The Sixth Lamentation

Chapter Twenty-Nine

1

Anselm got back to Larkwood just after Vespers, in time for a brief conference with Father Andrew before supper. They sat in the Prior’s study, looking out over the cloister garth. It was a calm evening and long shadows lay on the neat grass like canvas sheets of scenery fallen flat.

Father Andrew asked, ‘How did they respond when you said the police were powerless?’

‘With inspiring equanimity. I’d prepared myself for bewildered anger.’

‘Those close to politics often understand better than most the limits of the law’

‘There was something between them though, coming I think from the mother, something like an accusation. That is where the anger lay, the confusion. And by accident I think I trespassed upon it:

‘.Anselm,’ said the Prior dryly, ‘most of your accidents stem from intuition let loose. What did you say?’

‘We were talking about Pascal and I mentioned Agnes, that she had had a child, and I asked if she’d ever been known to the family’

‘And?’

‘The mother said absolutely nothing but the father said Jacques never knew anyone called Agnes … we weren’t talking about Jacques but he made the link.’

‘And you call that an accident?’

Anselm remonstrated, ‘Not far off. My best cross-examinations were always by mistake. I didn’t realise how clever it looked until it was done:

The Prior smiled with faint indulgence. Anselm continued, ‘Anyway I then had a most peculiar encounter with the butler. Throughout he pours the tea, sidles in, says nothing, sidles out … but when he shows me the door he tells me he knew Agnes and held her child. He then gives me a letter to deliver to Agnes from Jacques, a letter he’d guarded since the war on the off-chance she survived.’

The two monks pondered in silence. Frowning, Father Andrew said, ‘It is clear from what Max Nightingale said to you that his grandfather, somehow, knew both Jacques and Agnes. In this whole tragic business they seem to be the only ones to have reduced him to a state of panic. So they must have come across each other during the war …’ He rounded on Anselm: ‘What was that riddle you were told about Schwermann at Les Moineaux?’

‘That he had risked his life to save life.’

The Prior tilted his head as though straining to catch distant voices. His glittering eyes vanished behind long creases … but whatever he’d sensed was slipping out of reach.

The bell rang for supper. Anselm said, ‘The strange thing is, how do Etienne Fougères and his wife come to know about Agnes and her child?’

They rose and entered the corridor. The busy sound of other feet heading down to the refectory echoed from a stairwell. The Prior replied, ‘Jacques’ family must have passed it on after his death’ — he followed his insight through — ‘and in due course Etienne told his wife … but they did not tell their son, Pascal … a secret known by a paid servant, a butler … now, why’s that?’

Intuition failed them both and they went into the refectory.

2

The evening meal was the usual emetic blend of leftovers from the guesthouse. Anselm pushed something purple around his plate. There would be no knowing what it had been in its many previous lives. Afterwards, the community filed into the common room for recreation, where Anselm joined Wilf in his usual corner by the aspidistra that no one watered but yet miraculously never died. It was one of Wilf’s greatest attributes that he used events in his life as a prompt for research into things about which he knew nothing. After Schwermann’s arrival he had quietly buried himself in reading about the Occupation and its aftermath. He liked to share his findings and Anselm enjoyed his reported forays, marked as they were by the wonder of David Bellamy having found a new snail in the garden.

‘Wartime creates its own unique moral dilemmas,’ uttered Wilf with Delphic calm, inviting a request for more disclosure.

‘Why’s that?’ obliged Anselm.

‘Well,’ said Wilf, gratified and settling back, ‘there’s the strange case of Paul Touvier. A traditionalist Catholic but in the Vichy Milice. Pushed into it by his father and a priest. So he’s French, policing the French for the Germans. ‘

‘A collaborator,’ contributed Anselm obviously

‘Indeed. And his job was to combat the Resistance.’

‘Not a very devout thing to do.’

‘Bear with me, Father. For therein lies an interesting conundrum. The Resistance assassinated the Vichy minister of information in 1944. The Germans wanted reprisals. According to Touvier, they demanded the execution of a hundred Jews. He says he bargained them down to thirty, and ordered the deaths of seven, at Rillieux-la-Pape, as an appeasement to save the remaining twenty-three.’

‘Where’s the devotion in that?’

‘Well, there isn’t any of course. Only it set me thinking. Here is a man who will, in due course, be convicted in absentia of treason. I don’t know any more about him, and what he said was probably nonsense, but it occurred to me that it was only those who collaborated who were in a position to bargain with the Nazis if the opportunity arose. That is not, of course, a reason for collaborating. But it suggests an interesting abstract principle: in certain situations, only someone who’s lost himself can do the good deed, even though he can never make atonement for what he has done.’

A shared pause of reflection ensued. Wilf picked up a newspaper, found the crossword and said: ‘Even so, I can’t for the life of me understand why Touvier was hidden in a monastery.’

‘Pardon?’ said Anselm.

Wilf repeated his observation, frowning gravely at the first clue. ‘Fundamentalists, apparently Intégristes. Not our cup of tea.’ A touch complicated, he added, because Touvier had been pardoned by Pompidou. Ten years later he went into hiding when it transpired he could still be prosecuted. He was eventually convicted of the Rillieux murders in 1994, the first Frenchman to go down for war-related crimes against humanity.

‘Hideously embarrassing for the Church when they caught him, of course,’ pursued Wilf, laying the paper on his lap, ‘if only because it dredged up the ecclesiastical compromises of the past.’ During the war, he said, the Church had been in a very difficult position. Pétain and Vichy reintroduced support that had been previously withdrawn by a viciously anti-clerical state. An alliance grew that was far too cosy ‘It was all rather complicated.’

Slightly uneasy, Anselm left Wilf to his crossword. As he got ready to clean the refectory floor he all but heard another voice, whispering, and he saw the luminous eyes of Cardinal Vincenzi:

‘It’s all rather complicated.’