loneliness and loss. It was blinding, for he trudged on, losing sight of his surroundings, save for the small stones underfoot. Birds whistled in the trees that were banked tight against the verge.
When George looked up, he saw a woman coming towards him. At first he didn’t recognise her because she was out of place. A monastery was not her normal stamping ground, although, that said, The Sound of Music was her favourite film. He became confused in a terrible way a way that had come with the beating to his head. For there were times, now, when he doubted what he experienced, when he tramped through a world that he didn’t fully understand. Such is the importance of memory, and the things it saves; for, as George well knew, it’s only by remembering the lot that we can hope to grasp the lot. And when you cannot grasp the lot, you become very circumspect indeed. But Emily was there, right in front of him, advancing along the same imaginary line as if they were on the top corridor of the Bonnington. Father Anselm appeared behind her… he ran past him, asking of Nancy and George mumbled something, keeping his eyes on this apparition from his past that was crying.
In the same drunken spirit of doubting – and of terror that someone would shortly explain what was really happening – he said goodbye to a parade of monks as if he were the Pope. The boot of Emily’s car was open… robed figures carried a crate of apples, two bottles of plum brandy and some preserved pears. He was mumbling to himself while someone took his arm by the elbow The passenger door banged shut. He opened the window as if he needed the air to breathe. A small crowd smiled and waved and Emily was at his side unable to get the key into the ignition. Someone did it for her, and she laughed into a handkerchief. A long corridor of oak trees passed slowly as if the car were standing still. The lane opened out onto gentle hills with a scattering of houses, and the place that had given him shelter was gone.
‘Emily’ said George, very sure of himself now, ‘are we going home?’
‘Yes.’
He looked at the hedgerows, thinking of the other man he’d seen in Mitcham. ‘I tried to come back, once.
‘I know,’ said Emily She understood. ‘No one has ever taken your place. Peter was nothing more than a friend. He was to me what Nancy was to you. And God knows, George, we have needed friends, if only to bring us back together.’
Emily explained that the house would look very different, that it was new and clean. The neighbours hadn’t changed but someone round the corner had bought a dog that they let loose at night.
‘Why do you want me back?’ asked George, pulling at the sleeves of his blazer.
‘Because I found you again, in your notebooks,’ she replied, reaching for the gear stick, but not changing gear. ‘I don’t know how I could have ever let you go. Maybe I lost sight of the right and left of things, the front and back, the top and bottom… everything that brought us together. I didn’t only find you, George. I found myself.’
George slept – not the sleep of exhaustion through labour, or the fatigue of strong emotion. A great weariness had taken hold of him, as though a whole life had ended. He woke somewhere in London, unsure again of his senses until the car parked outside the home he’d left so many years ago. It was very dark.
‘Can we start again?’ asked Emily her voice heavy with hope.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
They both looked through the windscreen at the antics of a stray dog. George had strong views on dogs – especially those that barked.
‘Can we carry on from where we left off?’
‘That makes a lot of sense,’ said George. ‘Of course, I can’t remember what’s happened in between.’ He took her hand. ‘It’ll be as though nothing ever happened.’
That, of course, wasn’t true. It was a joke to bridge the distance between honesty and expectation. Emily unlocked the front door and George came home, as he’d gone, without any luggage. What did he have to show for it? Nothing you could put your finger on, he thought merrily except apples, plum brandy and some pears in ajar.
10
A long-forgotten Gilbertine once had the wild notion that Larkwood’s dead should be broken up by aspen roots. The proposal had been enthusiastically endorsed without a mole’s breath being spent on the implied logistics: the need to dig through the roots for each internment. But perseverance with the shovel won out. And so, years later, white wooden crosses lay sprinkled between the slim trunks, as if they’d grown with the dandelions. A railway sleeper had been sunk into a facing bank for the comfort of visitors. Anselm and the Prior sat in the middle, wrapped in their cloaks.
‘When I look at everyone involved in this case,’ said Anselm, ‘Mrs Dixon, Walter Steadman, Elizabeth, George, Nancy me… we’re all, in varying degrees, responsible for what happened; but in varying degrees were not to blame.’
‘You left out Mr Riley’
The omission had not been deliberate, which, thought Anselm, was telling. It showed that Anselm was undecided on something of great importance. Inspector Cartwright had, with a marginal lapse of propriety, shown the text of Riley’s interview to Anselm. There were hardly any questions. He just spoke into the tape machine, sometimes so fast that the transcribing typist couldn’t catch the words. Each page contained multiple ellipses. It was (in their joint experience) a unique mixture of honesty, insight, right thinking and, fundamentally a defining self-regard. At the end, when he’d recounted all he’d done, and how and (most strangely of all) why he said to the officers at the table, ‘Look, I’m crying.’ With a hand he’d touched his face as if it belonged to someone else. Inspector Cartwright said he kept saying it, looking around the room. It was as though he were announcing an achievement.
‘The passages that unsettled me most,’ confided Anselm, ‘were those where he seized the blame. Repeatedly he said he’d made his choices, that no one had twisted his arm, that he was his own man. It read like vanity or a kind of vicious pride; as though he was holding on to what he could of himself, however ghastly it might be. And yet, in one place – almost inaudibly I assume, because the typist had put questions marks on either side – he seems to have said, “I never had a chance.” He strangled his own mitigation before it could see the light of day’ Anselm wrapped his cloak tighter, hugging his knees. ‘Was he free, even though he claimed his actions for his own? Can you be responsible if you’re so injured in the mind? I’m filled with dread at the thought that today’s capacity to choose might already be forfeit to yesterday’s misfortune.’
‘Well, it might be,’ said the Prior simply ‘But it might not. When I first went into the confessional, I believed that all evil, at root, was a wound and never a choice – and I still hold on to that, when I can. But I’ve met charming people who tell me they’ve done unconscionable things, quite freely without the benefit of yesterday’s misfortune. And I believe them. The wounded and the free: they both break windows. But there’s one narrow piece of ground upon which they have an equal footing. It might seem unfair, but forgiveness is available to each – not because they can prove they deserve it, but because they can both say sorry. I used to think it scandalous that each could be reprieved on the same basis, just as easily when the deserts of one so outweighed the other.’
‘What changed your mind?’
The Prior’s eyes twinkled. A little knowledge of myself.’ He stood up and brushed the back of his cloak. As for Mr Riley who knows where he stands? We can’t discern who’s truly free, and who isn’t, or where the difference might lie. We have to muddle along, all of us, remembering, I think, that in the end, the giving of mercy is not our lot.’
Resolutely Father Andrew followed the track away from the aspen trees towards Larkwood. He had a meeting organised by Cyril. Gazing at graves, he’d said, was an excellent means of preparation.
The winter sun was low and clouds were moving over St Leonard’s Field. The air was charged with precipitation, and the light curiously pink.
The court system, thought Anselm, would handle the question of Riley’s intentions and deserts with bracing clarity. He would receive censure, a certain amount of sympathy and a lengthy custodial sentence, which, on reflection, would be merciful to Nancy But despite his many crimes, Anselm felt pity for Graham Riley He could not easily dismiss the image of a boy collecting coloured stones and bottle tops; of such a boy casting a poker into a lake that it might never be seen again. In a sense, he thought, Elizabeth had successfully recreated herself; and so
