Anselm made for a quiet place beside the river – the place he’d brought Elizabeth when she’d turned up, all of a sudden, three weeks ago. A narrow flowerbed ran along a wall to an arch. Passing through, he turned right and sat on a bench of dressed stone – remnants of the medieval abbey, turned up by one of the tractors. The Lark splashed in front between the shoring of black timbers. Elizabeth had sat beside him. ‘I need your help,’ she’d said, quietly.
Thinking of that conversation now, Anselm recalled an earlier impromptu meeting ten years earlier – their last, in fact, before he’d left the Bar. Within a month he’d be at Larkwood. He’d been at home in Finsbury Park listening to Bix Beiderbecke knock out ‘Ostrich Walk’ when the doorbell rang (Anselm was a fiend for all jazz prior to an indefinable but tragic moment some time in the 1950s). It was Elizabeth, clutching a box of Milk Tray.
‘I don’t expect you’ll taste such delights in a monastery,’ she said. They sat in Anselm’s small garden eating chocolates, and reminiscing, while Bix moved on to ‘Goose Pimples’. They talked of the job and its strange compromise.
‘We always stand on an island,’ she said, ‘the cold place of not knowing, and not being able to care.’ Her hair fell forward: it was straight and black and cleanly cut, like a queen’s in the days of pharaoh. A silver streak marbled one side. It had appeared quite recently almost overnight. ‘We never know if they’re guilty, and we can’t care if they’re innocent. The terms are, of course, interchangeable. And yet, we do care; more than most. But we’re marooned from our conscience.’ She looked at her hands, checking the palms. ‘I’m sure there’s a trial out there for each of us, which could slip between the not knowing and the not caring and pull us off that beach.’
Anselm reached for the praline and Elizabeth smiled thinly.
Then and now Anselm was struck by her forcefulness, for Elizabeth, like many prosecutors, had been inclined to perceive guilt in anyone who’d been charged. It was a sort of infection, caught through excessive exposure to flimsy defences. ‘You’re lucky to be called away from it all,’ she said, adding cheekily ‘Did you hear a voice?’
A quiet one,’ replied Anselm. ‘I’ve had to learn how to listen.’
Her question had been a joke, but she’d become serious. ‘How?’
‘It sounds through your desires.’
Elizabeth thought for a while, as though examining the pointing on the yard wall. ‘You listen by heeding what you want to do?’
Tentatively Anselm explained what he’d learned. ‘Yes. But it’s deeper than any desire. It won’t let you go. And even then you need a guide who knows the ways of the heart, in case you’re deceiving yourself.’
Elizabeth seemed to snatch a thread. ‘Someone to help you understand a voice that won’t be stilled.’ It was as if she’d decided to become a nun. She knew the score already.
‘Exactly.’
‘And to ignore it would bring a kind of death?’
Smiling, Anselm studied the curtain of hair with its strands of silver. This was a wind-up, after all. She must have been reading a manual on the spiritual life.
Elizabeth went on, ‘So you don’t have a choice?’
‘Not really’ This was no prank. Anselm wanted to revive the cheekiness that had fled. ‘I get the impression God isn’t that keen on dialogue. It comes with the territory of always knowing what’s for the best.’
She took the praline from the second layer. ‘Are they a strict lot, these monks?’
‘Not especially… Well, they are.., but about things most people wouldn’t care about.’
‘So you can pop out on little errands?’
‘It’s up to the Prior.’
‘What’s he like?’
Anselm thought of the various things he could say: that he didn’t talk much, that he was always one step ahead of you, but he said, ‘He pops your illusions.’
At the door she kissed him on the cheek and said, ‘I shall miss our little chats.’
It was a truth neither of them had ever named: on a Friday they’d often been the last to leave chambers. For fifteen minutes or so, they’d sit, feet on the table in the coffee room, going over life, prodding its verrucas. But it showed up a peculiarity in Elizabeth’s personal relations. The different aspects of her life – the Bar, the family, the Butterfly Society, and so on – were screened off from each other like beds in a hospital ward. As far as Anselm was aware they were never brought together round the one table. He had only heard of the others. It had made their chats significant while keeping him at a distance.
Anselm went to bed uncomfortably sure that Elizabeth, like all examining barristers, had wanted to find out something, without letting him know what it was. And while he’d been talking, Anselm hadn’t been able to dispel the notion that Elizabeth wanted to speak herself, and that the inclination had ebbed away. For days afterwards he thought of that silver streak in her hair. She was, he concluded, very attractive. It was as though he’d never noticed before.
‘I need your help,’ she’d said, quietly, ten years later.
Again she’d come unannounced. Anselm brought her to the stone bench by the Lark. The long flowerbed was bright with planted daffodils and wild poppies. She’d hardly changed. Though she was in her late fifties, her hair remained jet black with that dash of silver, less bright now.
‘I once asked if you’d be free to do errands, do you remember?’
Anselm nodded.
She reached into her bag and pulled out a box of Milk Tray ‘You can have the praline in caramel.’ Bix seemed to be with them, blowing ‘Ostrich Walk’ in the distance.
Anselm said nothing. Monastic life had taught him this much at least: to know when to be quiet.
With a delicate gesture, Elizabeth placed the fall of hair behind an ear. Her profile was exquisitely drawn against the pink blur of Larkwood. Looking towards the river, she began to speak. ‘I’ve been tidying up my life. It isn’t easy But there’s always something we can do, don’t you think?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘We can’t be lukewarm. That’s the only way to mercy or reward.’
Absolutely’ He’d use that one on Sunday He waited, silent again. Elizabeth took an envelope out of her pocket, turned to him and said, ‘Could you do something for me?’
‘Of course.’
‘It holds a key and an address.’
Anselm took the envelope.
‘If I should die – it does happen – use it.’ She looked around, at the river, the herb garden, the arches of the old abbey ruin. ‘It opens a safety deposit box. Inside you’ll find what you need to know.’
She rose and walked to the bank of the Lark. Anselm followed, keeping slightly back, puzzled by her solemnity and his new responsibility. They listened to the chattering water. It was autumn. Aelred had lined up potted plants on the other bank, as if they might like the view, but most had turned away to face the sun. Quietly Elizabeth said, ‘You mentioned once that to ignore a voice would have left you bereft.’ She added, with regret, ‘You listened. I turned away.’
Lamely Anselm said, ‘It’s never too late.’ It sounded awful.
‘I hope not.’
‘We can salvage anything.’ That was worse. He didn’t even know what he meant, but it was encouraging. He tried a serious kind of joking. ‘Don’t be lukewarm.’
Elizabeth nodded thoughtfully, her gaze fixed on the Lark.
Lightly, she said, ‘You can’t always explain things to your children. If need be, will you help Nicholas understand?’
‘Yes, of course.
They walked side by side to the car park among the plum trees. The fruit was soft, ready to fall. Elizabeth quickly kissed him goodbye and rummaged for her keys to avoid his attention. Once again Anselm sensed she’d come to say something but had stepped back. After she’d driven away, he retraced his steps to collect the unopened box of chocolates.
Anselm stayed by the river brooding over these two encounters – impulsive actions, linked it appeared, despite the interval of so many years. Before he could trawl his imagination for the explanation, Larkwood’s bells began to peal, calling him to vespers. Nipping through the cloister, he saw a huddle of monks in the South Walk. He paused and listened to their muted conversation. A policewoman – someone called Cartwheel – had arrived a few
