Evening light came with a faint chill. Together they retraced their steps through the fields, away from The Hermitage crouching by the stream. When they had gone a fair distance Salomon Lachaise stopped and turned, as though taking a mental snapshot of a place to hide.
Anselm said, ‘I meant to say sorry for the fact that… he is here at all.’
‘Thank you. I have to say your Prior must be singularly unconcerned about appearances.’
‘He is, actually But it wasn’t his decision.’
‘I see.’
Tact and a sudden disquiet prevented Anselm from disclosing that it had been the Vatican’s proposal. He simply said, ‘I know it looks bad.’
‘Perhaps it is bad,’ said Salomon Lachaise. ‘For someone like me it could so easily belong with all the other springs of lamentation which, I am afraid, are not simple misunderstandings. ‘
‘What do you mean?’ asked Anselm apprehensively Immediately he wished he’d let the matter pass.
‘There are too many to mention… they run wildly one into the other, from the first charge of deicide… to the expulsions of the Middle Ages… through to the complicated time of anguish, silence and diplomacy In my own way I, too, have known these.’
It was the old agonising problem for Anselm. He was forever confronting the face of a church to which he belonged, many of whose features he did not wholly recognise. He said, ‘I hope Larkwood offers you something different, another kind of spring.’
Salomon Lachaise, glancing over his shoulder, said, ‘I have already discovered one, in a place I least expected to find it.’
They walked on, the light swiftly thinning, the mad swooping of distant birds suddenly ended, leaving the sky bare, unscored. The high monastery wall grew larger, a dam between great banks of trees.
Salomon Lachaise said, ‘Do you know which great romance of literature emerges beside the pogroms of the Middle Ages as they erupted across Britain, France and the Rhineland?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘It is the poetry of the mystic king… Arthur, The Round Table and the Grail.’
‘How strange. ‘
‘It’s as though the attacks upon the Jews and medieval chivalry belonged to the same cultural flowering. And then, fifty years ago, some genius set up a Round Table to save the Jews, to redeem its association with ancient hostility.’
Anselm, intrigued, glanced at his companion. Lachaise’s head was lowered, his face dark as he said, ‘Isn’t it all the more tragic, then, that the person who broke it apart was-’
Anselm finished the complaint, to demonstrate his understanding, his profound regret, ‘-able to find refuge in the arms of the Church.’
Salomon Lachaise seemed not to have heard. They had reached the oak door in the wall. Anselm forced in the key and turned it heavily They parted, promising to meet again, and Anselm felt the slow, piercing influx of shame: he had quite deliberately said nothing about his planned trip to Rome, which had imperceptibly come to present itself as something disagreeable. Unable to shake off the discomfort, he hurried back to the Priory. Climbing the spiral stone stairs to his room, it dawned on him that Salomon Lachaise had told him everything, and yet, with calculation, with regret, he had told him nothing.