Anselm dreamed vividly receiving the special enlightenment that comes from the paradox of watching oneself in action. It was as though his psyche — exasperated once more with its host’s predilection to skate past the obvious — hit back, hurling into the sleeping mind something simple but significant about John’s motivation in coming to Larkwood. Something else he’d forgotten: Faithful to the facts, the drama unfolded like a black and white newsreel from a forgotten war.
Anselm had been a monk for about eighteen months and hadn’t heard from John at all. For his part, Anselm had sent tape recordings in place of letters, describing the rough and tumble of life around a cloister. He’d told funny stories about the older duffers. He’d passed on some of the wisecracks from the Prior. But nothing came in return. With the passage of time Anselm had grown anxious because he couldn’t expunge his last memory of John: unshaven, the buttons out of order on his shirt, the coloured socks that didn’t match. And so, with the Prior’s permission, Anselm had taken an early train from Cambridge and turned up unannounced at John’s flat.
‘I thought we might have breakfast,’ said Anselm, as the door opened.
‘Have they kicked you out?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Are you wearing sandals?’
‘Yes.’
‘O God.’
Anselm followed John down the dark corridor, weaving between unopened mail and slumped rubbish sacks loose at the neck, horrified at what he’d just seen: the bloodless face behind dark glasses; the creased, slept-in clothing; the saffron stains on the open shirt. Cautiously he entered the kitchen, smelling a nauseating blend of cigarettes, stale beer and spices. The work surface and sink overflowed with filthy crockery, half empty aluminium take-away trays, empty bottles and crushed cans. On a table, by a tape recorder, lay a saucer heaped with ash and stubs. One of Anselm’s cassettes was in the deck. The others, salvaged from the corridor but still in their envelopes, were piled to one side.
‘I take it you’ve made a significant effort to continue your engagement with the local community?’ queried Anselm.
‘I feed my neighbour’s cat.’
‘You’ve sought help from professionals trained to help a talented young man come to terms with restricted vision?’
‘Don’t be shy. The word’s “blind”.’
‘You take frequent and regular exercise?’
‘Without fail. I go upstairs… and then I come down again.’
John was opening cupboards, patting his hands inside, trying to find a jar of instant coffee.
‘You’re relatively happy, grappling with the exciting question of what comes next in your life?’
‘I’m raring to go.
‘I assume you have a suitcase?’
John turned around, letting his arms drop.
‘A suitcase,’ repeated Anselm. ‘Let me pack it. You’re expected at Larkwood. I realise you’ll be leaving behind a vast, carefully constructed support network, but you’ll find another community, different help, lots of exercise and as much time as you need to grapple. Sandals, too, if you want.’
‘And a whip?’
‘No. And leave yours behind. The point of coming is to learn to do without.’
John was not the first person overwhelmed by depression to stay at Larkwood. Many tortured men and women had taken a room in the guesthouse while learning to grope through various kinds of darkness. John was allocated a room on the ground floor. In lieu of a white stick, Anselm cut down a sapling with twists and turns produced by a struggle with a winding creeper. John was given a job picking apples, alternating with bottle washing and waxing floors. He was given a structure. Early rising, quiet, work, more quiet, more work, recreation (sometimes raucous), a Great Silence, early to bed. Between times: mysteriously bad meals.
‘This is good, Anselm,’ he said after three weeks. ‘I’m beginning to find my way.’
It was a warm, grateful but cryptic comment. Anselm had anticipated that John would eventually start shaving, pick fruit and — when the moment was ripe — open up about the terror of finding himself blind, haunted by the memory of colour. However, only a portion of those expectations came to pass. He did shave. He went one step further: despite strong warnings to the contrary, he asked Larkwood’s unskilled barber for a haircut. He wandered through the orchard, arms reaching up into the lower branches feeling for apples that were ready to fall, removing them with that gentle twist required by Brother Aiden. But he didn’t open up. At least not to Anselm. In the evenings, in that quiet hour before Compline, Anselm often saw John walking with the Prior, the man whose pungent remarks had made it on to the cassette left in the tape deck. Heads bowed, they ambled along the Bluebell Walk; they sat on the railway sleeper overlooking Our Lady’s Lake; they paused in the woods, suddenly alert, as though wondering if someone had tailed them. Moving once more, the Prior listened intently his arm hooked into John’s, nudging or pulling as the turns of the lane required.
‘You’re back to your old self, John,’ remarked Anselm six months later as they rinsed bottles in the scullery. ‘And I’m glad, real glad.’
‘I’m not quite there,’ he replied, plunging his hands into the hot water. ‘But I’m learning… slowly learning… to bide my time and wait.’
Wait for what? Anselm wanted to know but he couldn’t ask. There was something confessional about John’s talks with the Prior which, by their nature, excluded repetition, even to a close friend. Anselm understood this, but it didn’t erase the jealousy: his wanting to be an important — if not decisive — part of John’s recovery. The sense of exclusion was all the more difficult to manage because John became increasingly relaxed with Anselm. He joked again, as they’d done at school. He sought him out to talk about everything but the past: he confided to Anselm not the path travelled, but his plans for the future.
‘I can still contribute,’ he said cautiously almost lapsing into the Prior’s strange Glasgow-Suffolk dialect. ‘I can write. I can teach. I can see certain things without my eyes… things I might not have seen unless I’d been forced to look in a different way Do you know what I mean?’
‘Yes.’ Anselm did. It applied to his life of faith.
John left Larkwood after seven months. By his own account he wasn’t ready to handle life alone in Hampstead but the time was right — like one of those apples that need a little twist to leave the tree. Anselm drove him home, a restored but still broken man — that contradictory state of the injured who have come to accept their injury and the limitations it brings.
‘Thanks for the tapes, Anselm,’ said John after they’d tidied up the kitchen.
‘No problem.’
‘Thanks for coming to get me.
‘Sure.’
‘Thanks for bringing me back. I can take care of myself, now.’
A pause fell between them. Anselm’s failure to reply contained the unspoken hurt: that he’d planned his own wisecracks and counsel only to find himself employed as the chauffeur.
‘Anselm?’
‘Yes?’
‘If ever I needed help — real help… with something far more difficult than what to do when you can’t see the end of your nose… I’d only come to you.
At those words Anselm woke up as if someone had snapped a thumb and forefinger.
He showered and threw on his habit, glancing afresh at the milestones to John’s professional rehabilitation. After leaving Larkwood he’d found a place at St Anthony’s College, Oxford, and completed a PhD, a meisterwerk on the contribution of dissident thinking to political theory in East-Central Europe. Honoured with a copy Anselm had confined himself to the first and last pages, thus missing those abundant references to the Shoemaker. Fortunately, more discriminating readers had considered its merits and John had been offered a tiny room in Birkbeck College, London. There, speaking from a cloud, Sobranies to hand, he’d entranced successive generations with tales of the movers and shakers behind a peaceful revolution; of how he’d once rubbed shoulders with greatness.
But the dream had left another imprint on Anselm’s mind: the recollection of something altogether personal. The bell for Lauds came like a herald: John’s request for help had been planned long ago, even as he’d stumbled through the woods at Larkwood.