The Sixth Lamentation (19 page)

‘Student
… second time round.’

‘Pushy
parents first time?’

‘Sort
of.’ She thought of Darren, who’d made that specific judgement with hostility,
noticing how from Pascal’s mouth the question carried the promise of
understanding. Without doubt the time would come when she would explain, but
not now She continued, ‘Pascal, I’ve been thinking about our last conversation.
I don’t understand why you want Brionne so much for the trial. What about all
the other evidence?’

Pascal
said, ominously, ‘This trial is going to be about what the victims remember as
much as what Schwermann did.’

They
left the gallery and joined the crowds walking round to Nelson’s Column. The
naval commander towered above them, safe, as they walked through a sea of fat,
scratching pigeons.

‘Do you
ever wonder how Schwermann and Brionne got out of Paris in the first place?’
asked Lucy

‘Frequently’

‘I
mean, where did they go, and who would want to put them on the road with new
names?’

‘No one
knows. One minute they’re both at Avenue Foch, then four months later they’re
in the hands of British Intelligence with new identities and a story that got
them into England. Sometimes I think of the Touvier case.

‘What’s
that?’

‘Basically
he was an old-school Catholic hidden for years after the war by his own kind.’

‘A
collaborator?’

‘Yes.
He was head of the Milice Intelligence Network for Savoy’

‘Protected
by the Church?’

‘It’s
more involved than that, but he was hidden in a monastery. So I do wonder in my
wilder moments if the Church could have been involved … but it’s so
unlikely Hiding a Frenchman, maybe, but an SS officer? That stretches even my
imagination.’

He
looked down at the demented scavenging of the birds and said, ‘Are you hungry?’

Half
and hour later they were eating at a small table in the crypt of St
Martin-in-the-Fields.

‘Funny
place for a restaurant,’ said Pascal.

3

The convent was situated
half a kilometre from the Priory. The orphanage had long since closed and the
school buildings were now a diocesan youth centre. Anselm had seen it all
before. Hordes of champing, over-sexed youths arriving in transit vans, closely
supervised by impossibly confident chaplains and teachers, all of whom deserved
the Croix de Guerre.

Mère
Hermance had worked in the laundry during the war. She was lodged upon a wicker
chair in the convent gift shop, recalling the good old days when religious life
was hard. Anselm had to drag her towards the subject of his visit.

‘Oh,
yes, Father, it was a terrible time, terrible. I saw poor Prior Morel fall like
a rag doll. I waited for him to get up. There were three children hiding in the
orphanage.’ She smiled, as only the very old can; intimating an acceptance of
things that once could not be accepted.

‘Do you
remember the two men who stayed at the Abbey in 1944?’ asked Anselm gently

‘I do,
yes, but not much. In those days religious life was lived as it should be. You
didn’t talk to men unless you had to.’

Anselm
nodded in firm agreement.

‘I
never spoke to either of them,’ she said. ‘We were told it was as secret as the
confessional. We were used to that sort of thing. But I do remember one thing,
Father—’

Mère
Hermance broke off to answer the phone. The shop was open from three to five… the biscuits were handmade … by the young ones with nothing better to
do … fifty francs … very well worth it … goodbye. She put the phone
down arid carried on as if no interruption had occurred: ‘When I came here as a
novice in 1937 there were thirty-nine sisters. The Prioress at the time was a
dragon. Her father had been in the army and …’

Anselm
listened patiently for ten minutes or so before he cracked and reminded her of
what she had been about to say .

‘Oh
yes, that’s right. He came to the orphanage almost every day’

‘Who
did?’ pressed Anselm.

‘One of
the young men we were hiding. He talked and played with four or five little
German boys and girls. Those were the last Jewish children to come here. Their
parents had fled Germany to France, only to be hunted all over again. They
saved their children and then perished. He was a good fellow to visit those
poor dears. One of them never spoke and had the deepest brown eyes you have
ever seen.

‘Do you
remember which one came?’

The
phone rang again. The nun listened distractedly, once more delivering pat lines
on the quality of biscuits and the weakness of the young. She put the receiver
down. ‘As I was saying, the Prioress was a dragon—’

‘Mère
Hermance, the young man, do you recall which one?’

She
looked darkly into the past, into the presence of a banished fear. ‘I think it
was the German.’

Unfolding
a large starched handkerchief, she wiped her eyes. ‘It was a terrible time,
Father, a terrible, terrible time.’

Chapter Eighteen

1

Agnes sat by the kitchen
table, her hands limp upon her lap, palms open. Her head leaned forward
slightly and to one side, as if in a trance of concentration. It was, of
course, not quite that. Her posture was assuming a life of its own, pulling her
body slowly down, with Agnes quietly tugging the other way, her blue eyes
bright with resistance. She was still able to look after herself, but not for
much longer — Agnes was tired by evening and soon the slumping would encompass
the day Freddie knew it but had no idea what to do, given Agnes’ refusal to
involve anyone skilled or trained in her care. By default, an interim system
had emerged to which Agnes did not object. Each evening a member of the family
took it in turns to drop by, to make sure everything was fine before she went
to bed. And Agnes cooperated not because she required their help but because
she knew they needed to come.

Sitting
opposite her, Lucy tipped the green beans out of the bag and began the ritual
of nipping and throwing, taking off the curled ends and putting the long
remaining stems into the waiting pan. Agnes watched.

‘What’s
he like?’ asked Agnes, deadly calm, her eyes following the deft movements of
Lucy’s fingers.

‘Older
than me and younger than me at one and the same time. The past means as much to
him as the future, maybe more.

‘You’ve
missed one,’ said Agnes, pointing towards the pan with her head. Lucy retrieved
the rogue. The soft clipping of her nails, the patter in the pan, the ticking
of a clock in the hail suspended time’s nimble passing. The moment lay open,
unexplored, healing, inhabited by them alone. The stray cat, no longer stray
but ensconced and enthroned, idled by, surveying his subjects with transcendent
scorn.

‘He’s
known Mr Snyman all his life.’

Lucy
glanced over to Agnes and met in her eyes the question, the plea. Lucy turned
away She would not provide the answer … no, Pascal did not refer to you… I’m sorry, but he didn’t seem to know that Jacques had had a son. Instead,
Lucy said, ‘Mr Snyman believes that Brionne would probably condemn Schwermann
if he got the chance.’

‘Does
he?’ asked Agnes, made alert. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

From
somewhere immeasurably cold she said, ‘Maybe he’s right.’

Stung
by her grandmother’s remark, Lucy pushed the pan across the table. Agnes lifted
a wavering spoon of salt from a bowl and let the grains spill into the water.

Lucy
said, ‘I’ve a small role to play in the trial. I will be there on your behalf.’
She would say nothing of her intention to confront Brionne with what she now
knew and compel him to enter the courtroom. Her grandmother would discover that
in the happening.

Agnes
nodded, unblinking, her mouth sloping to one side. It was a smile, against the
will of failing muscle and the tiny, dying engines of the nerves. Then she
breathed a sort of laugh, leaned back, her face averted, and said: ‘Victor was
no fool.’

Lucy
boiled water, mesmerised by the rage becoming steam. It vanished in the air, to
reappear upon the window, water once more, streaming down the pane, to be wiped
away by Agnes.

2

Anselm
returned to a sunny day in England. The sight of Larkwood pierced him. In a
flash he longed to hear the bells and find himself in the psalms that named
everything when he could not. At the entrance to the Priory, Father Andrew
said, ‘Schwermann’s grandson, Max, wants to see me tomorrow afternoon. I’d
like you to be there.’

‘Of
course.

‘Are
you all right?’ The Prior glanced briefly sideways.

‘Yes,
thanks.’

Funny,
Anselm thought wistfully, watching the Prior’s square back as he slipped
through a side door, this is want I’d wanted all along, to be involved in the
fray to be called upon, and now it’s happening it has somehow lost its savour.

Max
Nightingale was a painter. By which he meant, he said, someone who paints
pictures that few people buy but who continues to forsake career and financial
security in order to paint more pictures that might never be sold. He made
regular money working as a waiter or, when things became unbearable, smiling
over a cash till at McDonald’s. Anselm placed him at about twenty-seven. He had
close-cropped hair and held his head ever so slightly to one side, as if
anticipating a sudden slap. They were taking tea by Anselm’s favoured spot on
the south transept lawn. Warm sunshine fell over them. Max spoke as if language
was a clumsy tool, hesitating occasionally, his eye on a mental image that
defied representation in a sentence. But when he did name something it stood
out starkly, because of the unexpected angle of his observation.

‘I said
to my grandfather — look, hundreds of thousands of Jews are being transported
across Europe to a small village in Poland. They won’t fit in.’

‘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.