‘Not quite. A private detective can only open so many doors. Max’s candour is just one string to my bow’
‘You have another?’
‘Yes. I think so.’
Father Andrew fell into an abstraction and said, ‘Maybe one day they’ll make you a Cardinal.’
Later that night Anselm heard the bells for which he had longed; he sang psalms that named the motions of his soul; but, to his faint alarm, he did not find himself in quite the same place that he had left. Or rather, a slightly different person had come back to Larkwood, not entirely known, even to himself, and he didn’t know why
5
Lucy sat in the warm darkness of her flat wrestling with two emotions, each getting stronger, each slipping out of control.
She was losing her grandmother: the foundations of grief were being hewn out of rock. But at the same time, in another part of her soul she was gaining something. The fundamentals were already in place and she hadn’t noticed them in the making. Perhaps they’d been built years and years ago. But the result was that Lucy found herself intrinsically and terrifyingly receptive to Pascal Fougeres.
The phone rang. Reluctantly she lifted the receiver.
‘It’s me, Cathy’
‘Hi…’
‘Well, do you regret missing the Turkish bath?’
‘No.’
‘Ah.’
‘Honestly, he’s just an acquaintance. ‘‘Where did you go?’
‘For a meal.’
‘Where?’
‘In a crypt.’
‘Sounds like my sort. How did you meet him?’
‘I’m too tired to explain,’ Lucy said, laughing for the first time that day
‘I’ll sweat it out of you. Give me a call.’
They said goodnight and Lucy put the phone down with a sigh. As with all misunderstandings, Cathy was on to something. Since meeting Pascal Lucy wasn’t quite her old self, and she didn’t fully recognise who she was becoming.
Chapter Nineteen
1
‘Apollo adored the Sibyl so he offered her anything she wished,’ said Pascal, turning a beer mat round in circles. A gathering of other conversations drifted from the debating room out to where they sat on the veranda. Putney Bridge lay black against a scattering of white and orange evening lights.
‘And?’ said Lucy
‘She asked to live for as many years as she had grains of sand in her hand. He granted her wish but she refused to satisfy his passion.’
‘Sounds like a good deal to me.’
‘Not entirely’
‘Why?’
‘She forgot to ask for health and youth.’
‘Ah.’
‘So she grew old and hideous and lived for hundreds of years.
‘Doing what?’
‘Her old job, writing riddles on leaves, left at the mouth of her cave.’ He sipped his drink. ‘That’s the part of the myth I like, the fragility of what she had to say; words written on leaves, easily made incomprehensible if disturbed by a careless wind.’
Lucy could only think of Agnes, the sand all but gone. She said, ‘I understand her, though, wanting to live so much.’
‘Yes, but life pushed on is always death pulled back. It comes. In a way there’s something dismal about wanting to postpone what you can’t avoid.’
‘But it can come too soon.
‘That’s what the Sibyl thought.’
Lucy admired his lack of complication — but with nostalgia: her own simplicity had been mislaid. She had seen death at work, its industrious regard for detail, and, like the men who dug up the roads, its preference for doing the job slowly
‘I think you’d get on with my grandmother,’ she said.
They had met at Pascal’s suggestion. He gave no reason; he just asked. So they sat down with no purpose other than a shared inclination to know one another better. Leaving the Sibyl behind, Lucy raised the key question:
‘What do your family think of you dropping journalism for all this?’
‘Not pleased at all.’
‘Do you mind if I ask why?’ She had the sparkling enthusiasm of a specialist.
Settling back, like a long-distance driver who knows the road, Pascal said, ‘It’s all about guilt, really’ — he flipped the beer mat — ‘even though none of us were around at the time. To put it bluntly, the whole family ran off to the south, leaving my great-uncle Jacques behind in Paris. Okay it was his choice, but it’s an unpleasant fact. If they’d stayed with him, maybe they could have done something after he was arrested.’ He sipped his beer, thinking. ‘That’s probably not true, but it’s one of those peculiar notions. Once thought, it won’t go away They settled on the Swiss border and Jacques was deported to Mauthausen. They survived. He didn’t. The lack of symmetry says it all. After the war they made sure Jacques was remembered. It was all they could do. Schwermann and the rest had vanished. So I grew up with a complex memory of remorse, pride and what you might call unfinished business.’
But, as Pascal explained, the family memory had become complicated by the political career of his father, Etienne, and the complex mood in France during the 1960s. Myths assembled after the war to smooth out the realities of Occupation — the mix of resistance and cooperation — had come under attack. Heroes were denounced, villains rehabilitated. And it was within this public struggle that Pascal’s father had deftly trodden the political stage. He’d had considerable ambition and a considerable problem: his father, Claude, had been a supporter of Vichy and he couldn’t refer to Jacques’ exploits without placing a spotlight on collaboration and plunging his name into the maelstrom of conflicting views about the past. So while Pascal had grown up with a memory of stolen retribution, the official family line on war crimes had become one of merciful forgetfulness. Let the past bury itself. Thus, when Paul Touvier was arrested in the late eighties, Etienne had been for understanding the moral complexity of the time, but the high-minded Pascal, then seventeen, had advocated judicial retribution. After all, he’d been a French servant of the Reich. That row had caused no lasting harm. For his parents it had been just one of the more extensive entries in the Register of Differences filled out by Pascal as he defined himself against them, made colourful by adolescence and by that fact destined to fade back into unanimity once he’d grown up and seen things as he should.
Pascal did grow up, and things did fade, but, as always happens, far less than his parents expected. He became a political journalist with a side-interest in Vichy, producing one or two scoops about notorious figures who had lived comfortable lives in post-war France undisturbed by their past. This was closer to the family bone, and,
