was sitting on the grass beside his daughter in the shade of wide oaks and slender alders. They’d come for a jaunt after a follow-up consultation at the hospital, six weeks after Jenny had returned to Polstead.

‘And when it does, they will float again,’ said Jenny. ‘They will rise slowly off the sand. They’ll drop their sails, catch the wind and sail out to sea, away from the wrecks and rusting—’

‘The tide comes in,’ interrupted Michael. ‘It always comes in.’

‘But not for me, Daddy. Not for me. Because I can’t move.’

Michael ground his teeth, screaming inside his exploding mind.

‘Even if I ever felt better again, wanted to smile again, I’m still stranded. And so is everyone around me. None of the barges with their big sails can head off anywhere without having to head back here again. Someone always has to stay behind, moored to me.’

‘I’ll stay, my darling.’

‘I know, Dad. You’re always there. But it’s not enough. You’re not enough. I’m sorry, but you’re not. I want to go out to sea again, on my own. That’s what it is to be alive, to feel alive and love living. It’s to be free, moving in and out with the tide.’

They were both crying – the most awful, calm, brutally simple tears. Michael’s hand reached out for Jenny’s and when she took it, he realised, with shame and self-hatred, that it was she who was keeping him afloat and not the other way around. She was by his side in this moment of unbearable anguish. He was going under and Jenny was holding tight, leaning over the edge of her wheelchair.

‘Dad, do you remember when I was a child, I sometimes tied my laces too tight?’

Michael sniffed and nodded.

‘I couldn’t undo the knots and my feet were swollen?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘You’d carefully pull the laces apart?’

‘Yes, by a basin of cold water. And when you were free, you’d stick both feet in and sigh.’

‘That’s right. It felt lovely, really lovely. A relief.’

Jenny looked down at Michael from her chair, black hair held loose in a bun, her strong black eyebrows arched with a curious knowing. She had a slightly tilted smile.

‘Would you do it now?’

Michael frowned. He didn’t want to say what had almost tripped off the end of his tongue – ‘But you can’t feel anything’ – so he deepened his frown as if this unsettling exchange were some parlour game of wits and illusion.

‘I don’t mean here, this minute. But some time when I’m not looking.’

‘Darling, I’m just not following you.’ He shifted around onto his knees.

‘Untie the knots, Daddy. Let me go. No one will miss me.’

Michael gazed into his daughter’s slightly open mouth, not believing that he’d heard such words, words that had entered the pulp of his soul with the heat of a radiant poker.

‘No, no, no, Jenny, no, no, you can’t think like that … ever, never, not now, not tomorrow, not—’

‘Daddy, I’m trapped in here’ – she touched her legs as if they didn’t belong to her – ‘like I was trapped in those shoes. Take them off, like you used to; let me feel that cool, refreshing water. Let me walk away.’

She nodded at Michael as if she were reassuring a frightened child just before she turned out the bedroom light. Then she moved her serene face towards the family of boats. It was as though parent and child had made some sort of pact, only Michael hadn’t had his full say. Which was how it was meant to be. He
had
no say. None at all. Nor did Emma, or Peter. Or Nigel and Helen. Not even Timothy. This was about Jenny’s life. Her independent, sovereign existence. All at once, his heart seemed to tear open and a hole appeared, vanishing into some darkness of unimaginable dread: if he didn’t do what Jenny was asking, then someone else might. Out of a love and kindness seen to be greater than his own.

The rigging and cables rattled against the tall masts. Small triangular flags fluttered. The sea wind was bringing home the tide.

On the way back to Southwold, Michael purchased a box of toothpicks from a corner shop, surprising the girl on the counter when he asked for a plastic bag. Half an hour later he bought an old armchair from a second-hand furniture dealer whose shabby goods had spilled onto the pavement. After a lot of manoeuvring, he managed to fit the chair in the back of the car, on top of the tarpaulin, the cabbage and the sprouts. The garrulous dealer gave Michael some string because, try as they might, they couldn’t quite shut the boot.