Light. Seaton nodded. He could smell animal piss and sweat now strong on the snow, follow the dark stench of its fury through the tunnel in the trees of the havoc mauled by whatever creature had preceded them.
They talked and drank mulled wine and made love into the night, the cabin dark except for log embers fading in the grate and the twinkling through the window of night fishermen around their braziers, camped on a frozen lake a mile distant through trees. Maybe it was the woods and the memories they recalled in him that did it. Probably it was the path through the woods, forged by the beast. But in the small hours, in the still and the vastness as he held his Danish lover under their blankets and they drowsed, he called out a tender name that wasn’t hers.
Where was home? It was a vexed and vexing question. Before his mother’s death, he would have said Dublin, city of his birth and youthful bruises, education and near-indelible voice. Since then? Surely it had to be London. London was home.
And so he went from Canada to Dublin. And he knew nobody there really intimately, on the outside of a grave. He was isolated. He was, of course, lonely. But loneliness, to Paul Seaton, was by now as is an itch beyond the scratch of reaching limbs. He was resigned to his isolation. It was as normal and regular a condition to him as the regular requirement to breathe. Loneliness had been so long with him, he almost didn’t notice it. And he would have stayed in Dublin. Without fanfare, the 1990s arrived. He got a research job at Trinity and a flat on the canal and life was not intolerable. Prosperity started to change the city, giving its people a pride and purpose he’d never known there as a child. He would have stayed, except that one day, he realised that he was no longer haunted. He was free of the haunting. He stood still on Grafton Street on a Saturday afternoon and sensed only shoppers and tourists and heard only the music made by chancers with acoustic instruments in their hands and caps twinkling with coins on the pavement in front of them. He turned around and looked for dim expected figures, walking dead across the flagstones. But there were none. With a wilfully steady intake of breath, as he passed Brown Thomas, he looked at the reflection cast by one of the great department store’s sombre windows. He could see himself pictured in the glass. He could see, behind him, the moving panorama of the street. But nothing spectral, watching, grinned sardonically back at him. It seemed the haunting had ceased. And so he decided to go back to London, where he had been truly happiest, if only for a brief time, and where he knew he was truly most at home in his damaged Irish soul.
Seaton finished his story and then listened for a while to the silence that followed it. The night had passed peaceably enough for the patient sleeping her narcotic sleep above their heads. She had not stirred. Mason had smoked steadily as he listened, the occasional frown his only reaction to what he was being told. They were in the room with the expensive hi-fi equipment and the pretty landscapes painted by the St Ives School of colourists on its walls. The pictures had just been dark oblongs in the night. Now their detail was accruing cautiously, as November light leaked through the wooden shutters over the ground-floor windows. But the storm of the night before, which had threatened the Wavecrest panes with bursts of pounded shingle, had blown itself out. And mercifully, they’d been free of music since leaving the car. All through his story, Seaton had expected the sardonic accompaniment of uninvited song from Mason’s speakers. But none had come.
‘What do you think?’ he said.
Mason looked at his watch. He looked up towards the ceiling, as though looking through the floors to where his sister lay. He lowered his head and levelled his eyes on Seaton.
‘I’ve got a Land Rover garaged in Tankerton. It would take me twenty minutes to get some gear together, maybe another thirty-five to load it so it’s concealed. The ferry crossing could be risky, because ammo is heavy and sometimes they’ll weigh a vehicle. But it’s unlikely, unless we’re very unlucky. And we’ve both had more than our share of bad luck already. My instinct is to try to do what I did to that thing in Africa. But my intuition is that I don’t know everything I need to. There’s stuff I feel I’ve not been told. Know your enemy, they say. Fucking right, I say, if you want to survive. If you want to have a chance of coming out on top.’
‘I’ve told you everything,’ Seaton said.
‘Malcolm Covey,’ Mason said. ‘Even his name sounds like a fucking anagram.’
‘Oh, he’s real enough.’
‘And he sent you to me, didn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would you mind telling me why?’
‘We need to talk to the priest,’ Seaton said. ‘We need to go and talk to your Jesuit. Covey told me we’d be wise to do that, before attempting to do anything else.’
Mason pondered. ‘Ever think that Covey wasn’t coming entirely clean with you?’
‘Always,’ Seaton said.
‘Who is he?’
‘I don’t know. As God is my judge, I don’t know. But I spent an hour with him the other night in a bar adjacent to St George’s Cathedral in Lambeth. And he was most insistent that we need to talk to the priest if we’re to have any chance of saving the lives of the girls.’
‘Why does he say you have to go back there, Paul? Out of the goodness of your heart?’
‘He always said it. He always insisted that one day, I would have to go back.’
‘Why?’
The air in the room was yellowish and bitter with smoke grown stale. The light drifting now through the shutters suggested one of those autumnal days that never brightens noticeably beyond its enfeebled dawn. Even the rhythmic slap of the water on the shingle below sounded tired. Seaton sighed with fatigue and the spent effort of all his recent reminiscing.
‘Malcolm Covey said I would have to go back, because the dead don’t bury themselves.’
Mason snorted. He said, ‘What’s that, some sort of psychiatric riddle?’
‘I don’t think so. I think he was just stating a sad and unfortunate fact.’
Mason was still for a moment. Seaton knew this was a man who was very seldom entirely still. Then he shifted and blinked. He looked up again; up through the layers of his inherited house, towards where he no doubt hoped his sister still slept her dreamless sleep. ‘That priest must be so old and frail by now. He was very old in Africa. And Africa was almost seven years ago. And then there’s the job of finding him. Christ.’
‘He’s at a retreat in the French Alps,’ Seaton said. ‘A former monastery, above the town of Chamonix. Covey told me. Covey told me that’s where we’ll find him.’
‘Somewhere secluded he’s gone, reconciled, to die,’ Mason said. ‘Who is Covey?’
‘I told you. I don’t know. I’ve never really known.’
Mason nodded. ‘Get some kip,’ he said. ‘We’ll sleep for a couple of hours and then we’re going for a run to help clear our minds before the trip.’
‘A run?’
‘You were fit once, weren’t you?’
‘Don’t you want to leave immediately?’
‘I don’t want to leave at all. My instinct is to stay with Sarah. But my being here doesn’t seem to be helping my sister very much. That said, I don’t think important things are very often, if ever, achieved in haste. And to be really honest, if I don’t sleep first and then burn off some of this tension, I’m likely to hit something. And you are the clear and present target.’
‘I haven’t got any kit.’
‘I’ll lend you some,’ Mason said. ‘I’m fucked if I’m running on my own. And running kit, mate, is the very least of your problems.’
They took the train to France from Ashford and caught a connecting TGV, mostly full of skiers. On the journey, Mason told Seaton about the condition of the other surviving girls from the ethics seminar. He’d established contact with the families of the English girls in the aftermath of the funeral he’d clandestinely witnessed. Both were in hospitals, sedated and on suicide watch. The American student, older, apparently tougher, had been restrained by air stewards trying to open an emergency door on a flight home, six miles above the Atlantic. She was wearing restraints in Bellevue, now, her distraught parents swapping vigilant shifts outside her room.
The TGV was quick. But Chamonix was the Alps. It was forty-five chilly and discouraging minutes before they were able to find a taxi prepared to take them to the address above the village provided by Malcolm Covey.
‘How do we know he’ll see us?’
‘Covey said he’ll be expecting us.’
It was cold inside the taxi. Colder outside, as they climbed higher and the air got thinner. Seaton rubbed his glove against the condensation on his window. It was a borrowed glove, one of a pair of Mason’s skiing gloves he’d been lent for the journey. Splashes of snow looked luminous between the trees in the pond of view the knuckles of his hand had rubbed against the glass. He shifted against the car’s upholstery. He felt his leg and back muscles, stiff and tender after their run of the morning. The run had been long and hard. Mason was as well-conditioned as he looked. But the unaccustomed exercise had left him feeling better than he could have imagined. The car started to climb a steep gradient that pushed him back in his seat. He watched condensation encroach on his diminishing pond of view. It bleared to a puddle. They were rising through the tree line, the boughs coniferous and dense. Through the windscreen, in yellow headlamp glare, snow twirled downward in slow thickening flakes. Music crackled into life on the cab radio, the Quintet of the Hot Club of Paris, the gypsy virtuoso Django Reinhardt nimble on the frets of his guitar.
‘
Merde!
’ their driver said, stabbing buttons on the dash. Behind him, in the light from the glowing radio, his passengers swapped a glance.
They were left on the cobbles of the monastery courtyard by the cleric sentry who answered Mason’s pull on the door-bell. It was snowing more heavily now, wet flakes that clumped on to their shoulders and bare heads as they waited. Seaton’s impression, looking at the dark arches and the walls above them, was of stone chilled to indifference by centuries of winters like the one on the way. It was a bleak and ancient building. Yellow patches against the brooding mass of the place, sparse and without warmth, suggested candlelight burning through the windows of odd cells and cloisters. Seaton shivered. But only with the dampness and the chill. There was no sense of menace here. That was entirely absent. There was none of the feeling he had felt first in his own flat, so strongly in the humanities block at the university in Surrey; nothing of the subtle foreboding he had felt even in Richard Mason’s house at the edge of the sea in Whitstable. This retreat was a true refuge. How far you had to come to feel safe! He shivered again, aware that Mason was studying him.
They were shown into a large room lined with leather-and vellum-bound books. A fire of pine logs burned in an iron grate and made the air sweet with the scent of resin. The smell brought a pang of hunger to Seaton’s stomach. They had shared breakfast on the train from Ashford but had eaten nothing really since. A cleric came into the room dressed in the brown fustian and rope belt of a Franciscan monk. He was carrying a tray. He gestured for them to sit in chairs to either side of a wooden table and placed bowls from the tray in front of them. The bowls were filled with a thick dumpling stew. He put down a platter, heaped with chunks of bread. ‘Eat,’ he said. ‘Please, gentlemen, eat freely.’ His English was harsh with mountain vowels. ‘You are to meet with Monsignor Lascalles. You will need for your bellies to be full.’ He laughed at whatever joke he thought he had made and poured water from a pitcher into pewter goblets for them before turning to go.
‘Without wishing to sound ungrateful,’ Mason said, ‘when it comes to monks, I’ve always had a preference for the Trappists.’
Seaton sipped water from his goblet so cold it bit into the nerves of his teeth. Mason tore bread with strong fingers and shoved a piece into his mouth and chewed. Seaton thought he should try to make conversation, make a joke of his own, make light of the circumstances. But he couldn’t think of anything funny to say. And Mason seemed to be avoiding his eyes. He was suddenly struck by the feeling that Mason was nervous, meeting the old priest. So, like his companion at the table, he ate in silence. The only sound in the room was occasional sharp cracks and bursts from the grate as heat exploded pockets of resin under the bark on the burning logs. Both men concentrated on their food until their bowls were empty under resting spoons. Then the handle turned in the door and Lascalles came in.
They stood. The priest bowed his head briefly, twice, once in courtly acknowledgement of each of them. He wore a soutane to his ankles and his head was bare. His white hair was cropped severely short. He was tall in the soutane and looked very thin. When he walked towards them, Seaton saw that he wore old shoes, vigorously polished to a painstaking lustre. And he felt a completely unexpected and hugely strong wave of pity for the old priest. For his fragility and his proud unflinching faith.
He wondered would the three of them somehow prevail. Fate linked them, perhaps even predestination. There was something Gothic and strange, and at the same time recognisable, about their situation in this remote and Catholic keep, with its roaring logs and walls of scholarly vellum. It reminded Seaton of the fictions of Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker. Three men, civilised and formidable, gathered to plan an assult on the forces of evil armed with valour and learning and staunch moral rectitude. It was a plot that seemed reassuringly familiar from the torchlight reading of his youth under the blankets of his bed. Except that he had been to the Fischer house. And the reality of it was so black and hopeless with evil that it made a nonsense of the cosy collusive fantasy he was tempted to indulge in now. You weren’t staunch in the midst of the slippery chaos dwelling in the gloom in the mansion in Brightstone Forest. You were helpless. You were prey.
He looked again at the priest. The skin was like taut tissue paper over his facial bones. At one temple, in the firelight, an artery beat feebly with the thin blood that fed his brain. His faith endures, Seaton thought, but whatever strength and vitality he once possessed can only be a decades-old memory to him. Lascalles was dying.
He looked at Mason, with his distrustful eyes and sullen cheekbones; Mason, lithe and powerful, with the look on him of an angel about to fall. There was strength in Mason, right enough. But it seemed to be entirely of the bludgeoning sort. He’d asked Mason how he’d planned to keep his sister sedated and therefore safer while they were away. Morphine, Mason told him, sourced from a tame doctor in Herne Bay. How do you tame a doctor, Seaton had wondered out loud.
‘You make him grateful. He had a problem with a gang of seafront B&B scumbags, living on benefits and demanding methadone scripts with menaces. It got worse after he went to the police. He contacted me in desperation after they beat up his twelve-year-old kid.’
Seaton had laughed. ‘How many kneecappings did you actually have to perform?’
‘Only the one,’ Mason told him.
Seaton hadn’t been able to tell whether he was joking or not.
Now, he felt a chill as cold as mountain water seep into his soul. He thought about the long corkscrew of descending turns on the snowbound road beyond the monastery walls, separating him from the skiers sharing Glühwein in their pretty cabins a thousand metres down the slopes from where he sat. Here, he was in the domain of the crag and the blizzard, high, where avalanches gathered their profound and fatal enormity. He felt lonely. It was not an unfamiliar feeling. In truth, he had spent every waking hour of his last twelve years in lonely conditions of varying intensity. But even by his own dismal standards, here and now, he felt very isolated. And it wasn’t just loneliness, was it? What Seaton really felt, what really isolated him, was fear. That was where his Rider Haggard fantasy really fell apart. He wasn’t valorous and staunch. He knew it, in the company now of these two brave men. He was a coward, mortified, alone.
In the room, the silence was broken. ‘We’ve met before, Father,’ Mason said.
Lascalles smiled at him. ‘Twice,’ he said.
Mason looked nonplussed. ‘Twice?’
‘On the first occasion, you were very young. I am not offended you do not remember. But I remember, for the joy and the relief the moment brought me. I baptised you, Nicholas.’ He smiled again, more broadly. He gestured for his guests to sit. They sank back on to their chairs at the table and he sat himself, in an armchair facing them. ‘I see I have your attention. But we need to begin at the beginning, do we not. And I suppose the beginning for me was when I met Wheatley, at the front, at the place history has come to remember as Passchendaele, in the autumn of 1917.’