Anselm waited for John to elaborate but, for a moment, he said nothing. He washed his mug, scouring the coffee stains with his toothbrush. When he’d turned off the tap and dried his hands on the curtain he came back and sat on the edge of his bed, looking at Anselm from some distant place, far from school and the recollection of Misery in Cornwall.
‘I’m not like you, Anselm,’ he said, almost regretfully ‘I can’t just open up and tell you what’s inside. I wasn’t made that way And, you know, sometimes, there are things you can’t talk about. They have to be left where you find them. Six years ago I found my birth certificate. That’s how I learned my mother’s name. You see, Anselm, the difference between me and you is this: I was the one that was lied to. I’m like your mother, only nobody sat down and told me the truth, not until I asked; and when I did… I preferred the lie.’
John would have left it there, but he saw the question in Anselm’s face: his wanting to share the load.
‘She betrayed my father,’ he said, frowning, loathing the harsh atmosphere roused by the charge. ‘And I don’t appear to have featured on the balance sheet… at a time when I couldn’t eat unless she held out the spoon.’ Shuffling back on to the bed to lean against the wall, he looked at Anselm with undisguised envy, as if to say parental death has its compensations. ‘I came to Roper’s Hall not because my father thought it was cheap, but because I didn’t want to stay at home. I needed to break out of the make-believe. Find myself. You wouldn’t understand that.’
Gazing out over Larkwood’s restive trees Anselm mused how these differing experiences of family trauma had shaped them both. Speaking for himself, the loss of his mother had opened a wound on to life itself — that the rich grass, soft to touch, rich to smell, withers too soon, an insight that had prompted a quest and helped illuminate the narrow path to monastic life. Rooted very much in this world, Anselm strived to see everything as a mirror on to the other side of the fence, where the pasture was a contrasting green, and unfading.
As to John, the effect of the loss of his mother was a far more complex matter to gauge, not least because her great going had been voluntary She’d turned away from her son and husband, presumably for someone else and a new life weighed and checked as having far more appeal. But Anselm, remembering these ancient, nearly forgotten disclosures, now received a glimmer of understanding. In retrospect — and Anselm had never quite noticed this before — John had always been on the move, in search of something out of reach. Throughout his school days, as soon as he was able, he’d run after the big ideas — from Zeno to Marx, never quite finding satisfaction at the end of the book. He’d wrestled with theories of right and wrong, wanting a rational basis for why one should be moral at all, searching — Anselm thought — for some intellectual mechanism that might excuse if not explain his mother’s conduct. At university, he’d chased the reticent, colder girls, sometimes breaching their fragile defences, never staying with any of them for long. They’d thought him heartless. And his first job had been in East Berlin. The next in Warsaw He’d learned languages increasingly far from his own. If the accident hadn’t happened, he’d probably have ended up in Shanghai. In every way he’d been on a quest, like Anselm, only he’d never arrived at a moment of stillness — a recollected, clear-sighted understanding of where he’d come from and where he was going. Seen like that, Anselm recognised another facet of John’s character. The man who searches is looking for something; and until it’s found, he’s waiting. That was John… a man who’d been left waiting ever since his mother turned away.
Anselm shut the window, muffling the clamour of the trees and the great sighs of the wind. He was troubled by his unremitting failure to recognise the pikestaffs in his life. All these years he’d thought 1982 was the one subject they’d never spoken about, forgetting that this other, older crisis remained, for the greater part, unexplored. They were blood brothers, but John had kept two secrets beneath his skin, not one, The first had now been ventilated. Strange, really (thought Anselm, climbing into bed) that tonight he should think of the oldest. He’d forgotten all about it.
Chapter Nine
Anselm dreamed vividly receiving the special enlightenment that comes from the paradox of watching oneself in action. It was as though his psyche — exasperated once more with its host’s predilection to skate past the obvious — hit back, hurling into the sleeping mind something simple but significant about John’s motivation in coming to Larkwood. Something else he’d forgotten: Faithful to the facts, the drama unfolded like a black and white newsreel from a forgotten war.
Anselm had been a monk for about eighteen months and hadn’t heard from John at all. For his part, Anselm had sent tape recordings in place of letters, describing the rough and tumble of life around a cloister. He’d told funny stories about the older duffers. He’d passed on some of the wisecracks from the Prior. But nothing came in return. With the passage of time Anselm had grown anxious because he couldn’t expunge his last memory of John: unshaven, the buttons out of order on his shirt, the coloured socks that didn’t match. And so, with the Prior’s permission, Anselm had taken an early train from Cambridge and turned up unannounced at John’s flat.
‘I thought we might have breakfast,’ said Anselm, as the door opened.
‘Have they kicked you out?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Are you wearing sandals?’
‘Yes.’
‘O God.’
Anselm followed John down the dark corridor, weaving between unopened mail and slumped rubbish sacks loose at the neck, horrified at what he’d just seen: the bloodless face behind dark glasses; the creased, slept-in clothing; the saffron stains on the open shirt. Cautiously he entered the kitchen, smelling a nauseating blend of cigarettes, stale beer and spices. The work surface and sink overflowed with filthy crockery, half empty aluminium take-away trays, empty bottles and crushed cans. On a table, by a tape recorder, lay a saucer heaped with ash and stubs. One of Anselm’s cassettes was in the deck. The others, salvaged from the corridor but still in their envelopes, were piled to one side.
‘I take it you’ve made a significant effort to continue your engagement with the local community?’ queried Anselm.
‘I feed my neighbour’s cat.’
‘You’ve sought help from professionals trained to help a talented young man come to terms with restricted vision?’
‘Don’t be shy. The word’s “blind”.’
‘You take frequent and regular exercise?’
‘Without fail. I go upstairs… and then I come down again.’
John was opening cupboards, patting his hands inside, trying to find a jar of instant coffee.
‘You’re relatively happy, grappling with the exciting question of what comes next in your life?’
‘I’m raring to go.
‘I assume you have a suitcase?’
John turned around, letting his arms drop.
‘A suitcase,’ repeated Anselm. ‘Let me pack it. You’re expected at Larkwood. I realise you’ll be leaving behind a vast, carefully constructed support network, but you’ll find another community, different help, lots of exercise and as much time as you need to grapple. Sandals, too, if you want.’
‘And a whip?’
‘No. And leave yours behind. The point of coming is to learn to do without.’
John was not the first person overwhelmed by depression to stay at Larkwood. Many tortured men and women had taken a room in the guesthouse while learning to grope through various kinds of darkness. John was allocated a room on the ground floor. In lieu of a white stick, Anselm cut down a sapling with twists and turns produced by a struggle with a winding creeper. John was given a job picking apples, alternating with bottle washing and waxing floors. He was given a structure. Early rising, quiet, work, more quiet, more work, recreation (sometimes raucous), a Great Silence, early to bed. Between times: mysteriously bad meals.
‘This is good, Anselm,’ he said after three weeks. ‘I’m beginning to find my way.’
It was a warm, grateful but cryptic comment. Anselm had anticipated that John would eventually start shaving, pick fruit and — when the moment was ripe — open up about the terror of finding himself blind, haunted by
