living memory. Was there any better diversion, thought Anselm, entering the lift, than to shatter everyone’s illusions, including your own?
Sebastian was waiting for Anselm in the hotel foyer. He took his bag and drove him to the airport with the solicitude of an undertaker holding up the traffic, his mood similar to that of the quiet monk at his side. He’d come dark-suited with a mumbling apology of his own, for how things had turned out. He’d have preferred it if Roza’s informer had been someone at arm’s length.
‘But, then, the point of informers is that they get close. It’s a pity you got burned, too.’
Yes, that was the right word — Anselm woke as the aircraft tilted into dense cloud over England — it was a pity all round.
A pity for Roza. A pity for Klara and for Irina, blunted tools thrown aside. A pity for the fat young man with the plastic Kalashnikov. A pity for Edward, who knew more than he could ever say A pity for Bernard and Aniela who knew nothing. A pity for George Fielding whose love turned sour and Melanie who came on as substitute to play Misery. And John, too. There was pity for John somewhere.
The scale of these dark reflections obscured all thought of Anselm’s one remaining task: the confrontation of his old school friend, the person who’d sent him to Warsaw to find out why Roza had come to London. Instead his mind went elsewhere, seeking a diversion of its own. And it went somewhere altogether interesting.
Mooching round his cell before Compline, warmed to the point of injury by that first sound of bells, he recalled that Roza Mojeska and Father Kaminsky had something in common. Unknown to the other, they’d each shared a friend: Mr Lasky the caretaker at Saint Justyn’s Orphanage for Girls. The name had cropped up in Roza’s statement as it had fallen from the mouth of Father Kaminsky In one of those flashes of certainty-without-good-cause — sudden perceptions that Anselm no longer presumed to question — he was sure that the relationship between the three people — an orphan, a caretaker and a priest — lay at the centre of the greater picture, the canvas upon which John had made a late and troubled entry.
‘Maybe Mr Lasky is part of the pity of it all,’ said Anselm, heading down to Compline. ‘A man whom Roza had known as a child, long before she faced the terrors of the night.’
Part Six
Chapter Forty
The woodshed at Larkwood remained standing by some mystery of physics not yet known to modern science. Two of three central beams were cracked. Most of the dark rafters seemed to be unattached at either end. All the main uprights, already bent, were gravely aslant. The caramel wattle and daub was crazed with deep fissures. Chunks were missing, leaving ancient silver twigs peeping out like the stems of dried flowers, their heads long gone.
‘You were right,’ said Anselm to the Prior.
‘In what way?’
‘Brack’s world. It’s a dangerous place. I wish I’d never been there. I wish I’d never tried to understand these people, the Bracks and Frenzels. You can’t get close without losing something essential to yourself. They’re leeches on your soul, they suck and suck and then excrete your best intentions in some dark corner.
He was sitting on an old piano stool. The Prior faced him, the sleeves of his habit rolled up, the scapular tucked into his belt. But for the accent, distilled from the Clyde and the Lark, he’d have stepped straight out of a Turgenev short story. In his hands was a large axe.
‘You were right,’ repeated Anselm. His tone had changed from lament to accusation. ‘I grubbed around buying information from a man who chewed up people’s lives over a bottle of Bollinger. Why did you let me go?’
‘I thought you wanted to help John,’ replied the Prior, reasonably ‘Perhaps John more than Roza.’
‘I did. I went to Warsaw for him. He asked me for help.’
‘With good reason, it seems.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’ The Prior seemed to test the weight of the axe, letting it swing like a pendulum. ‘I get the impression you wanted to give one kind of help and you’re discomfited to find you’ve been asked for another. But that’s what happens when you grasp someone’s outstretched hand: you don’t know what will happen once you start to pull.’
Relatively speaking, the Prior had been unmoved by the revelation of John’s betrayal. There’d been a lifting of an eyebrow; a slight tilt of the head as if to acknowledge that a Lebanon cedar had just crashed through the main Dorter window. But he wasn’t overly troubled by the glass on the floor and the fault in the exposed grain. These were his woods, he seemed to say He knew all about trees and why they fell. And how to cut them down, too. He tapped the axe on the ground.
‘When someone asks for assistance, Anselm, you count the dangers, you eye up the risks, and you take precautions. And then you help. You don’t count and appraise so as to take the preventative measure of leaving. You stay. You reach out, perhaps with fear in your heart, knowing that you, too, might fall.’
‘Why did he ask me to go?’ mumbled Anselm, not quite hearing the Prior’s rebuke. ‘He knew I’d find out about his mother. He knew I’d find out that he’d worked with Brack. He even gave me Brack’s old number as if he wanted me to give him a call to talk over the life and times of agent CONRAD. Why not tell me himself, outright?’
‘Because there’s more to John’s story than a betrayal. His life is more than a list of facts. Perhaps there is too much to tell, too much to reveal, too much to explain; because he’s lost to simple declarations. In those circumstances, the lost man doesn’t want to talk, he wants to be found. He wants his friend to find him. He wants him to learn everything along the way so that when they finally meet a discussion can take place, one that is deep and honest and true.’
I want you to coax them out of the dark, John had said. Failing that, bring them kicking and screaming into the light. Rough or smooth, give them a helping hand.
Anselm studied the Prior’s contracted features, the squared shoulders, the rolled up sleeves.
‘Just how much do you know?’ he asked, quietly knowing the Prior wouldn’t answer, seeing him once more at his friend’s side, long ago, listening intently to mumbled confidences.
‘Enough to be sure that John needs a helping hand. As, in fact, do I.’
He nodded towards a pile of mature, dry wood stacked high against one wall. It reached the split central beams which ran to the other side of the shed where they met another pile of timber — the green stuff, fresh cut and still heavy with sap. Anselm gingerly pulled free a log and stood it upright on the block, mindful that this partnership between the old and new almost certainly held up the roof. Large flakes of snow drifted through the open door. There was a faint, freezing breeze.
‘It was immense,’ said Anselm, standing back, hands in his habit pockets.
‘What was?’ To aim, the Prior tapped the centre of the log three times with the blade of the axe.
‘His deception. Look at his public life, his entire social existence. He wrote a dissertation applauding political values he doesn’t hold, ideas that he doesn’t accept. He teaches them now He basks in the reflected glory of every thinker whose mind he managed to pick. He’s held in awe in the senior common room because he tramped over the intellectual killing fields and came back with his mind intact.’
The Prior brought the axe down and the wood huffed and gave way.
I defended your reputation in the High Court, thought Anselm, looking at the two halves. Did you think me a fool? I stood by you and fought your corner, despite the destruction of a journal, the reluctance of a witness and a total absence of coherent instructions.
‘I’m sorry, I think you’re wrong,’ Anselm said, dragging aside the split wood and pulling free another log. He held it between his arms, leaning back against the pile, challenging the Prior’s belief in John’s willingness to be
