The Lazarus Prophecy (6 page)

He broke bread with them before he left the priory. The custom only delayed his departure by 20 minutes or so. A small part of him felt remorseful at having humiliated three feeble old men. It had been a necessary process but when you attacked people without the
means to retaliate it could justifiably be described as bullying. The role of bully was not one with which he felt comfortable.

They seemed happier, or at least relieved, when he put Daniel Barry's account carefully into his rucksack. Their secrets were safe with him. He had told them the truth about that. Their beliefs and the purpose of their order would do untold damage to the credibility of the Church should any of their antics be exposed as duties practiced until as recently as seven or eight weeks ago.

‘Make sure that they are obeying my explicit instructions,' the Cardinal had said. ‘If there is further damage, do what you can to conceal and limit it. We will have of course to close the priory and dissolve the order and disperse them and reintegrate each of them individually into the true faith over the next few months. But in the first instance, their strict obedience is the most important thing, that and their silence.'

Cantrell felt he could leave quite satisfied for the present. He felt magnanimous enough to eat their mountain cheese and home baked loaves with them in their stove-warmed kitchen and to sip more of the cold well water that had earlier satisfied his thirst. They offered him wine as their guest. But he refused it because the descent he faced to the meadow where he'd left the Jeep was long and arduous and required sobriety.

He wondered about their individual natures and backgrounds. Dominic was not what the Americans would have called the sharpest knife in the drawer. Stephen was the most openly defiant of authority. Philip was their leader, more intelligent and pragmatic than the other two, someone whose intellectual gifts might, in other circumstances, have been useful in Rome. He could have seen Philip in the role of a Vatican diplomat, had the self-delusion of his calling not caused him to waste his vocation and life.

They had each wasted their lives, he thought, chatting pleasantly with them, a smile on his face, his compliments about the quality of the bread provoking a smirk from Brother Dominic, who had kneaded the flour and yeast and done the baking, he was modestly informed.

He paused as the heavy wooden door slammed juddering in its stone frame against his back, with the world a panorama before him of fluffy clouds and bleak rock gullies still smeared
this high by stretches of winter snow. He turned and saw the home the three old men shared once more as a forbidding rampart erected on deceit, defending malign and covert practices.

For a moment it occurred to him that they might simply have lied about their obedience to the Cardinal's command. It would be difficult to abandon rituals faithfully observed over a lifetime of self-denial. It would make all that suffering seem futile. He turned back to the vastness of the view and shook his head. They would not risk exile from the Kingdom of Heaven, would they? That was, for men like them, too terrible a price to think about having to pay.

Pride, ego, ligaments, muscles, spirit, sinews: there wasn't a single part of her that didn't hurt. She left the rehearsal studio in Covent Garden with the vet-smell of embrocation rising from the sorest bits of her severely abused body. She decided she would walk to the flat she had recently rented for herself and the children in Pimlico. If she cut south along Catherine Street she could cross the Strand and do most of the journey with a view to her left of the river.

It was eight o'clock in the evening and nowhere near dusk yet. It had been a sunny day. It had been a hard afternoon at the barre. The piano pieces she'd rehearsed to still rang vibrantly in her ears. She had almost forgotten that the piano was of course a percussion instrument. Four hours of its loud and relentless prompting had been an emphatic reminder of that.

She needed the serenity the walk would provide. The walk would work in this balmy July weather as an effective warm-down. The kids were with their dad for a couple of days so there was no overtime bartering to have to factor in with the time-conscious nanny she'd too hastily employed. The walk would be stress-free. It was a good idea.

Except that Charlotte Reynard did what she always did when she walked without an appointment to keep or a deadline to have to meet. She inventoried her successes and her failures. She took stock of her life. She calculated the pluses and minuses with the cold and objective analysis to which a forensic accountant might subject a balance sheet for evidence of profit and loss.

She came down heavily on the side of deficit. She was an ambitious woman, defined by her achievements. She couldn't help being that. She didn't think she was cold or ruthless or even particularly superficial. But she existed to her own mind on what she'd accomplished and this evening, she didn't think it honestly amounted to very much.

Technically, the rehearsal had gone better than she'd hoped it would. Royal Ballet choreographers were not noted for their compassion or tact and she'd spent forty minutes of the session watched by Alain Prideaux. It was not to his steps she was dancing. She assumed he'd been drawn there out of curiosity. Come-backs were notoriously tricky. They could be triumphant, which they were rarely, or they could be tragic, which was far more often the case.

She'd danced the principle role in two of Alain's settings for the company and he would have noticed any deterioration in technique or athleticism or just the basic energy required to perform to the highest level.

He watched. He studied. He frowned. Finally he put his hands together as she paused after completing a particularly difficult passage and said, ‘Bravo!'

‘Really?'

‘Obviously you'll never again have what you had when you were 17.'

‘You mean a hymen?'

‘I mean promise, darling. I mean potential.'

Sweat trickled at the small of her back as the price of exertion. At the nape of her neck, her hair clung damply with it. She was all but out of breath. Alain was a French-Canadian with an eye for an ingénue.

‘The lay-off has been good for you. I'd say it's worked as a period of recuperation from some of the old injuries, the persistent ones?'

She nodded. She knew all about the persistent injuries. She'd danced through them, as every prima ballerina did.

‘With a few more weeks of work, who knows?'

‘I've some weight to lose.'

He shrugged. He scrutinized. ‘More a question of tone than inches,' he said. ‘You'll do it, sweetheart. You've the muscle memory and the will. You've always had the talent.'

‘Thank you.'

‘This story could have a happy ending.'

She was 34. She'd retired at 32. She'd taken time out in her mid-20's to have the children and, like most women who were essentially professional athletes, had discovered that the experience of having them had made her physically stronger. But the story wouldn't have a happy ending. How could it? She didn't have the freshness or exuberance she'd had when she was in her 20s. The bloom had faded and the spotlight would expose the fact.

Coming back was a strategy born of desperation. It was a gamble probably doomed to failure. At best, she might have another two years at the pinnacle as a performing artiste. She felt fairly sure she would be offered roles beyond the one for which today had been the start of her preparation. She might be about to inflict permanent damage on her own legacy, but she honestly didn't know what else to do.

She'd retired to bouquets and ovations and unanimous press plaudits two years ago. The world had looked then like an open invitation to make the money she hadn't really earned as a dancer. Ballet didn't pay what people assumed it did and with her marriage in trouble, the opportunities looked very inviting.

Except that the cook book hadn't sold. Neither had the children's stories she'd written. They'd been callow and unimaginative and ghosted and rushed. In retrospect, she could see everything wrong with them. And they'd had to compete with the excellent stories from established authors she was familiar with from reading to her own children.

The television work had been a disaster. She was telegenic and wittily fluent on screen and the polls suggested she remained personally very popular with the viewing public. But the formats had been clumsy and misconceived and audience ratings had dropped off as one light entertainment commentator put it, ‘Like lemmings off a cliff.'

She'd reached the north side of Lambeth Bridge. A fellow pedestrian smiled at her as they waited together for a green light at the crossing. A passing cabbie hooted his horn and waved from his open driver's window. She was famous and well-liked, despite the career failures, even if she didn't, at that moment, very much like herself.

Her charity work was the reason for this public affection. A bit older and frumpier and in this weird age she was living through of emotional incontinence, she thought she'd probably qualify as a National Treasure. She'd begun the fund-raising after her son, Nicholas, was diagnosed with leukemia when he was just less than two years old.

Her son's illness had done two things, really. It had put an intolerable strain on her marriage and it had gifted her with the empathy to raise money for the treatment of sick children. Now there was a new ward named after her at Great Ormond Street Hospital. She'd been honoured with a CBE. Strangers smiled at her at pelican crossings and cabbies not only waved through their windows, but quite often refused to take her fare at the end of a journey.

It was something, she thought, treading the paving stones of the river embankment on tender feet and sore tendons, painfully aware of every ounce of the weight of her poorly conditioned body. It was something to console herself with as she returned to the stage for a stop-gap couple of years and wondered what the hell to do with the rest of the life left to her. And Nicholas was free of cancer. Her son was well. There was that, the precious, priceless reprieve for which she would always feel grateful.

Her children were her greatest achievement. Nicholas and Molly were happy and healthy and well-adjusted. She'd let herself into the flat and they wouldn't be there. The poignant reminders, the toys and clothes and crayoned sketches had all been tidied away that morning. Coats and hats belonging to them would be the first bright objects she'd see, hung on their hooks in the hallway of their new home.

The place would feel empty, but they'd be back soon, wouldn't they? If Charlotte's future lay largely in her past, at least theirs held a golden sort of promise. A satellite channel had wanted to make her dance comeback the subject of a reality TV series. Nick and Moll were the reason she'd found the dignity to say no.

‘Fuck it,' she said out loud to herself. She'd go for a drink. She didn't do much spontaneously, but there was a boat moored just to the west of the south footing of the bridge that functioned as a bar. It was a quarter to nine. It was warm enough to sit outside. She'd go and have a couple of glasses of wine at a table on the deck of the boat and watch the sun go down. It was a tempting alternative to going home alone. She'd earned a drink. The exertions of
the day, the start of her effort to resurrect her glorious past, had surely burned off a couple of thousand calories.

The sky turned rosy over Battersea. Charlotte treated herself to the indulgence of a pack of salt and vinegar crisps. She watched shadows lengthen and the traffic thin and the river take on an orange tinge that gradually matured into pink. She rooted around at the bottom of her bag. She salvaged a crumpled soft-pack of Marlboro Lights containing still only a single cigarette. She borrowed a lighter from the guy tending the bar. The smoke tasted slightly stale and guiltily delicious.

The ghosts of her bunions were returning to her toes. She could feel their familiar, half-forgotten throb. It wasn't just muscle in the body that possessed a memory. But she was okay with that. After half a bottle of red, she was reasonably philosophical.

The river was inky and the current strengthening in urgent braids between the patches of slack water when she finally rose for the 20 minute trudge home. The cars had their headlamps switched on. Another day was drawing towards its conclusion. She thought that even in the absence of the children, she would sleep very soundly tonight. She felt buoyed by the wine, her mood improved. Life would have a lot to offer if she could only stop being so bloody hard on herself. There were far worse predicaments than hers.

She was at her front door and the key had been inserted into the lock when the feeling of approaching hazard hit her without warning. It was worse than hazard, wasn't it? It was brutal and inhuman harm. She shuddered like someone would under the impact of a physical blow. Her mind blackened and reeled and terror filled her and her fingers trembled uselessly on the key fob. She swallowed and realized as she tasted it that her throat had filled with bile. Her bag slipped from her shoulder, spilling her damp tights and towel and leotard onto the lobby floor as she lost control of her bladder and felt the hot gush of urine down her thighs.

Charlotte turned and fled. She fled on foot. She did not dare take the route to the underground space and her car. She could not endure even the thought of the confinement of the lift or the gloom of the basement car park. She felt animal panic and beyond the immediacy of that, a craving for light and space that seemed instinctive and the only sane priority. Except
that she could barely move. She progressed along the lobby to the communal entrance door like someone wading through treacle.

‘Please God,' she said, ‘Please God.'

The door felt weighted by lead. It was an impossible obstacle. She pushed her way through it feebly and stumbled, turning an ankle with an audible tear of cartilage down the small flight of exterior steps. She fell and banged her face on the concrete, bloodying her lips and loosening a tooth. She clambered and crawled her way back to her feet and lurched onward like someone drunk.