down. He said very little but his face disclosed the constant workings of his mind. I think that is what drew me to Jacques, the absence of words.
Now, imagine him with Victor standing like a general, his hands behind his back, firing off frivolities to whoever would listen, hooting playfully at Jacques’ indignations. He winked a lot at the spectators. He was very careful with words and that rather sums him up. Beneath the badinage lay caution and a calculating brain. He always saw both sides of a problem and you never quite knew which side he was going to take. Sword and scabbard. Which was which?
Same day
I’m not sure when the parting of the ways began. Perhaps it was the day Jacques’ father called me ‘Guenevere’. With that one word he named where we stood on the stage. One of the more unfortunate things about late adolescence is that you understand the part you’re playing without being able to appreciate the likely consequences. You see, in a way I led Victor on, and I knew it. For anyone else this was just a part of growing up. But for me, the whole shebang got caught up with the war, when heroes were needed before their time and when my stumblings became the stuff of tragedy
It wasn’t me who made the choice that set us apart. It was Jacques. By then he was studying Classics at the Sorbonne. He turned up once ‘by chance’ at the Conservatoire and I showed him Chopin’s death mask and a cast of Paganini’s long pointed fingers. He said something about relics in Saint Eugene across the road. When I told Madame Klein that night about our meeting, her eyes narrowed and after a long pause she said, ‘I think you should go for him,’ and I said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ A week later I saw him at a recital when I hadn’t said I was playing. Shortly afterwards, by an old bookstall where the shelves were fastened to the outside wall, he muttered, ‘There’s something I have to tell you.’ But he couldn’t get the words out. I had to put various suggestions to him. He shook his head mournfully after each one. Eventually he looked away from me and grimaced, ‘I think I might be attached to you.’ I felt nothing. But I woke the next morning with a fountain spurting from the pit of my stomach.
19th April.
Victor must have known, but he said nothing. Maybe because we never spelled it out he never took it seriously Remember, words were very important to him. If something hadn’t been reduced to language he didn’t understand it. And, appropriately writing that sentence reveals how careless I was. For Victor wrote poems for me and I should have taken him, of all people, at his word. They were lofty with plenty of classical allusions, making them sufficiently impersonal to be safe. I kept them in a book. I should have told him to stop, but I didn’t. You see, on the face of it we were a trio, and I didn’t want to cut Victor off. But lurking within that laudable sentiment was the truth — a reluctance to give up the attention he gave me. Against myself I encouraged him, ever so slightly, but I did it without really meaning it. It’s called vanity.
I told Jacques that Victor was just showing off. Our failure to speak up became a sort of conspiracy of pleasure between us, in the secret kept from Victor who blindly carried on. I remember the three of us looking over the waters of Launette to the Isle of Poplars at Ermonville. Victor recited something about Euterpe’s aching soul before Rousseau’s empty tomb. Jacques and I listened, watching creamy clouds drift across the sky, making his words our own. But I knew Victor wrote them for me. Maybe Jacques did as well.
And there you have it. Jacques and I, and Victor soon to be disappointed. That was the beginning of the end.
Same day
And all the while something else was under way The weekly musical gatherings, the summer outings, had brought us all together and we grew up side by side. Through the keyhole, after everyone had gone one Sunday might, I could see them. Father Rochet finishing off the bottles. Madame Klein at the table, telling him not to drink too much. But each of them looking very pleased with themselves. Looking back, I can see it was the beginning of The Round Table. Father Rochet was calling together his knights for when the time was right.
Chapter Ten
1
Anselm’s presence during that harrowing confrontation in the woods had established an understanding between him and Salomon Lachaise such that future relations could never be characterised by mere acquaintance. They had stood on the same burning ground. A few days later, just before his flight to Rome, Anselm knocked unannounced at the door of ‘The Grange’, a small B amp;B with a name plaque of heavy iron. He’d planned a walk deep within the monastic enclosure to The Hermitage, a shack by a stream where no one ever went except with the Prior’s permission — which he had obtained. Salomon Lachaise emerged, smiling and expectant, and Anselm led him back to the Priory to a locked oak door in a high wall of Saxon flint.
The bent key was ancient and large and required both of Anselm’s hands in the turning. The door swung open and they stepped through into the hungry silence of the fields. As with many hidden places in the grounds of a monastery, the fact that it was cut off produced in those who entered a surprising sensation of having been freed, set loose from a captivity they had barely recognised. With a light step they set off for The Hermitage in the distance.
‘How long will you stay?’
‘Until he goes.
Anselm said, with feeling, ‘It was most unfortunate that you should meet him in the way you did… without warning… or preparation.’
‘I could never have prepared myself.’ His relaxed face scanned the rolling fields, sunlight flashing upon his heavy glasses. ‘Anyway, I always look for something to be grateful for.’
Anselm flinched at the notion of thanks. But Salomon Lachaise said, ‘I am glad my mother was not there, to see him and to see me before him. It would have been…’The sentence vanished, not through emotion but because the right word did not exist.
Anselm asked, ‘Does she know that you are here?’
‘She died before he was exposed,’ he replied evenly ‘I am also grateful for that.’
‘Tell me about her,’ said Anselm, tugging, he suspected, at the one significant thread of a seamless garment.
‘In many ways I am here on her behalf. Her story will never be told. And neither will mine.’
Anselm understood that to be an imposing refusal, but Salomon Lachaise continued as though it had been a preface:
‘Like so many others, the war told her who she was and who she wasn’t. She thought she was a young Frenchwoman, a Parisian, with a sister, two brothers and the usual clutch of uncles and aunts… and, out of mind, a couple of estranged German grandparents she’d never known. There’s always someone that everybody else isn’t speaking to. Then France fell and the occupier told her she was Jewish — on account of the grandparents. She’d never seen a synagogue in her life.’
Anselm slowed, for Salomon Lachaise was keeping slightly back; but the small man maintained his position, almost out of sight, close to the shoulder of his guide. His deep voice came on the air, while Anselm could only see the empty fields, the wild abundance of the grass.
‘My mother and I escaped to Switzerland with the help of a smuggling ring known as The Round Table. Then the border closed. The rest of the family were taken…’
Anselm said, to the breeze, ‘Did she know anyone, where she settled?’
‘No. Like all the others she lived waiting, waiting, waiting… during the war… after the war… until she died… in some sense always waiting. But no one else survived.’
The bare grass ran to a long line of trees, their tops hazy where the phosphorescence of the sky fell upon them. Diffuse sunlight picked out against the vague green a sloping wall of The Hermitage.
‘Hitler, she liked to say, had been responsible for her conversion. Confronted with such evil, she said, there had to be a God. She crossed the border a believing Jew There were many like her… alone, cut off, yet free… and there was help. She opened a kosher shop beneath a bridge… in a sort of cavern… the shelves were packed with mysteries last seem by Solomon. And yet… paradise? Not quite. The shop became a meeting place for those who’d
