‘You kept your promise.’
‘Yep.’
‘Which was why you couldn’t tell me anything during the libel proceedings.’
John nodded.
‘What’s changed John?’ Anselm removed his glasses, and held them up to the light of the fire. Cleaning them on his scapular, he said, ‘You’ve kept that promise for twenty-eight years. Why break it now? I’d have thought…’ He paused, suddenly understanding.
John counted the steps back to his seat and carefully lowered himself into the armchair. Taking his drink, he nursed it again and said, ‘Roza knocked on my door last night. She wants my help after all.’
Anselm listened with the helpless compassion that he often felt in the confessional. He identified with other people’s lives and dilemmas; he railed against the random sequence of events whose ordering caused as much grief as any want of goodness. John evidently blamed himself for Roza’s collapse. He was the one who’d badgered her for that interview And someone had used the circumstances to engineer her spiritual obliteration.
‘She rang first,’ explained John. ‘There was no “How are you?” or “Long time no see”. She just said she was in London and went straight to the point. “John, I wear two wedding rings. You’ve seen them. The second belonged to my husband. He was shot in nineteen fifty-one. Pavel, and another man… they were killed like beaten dogs. I was there, in the cellar of Mokotow After my release, I could do nothing for him, for both of them, except wear the rings. I feel them every day; I’ve never forgotten the sight and the sound of that gun, or the face of the man who pulled the trigger.” She was whispering hard and I told her to slow down but she sort of pushed past me, her English breaking up as she ploughed on.
Roza had switched to her mother tongue, speaking with deadly emphasis.
‘She said, “You, too, have seen his face. It belongs to Otto Brack. He arrested me at the grave of Prus in nineteen eighty-two. Do you remember?” I said I did, and then her voice dropped even lower. “When we got to Mokotow, he warned me that if I ever chose justice for Pavel consequences would follow, that he’d expose the informer he’d used to catch me… he’d spill their past all over the floor. Then he let me go. Do you understand what he did? He gave me power over their future, a power that could end their life or save it.” Her voice cracked again and seemed to vanish down a hole and I just waited and waited… and all 1 could hear was her breath dragging at the other end of the line. Then she said, cold and quiet, “That power… I’m going to use it.”‘
John gave the remaining exchanges without commentary. Anselm seemed to pause in a Hampstead corridor, listening hard.
‘Why now, Roza?’
‘Because sooner or later someone else will name the informer.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. There are files in Warsaw Lawyers are reading them.’ John paused to light another Sobranie, struggling with the matches. ‘If they’re named later, Brack might be dead. I have to act now’
‘Absolutely’
‘But the informer must know that I don’t seek to condemn them. That’s not my objective, it’s not what I want.’
‘That’s… generous, Roza.’
‘If they face the past, then I can, too. This is the only way to catch Otto Brack.’
‘Yes, I see that now’
He leaned forward, feeling for an ashtray.
‘You once offered to walk through fire, John, do you remember?’
‘I do.’
‘Well, I’ve written something that’ll help you get to the other side.’
‘You better bring it round. We need to look each other in the eye.’
Sitting back, it was as though John had put the phone down in London and returned to Larkwood’s calefactory, short of breath and vaguely agitated.
‘She obviously wanted me to find the informer, to reassure them and appeal to their conscience, prior to some sort of meeting… but she couldn’t see me of course, she didn’t know that I’m as blind as a bat, that all I could do was stumble in the dark.’
‘Did she come round?’
‘Yep.’
‘And?’
‘I made roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.’
‘Any reference to that fire?’
‘No. We just talked about the old days. No mention of Otto Brack. Just a passing shot at the Shoemaker.’
‘What about whatever it was she’d written?’
‘Kept it to herself. Seems Braille didn’t get a look in.’
‘What then?’
‘She left.’
‘Just like that? No proposal to meet at the Tate or the Festival Hall?’
‘She was too upset. Couldn’t see her, of course, but she held me by the arms once more and I knew she was leaving me as I’d left her the last time, a devastated woman. She realised I couldn’t help her, that Brack had won again.’
He’d finished his whisky with an intake of breath and seemed to be waiting and listening, as he’d waited and listened to Roza on the phone. The resulting space in the conversation seemed to have Anselm’s shape, so he filled it.
‘John, what is it you want me to do? You said you needed a lawyer, someone to be your eyes and hands.’
The wood had ceased to spit or hiss. Embers glowed, turning black and red. Outside the rain had stopped and a wind had begun to loosen the trees.
‘I want you to do what I can’t do,’ said John, resigned and tentative. ‘I want you to walk through fire. I want you to find out who betrayed Roza Mojeska in nineteen eighty-two. And once you’ve found them, I want you to coax them out of the dark. Failing that, bring them kicking and screaming into the light. Rough or smooth, give them a helping hand.’
Chapter Eight
Anselm went to his cell and threw open the window, wondering how he was going to tell John that life’s changes intervene. If John was blind, Anselm was lame. He was a monk, now, not a lawyer. He couldn’t go where he pleased, even for the sake of lost justice. The trees began to lift and sway in the darkness, restless and strong, fighting back. Looking towards the lights in the guesthouse, warm and comforting, like banked fires on a headland, he thought of other trees, and other storms, of first disclosures and the binding, unforgettable confessions of childhood.
Anselm first met John at the school gates, shortly after his eleventh birthday His father had just driven off and tears were rising in a great wave of sadness, their force jamming in his throat. He was about to sob when he heard a twig crack among the rhododendrons that fenced off the woods which flanked the school entrance. Peering into the darkness Anselm saw a stained face, a stiff white shirt, and ruffled sandy hair.
‘What are you doing in there?’ asked Anselm.
‘I’m not entirely sure, to be honest,’ said the boy emerging with a trombone case in his hand. On his back was a leather satchel. He whistled nonchalantly and looked around, as if he often made irrational excursions into nearby woodland, instrument oiled for action just in case he came across a brass band. He, too, had been crying. Anselm understood at once. His parents had gone, and, unable to let anything else go, the boy had wandered about the school grounds clinging on to his music and his books as if they were someone’s hands, finally hiding in the trees when the weight of isolation grew too heavy, when the indignity of tears erupted into this grown up world of boys who didn’t cry, least of all for love of one’s family.
‘Are you new?’ asked the boy.
‘Yep.’
‘Good.’
There was nothing else to be said for the moment. They’d each found their Man Friday They were going to survive. They shook hands and swapped names.
Neither of them, in the true sense, had been abandoned, though from Anselm’s perspective there’d been an element of shipwreck. Two years earlier his mother, Zelie, had died of cancer, leaving her husband, Gilbert, bereft in his soul and all fingers and thumbs in the home. A chancery lawyer not gifted in the management of emotions, least of all those of other people, he’d been unable to handle the grief of his five children. They’d all started swearing in French with shocking ingenuity. There was no obvious link, but boarding school for the three oldest eventually surfaced like a message in a bottle, bobbing up and down on the waves of unchartered feeling.