The Sixth Lamentation Read Free Page A

remained as they came, in three cardboard boxes
strapped with tape which he stacked in the corner of his living room and used
as an inelegant resting place for coffee cups and take-away detritus. Anselm
would then recover and continue his life at the Bar until ambushed by another
God-ward impulse. It was a sort of guerrilla war for which he was always
unprepared and ill-equipped. And all the while his book collection became
larger, more comprehensive and unread. Eventually he stopped buying books. He
realised one day while looking through a wide-angle lens that he wanted to become
a monk.
    It was
a slightly odd experience. On leaving the Court of Appeal one late November
afternoon, he was stopped in his tracks by a Chinese tourist who never ceased
to smile. Several gesticulations later Anselm stood beneath the portal arch of
the Royal Courts of Justice looking into the camera of a total stranger.
    Suddenly
he felt the urge to put the record straight, to say:
    ‘Look,
you’re mistaken. I’m not who or what you think I am; I’m a fraud.’ This happy
man from a faraway place had pushed an internal door ajar and Anselm knew at
once what was on the other side. He set off down the steps with incomprehensible
protestations ringing in his ears — from himself and from the tourist who’d
inadvertently nudged him away from the Bar. Taking the bus to Victoria, Anselm
walked past the bookshop and into Westminster Cathedral, where he sat down
beneath the dark interlocking bricks of the nave and prayed. It was to be the
only moment of near certainty in Anselm’s subsequent religious life. The
jostling between doubt and perseverance was to come later. But at that time he
understood, at last, what the underlying problem had been. It had been Larkwood
Priory all along.

 
    Chapter Two
     
    1
     
     
    Lucy Embleton made a stab
at the washing-up and then took the tube to Brixton, knowing her grandmother
would do them again. They’d cleaned out all the beans and even squabbled over
the cold ones lying limp in the sieve. It was macabre, for Agnes would soon be
gone, and eating had suddenly become a singularly futile activity. Waving
goodbye, Lucy sensed every gesture now had another meaning that each of them
would recognise, but never articulate, shaped by the torpid proximity of death.
Her spirits sank into a chilling silence: a part of her past was almost
complete and she’d never even understood it.
     
    Lucy was twenty-five years
old and had spent a large proportion of that time trying to understand her
family’s winning ways. She had never been able to locate any particular moment
of crisis within the family history that might account for the present
entanglement. It was more of a cumulative happening constructed out of tiny,
otherwise insignificant building blocks tightly pressed together and cemented
over time. As a child she asked penetrating questions borne of innocence; she
guarded the answers with such care that, when she was older, confidences
rained upon her — but never from Agnes or Arthur. Lucy became the one in whom
the different facets of the past had been consigned, as if she was the one to
bring them all together. And from that privileged position she concluded that
if there was a simple explanation for what her father called ‘the mess’, it lay
in the war years.
    The
received history was as follows: Agnes was half French, half English, and had
lived in Paris during the Occupation. She was there when the black shroud from
burning oil reserves hung over the city. She saw the German troops taking
photos of ‘La Marseillaise’ on the Arc de Triomphe. She heard the thin, high
voice of Marshal Pétain say he made a gift of himself to France, that he would
seek an armistice with Hitler. About this period she was able to talk. It was
the time after that had to be handled carefully, if at all. As a child, Lucy
was small enough to inch under the fencing with her curiosity, moving from one
month to the next, into the