Part Four
‘They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour …’
(Laurence Binyon, ‘The Burning of the Leaves’, 1942)
Fourth Prologue
Agnes could no longer lift her arms or head, but her fingers moved and she could still use the alphabet card if everything was held in place. There were still some things that had to be said.
She was fed by drip now, procured by Freddie when he insisted that his mother would not die in a hospital bed but in her own home. Everyone diligently fussed over her needs, not realising that Agnes didn’t care, knowing nothing of the carnival that raged out of sight.
For within her the heavens were lit by repeated explosions of fireworks, with every shade of blue and green and yellow and red, splintering into trillions of gleaming particles against a vast stream of silver, dancing stars. They fell as a shower upon her raised head, on to her lashes, balancing precariously on each curved, counted hair before tumbling joyously over into the abyss beneath, where she would soon follow after the reunion with Robert that would surely come. She had entered upon a timeless, enduring, secret benediction.
Chapter Forty-Five
1
The reliability of a wartime revolver after decades in a cupboard was literally a hit and miss affair. Unlike capsules of potassium cyanide. Which struck Anselm as a happy imbalance in the scheme of things, given Lucy’s misguided attempt to provoke Victor’s suicide.
It transpired that Victor had had no intention of killing himself at all. Like all men who have known grave dependence on alcohol, he had a certain clarity of mind that was sharpened when drunk. And so, confronted with a young woman whose level of foolishness reflected the degree of her distress, he’d thought it prudent to accept the offered gun. After Lucy had gone he’d pointed the barrel at his face, looking into the dark, narrow hole. It had been, he said, a sort of playing, an acting out of the preliminary steps to an oblivion that had its attractions but which he would not choose. How could he? No matter what personal suffering he had endured, no matter the scale of moral compromise, there was Robert, the children and the grandchildren. They rose like flowers from the catastrophe of his life, and their splendour, however circumscribed, had a fragile, redemptive quality. He lived for them. And now, Victor had learned that they lived for Agnes.
And yet, but for the protecting hand of luck, Victor would have shot himself. Upon lowering the barrel, the hammer suddenly discharged, held back (it turned out) by a hairline trigger. The round went off, destroying a rare copy of Doctor Johnson’s dictionary that had cost Victor most of his retirement lump sum.
Victor was kept in hospital overnight, on account of his bitten lip and presumed shock, and released the next morning, whereupon Anselm paid him a welcome visit at home.
‘As I told you before,’ said Victor, ‘I had always seen the irony of my predicament — on paper, I was the one who had betrayed The Round Table. So when I came to England I decided to set the record straight, if you will forgive the expression. The idea came to me when I was wondering how I might conceal my identity still further. I decided to change my name a second time. What name? I thought.’
‘Brownlow?’ interjected Anselm with a faint, querying smile.
‘The man who rescued Oliver Twist,’ replied Victor. For him it was an old joke, lame but enduring, a sniff at adversity.
‘Of course,’ snapped Anselm. ‘I knew I recognised it.’
Abandoning the advantages his education and talent would have brought him, Victor then chose factory work as a long-term hiding place. For most of his employed life he stood by a conveyor belt putting lids on jars of mustard. He saved what he could for Robert’s precocious talent at the piano. He met Pauline, his wife-to-be, at a church fair bookstall. Nature ran its course and she became a mother to Robert, but he was old enough to remember her coming into his life.
‘When he was old enough to understand, I told him his real mother had died during an air raid. Disasters are always convincing.’
For twenty-six years Pauline had been his strength, the woman to whom he confided all that had happened. When she knew she was going to die from a rare kidney complaint she wrote Victor a letter, to help him after she had gone. But they were lifeless words, shapes in ink. He used to stare at them, trying to summon up the voice that had once spoken to him, her passion, her belief in him, her constant forgiveness for the wrongs of which he was a part. He’d been to confession.
‘He gave me absolution,’ Victor remembered, ‘but he refused to give me a penance. Keep talking to Pauline, he said. And I did. But her kidneys packed up and she died. That’s when I started drinking.’
All the family thought it was grief, which was true, but it was also the other burden he could no longer carry alone. He attended an expensive rehabilitation programme sorted out by Robert and found it completely humiliating — not because he was proud but because he could not disclose the reasons for his collapse.
‘They thought I was “avoiding the pain required to face the truth about myself”. I found that judgment distinctly unpalatable. It was, as with so much of my life, a hideous misunderstanding.’
They sat in silence until Anselm rose. He had a train to catch.
‘Robert will have to be told everything,’ Victor said, exhausted. ‘Difficult as that might be, the thought of it done is like … an accomplishment.’
‘I have already arranged to see him,’ said Anselm.
Cautiously, reflectively. Victor said, ‘It’s all been an inexplicable mix of misfortune and luck. But since I’m a religious man, I look to Providence. Only that rather complicates things, don’t you think? Because there’s no accounting for the graces received, set against what went wrong, without hindrance, for so long.’
Anselm didn’t have a reply for that particular observation.
2
Lucy met Father Anselm on the forecourt of Liverpool Street Station. She had wanted to see him before he went back to Larkwood Priory, to say thank you, and had duly rung him at St Catherine’s the night before. The monk stood behind his suitcase like one of those carved statues on the front of a cathedral, observing the passing world on its busy way to somewhere important. He saw her and raised a hand.
Lucy said, ‘I’m told it’s because of you I’m not going to be charged.’
‘That’s not strictly true,’ replied the monk. ‘Detective Superintendent Milby and I go back a long way He’d never have put you through the system if he could help it. But what you did was remarkably daft, wasn’t it?’
‘At the time I was watching myself,’ said Lucy. ‘It was as though the whole episode was part of a play and once I’d started writing the script I couldn’t stop. At last I was in control. I could choose the ending. But it was unreal. I just wanted to rehearse what it would be like and see it through to the end.’ She felt again the queasy warmth of guilt passed by ‘Detective Inspector Armstrong told me that, once cocked, the trigger was so light it could have gone off in my hand without me even touching it.’
‘And you would have killed the last knight of The Round Table,’ said Father Anselm, ‘the man who saved Robert. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’ The monk went on to give a short account of Victor’s true position in the weave of events. Horrified at the magnitude of her error, humbled and ashamed, Lucy said, ‘Someone must have been looking after me.’
‘I know what you mean,’ replied the monk pensively ‘That is a phrase upon which to ponder.’ He glanced at the departure board. ‘I’m afraid I have to go.