They both leaned on the wall, watching boys pull oars out of time.
Lucy said, ‘I’ve waited all my life for what’s happening now, although I never knew it.’
Father Anselm flicked something from his fingers.
‘I could never have planned it,’ she continued, ‘because so much was hidden … but even if I’d known all there was to know, there was still no thing I could do … nothing I could say. We’re all so helpless.’
They were both quiet, listening to the tidal lapping of the river. Lucy went on:
‘I’ve tried — several times — to talk through the mess I did know about, to unravel the misunderstandings, but that usually made things worse. And yet, now, the words work … as if they’ve come to life.’
The water rippled across the stones below, endlessly smoothing them.
Father Anselm said, ‘There is a kind of silence that always prevails, but we have to wait.’
They both turned and walked back to the house. Lucy said, ‘I’m going to introduce Max Nightingale to an old girlfriend of mine. I suspect they’ll get on.’
‘Someone did that to me once,’ said the monk, smiling, ‘and look what happened.’
Lucy laughed. ‘It can’t do any harm then.’
‘No,’ said the monk, ‘I get the feeling we’re all on the other side of harm.’
‘For now’
‘That’s good enough.’
By the front door they heard soft undulations with a gentle melody rising like a song.
‘That must be Robert,’ said Father Anselm, stopping. ‘Do you know what he’s playing?’
‘Yes, it’s my Gran’s favourite piece of Fauré,’ replied Lucy deeply moved. “‘Romance sans parole”.’
“‘A love song without words”,’ said the monk.
‘Oh God,’ exclaimed Lucy, ‘every time I see you I cry.
And the reserved monk took her arm in his and held it tight.
Chapter Forty-Nine
1
Anselm stood awkwardly facing Conroy on the forecourt to the Priory. His sabbatical was over. He’d finished his book and found a publisher with an appetite for trouble, and now the big man was heading back to Rome. After handing the manuscript over to his Order’s censors, he’d catch a flight home to São Paulo and his children.
They shook hands, Anselm wincing at the grip. Conroy compressed himself into the driving seat and wound down a window
‘I’ll wend my way so.
‘Come back.’
‘Sure, I’m taking something of the place with me.’
‘And you’re leaving something of you and your work behind.’
‘Pray for my kids.’
Anselm waved and the chariot of fire left Larkwood.
After Compline that night, when the Great Silence was under way, Father Andrew led Anselm out of the cloister and into the grounds, suggesting a walk.
They talked over all that had happened under a fading sky then idled down the bluebell path towards the Priory. The woods on either side lay deep in silence, restraining a cool, brooding presence. A solitary owl cried out somewhere near the lake.
‘Almost without exception, I misunderstood everything, said Anselm, his feet scuffing bracken and loose, dry twigs. ‘The list of misjudgements is too long to enumerate … all from prejudice, loose-thinking, fancy. But I’m not altogether sure Holy Mother Church helped me on my way.
Father Andrew stepped into the woods, foraging among the undergrowth. He re-emerged with a long quirky branch that must have fallen in the winds. The Prior smiled and swung the stick at the raised heads of winsome dandelions, a boyhood pastime that had come back in older years. He said, ‘She has a frail face, made up of the glorious and the twisted.’
Anselm said, ‘I still don’t know what Rome was really up to.
The Prior, harvesting, made a heavy, sweeping swish with his stick.
Anselm continued, ‘The Vatican had two reports about what happened at Les Moineaux, one of them, damning, from Chambray … the other, from Pleyon, apparently exculpatory — only it was never finished. So Rome couldn’t have known what Brionne would do when I found him and pushed him into court. He might have filled out the exculpation — which happened to be true … or he might have lied to protect himself. Either way, the face of the Church would have been saved. It’s not particularly inspiring.’
‘Like I said’ — the Prior looked around for something else to reap — ‘at times the face we love takes a turn, so much so that we might not recognise what we see. And yet, there is another explanation.’
‘Which is?’
‘Rome trusted the reputation of Pleyon over the words of Chambray’
Anselm frowned with concentration as the Prior continued, … and remember, they went to Chambray first, before they spoke to you, and he told them to get lost. His mind had been made up fifty years earlier.’
The Prior and his disciple slowed to a standstill. The owl, high now in the sky cried again. An early silver moon hung over the Priory in a weakening blue sky Anselm sat on the stump of a tree, cut down by Benedict and Jerome after the last year’s storms. The Prior, standing, looked at him directly and said, ‘And what about you?’
It was a typical question from him. It was so wide in compass that anything could be caught in its net. The Prior always threw such things when he had something specific in mind. Anselm said, ‘I lost myself, and I don’t know when it happened … I lost my hold on Larkwood.’
‘It usually happens that way’ said the Prior. ‘There’s rarely a signpost where the roads divide.’ He lopped a clump of ferns. ‘Have you found your way back?’
Anselm looked down the path to the monastery, barely discernible from the trees. ‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Good,’ said Father Andrew, delivering yet another whack.
The Prior, as was so often the case, seemed to see things not on view Anselm said, ‘I think in an obscure way I might have arrived’ — he had a sudden thought — ‘helped on my way by Salomon Lachaise … the scale of his suffering.’
The Prior rested both hands on his stick, looking quizzically at his son.
‘I can’t tell you the route. But I’ve arrived with something like … tears in my soul.’
The Prior’s gaze grew penetrating. Anselm said, ‘Millions died from hatred, beneath a blue sky like the one over Larkwood this afternoon … almost by chance, someone like Pascal is trodden underfoot like an ant, along with countless others. And yet, against that, the life of Agnes Embleton is resolved, as if there is a healing hand at work that cannot be deflected from its purpose. I just can’t make sense of it, other than to cry.
The Prior said, ‘You never will understand, fully; and in a way you mustn’t. If you do, you’ll be trotting out formulas. That will bring you very close to superstition. It can be comforting’ — he struck out at the air — ‘but it won’t last.’
Walking over to Anselm, the Prior thought for a while, leaning his back against a tree. His silver eyebrows, thick and untrimmed, for once looked incongruous on a face so devoid of guile. He said, ‘Those tears are part of what it is to be a monk. Out there, in the world, it can be very cold. It seems to be about luck, good and bad, and the distribution is absurd. We have to be candles, burning between hope and despair, faith and doubt, life and death, all the opposites. That is the disquieting place where people must always find us. And if our life means anything, if what we are goes beyond the monastery walls and does some good, it is that somehow, by being here, at peace, we help the world cope with what it cannot understand.’