And they had both known Jacques — an interesting fact that had escaped the family education of Pascal Fougeres.
Anselm shook his head, ruing the scheme of things that only allowed him to discover great truths by accident.
3
They travelled in silence for a mile or so. The roads were empty and the evening sun was beginning to dip behind the darkening trees.
‘Who’s Agnes?’ Pascal said.
A cold, crawling sensation spread over Lucy’s scalp: it’s a fact, he’s never even heard of her. Proudly vehemently, she said, ‘My grandmother.’
‘And the child?’
‘Her son.’
‘The father?’ He’d guessed the answer: his own history, the redactor’s script, had been torn in two.
Lucy checked her mirror and pulled into a lay-by near a farm gate. The sun slipped further down, a dying blaze. She said, ‘Jacques Fougeres, your great-uncle:
‘What happened to the boy?’
Lucy couldn’t read his expression. Resentment and despair choked the words.
The whole story would now tumble forth. Pascal wound down his window, pulling in a slap of cold fresh air, and Lucy broke her promise to Agnes.
The late evening sky had acquired a faint glamour, like the surface of the sea, deep but impenetrable. Lucy drove into the advancing night, the obstacles that had lain between her and Pascal floating all around — broken words on a rising wave, a swell made of two rivers suddenly joined.
Chapter Twenty-Three
1
Pascal rang Lucy on her mobile while she was having lunch with her parents. Her father sat at the head of the table; her mother had just left the dining room for the kitchen. The opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth, electrified and appalling, blared out from Lucy’s pocket.
‘Destiny, I presume?’ asked Freddie woodenly
Lucy took the call.
‘I think a little miracle happened when we were at Larkwood Priory.’
‘It passed me by’
‘Meeting Max Nightingale.’
‘You’re joking.’ She thought of him with revulsion. ‘I call that unfortunate. ‘
A long moan of hopes betrayed floated out from the kitchen. As usual her mother was battling with milk and powder, strong adversaries that would not be reconciled.
Pascal said, ‘I don’t know why he threw that question in about your grandmother but he hadn’t the faintest idea who she was.’
‘That’s not a miracle.’
‘But if he knows of her, he may well know of Victor Brionne… and his name.
Her father realigned his plate, clinking it against a neatly laid dessert spoon.
Lucy said, ‘But he’s not going to tell you, is he?’
‘I’d like to find out.’
‘You’re joking again.’ Lucy sensed the future, predatory and inevitable.
‘I’m not. In a way he’s no different to you or me-Lucy spat, ‘How?’
‘He’s part of the aftermath. He’s not a criminal. I’d like to meet him, it’s just… right… and I couldn’t be bothered to work out why’
‘I have to go,’ said Lucy The approval of her father flowered in a smile. Phone calls during meals were not encouraged. It had been one of Darren’s specialities, done on purpose.
The call ended, and Lucy’s father said, ‘Dreadful things those. Who was that?’
‘Just a friend.’ The barricade on her private life appeared. Her father scouted around for an opening, looking for light between the slats: ‘How’s your study getting along?’
‘Not so bad.’ The phrase sealed a gap. Lucy had detected the true meaning beneath her father’s question: ‘You made a hash of Cambridge so please don’t fail again.’ She thought: fail who? You or me? Who do you really think lost out in my growing up? Shocked by her own charity she answered: we both did, terribly and she suddenly wanted to touch him. She took her father’s empty plate and laid it on hers. When were they ever going to forget the past? Why were they cursed to remember everything?
Her mother came into the room, hands on her hips, her face fallen: ‘I’m afraid there’s lots of lumps in the custard.’
‘Oh God, not again,’ said her father as he reached out for Susan’s hand.
2
Anselm drove Salomon Lachaise to Long Melford, a town of Suffolk pink not far from Larkwood. Having parked they walked into Holy Trinity Church, a huge construction more like a cathedral, its magnificence built upon medieval piety and the wool trade. Salomon Lachaise removed his heavy glasses, squinting with wonder at the windows and the empty stone niches in the chantry, once the home of solemn apostles. They passed through a churchyard to the Lady Chapel.
‘This was a school after the Reformation,’ said Anselm, pointing to a children’s multiplication table on the wall. Salomon Lachaise quietly studied the enduring markings of long, long ago. He said, ‘It is a kind of mockery, but one cannot survive without shame.’ He pressed small hands deep into cardigan pockets, making them bulge. ‘It is something I could never tell my mother.’
‘Why?’
‘Her peace grew out of my being am ordinary boy doing his sums at school like all the others.’
Anselm said, ‘But why shame?’
‘Because you cannot escape the sensation that you have taken someone else’s place.’ He looked closely at the wall. ‘It’s like a debt to heaven.’
They stepped outside, back into the churchyard. Salomon Lachaise said, ‘When I was a boy my mother used to say that hell was the painless place where everything has been forgotten. ‘
‘That doesn’t sound so bad.’
‘It couldn’t be worse.’
‘Why?’
‘Because there’s no love. That’s why there is no pain.’
They walked beneath a milky sky shot with patches of insistent blue. Anselm looked up and asked, ‘Then what’s heaven?’
‘An inferno where you burn remembering all that should be remembered.’
