Anselm drove Salomon Lachaise to Long Melford, a town of Suffolk pink not far from Larkwood. Having parked they walked into Holy Trinity Church, a huge construction more like a cathedral, its magnificence built upon medieval piety and the wool trade. Salomon Lachaise removed his heavy glasses, squinting with wonder at the windows and the empty stone niches in the chantry, once the home of solemn apostles. They passed through a churchyard to the Lady Chapel.
‘This was a school after the Reformation,’ said Anselm, pointing to a children’s multiplication table on the wall. Salomon Lachaise quietly studied the enduring markings of long, long ago. He said, ‘It is a kind of mockery, but one cannot survive without shame.’ He pressed small hands deep into cardigan pockets, making them bulge. ‘It is something I could never tell my mother.’
‘Why?’
‘Her peace grew out of my being am ordinary boy doing his sums at school like all the others.’
Anselm said, ‘But why shame?’
‘Because you cannot escape the sensation that you have taken someone else’s place.’ He looked closely at the wall. ‘It’s like a debt to heaven.’
They stepped outside, back into the churchyard. Salomon Lachaise said, ‘When I was a boy my mother used to say that hell was the painless place where everything has been forgotten. ‘
‘That doesn’t sound so bad.’
‘It couldn’t be worse.’
‘Why?’
‘Because there’s no love. That’s why there is no pain.’
They walked beneath a milky sky shot with patches of insistent blue. Anselm looked up and asked, ‘Then what’s heaven?’
‘An inferno where you burn remembering all that should be remembered.’