A Whispered Name (3 page)

‘However,
it’s what I found on the body that surprised me most.’

All
Gilbertine Priors prepare their dead for burial. It was a Larkwood custom that
the local undertakers couldn’t quite comprehend. During the washing down,
Father Andrew had lifted Herbert’s right arm and found traces of a most
peculiar wound. A scar ran from the elbow, round on to the forearm, across the
wrist, bending into the flat of the hand. ‘As far as I know Herbert had never
hurt himself like that in all his years at Larkwood.’

‘A war
injury, then?’

‘So it
seems.

The
Prior nudged his glasses high on to his nose. ‘Of course I kept the tags. Here,
take a look.’

They
were round and well worn, like game tokens. Anselm made a start: he’d expected
to read a name he recognised. Instead, each tag had been stamped 6890 Private
Owen Doyle. ‘Who the hell is Doyle?’

‘God
knows,’ replied the Prior.

A
letter, a book, a scar, and some tags. Anselm’s mind began to float away once
more. These relics didn’t really belong to the prayerful man who’d slept during
Compline. What did they all mean? Part of his intelligence set to work without
him, for he heard himself say ‘You can still fulfil Herbert’s request. Kate
Seymour must have given her address to Sylvester.’

The
Prior promptly left the room and returned ten minutes later, carefully snipping
the door into place.

‘She
left a business card,’ began the Prior, back by the Garth. With a fingernail he
tightened the paperclip repair on his glasses. ‘Unfortunately our man at the
Gate can’t find it.’

Anselm
closed his eyes. There was always a risk with Sylvester. His memory was half
shot, finding greatest accuracy in his youth, when the horse had given way to
the engine. His dislike of all contraptions without cogs or springs —
especially the telephone —meant that reported conversations were often garbled;
and written messages frequently vanished, though they usually turned up after a
while. This lapse, then, was no real surprise. And, in a way it was the Prior’s
fault for having kept him at reception. But he would have none other in his
place. Sylvester, he frequently argued, was the face of the Gilbertines. He
carried the community with him. He was the right monk to first meet any
traveller.

‘So
what do we do now?’ asked Anselm.

‘What
we always do,’ replied the Prior, supremely undisturbed. ‘We wait. It is always
good to wait.’

Anselm began his descent
from the Prior’s study negotiating the narrow spiral stairs. He had a strange
feeling of interlude, as before a great awakening; as when the sky is bruised
before dawn. All will be laid bare, he thought, seeing again that old man in
tears by the aspens. The fields will lose their shadows. It was a matter of
necessity. Anselm’s thoughts, however, soon turned in the opposite direction,
away from what must come to pass, towards the contingent; to the small
accidents that had helped change the direction of his life.

Chapter Three

1

It was chance that first
brought Anselm to Larkwood Priory. Aged eighteen he signed up for a school
retreat in order to avoid an otherwise compulsory geography trip. However a
glance at a vocations leaflet on the last day left him subtly changed, for the
words slipped deep into the housing of his mind and heart. In the years to come
they rattled the bolts between the two and tapped insistently upon the more
obscurely located windows. He learned in due course that Herbert had written
them:

We
can’t promise happiness,

but if God has called you to be here

you will taste a peace
this world cannot give.

This pledge tracked Anselm
from schools in England and France to university at Durham and a career at the
London Bar. And so did its geography: Larkwood itself had touched his life,
leaving a sort of wound that would not heal. While progressing in the law from
hit and miss performances in the Bow Street Magistrates ‘Court to the
occasional scintillating triumph at the Old Bailey his inner eye remained upon
a folding of low hills, thick trees and a mishmash of pink and russet tiles.
The clumsy chimes from the bell tower floated over the Suffolk dales, the M11,
and a maze of London’s streets, to reach a spacious flat in Finsbury Park,
where they reminded Anselm that peace might yet be his. A special kind of
peace. The words on the leaflet were like a voice by his ear.

Being a
lawyer, Anselm examined the main clause. Peace was on offer ‘if God has called
you to be here’. There was, unfortunately no room for argument. There could be
no wrangling towards an acceptable compromise. It was only when a tourist from
a distant land snapped his photograph outside the Royal Courts of Justice that
Anselm recognised the enormity of the problem: the fellow had gone away with
the wrong picture; the man in wig and gown was not truly Anselm. Defeated but
profoundly unsure, Anselm decided to return to the place of his undoing. He was
thirty It had taken him twelve years to act on what he’d read.

At
first he kept his distance. There was a charming B&B in the village and
from there Anselm made discreet excursions into the monastic enclosure. But
once upon its tangle of aimless lanes his longing grew intense, even painful.
This place was home, though he didn’t know anyone who lived there, though he’d
never been inside the cloister. Weakened and miserable, he’d drive back to his
flat and untie the red tape on the papers of another trial. This is real life,
he’d say: defending the possibly innocent or the probably guilty. But he didn’t
believe his own rhetoric. After a few weeks of terrible homesickness he
reserved the same room in the same B&B. The owners thought he just loved
the homemade Suffolk dumplings (known as ‘swimmers’ because they floated).

At
length Anselm left the lanes and bushes behind and entered the chapel. He sat
at the back, eyes on a glimmer in the sanctuary stunned by the silent
celebration within himself. Distantly and calmly he recognised that there
were
questions to be answered at some point, but that there was no urgency no
haste in finding the answers: Why does my restlessness speak of God? What are
these cowled men doing here? How can a chance reading of a promise so dismantle
one’s life? These mind—benders, and more, were all rather remote, because for
that one brief moment he felt he was dancing in the waters of life. Thereafter
Anselm abandoned the ‘swimmers’ and always stayed in the guesthouse. To no one
did he confide his growing desire to cross the gravelled lane marked ‘Private’,
the narrow lane that led to the monastery door.

It was
at this moment in his life, when the questions were well formed — ripe, one
might say — that Anselm came across an old monk called Herbert.

2

At the precise time of the
meeting Anselm was wrestling with a problem which even to his own mind was of
superficial importance. When not in court or wondering how to separate God’s
voice from his own (in a forensic sort of way), Anselm’s passion was jazz. The
earlier stuff, mainly: Louis, Bix, Bunny … Fats, Teddy Wilson, Earl Hines.
Art Tatum. He’d been thinking (wrongly as it turned out) that these wild cats
would have to be caged if he became a monk, Troubled by the notion of no more
foot tapping, he’d ambled without purpose to the limits of the enclosure where,
to his complete astonishment, he saw a battered green Cortina stuck in a ditch.
It had no number plates and the headlights had been smashed long ago. The
stranded driver was very old and obviously a Gilbertine because he was dressed
in the distinctive black habit and long white scapular. He was laughing to
himself. Anselm tapped on the window.

‘Do you
want a lift?’ said the monk, mischievously.

Fifteen
minutes later, after jamming a branch under the back wheels — a method he’d
seen in a film about commandos in the Burmese jungle — Anselm was sprayed in
mud, but the vehicle had been salvaged. He sat in the passenger seat and the
monk started asking questions, as if he’d known Anselm since childhood but had
a lot to catch up on. There they sat, not moving in the middle of the road,
surrounded by oaks and chestnuts. It was November. Every now and then a copper
leaf floated down, swooping right and left. The path ahead was covered in
acorns and split conker shells. Everything fascinated the old man. It was as
though the commonplace details of someone else’s life were further proof that
existence was wonderful. When Anselm revealed his profession, however, he
groaned.

‘Ali,
the Lord wasn’t that fond of lawyers.’

Anselm
glanced sideways. The old monk’s hair was white and ruffled, and he grimaced. ‘Law
and love, it’s not always a happy marriage.’

Somewhat
defensively Anselm volunteered another analysis, that love without law would be
licentious, and law without love would be ruthless. The monk liked that one. He
thought it through, moving his mouth round the idea as if it were a gobstopper.
Anselm was about to turn the tables and ask the old man what
he
had done
before coming to Larkwood, when, to his own surprise, Anselm’s sights shifted
target. ‘Father, what do you do here?’

The
question sprang from Anselm’s longing to understand. He didn’t really care
about previous employment histories. He’d watched the monks shuffle to their
stalls, their heads shaved and bowed, their robes long and slightly ill fitting;
and he wanted to join them, though he didn’t fully know why.

The old
monk seemed to be watching a memory out of the car window His face became quite
serene, though his lips trembled. Suddenly wistful and frail, he said, ‘We tend
a fire that won’t go out.’

Anselm
would have liked an extensive exegesis upon that remark, but he was already
learning: Gilbertines often lapsed into silence. As if he’d left out something
of importance, however, the monk added cheerily ‘I’m Herbert by the way.

He
turned on the engine and revved with such force that the car shook and birds
fled from the neighbouring trees. He rattled the gear stick and they lurched
forward with a terrifying bang. Herbert was enjoying himself immensely The car
swung off the track and bounced through a field. It slid and the wheels span,
and Anselm at once understood how the car had ended up in a ditch in the first
place. By the time they reached the Priory Anselm was rattled by fear. With
forced calm he said, ‘I came across you by accident. What would you have done
if I hadn’t turned up?’

The
monk thought for a moment and said, ‘Nothing happens by accident.’

3

In retrospect — though one
can never be sure of these things —Anselm considered himself altered by that
meeting with Herbert.

The
following morning he woke to a certain brightness in the room; on rising, he
felt well-toned and athletic, though he was a man who looked darkly upon
strenuous exercise; throughout the following months his mind seemed well aired
and, for once, simply furnished. While cross-examining a belligerent policeman
he realised that his own private questions no longer stood as riddles above the
door to monastic life. Which is not to say that they’d been answered. In
meeting Herbert Anselm now understood that it is faith which seeks to
understand, not understanding that seeks faith.

Confidently
and freely like a man leaving his house wide open, never intending to return,
he decided to become a Gilbertine monk. As a first step towards asceticism he
put all his jazz collection in a crate by the bin. There was no more serious
gesture of which he was capable. He said goodbye to Bix and all the other
tigers.

Unfortunately
the powers-that-be at Larkwood didn’t immediately share Anselm’s enthusiasm.
The novice master suggested he dwell upon Isaiah, Chapter 11, verses one—ten, a
passage which Anselm later read with horror, because it laid out the wondrous
qualities of a good judge. The community was pushing him away, he thought, back
to the law, to the misery that would desiccate the marrow in his bones. Of
course it was wise counsel: they had to be sure; and he had to clearly
appreciate what he might leave behind. But Anselm refused to be discouraged.
For two years he knocked tenaciously upon a heavy door that only opened ever so
slowly, ever so cautiously He looked through the gap, seeing more and more; and
the community looked back like puzzled badgers in their set. In fairness, each
side blinked once or twice, wondering what they might be letting themselves in
for, but each eventually formed the sort of merciful judgement described by
Isaiah. Aged thirty—four, jazz records in his bag, Anselm’s feet finally
crunched upon the gravel of a lane marked ‘Private’. The door was already open
and he stepped into the silence he’d first discovered in the woods nearby when
he’d been lost to the world, when he’d not yet found himself.

It is a monastic practice
that a junior member of the community is given the task of helping an old monk
— literally someone for the elder to lean on. The junior helps him manage the
night stairs, brings him tea laced with illicit Scotch, steals the newspaper
from the library or takes him out for a breather when it’s not too cold. While
these and other mundane tasks are carried out, the elder — in return —usually
comes to share his understanding of the silent life. It is a kind of deep
teaching by default.