The Day of the Lie (8 page)

‘Did she come round?’

‘Yep.’

‘And?’

‘I made roast beef and
Yorkshire pudding.’

‘Any reference to that
fire?’

‘No. We just talked
about the old days. No mention of Otto Brack. Just a passing shot at the
Shoemaker.’

‘What about whatever it
was she’d written?’

‘Kept it to herself.
Seems Braille didn’t get a look in.’

‘What then?’

‘She left.’

‘Just like that? No
proposal to meet at the Tate or the Festival Hall?’

‘She was too upset.
Couldn’t see her, of course, but she held me by the arms once more and I knew
she was leaving me as I’d left her the last time, a devastated woman. She
realised I couldn’t help her, that Brack had won again.’

He’d finished his whisky
with an intake of breath and seemed to be waiting and listening, as he’d waited
and listened to Róża on the phone. The resulting space in the conversation
seemed to have Anselm’s shape, so he filled it.

‘John, what is it you
want me to do? You said you needed a lawyer, someone to be your eyes and hands.’

The wood had ceased to
spit or hiss. Embers glowed, turning black and red. Outside the rain had
stopped and a wind had begun to loosen the trees.

‘I want you to do what I
can’t do,’ said John, resigned and tentative. ‘I want you to walk through
fire. I want you to find out who betrayed Róża Mojeska in nineteen
eighty-two. And once you’ve found them, I want you to coax them out of the
dark. Failing that, bring them kicking and screaming into the light. Rough or
smooth, give them a helping hand.’

Chapter Eight

Anselm went to his cell and threw open the
window, wondering how he was going to tell John that life’s changes intervene.
If John was blind, Anselm was lame. He was a monk, now, not a lawyer. He couldn’t
go where he pleased, even for the sake of lost justice. The trees began to lift
and sway in the darkness, restless and strong, fighting back. Looking towards
the lights in the guesthouse, warm and comforting, like banked fires on a
headland, he thought of other trees, and other storms, of first disclosures and
the binding, unforgettable confessions of childhood.

Anselm first met John at the school gates,
shortly after his eleventh birthday His father had just driven off and tears
were rising in a great wave of sadness, their force jamming in his throat. He
was about to sob when he heard a twig crack among the rhododendrons that fenced
off the woods which flanked the school entrance. Peering into the darkness
Anselm saw a stained face, a stiff white shirt, and ruffled sandy hair.

‘What are you doing in
there?’ asked Anselm.

‘I’m not entirely sure,
to be honest,’ said the boy emerging with a trombone case in his hand. On his
back was a leather satchel. He whistled nonchalantly and looked around, as if
he often made irrational excursions into nearby woodland, instrument oiled for
action just in case he came across a brass band. He, too, had been crying.
Anselm understood at once. His parents had gone, and, unable to let anything
else go, the boy had wandered about the school grounds clinging on to his music
and his books as if they were someone’s hands, finally hiding in the trees when
the weight of isolation grew too heavy, when the indignity of tears erupted
into this grown up world of boys who didn’t cry, least of all for love of one’s
family.

‘Are you new?’ asked the
boy.

‘Yep.’

‘Good.’

There was nothing else
to be said for the moment. They’d each found their Man Friday They were going
to survive. They shook hands and swapped names.

Neither of them, in the
true sense, had been abandoned, though from Anselm’s perspective there’d been
an element of shipwreck. Two years earlier his mother, Zélie, had died of
cancer, leaving her husband, Gilbert, bereft in his soul and all fingers and
thumbs in the home. A chancery lawyer not gifted in the management of emotions,
least of all those of other people, he’d been unable to handle the grief of his
five children. They’d all started swearing in French with shocking ingenuity.
There was no obvious link, but boarding school for the three oldest eventually
surfaced like a message in a bottle, bobbing up and down on the waves of
unchartered feeling.

For Anselm the passage
of bereavement had been smoothed by treachery. Gilbert, clumsily had instructed
his children not to reveal that an operation to save their mother’s life had
failed. ‘Let the end come like an unexpected guest,’ he’d said, like General
Custer sighting the Indians. But within days of Zélie’s return home, Anselm
broke rank. Handing her a cup of tea, he said, ‘You’re going to die.’ From that
moment she was free — free to say goodbye. Free to look upon her family with
the clarity of vision that comes from knowing the last grains of sand were
falling fast through the egg timer. In public they kept up the pretence that
she would survive while, as between themselves, there grew an excruciating
pain, a liberating simplicity coming, on occasion, mysteriously close to joy
They’d grieved while she was still alive — a gift lost on the others who’d
taken refuge in the numbness of make-believe. In the two years that followed
Zélie’s death, all that Gilbert had noticed, as he pondered what to do and how
best to manage his own incipient breakdown, was that Anselm had sworn the
least.

‘So that’s why he sent
you here,’ said John, with a sigh.

They were walking around
the cricket square. In fact, they’d walked around it three times, ultimately
missing one of the most savage displays of fast bowling attack the school had
ever known. All John had done was to try and open up the territory between them
by asking, off-hand, ‘Why did you come to Roper’s Hall?’ and Anselm had delivered
what John later called a long and sparklingly honest confession. He’d evidently
been scared off, since (Anselm surmised) most disclosures work on a
quid quo
pro
basis and John hadn’t wanted to say anything beyond the commonplace.
After all, there was a match on.

‘What about you?’ asked
Anselm, vaguely hearing another cheer from the field.

‘Eh?’

‘Why Roper’s Hall?’

‘The price.’

‘Sorry?’

‘No story such as yours,’
explained John, ruefully looking over Anselm’s shoulder. ‘My father just went
for the cheapest prison he could find.’

Of course, Anselm hadn’t
sought any treaty by mutual revelation. He’d simply answered the question, but
in so doing he deepened the contract of friendship between them. Regardless of
John’s personal reticence, or being irked at missing seven wickets in two
overs, their alliance shifted level. They became blood brothers, even though
Anselm was the only one who’d opened up his skin. They looked out for each
other. They ambled round the school corridors, hands in pockets, planning dark
mischief against the dorm prefects on the top floor.

John’s quip had
nonetheless intrigued Anselm, and did so for years. What John didn’t seem to
realise was that holding back anything important from a friend always
communicates something profound. It wasn’t that term ‘prison’ or the jibe at
the cost. Rather it was the silence within the words. As life at Larkwood
confirmed, silence has a shape and content, but even back then as a twelve year
old Anselm sensed in John’s rejoinder something momentous and defining, another
manner of shipwreck. Anselm didn’t find out what it was, or why John had come
to Roper’s Hall, until they were about to leave it, some six years later.

Final exams were
approaching and, all classes being finished, John invited Anselm to his parents’
home in Cornwall, a large, white house that faced the sea at Bude Bay There,
protected from the wind and soothed by Atlantic sunsets, they might revise by
day and revel by night. The idea was to occupy the building without the benefit
of adult interference, an objective happily guaranteed by John’s father’s
diplomatic career. Without dropping any particular clangers, George Fielding
had singularly failed to attract any major promotions, finding himself exiled
to a basement office in the outskirts of Washington dedicated to trade and
foreign licence agreements. ‘Not that happy a man,’ John had said. ‘He never
found his way out of first gear, so now he’s just waiting to retire … prior
to which the house is empty and available for our undisturbed occupation.’

Except that things didn’t
work out that way John’s American mother, Melanie, insisted on coming over to ‘cook,
clean, and entertain’. It was the latter that took Anselm’s orderly — one
might say restrained — life by storm.

‘Okay boys, you’ve been
working too hard,’ she said on the first night before they’d even opened their
books. ‘Time to play’

‘Mother, no,’ said John,
closing his eyes.

‘C’mon, you old bore,’
she replied, winking at Anselm. ‘Follow me.

She swept down a
corridor, opened a door that led to a basement, and vanished down the stairs.
Anselm tracked her descent, John groaning to God from behind. Entering a low,
windowless room Anselm saw a pool table, centrally placed beneath a frame of
harsh lights. Mel — as she insisted on being called — placed a cigarette into a
long, black holder, flicked open a silver lighter and settled a hard stare upon
the two friends. ‘Forget exams, degrees, and the ladder to high office. All
that matters, for sure. But there’s something else you need to learn. Misery
Sometimes called Alabama Eight-ball.’ After lighting up, she took a slow, deep
draught and blew a stream of smoke towards the cue-rack. ‘Let’s go to school.’

Moments later Mrs
Fielding — Anselm couldn’t quite make it down the Mel route — crouched over the
green felt, tossed back a fringe of brown hair and smacked the ball, her
dazzling teeth biting the cigarette holder.

‘By the way’ she said,
reaching for the blue chalk, ‘I play to win. In effect a tournament began which
threatened to take over the object of coming to Cornwall. Each evening they
played Misery, cracking open bottles of Budweiser, the day’s revision
dramatically pushed into the background. Anselm would have enjoyed himself
without equivocation — and not just because Mel played to lose, handing the
victor’s mantle to Anselm — if he hadn’t noticed that John was three steps
removed from the fun, that his smile was half forced, that he was — to use his
mother’s term — an old bore. With the same puzzled eye Anselm also noted, very
gradually that Mrs Fielding’s capering wasn’t so simple or spontaneous: that it
had a target; that her verbal tricks were dealt towards John; that she was
trying, desperately and unsuccessfully, to please him, to win him over. She was
too much an extrovert to show her disappointment but, as Anselm’s French
grandmother used to say, the skin speaks, too. And at the corners of Melanie
Fielding’s eyes were fine lines of suffering, deepened by a ready laugh that
they might be hidden. Anselm let the matter pass.

It was John who raised it, two weeks later
when they were back at school, drinking the remnants from a bottle of altar
wine lifted from the school’s sacristy.

‘I just love her,’ said
Anselm, pouring an inch into two mugs stained with coffee. They’d locked the door
to their shared room facing the second floor showers.

‘Who?’

‘Your mother.’ Anselm
shook his head at the memory of her face, the twang in her soft voice. ‘She’s
clever, rude, funny and irrepressible. She’s good company She’s—’

‘Not my mother,’ inserted
John.

He walked over to the
sink and poured the wine down the drain.

‘Too sweet,’ he said.

Anselm waited for John
to elaborate but, for a moment, he said nothing. He washed his mug, scouring
the coffee stains with his toothbrush. When he’d turned off the tap and dried
his hands on the curtain he came back and sat on the edge of his bed, looking
at Anselm from some distant place, far from school and the recollection of
Misery in Cornwall.

‘I’m not like you,
Anselm,’ he said, almost regretfully ‘I can’t just open up and tell you what’s
inside. I wasn’t made that way And, you know, sometimes, there are things you
can’t talk about. They have to be left where you find them. Six years ago I
found my birth certificate. That’s how I learned my mother’s name. You see,
Anselm, the difference between me and you is this: I was the one that was lied
to. I’m like your mother, only nobody sat down and told me the truth, not until
I asked; and when I did … I preferred the lie.’

John would have left it
there, but he saw the question in Anselm’s face: his wanting to share the load.

‘She betrayed my father,’
he said, frowning, loathing the harsh atmosphere roused by the charge. ‘And I
don’t appear to have featured on the balance sheet … at a time when I couldn’t
eat unless she held out the spoon.’ Shuffling back on to the bed to lean
against the wall, he looked at Anselm with undisguised envy, as if to say
parental death has its compensations. ‘I came to Roper’s Hall not because my
father thought it was cheap, but because I didn’t want to stay at home. I
needed to break out of the make-believe. Find myself. You wouldn’t understand
that.’

Gazing out over Larkwood’s restive trees
Anselm mused how these differing experiences of family trauma had shaped them
both. Speaking for himself, the loss of his mother had opened a wound on to
life itself — that the rich grass, soft to touch, rich to smell, withers too
soon, an insight that had prompted a quest and helped illuminate the narrow
path to monastic life. Rooted very much in this world, Anselm strived to see
everything as a mirror on to the other side of the fence, where the pasture was
a contrasting green, and unfading.

As to John, the effect
of the loss of his mother was a far more complex matter to gauge, not least
because her great going had been voluntary She’d turned away from her son and
husband, presumably for someone else and a new life weighed and checked as
having far more appeal. But Anselm, remembering these ancient, nearly forgotten
disclosures, now received a glimmer of understanding. In retrospect — and
Anselm had never quite noticed this before — John had always been on the move,
in search of something out of reach. Throughout his school days, as soon as he
was able, he’d run after the big ideas — from Zeno to Marx, never quite finding
satisfaction at the end of the book. He’d wrestled with theories of right and
wrong, wanting a rational basis for why one should be moral at all, searching
—Anselm thought — for some intellectual mechanism that might excuse if not explain
his mother’s conduct. At university, he’d chased the reticent, colder girls,
sometimes breaching their fragile defences, never staying with any of them for
long. They’d thought him heartless. And his first job had been in East Berlin.
The next in Warsaw He’d learned languages increasingly far from his own. If the
accident hadn’t happened, he’d probably have ended up in Shanghai. In every way
he’d been on a quest, like Anselm, only he’d never arrived at a moment of
stillness — a recollected, clear-sighted understanding of where he’d come from
and where he was going. Seen like that, Anselm recognised another facet of John’s
character. The man who searches is looking for something; and until it’s found,
he’s waiting. That was John … a man who’d been left waiting ever since his
mother turned away.