A Whispered Name

by William Brodrick

  Lisette fiddled with the black ribbon, arranging it on her blouse. She sat upright, resuming the posture of reserve that they shared. But he knew that she was desperate to explain her own reticence, to tell Flanagan that in keeping back she was not rejecting him.

  ‘I want you to know, Joseph,’ she said, as if describing how the cooker worked, ‘I cannot love again. It’s not the war and what love might do to anyone I might meet; it’s not even what I have done. It’s what has become of me. My heart is like these wrung out hands. There is no life beating there. I’ve nothing left to give. So I look after all these boys who come back from the front. I wash the floors and clean the glasses and peel the potatoes and crack the eggs –’ she lifted her hands helplessly – ‘that’s all that’s left of me, Joseph.’

  Flanagan never entered the parlour again, not until the night he came back with Owen Doyle. And when that lad was upstairs, fast asleep in Louis’ bed, she’d knelt at Flanagan’s feet and begged him to stay. She’d crossed that awful, fiery divide and called him Seosamh.

  ‘Are you free now, Lisette?’ whispered Flanagan to a summoned shape in the cellar. ‘Are you free to love again?’

  He looked to the vent. The edge of cloud had drifted away and the sky showed the first glamour of the night. Before the sun rises high I shall be dead, he thought.

  Chapter Thirty

  1

  Anselm took a train to Bolton, surprised not so much that the Prior had required him to make the trip but that he asked him to leave the next morning. It revealed the pressure behind the Prior’s calm acceptance of events. Anselm duly arrived at an Augustinian Friary where, warmly welcomed, he obtained a room, a local map and a telephone directory.

  Anselm walked first to the cemetery at Blackburn Road where he discovered that, try as they might, people aren’t always as helpful as they might think. After an hour of pacing between the neat graves, he found an angled black cross – but not in the far left-hand corner as reported to Sarah Osborne, but in the nearside right, rather close to the main gate. For several minutes he studied the little name plaque attached with a screw that recorded the deceased’s particulars: Owen Doyle 1896–1908. The Prior had suggested, and Anselm agreed, that there were only two possible hypotheses.

  ‘First, the dead boy was known to whoever assumed his identity – let’s call him X – and the use of his name was a careful decision, or an impulse towards something personally significant; either way, not a random choice.’

  That scenario, they both accepted, would be problematic: if X had been a friend of Doyle there would be no clue left behind to tie the two individuals together in the one document. If X had been a family member, similar difficulties would arise, because a search would have to cover all Doyles within the family tree, along with those holding a different surname: it would be a massive genealogical enquiry that might take years to execute.

  ‘Second,’ the Prior had said, ‘the dead boy was not known to X. But someone important to X, and bearing his surname, was buried nearby, and that is how X came across Doyle’s name and grave in the first place.’

  With these two hypotheses in mind – and banking on the second – Anselm noted the details engraved on eight tombstones, four on either side of Owen Doyle’s resting place. He read them over in the breeze, the sound of traffic behind him, hoping that one of them had been close to X; that X had come here out of affection and respect; that his eye had caught on the tragically young age of Owen Doyle at the time of his death.

  A further supposition shared by Anselm and his Prior was that X was a runaway. This young man had left the northwest of England for London, where he’d joined The Lambeth Rifles. If he simply wanted to run to the Colours under a pseudonym, for whatever reason, he could have done so just as easily with the local regiment, the Lancashire Fusiliers. But he hadn’t. He’d gone south. On the basis that X was a fugitive of sorts, Anselm and the Prior made a further assumption: that somebody local to Bolton cared; that they’d kicked up some fuss and left behind a trace of their distress. Anselm’s plan was to check the archives of the Bolton Evening News – a paper with a long history and widely read (according to a Friar born in the suburb of Astley Bridge). A call to the paper’s reception sent Anselm to the Bolton Archives and Local Studies Service located in Le Mans Crescent where, to his enormous pleasure, he joined the twenty-first century. He’d expected bound volumes covered in dust. For the remainder of the day he examined Microfilm copies of the paper, checking for personal notices, his eye sharp for a ‘Come Home All Is Forgiven’ plea. Not one of the names on his list surfaced.

  2

  After breakfast the next day, Anselm followed his map, on foot, to 359 Leyland Park Avenue. With every step he thought the project increasingly hopeless, such that, by the time he knocked on the door, he was embarrassed. How would the occupier have any idea about the Doyles of the earlier twentieth century? The thought rather blanked his mind, and he stared at a young mother holding the wailing baby as if he’d lost his voice.

  ‘Sorry, Father,’ said the woman, clearing strands of blonde hair off her face. ‘I don’t go?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘To church, I don’t go.’

  Anselm told her not to worry and that frequent attendance was sometimes a problem for him, too. He then said he felt an utter fool but would she by any chance know anything about the Doyle family who’d once lived in this house. She didn’t. But there was an old woman in 459 who had a bomb shelter in her garden and she knew everything. Her name was Mrs Spencer.

  ‘And she goes.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘To church. She goes.’

  Anselm went along the cobbled street, past neat terraced houses until he reached 459. A young man chewing gum pulled open the door. Having listened, he shouted over his shoulder, went back inside, shouted some more and then returned with a beckoning hand.

  Mrs Spencer did indeed know everything. She sat in an armchair, a tartan blanket over her knees, describing all the families of her childhood. She’d been born upstairs and her husband had run the corner shop until he got the gout, though God knows, it wasn’t from the good life. He’d loved tripe, grown his own radishes and stuck to a pint of mild on a Friday. Anselm stayed for roughly two hours without any detail coming forward that remotely touched on anyone called Doyle. It was only when Mrs Spencer said that everyone had gone to Saint Stephen’s round the corner that a glimmer of light came from an unexpected quarter. School records. There was a slim chance that they’d been retained. Profuse with his gratitude, Anselm made his escape. He stepped out into the street and looked left and right, sensing a vanished universe, a whole history of memory spilling out of the door behind him.

  When Anselm got back to the Friary, he rang up Saint Stephen’s Primary School and made an appointment with the Head Teacher, a Mrs Holden. She was a local woman (she explained) and even if the available records were of no assistance, she might know of individuals Anselm might approach, or other places he might go. That evening, he sipped a glass of scotch and listened to a friar tell a very funny story about a priest who fell into an open grave. It seemed apposite, somehow.

  3

  Mrs Holden was what Dickens would have called an ‘ample’ woman. Small and compact in a brown skirt and yellow cardigan, she filled her clothes so the stitches had to work. Her face was cheerful, made up of soft lumps of flesh, well pressed together around an indomitable smile. Swirls of brown hair, perfectly groomed, suggested that very little indeed could ruffle her feathers. A jolt of a handshake told Anselm that this was a woman of efficiency, affection and inspir ation. She led him through the foyer, past a display cabinet containing oddments from a bygone era – sepia photographs of Bolton’s mills and mines, a pen, a watch, a book – and into her office. On the table was a selection of large, thin volumes, all open, all marked with slips of paper.

  ‘Owen Doyle was a pupil here,’ said Mrs Holden, her Lancashire vowels uncompromisingly flat. ‘Attendance was not his st
rong point.’ A finger touched the list of absences, week on week throughout 1904. She went deeper into the pile, to 1907. ‘By the age of eleven, he’s doing rather better, though there’s still considerable room for improvement.’

  The use of the present tense showed that Mrs Holden never lost hope.

  ‘And he was dead from TB the following year,’ said Anselm.

  ‘Yes, these were hard times in the north, Father,’ said Mrs Holden. ‘Most of the parents crawled underground or stood over the cotton machines. You’ll be familiar with the critique passed by Engels on the Manchester situation?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ replied Anselm, glad of teachers and their never-ending expectations.

  Anselm asked if he could examine the registers on his own for a while. The headmistress left him to his research, quietly closing the door while summoning a child who’d run down the corridor. With his list of graves, Anselm checked the registers between 1903 and 1912. Several of the surnames occurred and he began noting their frequency, drawing up another list, gradually realising, to his irritation, that the entire project was doomed to failure. He’d hoped to find one particular name that stood out, establishing a potential link with Doyle. But he was awash. There were several McCarthys, Nolans, and Kellys … along with all the other names on Anselm’s list. They were scattered all over his notebook. He stared at them, noting for the first time that most of them were Irish … that these were the immigrant families who’d left Ireland in the nineteenth century, searching for work, sending money back home. He tapped the names with his pencil, losing heart, thinking – hopefully to Mrs Holden’s approval – of the Great Famine which, like Engels’ critique, had not been a prominent feature in Anselm’s education. Trying to salvage something worthwhile out of the previous hour and a half, he concluded that X was Irish.

  That detail was more important than Anselm at first appreciated.

  For it completely changed the complexion of the meeting that had taken place between Flanagan and Doyle in September 1917. Sensing the advance of a presentiment, Anselm carefully aligned his pencil in the middle of his notebook, not wanting to disturb the idea taking shape. Perhaps their association goes back much, much further. Could it be that the ‘Doyle’ of The Lambeth Rifles had hailed from the same part of Ireland as Flanagan?

  Anselm stared at the children playing in the yard. Boys crowding together. Girls in smaller groups. Worlds apart, for the moment …

  ‘Had Flanagan met Doyle before?’ said Anselm, out loud. ‘Possibly,’ he replied, concluding that it didn’t really matter. The meeting between the two men in no-man’s-land could not have been planned in advance. It had to be a coincidence, because Flanagan had been sent back from Black Eye Corner with a wounded officer. There was no way his presence in the reserve trenches could have been foreseen.

  Another possibility struck Anselm – the second hypothesis – Flanagan and ‘Doyle’ weren’t friends. They didn’t know each other. But they were bound by a strong sense of Irish identity. Anselm sighed and turned to the window. Mrs Holden had corralled some boys and was wagging a finger. The girls were grouped, too, and loving the show. On a step to one side a little boy swung a hand bell and the children formed straggling lines according to their class. Within minutes desk lids banged, doors closed and Mrs Holden stood smiling at Anselm, her keen intellect interested to know if Anselm’s trip had been worth the bother.

  ‘Yes,’ said Anselm, ‘but not in the way I expected. I’d hoped to find a specific name linked to Owen Doyle, but instead I’ve found myself on the ground of his birth, and that has changed my outlook.’

  They walked back to the foyer and Anselm paused at the display cabinet with the pictures of Industrial Bolton. In the centre was a photo of a strong-looking man, a headmaster of the school from the war years through to the twenties. Mr Anthony Lever. His ink pen and pocket watch were like relics, reminders of life before the flood of computers and the digital timepiece. Anselm’s eye caught on the open book.

  ‘That is a very interesting document,’ said Mrs Holden.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Anselm, quietly dismayed. He’d started reading some of the entries, checking the age against the offence and the outcome.

  ‘It’s the Punishment Book. Offence and consequence are noted, just like daily attendance. Repeated infractions led to the cane. But if someone did something very serious, the entire school was obliged to witness the punishment. The boy – always a boy – was hit at the end of assembly after a short discourse on his misconduct. I once met an old man, a former pupil, who told me his trousers had been pulled down while he stood on the top step. He had to bend over while he was whacked. I misunderstood the point of the story, however. He wholly approved and went on to say that when they had the birch there was no thieving in Bolton.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I’ve met other pupils who think differently. But all schools were like that back then – many far stricter than ours. The social expectation of conformity and duty was high, and rather simple. Everyone knew where they stood and what happened if you moved out of line.’

  Anselm read some of the ages: eight, eleven … and the date on the page: February 1906. ‘May I see it?’

  Five minutes later Anselm was back in Mrs Holden’s office. He was flushed with both excitement and compassion. Owen Doyle’s name featured significantly between 1905 and 1907. And in that penultimate year before his death, so did someone else. The two were paired on no less than seven occasions for the same offence: dirty hands and nails.

  Mrs Holden then checked once more the registers in which Owen Doyle’s truancy had featured so significantly and there, sure enough, was the boy who, Anselm was quietly sure, had one day enlisted in The Lambeth Rifles using Doyle’s name. He was called John Lindsay.

  Anselm watched her industry from a very great distance. He gazed through and beyond her on to England’s green and pleasant land. He thought of those many mills and the deep tunnels spreading for miles beneath the ground in search of coal. He thought of men and women who couldn’t read or write, of bent heads, both English and Irish, their nationality lost in the sweat and the clatter and the grime. Labour was their nation state. And he thought of poor Owen Doyle, beaten with a stick because his parents hadn’t checked his hands were clean before they went to work at four in the morning.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Rebellion

  1

  Herbert ran to Oliver Tindall’s billet, a barn cleared of animals and serving now as a surgery. The medic was lying on a camp bed, legs crossed, boots off, a newspaper held in the air like a shelter from the rain. An oil lamp on the floor sent light upwards on to the open pages. Packing cases of medical supplies lined the timber walls. Metal dishes glinted on a table covered by a white cloth.

  ‘Oliver, there’s an execution tomorrow, you know.’

  ‘Yes. Flanagan.’ He continued reading.

  Herbert snatched the paper and hurled it across the room. ‘He’s one of ours, don’t you appreciate that?’

  Tindall sat up, baffled by Herbert’s rage, embarrassed by the show of this type of feeling. ‘Steady on, Moore, old fellow,’ he said, swinging his legs around. ‘The blighter did run off. Bloody hell, you sat on his court martial. I mean, I may not see the charge and parry and all that, but I see the consequences.’ He paused and gathered his pride. ‘You’ve not seen the RAP twenty minutes after the whistle … it’s … it’s –’ indignation at Herbert’s impudence burst open – ‘a slaughterhouse. You lot carry on running, throwing things, pulling a trigger, stabbing and doing God knows what … on and on you go, but I stand still. I stand there while they bring the pieces back to me –’ he stood up, his lips stretched tight, the cleft in his chin deep like a cut – ‘I hold them in these miserable hands and their lives don’t even drain away, there’s nothing left … and I stand there … Do you hear me? … I stand there with cotton wool and a needle and scissors and all around me is this screaming: the screaming that you leave behind.’ He glar
ed at Herbert – an astonishingly different man who, seconds before, had been reading the paper – and bellowed, ‘So don’t you come in here and tell me that one of ours deserves my pity … not when he ran away.’

  Herbert swayed on his feet, numbed by what he’d heard; wearied by his empathy. He looked at his own hands … and the finger that had pulled the trigger on Quarters. The haunted face stared out of the mud with beseeching eyes and Herbert almost collapsed. ‘I’m sorry, Oliver,’ he mumbled, sinking in a swoon. One hand gripped a chair back and he sat down. The face withdrew.

  ‘So am I, old man.’ The RMO spoke quietly, finding calm. ‘This bloody war, I hate it. It’s necessary, but I hate it. I spend my nights trying to link it all to some bigger purpose, to something beyond a battle … but the war won’t end, I can’t see the end.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Herbert. His heart had raced but now it was falling back into line. ‘Look, I didn’t come to lecture you. Just to remind you that you’re part of the detail … you appreciate that?’

  ‘What?’ Tindall picked up the newspaper.

  ‘You attend the execution.’

  ‘Do I?’ He rolled up the paper into a tight tube. ‘Doesn’t someone from Division do that sort of thing?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Oliver, it’s you,’ replied Herbert, despairing of the bureaucratic machine, its hit and miss efficiency. They should have shown the RMO the drill before sending him into action. ‘You have to witness it, check that he’s dead, and then write out a certificate for the file.’

  ‘Dear God.’ Oliver threw the paper on his bed and put the oil lamp on the table. He bent near the glass and raised the wick. ‘Er … what happens if he’s not?’

  ‘Not what?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘You check and see.’

  ‘How the hell would I know?’

  ‘You do what doctors do.’

  ‘Oh my God. Then what?’