The Sixth Lamentation (3 page)

The
received history was as follows: Agnes was half French, half English, and had
lived in Paris during the Occupation. She was there when the black shroud from
burning oil reserves hung over the city. She saw the German troops taking
photos of ‘La Marseillaise’ on the Arc de Triomphe. She heard the thin, high
voice of Marshal Pétain say he made a gift of himself to France, that he would
seek an armistice with Hitler. About this period she was able to talk. It was
the time after that had to be handled carefully, if at all. As a child, Lucy
was small enough to inch under the fencing with her curiosity, moving from one
month to the next, into the following years. But always the details from her
grandmother became sparer, begrudging; her mood increasingly unsettled, her
replies sharper, until Lucy learned she was approaching the place of shadows
where she could go no further: where, as Freddie once spat out to his burning
shame, Agnes became ‘La Muette’: the dumb one.

Of
course the family knew what lay beyond the wire. A town and a village:
Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. As to the why and wherefore, that was a mystery.
Susan often said that only Grandpa Arthur knew where she’d been and why, but
Lucy, as usual, moved as close to the line as possible trying to find out.

‘No, I
was never in the Resistance,’ Agnes said wearily to one of Lucy’s unremitting
schoolgirl questions.

‘Did
you know anyone who was?’

‘Yes, I
did.’

‘So you
were involved with them?’

‘Not
really I was just on the edge.’

‘Were
they brave?’

‘Very
brave. ‘

‘So you
must have edged towards bravery?’

Agnes
became very still, distracted. ‘We were all so young, so very young.

‘So you
did do something?’ pressed Lucy, eating chocolate.

‘Nothing
much to write home about. Now, stop your questions.’

That
was usually where the probing ceased. But this time Lucy chanced her arm,
pushed into the place of shadows: ‘You can’t have a big secret and not tell us
what happened.’

Agnes
gave a low animal growl through bared teeth. ‘Enough.’

It was
Lucy’s first experience of atavistic fear. She became scared of her own
grandmother. For Freddie, who was sitting in the corner, watching over a
collapsed newspaper, it was simply another example of his mother’s hopelessly
introspective temperament. But Lucy, aged fourteen, still possessed the awesome
non-rational percipience of childhood, and was young enough to be acutely
sensitive to something neither she nor anyone else could name or know It was
that which made her shrink instinctively back: a smell on the wind.

So the
reason for arrest and what had happened during two and a half years of
incarceration lay out of reach.’ The narrative trail resumed, through Lucy’s
persistence, at the moment of Agnes’ release, as if nothing had gone before: ‘A
Russian soldier stood gawping at me. He was no more than a boy, and his gun
looked like a battered toy He couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t speak.’ I was
standing with children on either side. He cried.’ We just watched him.’
Eventually he said in English, “You’re free now.”‘

Agnes
wearily passed a blue-veined hand through her grey hair, rearranging a silver
clip, and added, ‘I got out of Babylon, but there was no Zion. No promised
land.’

‘What’s
that, Gran?’ Lucy enquired, puzzled.

‘Just
an old song about homesickness. And hope.’

‘By
Boney M?’

‘A
psalm.’

It was
an opaque exchange, and all the more peculiar because Agnes was not a religious
woman.’

After the war Agnes
returned to Paris where she met Captain Arthur Embleton in a hospital. They
were married within two months, staying on in France for the next couple of
years, during which time they had twins: Freddie and Elodie. After leaving the army
Grandpa Arthur brought the family back to a suburban existence in north London.’
He became a solicitor in a large London firm and their life was superficially
comfortable and predictable, except for those who knew otherwise. After Lucy’s
unnerving exchange with her grandmother, Freddie told Lucy about his own
inexplicable childhood memories.

At
times Agnes was captivating and extrovert, Freddie explained, but could
suddenly and for no apparent reason become swamped by abstraction.’ It was as
if the apparatus of her personality shut down, like a vast generator losing its
source of power. The life in her would drain away until all the lights blinked
and flickered before going out. And then she was gone, even though she was
still in the same room, and everyone else was left adrift and awkward, trying
to make contact across the space left by her absence.

This
was the kind of thing Grandpa Arthur called ‘a tactical withdrawal from the
field of conflict’, which was his thin attempt to joke with the children. But
it also named a truth. Ordinary life was a battle for Agnes. Lucy’s father also
remembered those frightening moments: when Agnes suddenly froze, as if gripped
by vertigo, shaking and sweating, holding on to the rim of the sink, the edge
of a table, the back of a chair, until talked down by Grandpa Arthur.

Later,
when Lucy’s relationship with her father became more complicated, her mother
.passed on a little more history so that Lucy might better understand the man
she had ceased to know in a simple way

‘Try to
understand your father,’ Susan said appealingly. ‘It wasn’t easy for him as a
child, even though Grandpa did his best.’

Grandpa
Arthur, she said, had tried to provide some consistency for Freddie and
Elodie, giving them what he thought was a warm English upbringing, with lots of
Gilbert and Sullivan,
Wisden
annuals (which Elodie loved) and regular
tea at four o’clock. But he could not completely protect them. Where Agnes had
been approachable and inviting one day, Freddie in particular would run towards
her the next only to find her withdrawn. There had been one little incident
that Freddie had never forgotten:

‘Mum,
look what Alex gave me. It’s Excalibur. The sword pulled from a stone.’

Freddie
held out the plastic brand with both hands, holding tight, just in case anyone
actually tried to take it. Agnes slowed for a moment, but carried on peeling
carrots.

‘Mum,
look, it’s Excalibur. Alex gave it to me.’

Agnes
continued roughly peeling off the skins, aware that Freddie was at her side,
unaware he held out the toy he no longer wanted.

And
Susan continued: ‘You see, it wasn’t easy for your father. It wasn’t that bad
for Elodie.’

‘Why?’
Lucy asked, and was granted more history.

Part of
the problem for Freddie was that Elodie did not need Agnes like he did.’
Ironically, that made relations between mother and daughter moderately relaxed.
Elodie drew water from another well. She naturally gravitated towards her
father, with their shared love of cricket, leaving Freddie behind, resentful.
Batting averages held nothing for him and he vainly searched for something he
could bring to his mother, but she gave no lead. So he found himself unable to
reach his mother and jealous of his sister. When they grew up and left home,
the distance between siblings was weakly bridged by Christmas cards and awkward
phone calls, the most memorable of which was when Elodie rang to say she had
cancer. Freddie didn’t know what to say and to his horror said nothing of
consequence. He groped for the language they had once shared as children but
that was long gone. He asked questions but could not remove the note of polite
enquiry. He said goodbye as if nothing had really happened. The illness took
its time, drawing Elodie down despite treatments, prescribed and otherwise.
Curiously, as Freddie heard the details of decline he felt the need to talk to
her. He rang spontaneously, often in the middle of the day, without knowing
what he would say. More often than not conversation flowed easily, and
something began to grow He paid a few visits, always arranging another. And
then Elodie died, sedated and beyond the comfort of her family, aged
thirty-two. He blamed himself for having become a stranger.’ And, somehow,
Freddie blamed Agnes.

And
Susan said to Lucy, ‘So you see, it hasn’t been that easy for your father.’

Lucy could remember her
father still trying hard, despite his confusion. Grandpa Arthur had always
said, proudly, that Agnes was a jolly good musician. So her father bought a
piano. But Agnes never played it. He bought various records, but Agnes never
listened to them. In that conventional period of family calm, after Sunday
lunch, the piano and records became a silent accusation. The lid had not been
lifted; the records were still wrapped in cellophane. It was Lucy who first
pressed the keys and introduced ‘Chopsticks’ to the house. It was Lucy who
scratched Fauré’s ‘Romance sans parole’, anxious because of the simmering
politesse
among the grown-ups. The scratching was a symbolic mishap, because the
second of those three little piano pieces was her grandmother’s favourite
melody. That was why Freddie bought it.

It
seemed to Lucy — not surprisingly — that her father’s attempts to reach his
mother became more deliberate and dutiful, his need constrained by a thin skin
of self-protection. And yet, simultaneously, as Agnes grew older her
oscillations in mood were replaced by a more moderate inaccessibility. But by
then it seemed to be too late for Freddie. He could not slough the skin. Lucy’s
memory of Grandpa Arthur at this time was of a tired man, endlessly patient and
exquisitely gentle with Agnes but a man who had learned to live more or less
alone. He died quietly in his sleep one day, after a sudden stroke, as if he
had slipped out of the back door in his slippers, unnoticed.

Agnes was
strangely composed until the funeral, when her grief broke out like a flood.
Then it sank away like a stone beneath flattened water. However, she refused to
stay in the family home and sold up within two months, moving to a spacious
flat in Hammersmith, by the river.

The
loss of Grandpa Arthur left Freddie bereft. And Agnes, of all people, could not
help him.’ The remaining links between them began to fragment, and Freddie’s
anger at his mother began to break out. He snapped at her more frequently, his
outbursts becoming less of a protest and more of an accusation: for being his
reluctant mother.

2

Even
as Lucy received and experienced the living history of her family she
understood that her father’s problems had juddered wholesale into Susan, and
embrangled her own most formative years.

What
should have been a playground for a child had turned out to be more of a No Man’s
Land, strewn with adult debris. As she’d tried to romp around she’d snagged
herself on unseen obstacles, until she’d learned by experience to locate and
map out the specific danger spots between all her relations. By the age of
fifteen Lucy had acquired the ability to move among her family with the supreme
ease of a sophisticated adult. She became the deft one, prodding people away from
plotted minefields. She seemed wise.

It was
this shining characteristic that led her father to speak so unguardedly, and
her mother to say more by way of further explanation. They didn’t mean any
harm, but they said enough to take, inadvertently, the glow off Lucy’s
innocence. Only Agnes and Grandpa Arthur left her alone.

So, it
was not surprising that, after Grandpa Arthur died, Agnes and Lucy were
imperceptibly drawn to one another, without effort, decision or the swapping of
inner wounds. They grew to enjoy each other’s company, neither of them placing
demands upon the other. There was no weighted expectation. Long periods of
silence could be shared, punctuated by clipped, comfortable conversation. It
was obvious to anyone else in the same room that there was an alliance of sorts
between them. But this only triggered a jealousy within her father that he
could not bring himself to acknowledge, but could not stop himself from
expressing, even when something far more serious was at stake.’ As he did when Lucy
announced she was leaving home to live with a man:

‘A man?’

‘Yes.”

‘Could
you be more specific?’

‘Tallish…’

‘Don’t
be cheeky to your father,’ said her mother, flushed.

‘Have I
met him?’ he pursued. ‘No. But Gran has.’

‘Gran
has?’ said her father, incredulous, and lowered his
head.

‘Only
once, Freddie, by accident,’ said Agnes apologetically from her chair by the
fire.

‘He’s
called Darren and he’s thirty-seven.’

‘But
you’re only twenty,’ Susan said, pale and desperate, smoothing her blouse. ‘Darren,
you say?’

Her
father collected his coat and left the room, saying, ‘Lucy, I’m going home. You
can tell
me
as much as you see fit when you feel like it. Or maybe Gran
can tell me next Sunday.’

He
apologised profusely that evening for his petulance, by which time he’d got to
grips with the anxiety that really troubled him. At the time of her
announcement Lucy had recently dropped out of Cambridge, after winning a
scholarship at King’s to read Economics. It had been more of a triumph for
Freddie than for her — she had made it to the same college to read the same
subject as he had done. It was just marvellous … even though Lucy’s
interest lay in literature, not the science of wealth distribution. When Lucy
left university at the end of her first year, her father entered a sort of
mourning. So did Lucy; she wore black and dyed her hair. For a short while she
attacked the structure of Capital by drawing Income Support. Her father spoke
to his old college ― the place was open for the next academic year. But
she found a job as a finance clerk for a small company that manufactured pine
chairs. Pine chairs? Freddie cried. Yes, and a few tables. Oh my God, he said.
Her mother bought a rocker. And then, at a party, Lucy met Darren, who had a
lively interest in Lenin. He was the only person she knew who’d read the
lambent phrases of Joseph Schumpeter. He introduced her to the vast, liberating
plain of Other People’s Misery but he quarried his authority from Lucy’s lack
of self-esteem. Age and force of manner overwhelmed her innate, cultured
sophistication and she became a disciple. The large house called Home fell
under the heavy sword of ideological scrutiny. She moved out. There was little
Freddie could say. Her mother cried and cried.