William Brodrick - The Day of the Lie

‘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.

The jubilant opening antiphon did not command Anselm’s undivided attention. He kept thinking of Melanie Fielding propped up in a facing stall, pool cue in one hand and a bottle of Bud in the other. Beside her stood another phantom, this one empty handed: John’s real mother, the woman he’d never named. They seemed to watch Anselm with different kinds of appeal, wanting by turns to be understood and forgiven. They were at his shoulder when, after Lauds, he tugged at the Prior’s scapular. Standing in the cloister, he spoke in a hushed voice from one cowled shadow to another, the shamble of feet around them growing still. Given the hour and the place he restricted himself to the sparest details.

‘John Fielding has asked for my help,’ whispered Anselm.

Nod.

‘He wants me to walk through fire.’

A reasonable-request nod.

‘If I make it to the other side a killer from the Stalinist Terror will be brought to justice.’

An as-you’d-expect nod.

‘Will you tell him it’s just not possible? Monastery walls, and all that?’

The Prior nudged his glasses and the two round discs glinted suddenly in the darkness. His reply was barely audible. ‘This afternoon, two-thirty’

The meeting was convened in the parlour, a bright and draughty room opposite the reception desk where Sylvester endured his long face-off with the telephone. Anselm strongly suspected that the Watchman had quit the front line trench and had scouted silently to the door where he could listen to John’s explanation.

The Prior listened, too, but in that intimidating way for which he was renowned. He didn’t move, sitting on the edge of his seat, his dark eyes alive with an intense concentration that threatened to consume whoever was speaking. His cheap wire glasses, round and slightly out of shape, seemed to have been damaged by the force behind them.

‘Where is Roza now?’ he said, the accent more Glasgow than Suffolk.

‘I don’t know,’ said John. ‘She’d gone before I could ask where she was going.’