A Whispered Name

by William Brodrick

  2

  Herbert spent the morning in a nearby village, attending a lecture for officers on the coming operation. A severe Brigade Major called Tomlinson pointed with a long cane at a model of the battlefield made of plaster-of-Paris. It had been painted a muddy brown, and there were various bright flags on cocktail sticks identifying key objectives. Red, yellow, blue, green. It reminded Herbert of a golf course. The attack would take place along an eight-mile front. The sector relevant to Herbert was at the Menin Road, where the 8th and other units would provide flanking fire to an Australian division.

  ‘This is a four-step operation,’ said Tomlinson, uttering each word with exaggerated clarity. ‘Between each stage there will be three days of consolidation and three days of preparation. That constitutes a sixday interval.’

  It sounded so very easy.

  ‘We anticipate subdued resistance,’ he continued, rocking on his heels. ‘The bombardment will be colossal. Three and a half million shells have been set aside. It will open on the thirteenth. It will increase in density with each successive day. It will inch across the German defence territory removing machine-gun emplacements and wire. It will—’

  ‘Tell Jerry that we’re coming,’ chipped in an Australian Colonel.

  Everyone laughed, including Tomlinson. It was an old joke. But, as Tomlinson observed, the old ones were always the best.

  They’re a rebellious lot, the Aussies, thought Herbert. Even the officers.

  3

  In the late afternoon, when the men were enjoying Extended Order drill, Herbert went to collect Flanagan. His plan was to walk to the field of play before the rest of the team arrived. Corporal Mackie was standing like a statue at the door. As soon as Herbert stood among the gleaming silver, he coughed and said, ‘Do you play football?’

  Herbert had expected resentment – masked, of course – but discernible nonetheless, as it was with Joyce and the rest. But Flanagan showed nothing more than the customary reserve borne from their difference in rank and station.

  ‘Well, now, Sir, I played it once with a cabbage.’

  ‘A cabbage?’

  ‘Yes, Sir. It’s a French thing, Sir.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Herbert explained that, notwithstanding such novel tuition, Lieutenant-Colonel Hammond expected Flanagan to make a sterling contribution to the winning of the Lambton Cup for the battalion. Bemused, as one might expect from a man sentenced to death, Flanagan pledged his enthusiasm, if not his talent, to the objective. On that understanding, Herbert led the prisoner into the lane. Having dismissed Mackie, they were alone.

  Throughout Tomlinson’s lecture Herbert had been unable to conjure up a conversation that might approach the Étaples incident. Instead, he began with a question he’d often thrown at a new face, to welcome them to his Company. ‘Where are you from, Private?’

  ‘The plains of Banba,’ said Flanagan, ‘Ireland.’

  Banba. The reference surprised Herbert. It revealed learning. Uncertain of himself, and who he was dealing with, Herbert escorted Flanagan towards the clump of trees that had been visible from the schoolroom. The football pitch had been laid out in a nearby field.

  ‘Whereabouts in Banba?’ asked Herbert, his voice as detached as Major Tomlinson’s.

  ‘An island, Sir … on the west coast.’

  ‘When did you last see it?’

  ‘An age ago, Sir.’

  ‘Really?’ said Herbert. ‘Didn’t you see its reflection in a cracked mirror?’

  The skin around Flanagan’s eyes creased slightly.

  ‘Tell me about home,’ said Herbert, no longer distant like Tomlinson. ‘I could do with a tale of a faraway place.’

  Strangely, Flanagan described Inisdúr from the sea, seen as he was leaving it. He’d stood at the stern of a hooker looking back at the misty rocks. Shadows thrown by the cloud hid the coves and the tiny fields – neat compartments framed with chunks of stone, marvellously laid. The dark wrangled with the light, as they struck the white gables and the fissures on the flat expanses of rock. The speckling of green and ochre glowed and died. As Flanagan drew further away, the island itself seemed to move west, trails of smoke rising from the houses as though they were a fleet of tiny boats, a whole community leaving him to his chosen future.

  Flanagan’s parents had a farm near the slip – a small harbour in a cove where the men of a morning landed their lobster pots and the catch of the night. He had a brother, little Brendan, a tyke with chestnut hair and blue-green eyes, like the sea. He’d come late to the family, when Flanagan was too old to be a true companion. Brendan would follow him around, though, looking for approval, just as he followed the men as they trod to the shore, their currachs shouldered as if they were huge, black beetles. Flanagan had been the same. All the boys wanted to carry their own boat, and to find their true place in the island’s hierarchy. There, on the slip, among tradesmen from the mainland, Flanagan had picked up his first phrases of English.

  Muiris, Flanagan’s father, had only left Inisdúr twice, and on each occasion it was to visit Inismín, where he met Róisín. Over twenty years he’d made the three fields that surrounded the family home, their soil made from sand, smashed rock and seaweed. That was the history of the island, said Flanagan. Men and women, on their hands and knees, had slowly made the ground fertile. They were bound together: man and woman and earth.

  Herbert drifted into something like a trance. It was the way Flanagan talked of the land. His respect was almost fearful. While speaking, he occasionally stretched out both arms, his fingers spread wide, as though to approach something that had to be felt to be understood: a blaze in the ground.

  ‘Róisín, my mother, was famed for her quilts,’ said Flanagan. (He’d begun to relax, forgetting – as Herbert had hoped – that he was talking to an officer.) ‘She’d scrub her hands in the pail, to wash off the milch cow, and then she’d set to work, sewing by the light of the fire … a marvellous thing it was, of blue and yellow and green and brown, the pigments of the island. Without a clock or a timer, she knew when to pause for the bread that was baking beneath the sods –’ he glanced aside, adding by way of explanation – ‘back home, Sir, you can bake with a peat fire, if you know how.’

  This was Flanagan’s inheritance. He loved it. Whole lives were played out to the sound of the wind and the sea. He wanted no other future. But then a school was built in nineteen hundred and one, and a teacher came from the mainland.

  ‘I learned my letters and numbers fast enough,’ he said. ‘A Blasket poet became my companion, Piaras Feiritéar –’ he waved a hand – ‘sure, it was all desolation and dismay, you know, but it works up the blood like nothing else. War, distant horizons, love. What else do you want?’

  The teacher, Mr Drennan, was a travelled man from Cork with a water butt for a chest and bruises round the eyes from the porter. His short legs had been to America, to England, to France. He told stories of Boston high society, where he’d tutored, and of painters among the slatterns of Marseilles, where he’d played. Flanagan listened in awe. He wanted to walk those streets and hear those other voices. But by aligning himself with the teacher, Flanagan was risking the suspicion of his elders. ‘Island folk dwelled in the shelter of each other, as we say in Gaelic, and books – the notion of writing itself – somehow ruptured the scheme of things. For many of them, the teacher was a kind of necromancer … a draíodóir. They didn’t trust his spells, which was crazy, because they’re a poetic people –’ he paused at the thought – ‘you know, some of the older folk, they speak as many would like to write, without a trace of planning, just off they go, peeling the language. Putting phrases on paper … well, it’s against the telling, the oratory, the freshness of the word … do you follow?’

  Herbert nodded. He’d withdrawn into himself, fearing Flanagan slightly, as he’d feared the singing in the abbey. There was a kind of heat in the soldier, a crackling in the air around him.

  ‘Now, Mr Drennan had loads of books, piled
this high –’ Flanagan raised a hand level to his smooth chin – ‘all over his cottage. Books to stop the door, books to jam the window open, books to level the floor under the table. And they were all in English. “There are wide fields out there,” he once said, “and people rare, but unfortunately they don’t have the tongue –” he meant Gaelic, and he’d pointed to a huge map pegged to the wall – “look, Boy, it’s an English-speaking world; look at the spread of Empire pink.”’ Flanagan gazed at Canada, India, Australia … little Ireland, and Inisdúr.

  For Mr Drennan it was a history lesson about oppression, ‘the politics of tenure’. But for Flanagan it was an invitation to break loose. So one night he went by stealth to the teacher’s cottage (there was no need, he could just as easily have walked down the road in broad daylight, but he wanted to clamber through fields as though he were a fugitive). Little Brendan followed him and Flanagan sent him back home with a playful clip to the ear. When he was out of sight, Flanagan took a first step towards the island’s harbour: he asked Mr Drennan to teach him the profane language of the subdued nations.

  They met every evening, when Flanagan should have been learning the knack of those long oars, when he should have been out at sea with the others and, like them, attuning himself to the moods of the wind, and the meaning of a sudden wave – that other instinctive manner of living. But his mind had lifted like one of those gulls over the slip.

  ‘In a way,’ said Flanagan, ‘it was a betrayal without treachery. A turning away from my father’s soil to those pink lands beyond the cliffs. But, you know, it wasn’t an empire I saw. Sure, I don’t know what it was … more land, I suppose.’

  Flanagan stopped talking but Herbert was left with the drift of his own thoughts. He, too, had come from a close-knit community: each side of the family had worn a uniform for the empire. Military service had been followed up by civic responsibility, at home or in India. His father’s connections ran to the fringes of government, his mother’s to those titled by birth. Herbert had not rebelled; he’d just failed at the first hurdle …

  The sound of a bouncing ball on the road behind them brought the conversation to an untidy end. It was as though a bubble of soap had popped. They were back in Flanders, not far from Ypres; and the guns, which had seemed subdued, rumbled louder with something like scorn.

  Chapter Nineteen

  1

  ‘My, oh my,’ said Father Andrew, the Prior, with a shake of the head.

  He ran a finger down the column of offences endorsed on the regimental crime sheet of Owen Doyle, covering infractions between the date of his enlistment in 1915 and his voluntary departure two years later.

  ‘Unshaven on parade, improper conduct, losing by neglect his trench waders … the list is endless.’ He frowned. ‘With a little imagination, those would apply to Sylvester. But he soon gets into gear … insubordination, absent without leave – eight times – drunkenness, malingering, insolence to an NCO … it just goes on and on … until he’s court-martialled for desertion … twice … then he gets drunk again.’ He looked up and showed his pity. ‘Not bad for a man of, what, twenty?’

  Anselm nodded. He leaned against the window that looked on to the cloister garth below. When it rained, Herbert had liked to sit down there, wrapped in a blanket beneath an arch, simply watching the rain spill from the loaded guttering. Anselm sighed and turned away. He wasn’t quite with the Prior, though not because of Herbert. Since returning from London his meditations had drifted endlessly over the mass burials of spring 1917 and Joseph Flanagan’s way of talking. His way of describing the land and the sea. His disquieting admission to the court: And cold I was and wet. The collision between reality and language was so dramatic that Anselm could not forget it. Flanagan’s nerves had been shot, without a gun being fired …

  The Prior, not getting a full response, buried himself again in the paginated bundle. Anselm had prepared it. On the front sheet he’d set out three central issues: the relationship between Flanagan and Doyle; the outcome of Flanagan’s review process (as a door to his disappearance); and the link between these questions and Herbert. ‘Solve these,’ Anselm had said, feeling very tall, ‘and we find the meaning of the trial.’

  The Prior turned back a page.

  ‘With two reprieved death sentences to his name,’ he said, smoothing an eyebrow, ‘this fellow would have been shot … had he been caught. “Absent at Ypres. Age twenty, height five feet six inches, dark brown hair, clean-shaven, rather brown complexion, blue dot tattoos across each knuckle. Believed to have taken Field ambulance to Abeele.”’

  Anselm recognised the description. It was from a roster of absentees reported to the Provost Marshal and annexed to the War Diary of that office, a copy having been placed in the Doyle file. Two other documents were attached to it with a rusted staple: the first, a curt memo dated November 1917, revealing that pursuant to the King’s Regulations the same details had been sent to Scotland Yard on Army Form B 124 for publication in the Police Gazette; the second, dated September 1917, rendered the first a total waste of time: a letter from Doyle’s Brigade HQ reported the soldier killed in action on the 15th of that month. The system had obviously fallen out of step: the right hand did not know what the left hand was doing.

  ‘His offending began as soon as he joined the Army,’ resumed the Prior, ‘but I’m not persuaded his behaviour can be explained by that fact alone …’ Anselm had always thought the Prior would have made an awful judge, though admired in certain quarters. He always looked outside the evidence, for something to explain the evidence. The Court of Appeal would have pulled their hair out, faced with his extramural fairness.

  ‘His wrongdoing is too widespread … it adds up to an unhappy youth; to a manhood charged with vague grievances and specific antagonisms. Someone very difficult to live with.’ The Prior whistled, as though thinking of one or two names close to home. ‘I’d be interested to know if he’d troubled the magistrates before he troubled his King.’

  The idea had not occurred to Anselm but he nodded again, to affirm that their minds were, as ever, one.

  ‘Herbert said Doyle’s tags represented who he was,’ went on the Prior, pronouncing each word slowly. ‘Can you make any sense of that?’

  ‘None whatsoever.’

  The Prior was at Anselm’s side. Beyond the monastery wall, they could make out the bluish path that hugged the Lark. It veered away towards a copse of aspens, the hives, and Herbert’s white, slanting cross.

  By Anselm’s judgement, he’d got nowhere at the Public Record Office, though Martin did not agree. The idea that Flanagan had been in control of his own trial was both novel and persuasive. Only a lawyer would have seen that, he’d said by way of compliment. Sipping more beer in The Wheat Sheaf, he’d added, ‘I’d assumed Doyle led Flanagan astray. Now I’m not so sure.’ It was an inference, a next step in the thinking process, that Anselm had not in fact taken, but it made sense. If Flanagan had run the trial, so to speak, then it would be odd if Doyle had run the offence.

  Maybe the Prior had been tracing similar territory in his silence, because he picked up Anselm’s own line of reflection. ‘Something momentous happened between these two soldiers.’ Then he made a squint and mumbled as if he’d found himself on the wrong track, puzzled because the trees on either side looked so very familiar. ‘Both of them came back. That’s the trick. And, you know, Anselm, it doesn’t feel right.’

  2

  Anselm had stepped into the nettles of community living within minutes of his return to Larkwood. No jubilation at the return of the prodigal, and so on. No fatted calf and minstrels in the gallery. ‘Receipts?’ snapped Cyril, as if it were an obscure kind of greeting. ‘A gift,’ Anselm snapped back, putting the Friendship Plant on the table.

  Bede made a point of being very busy. He was desperate to know what Anselm had learned at the PRO, but he wouldn’t ask. More, he wouldn’t show his interest. He aped indifference. He wanted Anselm to seek him out in the archives, to kno
ck on the door and subordinate himself to an office of importance. Perhaps it was a small thing to ask, but Anselm wouldn’t play ball. His real and abiding concern was for Sylvester. He’d been to see him before taking off his coat, his bag still in hand, his papers yet to be bundled and paginated. For days afterwards Anselm ran the scene in his head, wondering what had gone wrong:

  ‘Hullo, Old Timer.’

  The gatekeeper raised a wavering hand in salute. ‘Your trip to London was fruitful?’

  ‘Yes and no. The trial’s out of reach. Too long ago.’

  ‘Water under the bridge.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’

  To build up tension for the coming release, Anselm decided to say nothing for a while. He rustled in his pigeon hole for letters. Finally he began with hesitation, ‘Have you found Kate Seymour’s address?’

  Sylvester’s eyes seeped regret and Anselm reproached himself harshly for not having spoken out at once. Quickly, wanting to bestow peace on the scamp’s venerable head, he said, ‘Rejoice, Keeper of the Gate. Her details are held at the Public Record Office. I’ve sent on a message. She can contact me.’

  Sylvester hooked his thumbs behind the orange twine that served as a belt. He slumped back as if beaten by a straight flush and, with a scowl, threw down his disappointment. ‘Bully for you.’ And with another wave of the hand, curt this time, he dismissed Anselm from the room.

  No amount of repeated viewing helped Anselm understand what had taken place. It belonged on the cutting room floor, because there was no need for Sylvester’s continued depression. The address was to hand. But, like Bede, he was unreachable. And Anselm knocked on his door but Sylvester would not answer. He could only look on while the Gatekeeper limped around reception. His feet were fine but he was bowed. A weight was pressing down his shoulders. His eyes seemed bruised and he moaned about the cold. Entanglements of memory, worse than usual, left him miffed. Irritation fused with sudden flights of humour that were difficult for everyone to gauge. Worse, the pensioner who’d never drawn down his years had finally become an old man.