The Sixth Lamentation

Third Prologue

6th January 1996.

The slow, physical destruction was matched by an increased mental clarity, a loosening between flesh and spirit. Agnes often felt a fluttering in her stomach, as though something roped to a ground peg was trying to take off. She wondered if she was going to be sick.

Agnes had lain day after day and night after night upon her back, or on one side and them the other, Wilma doing the dutiful, turning her this way and that. And then came the ointment, and the jokes, for the bedsores. The job done, she was left alone.

Agnes never realised there was so much to contemplate in one room: the paint lifting ever so slightly on the window frame, soon to be a soft curl pulling away from the wood; the pattern of faint shadows changing imperceptibly with the movement of the cloud, lighting little things with a barely noticeable difference. But once Agnes had seen all there was to see she got very bored. And then, for no apparent reason, she remembered how Merlin had taught Wart, the future King Arthur, the art of seeing — by changing him into another animal. So Agnes imagined herself as a bird, looking down from on high at the intricate mingling of things, like a hunting kestrel afloat on a bearing wind.

She saw the boat upon the Channel, bound for France, and her father staring anxiously out to sea with a little girl by his side — a beautiful girl, standing on the first rail, her hair adrift and her red coat about to be thrown leeward before he could stop her or see the abandon upon her face. She saw Father Rochet holding her boy in a parlour, just after the baptism, staring bravely through those infant eyes to another place and another child. She saw Madame Klein by the split boards of a cattle truck, pushing other mouths away from a thin stream of air, standing on a fallen, wheezing mound. Agnes turned into her pillow with a low moan and rose higher still, above the gathering wind. Through the first swirls of evening mist she saw a light upon the Champs-Elysées and a young man behind a desk, checking address lists and the timings of the next day’s work. His face was set hard. Down she swooped, faster and faster, over the chestnut trees heavy with leaves, and into the room, through the slate-blue iris and into his shivering optic nerve.

And Agnes understood. She finally saw into Victor Brionne, the traitor. Slowly she raised her hands, frail fingers extended and shaking. She could not speak. It was too late to write anything now And she could no longer dictate.

Wilma bustled through the door with a cup of ice cubes, a saucer and a teaspoon.