otherwise?
Turning the corner past the newsagent, she came into view of the river. The breeze played upon the water, tousling a small boy pulling oars out of time. She slowed, caught short by the resilient disappointment that always struck like a sudden cramp when Agnes paid homage to brute circumstance.
‘Loose ends are only tied up in books,’ she said quietly, and she pushed aside, probably for the last time, the lingering, irrational hope that her life might yet be repaired by a caring author. Agnes stopped and laughed. She turned, walked back to the newsagent, and bought two school notebooks.
2
Freddie and Susan drove over from Kensington that evening, and Lucy took the tube from Brixton.
It was like a set piece of bad theatre: Freddie standing by the bay window, Susan fiddling with the kettle flex and Lucy, their daughter, the unacknowledged go-between, sitting slightly tensed in an armchair opposite Agnes, who was reluctantly centre stage.
‘It’s called motor neurone disease. ‘
No one said anything immediately Freddie continued to avert his eyes. Lucy watched her mother keeping still, the flex suspended in her hands.
‘Gran, did he say anything else?’ Lucy asked tentatively.
‘Yes. He expects it to advance on the quick side. At some point I won’t be able to walk or talk, but I never did…’
Freddie walked across the room and knelt by Agnes’ chair. He put his head on her lap and Agnes, a mother again, stroked his hair. Susan cried. Agnes wasn’t sure if it was for her or the sight of Freddie undone. It didn’t matter. Agnes continued ‘… I never did say much anyway, did I?’
After a cup of tea, Freddie and Susan left. There’d been a surprising ease between them all and Freddie had said he’d come back tomorrow night. It felt like a family Lucy stayed on.
Joined by familiar silence, they sat at the scrubbed kitchen table preparing a mound of green beans, nipping the tips between their nails. Eight minutes later they curled up with bowls upon their knees, sucking butter from the prongs of their forks.
Agnes didn’t watch television very often but she did that night. After Lucy had left she waited with the volume off for something interesting to appear. Images flickered on the screen, throwing stark shadows across the walls, lighting her face and blacking it out.
The telephone rang. It was Lucy, checking up on her. As she put the receiver down, Agnes’ attention was suddenly seized by a grainy black and white newsreel of those elegant avenues she’d known so well, the slender trees and the sweep of the river. It was Paris before the war, almost sixty years ago.
‘No, it’s not,’ she said, looking for the remote control. ‘It’s the Occupation. All those damned flags.’ Merde! Where is it?
When she glanced back at the screen, she saw him and lost her breath — a handsome youth in sepia, with thick, sensual lips, for all the world a reliable prefect. Agnes froze, her eyes locked on the flamboyant uniform. ‘My God, it’s him. It must be him,’ she whispered. Then she saw a sombre monk shaking his head. The item must have ended.
Agnes did not move for an hour. Then, purposefully, she opened the drawer of her bureau and took out one of the school notebooks she’d bought that morning. Not the first time, Agnes was struck by that puzzling confluence of events which passed for chance: that she should decide to commit the past to paper on the day circumstance seemed to be forcing it out into the open.
Chapter One
1
‘Sanctuary.’
‘My bottom!’
‘Honestly’
The Prior, Father Andrew, was fond of diluting harsher well-known expressions for monastic use, but the sentiment remained largely the same. He was an unconverted Glaswegian tamed by excessive education, but shades of the street fighter were apt to break out when grappling with the more unusual community problems.
‘It was abolished ages ago. He can’t be serious.
‘Well, he is,’ said Anselm.
‘When did he come out with that one?’
‘This morning, when Wilf asked him to leave.’
The Prior scowled. ‘I suppose he declined to oblige?’
‘Yes. And he told Wilf there’s nowhere he can go.’
The two monks were sitting on a wooden bench on the south transept lawn of the Old Abbey ruin. It was Anselm’s favourite spot at Larkwood. Facing them, on the South Walk cloister wall, were the remnants of the night stairs from the now vanished dorter. Anselm liked to sit here and muse upon his thirteenth-century ancestors, cowled and silent, making their way down for the night hours. The lawn, eaten by moss, spread away, undulating towards the enclosure fencing and beyond that to the bluebell path which led to the convent. It was a sharp morning. The Prior had just come back from a trip to London, having managed to miss the main item on all news bulletins. He’d returned home to find a gaggle of reporters and television crews camped on his doorstep.
‘Give it to me again, in order,’ said the Prior. He always insisted upon accurate chronologies.
‘The story broke in a local newspaper of all places. By the time the nationals got to his home he was here, claiming the protection of the Church.’
‘What did Wilf say?’
‘Words to the effect that the police wouldn’t pay any heed to Clement III.’
‘Who was Clement III?’
‘The Pope who granted the Order the right of sanctuary ‘
‘Trust Wilf to know that.’ Disconcerted, he added, ‘How did you know?’
‘I had to ask as well:
‘That’s all right then.’ He returned to his mental listing. ‘Go on, then what?’
‘Wilf rang the police. The first I knew about anything was when the media were at the gates. I had a few words with them, batting back daft questions.’
Father Andrew examined his nails, flicking his thumb upon each finger. ‘But why claim sanctuary? Where did he get the idea from?’
Anselm shifted uncomfortably He would answer that question at the right moment, not now It was one of the first lessons Anselm had learned after he’d placed himself subject to Holy Obedience: there’s a time and a place for honesty, and it is the privilege of the servant to choose the moment of abasement with his master.
The Prior stood and paced the ground, his arms concealed beneath his scapular. He said, ‘We are on the two horns of one dilemma.’
‘Indeed.’
They looked at each other, silently acknowledging the delicacy of the situation. The Prior spoke for them both.
‘If he goes, there’ll be international coverage of an old man protesting his innocence being handed over to the police; if he stays we’ll be damned for supporting a Nazi. Either way, to lapse into the vernacular, we’re shafted.’
‘Succinctly put.’
The Prior leaned on a sill beneath an open arcade in the south transept wall, reflectively brushing loose lichen
