7
Nick came to Larkwood not so much because Roddy had urged it upon him, but because it was fitting. He’d begun a kind of journey with Father Anselm, and now it was over; there were no more secrets. It was the right time to say goodbye.
‘Because I’m a monk,’ said Father Anselm, wrapped in a long woollen cloak, ‘I am a creature of ritual. Symbols help me understand things.’ They were sitting on a bench of dressed stone – a chunk of the medieval abbey It faced the Lark and a row of empty plant pots. ‘Your mother and I sat here at the outset of her endeavour,’ he continued. ‘Perhaps it’s not a bad place to examine where it ends.’
A week ago, Nick had felt irritated at his father’s desire to protect, the energy spent on leaving his son unscathed. He’d found it patronising. Nick was a grown man, a doctor. He’d swum with cane toads. But now he knew that Walter Steadman had been his grandfather, killed by a boy who’d grown to kill as a man and who, for good measure, was Nick’s half-uncle. Roddy had come round to explain these niceties because, following Riley’s confession, a trial became inevitable and Nick would soon find out – if not from him, or his father, then the national press, who would probably be competing with one another for the most punchy by-line to describe his mother. It transpired that Roddy had known of Elizabeth’s short time on the street, but no more. He’d learned the rest from Father Anselm.
After Roddy had tumbled into a taxi, Nick finally appreciated his father’s bullish resistance. Even after Elizabeth’s death, Charles had clung on to a slender hope: that Father Anselm would fail; that Mrs Dixon would enjoy a long and private retirement. The matter of Walter Steadman had been the issue upon which Nick’s parents had been most divided. And Nick wholly endorsed his father’s reading of the compass: what was the point in bringing it out into the open? Why had she set up this dreadful, public annihilation of the living? For whose benefit? Only that of the dead. Nick wanted to be protected, frankly and left unscathed. He had said all this to Father Anselm on the way to the bench of dressed stone. Worm out, he slumped down, arms on his thighs. He looked ahead at the river and the teetering plant pots.
‘Your mother ran away from a house in which her father had been murdered,’ said Father Anselm steadily ‘She didn’t admire the man, although he’d made a claim upon her affection. That must have been difficult for her: to see his brutality, and his gentleness; to wonder how both could rise from the same soil; to try and give credit for one while condemning the other. She was, of course, just a child. And it was as a child that she turned her back on the gravest offence known to the criminal law. She’d made an unspoken agreement with her mother to remain silent, as though it were a payment she owed to her abused sibling. Elizabeth could do this only by wiping out her past – every memory, every smell, every taste, every sound – and by creating a new history of imagined sensations. And she succeeded. She launched a career, she married and she had a child. But then the half-brother she’d protected appeared in this wonderful universe of her own making.’
The monk reached down and picked up some twigs. He snapped them, while he thought himself into this other livid experience.
‘When Riley instructed your mother to represent him, he did so, in the first place, to silence George. But there was more to it than that. He wanted to destroy an achievement that, to him, must have been an unbearable sight. Since their last meeting, she had changed beyond recognition; while he, the other runaway could only look upon the same squalid reflection. So it’s worth pausing to consider what Riley now demanded from your mother. In the first place, he was holding up, like a mirror, her silence over Walter’s murder. He was saying, “Look well, look hard: your position as an officer of the court is a sham, it always has been; and your likeness is just as soiled as mine.” And nowhere could that have been acutely felt than when Elizabeth was obliged to cross-examine Anji, staring – as she must have been – at the unhappy face of her past.’
Father Anselm looked to Nick, inviting him to speak, but his mind had drained of everything save what he now heard. It was of course a fancy but there was something in the monk’s manner, his choice of words, that seemed to speak truly of Elizabeth, a mother who’d wanted to speak to her son.
‘Now, what did Elizabeth do in that terrible situation?’ Father Anselm reached for more twigs. ‘She surrendered. But why? This woman had given her life to the law, she believed in due process. How could she suffer his winning, and the defeat of everything she had valued? That is the most taxing question. I think I know the answer.
‘Riley asked for your mother, believing this: She helped me once; she’ll help me again. That was a huge error of judgement. Elizabeth had changed in more ways than he could imagine. Her attachment to the law was so great that I think she would have seized the opportunity to expose the facts of her life, regardless of the personal cost. But she didn’t. What Riley didn’t know, and this is what saved him, was that Elizabeth now had a son. Nick, I think she cooperated with Riley for you. To protect you. To leave you unscathed. To keep intact the world she’d created for you with Charles.’
Nick didn’t like Father Anselm using the words of his own complaint, but the monk did so kindly and tentatively as if he were passing them back across the counter. Nick looked to the river and a strange mist rising on the other side, stretched thin like a silver table. In a kind of daze, he listened to Father Anselm’s exposition.
The price paid by Elizabeth was high, he said reluctantly By continuing the case, she broke the rules of her profession. By asking him to cross-examine George, she hoped, nonetheless, to lose the trial. Even that went awry because, unfortunately the stooge had been lucky. Throughout the following years, nothing unsettled Elizabeth’s resolve to remain silent – not the letter from Mrs Bradshaw, not the death of that poor woman’s son. The strong spirit of her childhood had returned. And being so resolved, she lost her faith in the law -just as long before she’d lost faith in her family.
‘But then,’ said Father Anselm, ‘something of capital importance happened. Your mother learned that her days were counted – a moment which, I am sure, has a stillness all of its own. And in that quiet she recognised that a great lie had been allowed to take root, and that unless she acted, it would define her life. The problem, of course, was that it was too late. Your mother had already made her choice. She’d done Riley’s bidding. And it is at this stage, I think, that Elizabeth’s story becomes what my father used to call a corker. She decided to alter the past by changing how everything would end.’
The monk was smiling encouragement. He stood up and with a tilt of the head suggested a walk. They quietly followed the Lark and crossed a small footbridge. On the other side, they entered a field that was hard underfoot. Without a path, they tracked a furrow towards the table of mist.
As you know,’ said Father Anselm, ‘your mother devised two schemes. The first was for George: to let him take away the good character of the man responsible for the death of his son. She went to extraordinary lengths to succeed because she hoped to restore his self-worth. But a great part of her energy, I am sure, arose from a blinding desire to see Riley convicted of any offence of this kind, however trivial in the eyes of the courts; to have him proved a pimp. That outcome was denied her. She failed.
‘The second scheme was for herself: to bring Riley to court for a murder whose evidence she had helped to suppress. To succeed, Elizabeth had to convince her mother to reveal what she knew to the police. She failed again.’
They had reached the centre of the field and stopped. The mist was just above head height, rolling within itself.
‘It might reasonably be said,’ observed Father Anselm wryly ‘that I was the contingency plan. And I too failed, comprehensively’ He fixed Nick with an enquiring, kindly gaze.
‘Who persuaded my grandmother to speak?’ asked Nick. Whether he liked it or not, he felt himself a part of the narrative; as if it were his proper concern.
‘You did,’ said Father Anselm, quietly fervent. ‘She didn’t want you to live a lie – as she had done; as her children had. For no one knew better than your grandmother the cost of a lie.’
The monk started walking aimlessly his hands moving with suppressed animation.
‘It was only when I met Mrs Dixon that I understood the importance of what Elizabeth had set out to do,’ he said. ‘Once she’d decided to reclaim her past, the only available means was the legal system that she’d abandoned. So through each of these schemes, she was hoping to restore justice itself. She saw afresh – I’m sure of it – that the rule of law matters, that our attempts to punish matter, that to show mercy however clumsily matters.’ Father Anselm turned to Nick, wrapping his cloak around his body A man had been killed – your grandfather. Brute or not,
