5
Lucy went to Chiswick Mall and listened to the news with Agnes. There was a lengthy report on the evidence of Doctor Vallon. Agnes listened impassively while Lucy broke ice cubes in a saucer, feeding the melting fragments to her on a spoon. Agnes turned them over in her mouth like boiled sweets, her eyes glazed as one hearing a dull story on a wet afternoon.
Time mocked the survivors, thought Lucy. Everyone who lasts long enough becomes an end point in history, and then they must listen to others pass judgment upon what they have not known. But even after all this time, could there be any serious doubt? Schwermann must have understood the circumlocutions of his masters, just as Pam had understood Freddie’s.
Chapter Thirty-Four
1
In the natural course of things, Father Andrew made many decisions, passed off as ‘suggestions’, that Anselm was unable to fathom. One such was the proposal that Anselm ‘might’ show Father Conroy the North Country on the way to finding Victor Brionne. To Anselm’s mind sightseeing did not blend with the task of confronting a fugitive collaborator. But the ‘suggestion’ had been made. There was some sense to the proposal: it transpired that Con was writing another book after all (only this time he intended to ignore its likely condemnation by Rome). Frequent travel to the library at Heythrop College, London, and hours of drafting at Larkwood had worn him out. He needed a break.
And so, on the day Lucy listened to the considered views of Doctor Pierre Vallon, the two men left Larkwood first thing after Lauds. With Conroy at the wheel they sped north, the skies getting wider and brighter, the horizon flatter and longer. Anselm’s mind opened like a plain and he saw scattered here and there, like totems, the outline of those who had recently crossed his path; and Conroy sang wonderfully mournful songs to himself about a betrayed woman and her abandoned child, a young father on a British prison ship and a ditty on violent child abuse. You had to cry; you had to laugh.
Anselm turned his mind to the conversation with Father Chambray the night before, noting bitterly how apposite it was that the truth should finally have made its way out in a confessional. Father Pleyon, a monk of Les Moineaux, had betrayed The Round Table. Unforeseen executions had followed. And by an inexplicable, almost comic quirk of circumstance, Father Pleyon had become the new Prior. Why was it, thought Anselm, that chance so often assisted the wicked? Schwermann and Brionne had been handed a lifeline just when they might have been brought to justice: their accomplice had become the Prior and had lived long enough to secure their escape.
But Father Chambray had pieced together some fragments. He had read the signs. He had told Rome and they had done nothing. And, in dismay, he had left his Priory and his church, a priest for ever in a wilderness without sacraments.
‘Con,’ said Anselm, ‘would you mind not singing for a moment?’
‘All right, so.’
‘Tell me again what Sticky Fingers told you.’ Anselm had already been told, but he wanted to place the little Conroy had found out in context now that he had spoken to Chambray
Conroy pursed his lips, thinking. ‘The Vatican Secret Archive holds two reports from Les Moineaux, and both had been withdrawn by your man Renaldi in early April 1995.’
‘Just after Schwermann was exposed.’
‘Aye. The first was written by Chambray shortly after the end of the war.
Anselm knew what it contained, and he would soon see a copy
‘The second was written a year or so afterwards by Pleyon, just before the Lord called him to Himself. It was sent on to Rome by the new Prior with a note saying the old skin didn’t get a chance to finish whatever he wanted to say
Anselm, like Father Chambray, could now read the signs that had fallen into his hands. He placed himself before an earnest, sincere Monsignor quietly watched by an attentive Cardinal, each knowing the whole narrative set out by Chambray But they had only disclosed the incomplete report of Pleyon, knowing it was the beginnings of a self-preserving fiction. ‘I’m trying to protect the future from the past,’ the Cardinal had said.
Conroy returned to his singing and Anselm slept. They lunched and then pressed on, saying little. As late afternoon cloud gathered over the rolling Cheviot Hills, Conroy pointed to the signpost directing them to Victor Brionne’s hideaway After a few miles of empty, windswept road they reached a display board, informing the unwary that Lindisfarne was a tidal island. They were just in time to cross the narrow causeway before the cold, slate-blue sea crept over the sands and cut them off from the mainland. By the time they had found their bed and breakfast, booked by Wilf the night before, no one could reach or leave the island.
When night fell, Anselm left his companion in the bar and wandered outside, over to a cluster of solid monastic ruins, a fortress carved out of the sky. Standing alone with the wind in his face, he joined himself to the Celtic monks who had once gathered beneath brooding arches by a sea that ran to the ends of the earth; he said the psalms of Compline, as they had once done, while the sharp night enclosed him. Then he walked along a rocky shore towards a large house with its windows lit, the curtains left open. A wooden plaque on a gatepost bore the name ‘Pilgrim’s Rest’. Anselm leaned on the adjoining wall, concealed by darkness, looking in upon a play of domestic contentment.
Robert Brownlow sat at a piano. Adults and children, seemingly endless in number, passed to and fro across the glass as if on a stage, each with a walk-on part. Most were laughing, cans or cups in their hands, little boys and girls with beakers spiked with straws, and no one seemed to notice the old man seated by the window, looking out into the night as if he were alone.
That must be Victor Brionne, thought Anselm, and none of his family realise he carries a secret, except perhaps Robert. All available generations had gathered for a bash, untouched by the trial in London that had never been more than words in a news-. paper, remote but disturbing if read, destined to be thrown out with the cold leftovers within a day or so. Anselm suffered a stab of grief on their behalf, Was it really necessary to pull down what had been built over fifty years? Should the little boy with the beaker have to lose the grandfather he thought he had? Or go to school and hear whisperings or taunts? But then Agnes Embleton was approaching death, unknown to the judicial process, a forgotten victim. Lucy had once been a child with a beaker spiked by a straw but she had not been spared by ignorance. The vindication of one family entailed the destruction of another.
Anselm turned away heavily, wishing dearly that he did not have a part of his own to play: the awful role of the minor character who brings the news he does not understand, whose brief speech shatters unsuspecting lives, and who then walks off for a smoke in the dressing room. That would be Anselm’s contribution to the Brownlow family history.
Brownlow Again Anselm strained to recover a stirring at the back of his mind evoking a pleasant sensation. It was a name he’d known as a boy
2
Max Nightingale’s studio was a single room above a pet shop in Tooting. He said he lived elsewhere but a camp bed stood folded in the corner next to a small fridge, a Primus, a wobbly clothing rail and other innumerable signs of sustained habitation. Leaning against each wall were canvases stacked three or four deep. The walls themselves were covered with work in progress. Light swam among the colour. It was extraordinarily peaceful.
Max was self-conscious but seemed pleased to bring Lucy and Mr Lachaise into his private place. He glanced easily at the walls as if they represented a quiet gathering of his silent family, not one of whom had the capacity to cause acute embarrassment.
