A Whispered Name

by William Brodrick

  3

  Anselm was filling a bucket with hot water in the scullery when the telephone call came through. At a shout from Bruno, the cook, he went into the kitchen and took the receiver.

  ‘I’ve good news and bad,’ came Martin’s fine voice. ‘First the bad. When Kate Seymour left the PRO she insisted that her details be removed from the database. It’s her right.’

  ‘Blast.’

  Martin was again the loquacious host that Anselm had first encountered on the telephone. It must be all that close-up living, he mused. You withdraw inside and then pour out familiarity through a mouthpiece. It’s safer that way. He’d moved on to the good news. An appointment had been made with Sarah, the great-great-granddaughter of Ralph Osborne, the general who’d recommended clemency for Flanagan. ‘Her father, David, will be there too. They’re chalk and cheese, oil and water …’ The character sketches, while opposing, described a close family with a deep and personal interest in military history. Anselm jotted down the Cambridgeshire address and returned the receiver to its cradle.

  Confused and irresolute, Anselm returned to the scullery.

  Now that Kate Seymour was out of reach once more, the onus fell back on Sylvester to find that little business card. Perhaps he’d wanted to find the wretched thing himself. Maybe he’ll feel better if the ball bounces high, back in his court, so he can whack it down a tramline to the astonishment of the whole community. Do I tell him, now that he’s stopped looking?

  Decisively, Anselm clattered into the refectory with the bucket and mop. It was his turn to clean the floor. And he recalled the Prior’s own, inimitable strategy. If things follow their usual course, he’d said, Kate Seymour’s address will turn up just when we need it most.

  Chapter Twenty

  The Company of Strangers

  1

  Flanagan felt no resentment against Mr Moore, not because he’d taken those swipes at poor old Elliot – who’d nearly killed himself – but because Flanagan had noticed that the Captain stared at the wallpaper as he, Flanagan, had stared at the mirror. Both of them were strangers in some way. Islanders can sense these things, for they know what it is to belong and to be excluded. And that aside, Flanagan had chosen to put himself in that court: he could hardly blame the people who were obliged to jump through the hoops afterwards.

  The football practice nearly reduced Flanagan to tears. True, the off-side rule was baffling, but it wasn’t the laws of the game that unsettled him, it was the lads of his old section. He hadn’t seen them since the advance near Black Eye Corner. Pickles, Stan, Tommy and Chips. And the RSM. He’d expected a rebuff, but while no word had been spent on the trial, they’d passed him the ball, they’d tidied up his many mistakes. He’d wanted to tell them all, ‘Fellas, I didn’t leave you, it’s more involved, so,’ but he couldn’t – Mr Moore was there with his whistle, banging on about the off-side rule.

  That night, Flanagan lay locked in the cellar, his limbs aching as they’d done as a boy when he’d helped his father make the fields. He couldn’t sleep because the sounds of Inisdúr were all around him: the conversation with Mr Moore had released the many prisoners in his memory. No one had asked him about home – not since the Rising of 1916, when the Republicans had made a bid for power in a Post Office (as one English officer put it). Now, like birds uncaged, they swooped wildly in the darkness, seeking a window to freedom. Mr Drennan was one of the heavier gulls. What had become of him? Had he left the island to shoulder the Cause in Dublin? Or was he teaching little Brendan that yawn of an elegy by Feiritéar? Fifty-seven verses of desolation and woe written for a pal who’d died in Flanders. Mr Drennan had considered Piaras Feiritéar to be a symbol of Irish history, a guide to its past and a light to the future. A Norman-Irish Lord, respected in England and Ireland, he’d finally sided with the Irish when it came to rebellion. He’d been court-martialled and executed by Cromwell’s boys. Flanagan could still remember some of the verses. Reciting them made him drowsy, and as he slipped away to the sound of Mr Drennan’s heavy incantation – he’d always joined in, stamping his foot in time – Flanagan thought of … Lisette, whose thick hair he’d only ever touched once.

  She, too, had been a stranger among her people.

  2

  Flanagan had first met Madame Lisette Papinau in early 1916. He’d been on five days’ leave with High-Pockets O’Brien and a group of lads from their platoon. One of them said, ‘We have to go to Pap’s’. Flanagan had often heard talk of the place, though he’d never passed through the front door. The boys loved the proprietor. She looks after you, they all said. She just cleans up the mess. Never throws you out, never calls in the redcaps, never makes you pay for a broken glass. She understands the war. She understands soldiers. She’s wonderful, is Pap. Flanagan had thought she must be a woman who’s punishing herself, one of those unhappy angels that appear near a battlefield.

  And so, one night, Flanagan and his pals joined the rowdy boozers quaffing cheap white wine, only Flanagan didn’t drink, so he’d asked for tea. ‘Tea?’ repeated the mistress of the house with wide, astonished eyes. Though in her mid-thirties, she possessed the dazzling gravity that comes with grief. A frightful brew she made him, but he banked it with sugar and sipped it slowly while the boys got singing drunk, some of them staggering in the dark hours to spew in the toilet, to disgorge the war from themselves. All the while, Flanagan sipped tea on tea and those sorrowful eyes kept flashing in his direction. He was the only sober man in the house. For three nights he drank tea and as the darkness grew outside, she watched him from afar, until, finally, she called him over to her table – it was more of a plant stand covered in receipts and napkins – and among that riot of self-cleansing, chants and sickness, they talked, easily: him of Inisdúr, her of Brittany. She, too, had learned the King’s English.

  Madame Papinau had a fine nose, sharp without suggesting brittleness of temper. Her eyebrows were high and her lips were sad. Thick hair was tied back with a black ribbon. Widowed at twenty-one after three years of marriage, she’d left the salt flats of Guérande in 1902, and come east with her only child, to start afresh in Étaples. A girl who knew the sea, its many smells and sounds, she’d simply found another coastal town. That night, at closing time, High-Pockets and the boys waddled off, singing in the street, but Flanagan stayed behind. He made a wood fire in the parlour while she carved slices of boiled bacon from a hock. Striking a match on his boot he told himself he’d been right: this woman accuses herself. He felt it in the shared silence while he ate with contentment and while she watched with pain. And Flanagan perceived something tragic in this ritual: she’d been at her plant stand sipping water, watching soldiers and cleaning up since 1914.

  ‘Let me sing my kind of song,’ he declared, putting his plate on the table.

  His voice began uncertainly, but he closed his eyes and thought of a lost love he’d never known – Mr Drennan always said it gave edge to an air. ‘Siúl, siúl, siúl, a rún, Siúl go socair agus siúl go cíúin …’ ‘Come, come, come, my love, Quickly come to me, softly move …’

  Like one of the elders back home, he leaned one hand on his knee and sang to the reluctant flames. It was the plea of a young woman, begging her soldier boy to stay at home and not to go to France. When he’d finished, Lisette did the decent thing; like an islander, she wept.

  ‘You must call me Lisette,’ she said, wiping her eyes. But the tears kept falling. She covered her face with long fingers and gently shook her head.

  ‘I’m Seosamh,’ he replied, abashed, aware that something had gone wrong. ‘Joseph.’

  Flanagan left Pap’s that night with an uneasy step. The song had been a Drennanesque lurch towards sentimentality, brought on by the bacon, but like an invocation it had summoned feeling – in Lisette and himself. And feeling – that immeasurable range of subtle responses from joy to sorrow – had, for Flanagan, been a brutally reduced universe. With the exception of High-Pockets, all the lads who’d joined up from the shipyard we
re dead. Flanagan’s heart had become numb. It had become a muscle that pumped heat when he was scared. But another kind of warmth had returned … so he walked briskly down the street, away from that fire in the parlour. Away, too, from Lisette, and the warmth in her tears. In the barrack room, surrounded by the frightened moans of sleeping men, Flanagan felt something dangerous had happened, for him and Lisette; dangerous for their survival of the war. Each of them for different reasons couldn’t afford to feel anything. But Flanagan tingled with the thrill of being alive, and it kept him awake.

  The next morning High-Pockets winked, making a bawdy remark – the ordinary stuff of soldiers – but Flanagan suffered a flash of feeling, so intense he saw stars. He shouted him down, rebuking the filth in his mouth. And then, in the stunned silence, Flanagan laughed and roared. He giggled, even. But then tears blurred his vision. He fought them back and staggered to the toilet where he was sick. The war was in him too.

  Flanagan made his peace with High-Pockets. On their last evening of leave, he went again to Pap’s, but with a profound detachment to his manner: he imitated his mother’s reserve for the mainland priest. And Lisette did something similar, appearing to be bruised by some unmentioned slight. But they talked while the boys got drunk. And later, though it was reckless, Flanagan again lingered past the locking of the doors. After they’d cleared up the mess in the toilets, they sat in the empty café talking of dead lives that each of them had lost: she, the raking of salt in Guérande; he, the making of fields on Inisdúr. Both of them were wary, but unable to avoid the fascination of the living; each of them was quickened by the return of banished emotions. They were coming back in all their varieties. They were as fresh as fear.

  Thereafter, whenever Flanagan had some home leave, he came to Étaples and stayed in a first-floor bedroom at Pap’s as though he were a paying lodger in a Dublin boarding house. Without being asked, he did odd jobs. He made a drawer run smoothly and opened a jammed window. He changed the washer in a tap that had dripped since 1911. One glorious October – the only one, in fact – they picked apples together in the small walled garden at the rear of the premises. After they’d cleared the fruit within reach, Lisette climbed one tree and Flanagan climbed another. While reaching dangerously, Flanagan stalled, his hand left stretching out. Lisette was looking at him. She was quite still, in a very particular way, as though her portrait might be taken at any moment. Her eyes were full and dark, frightened of the coming flash. They seemed so very far apart. Two people in two trees, surrounded by heavy fruitfulness.

  No matter what they did, or where they were, she called him Joseph and never Seosamh. It was artificial, but the formula allowed each of them to return to their duties, though at every sound of that distant label he felt pain, a pain so very different from all the other injuries of war. He saw the same wound in the returned glances of Lisette. And whenever Flanagan left her to return to his unit, his mind swirled with confusion because he didn’t know where this strange friendship might lead. His consolation – and it explained why he would never cross the room and touch her – was that after leaving he would probably not return. He’d lasted a long time at the front, had Flanagan. His number was coming up, as the superstitious liked to say.

  Apart from the time he’d sung by the fire, Flanagan never went into the parlour again, save once, when Lisette made a confession. And on that night Flanagan learned why this woman he would love watched the troops and waited upon them, and why she would always accuse herself. Without realising it at the time, her words went very deep into his memory – perhaps because by then he was lost to her. They came to the fore of his mind in the strongest possible way when, in August 1917, Flanagan came across that crumpled, condemned heap in no-man’s-land. His mind fled to Lisette, whose only boy, Louis, had joined the French army in 1915. Everyone who went to Pap’s had heard of the boy. He was at the front, fighting for France.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  At Madame Papinau’s

  When Doyle woke he offered Flanagan a cigarette. They smoked in the heavy silence that lies between conspirators.

  ‘Give me your tags,’ said Flanagan, removing his own.

  ‘Wot fo’?’

  ‘Because if we’re stopped we’ll need to confuse the redcaps. We swap pocket books and we hide our tags. If we’re unlucky, you show my book because I’m not listed injured or missing.’

  Flanagan hid the tags inside the bandage on his arm, smarting at his own stupidity. What was he going to do if he were stopped and questioned? He could hardly show them Doyle’s book. He soothed himself with the probability that Doyle’s desertion hadn’t yet filtered through to Étaples, that the injured lists should slow the drip. And anyway, the trading of books and tags was just a ruse, part of a wider ploy that served Flanagan’s purposes: for, unlike Feiritéar, when it came to noble acts he preferred anonymity.

  The train pulled into Étaples at five in the afternoon. Ten minutes later their luck struck a hitch after all. While ambling down the main street, two bulky MPs motioned them against a wall. Sweat broke out on Flanagan’s chest and Doyle swore under his breath.

  ‘We’re on leave,’ said Flanagan as Doyle handed over the pocket book.

  The policeman rumpled his pocked face, squinting at the one-line description. Fortunately such entries were often so brief as to be useless, unless you had an identifying feature … like tattoos. Damnú, thought Flanagan, I’d forgotten about those blue dots. Damnú air.

  ‘And yours,’ said the second policeman to Flanagan. His eyes were hidden by the low nib of a cap that was far too small for his head.

  Flanagan produced Doyle’s book. Seconds later the eyes appeared from a head lifted high – hard blue eyes above a slit for a mouth. ‘Hold out your hand. I want to see your knuckles.’

  Flanagan’s resistance drained away. He was about to throw in the towel when, on the far side of the road, a shining black door opened. A group of women dressed in black stepped into the street, comforting the eldest of their number, a bent and huddled figure leaning on a stick. They were all dabbing their cheeks with white handkerchiefs while the men looked on, coming from the darkness behind … out of a Pompes Funèbres: a funeral parlour. Before Flanagan could clock what was happening, Doyle whistled through two fingers and pointed further up the street: ‘Oy, Fitzy.’ The two policemen’s heads turned as one, and at that moment Doyle dashed across the street, towards the crying and the open black door. Without thinking, Flanagan followed Doyle’s example. To a great hollering, he crashed through the stained faces into the dim interior, knocking over a table, two chairs, a little man with a waxed moustache; on he went, arms flailing, past an open coffin with a god-awful yoke inside with whiskers sticking out of his ears like a shaving brush, across a back yard, among three lads smoking by a couple of horses, and into a narrow back lane lit by breathtaking sunshine. Flanagan was laughing out loud – a reaction that would have traumatised his mother, had she seen him, but not Mr Drennan … not that great traveller. ‘Go, boy,’ he heard him splutter, and with the spirit of that old Fenian roaring joy in his ears, Flanagan grabbed Doyle’s collar and tumbled down an alleyway, into a warren of left and rights, until the only sound was the quick fall of their own feet. Panting and dragging Doyle as if he were the milch cow, Flanagan cautiously made his way to the back door of Madame Papinau’s estaminet, widely known as Pap’s.

  Flanagan lifted the latch, his other hand on Doyle’s arm. Beyond the scullery and the lounge he could hear the rush of army voices and the clink of bottles and glasses. They entered and Flanagan motioned Doyle to sit on a stool by the sink. ‘Peel those spuds,’ he said, heading towards the clatter.

  In a dim corridor that led to the main room he spoke urgently to a dark, lowered brow. He’d brought a deserter with him, he said, a rough and ready sort who’d surely be shot if he were caught. Her eyes shone as she glanced towards the kitchen’s light. That profile, seen of a sudden, stabbed Flanagan’s soul: he longed to touch her hair, that was
all; to feel if only for once the softness of her hair. With the turn of her head, a shadow claimed back her face and she said, ‘Take him to the cellar, Joseph.’

  The cellar where Flanagan had stored the apples picked in an October long gone. ‘Compote for the boys, Joseph,’ she’d said. The formality had flayed him.

  At midnight, Flanagan, Lisette and Doyle assembled in the lounge, their three faces lit by a single candle. Flanagan pressed the raised edge, releasing the small pool of hot wax from around the wick. As it ran down the neck and dried, he said, ‘This lady may be able to help us. If she does, it’s at considerable risk to herself. She must have reason to do it. She knows my tale already. Tell her yours, so, the tale you told me in the rain.’

  Doyle told another story altogether – far worse than the earlier account – beginning at his birth and ending in a borstal. Even Flanagan was rapt. For in this, his second testament, Doyle accused himself as much as the conditions of his infancy.

  ‘You can both hide here,’ said Madame Papinau in a faint voice. Her eyes brushed over Flanagan with desperate happiness, not quite believing its arrival. ‘I’ll write to my cousin in Boulogne. He works on the harbour. When the time is right, he’ll help you find a boat.’ She faced Doyle. ‘Tonight you sleep upstairs; from tomorrow it will be the cellar for you both.’

  Lisette stood up, as did Doyle, and the light from the candle made their features grotesque.

  ‘Thank you,’ muttered Doyle, tugging nervously at his belt. He looked reduced and ashamed.

  ‘Don’t thank me,’ she replied, the pitch of her voice dropping. ‘Thank my son, Louis. You’ll have the use of his bed.’

  Alone by the candle, Flanagan calculated he’d been away from his unit for twenty-two hours. But for a nap on the train he’d been awake for over two days. A terrible desire to sleep came upon him, and it would have seized him if he hadn’t seen Lisette’s haunting face. She was crouched by his chair. ‘Is it true … will you stay?’ she whispered, knowing in the uttering that she’d been mistaken. ‘Won’t you run to me, Seosamh?’