A Whispered Name

by William Brodrick

  Róisín’s family were all from Inismin. Seosamh had many cousins and aunts over there, but one was just a name: Úna, Róisín’s sister. No one mentioned her save to say, ‘She’s gone away’. Seosamh suspected a love story with the wrong kind of man, maybe a fling in Dublin that had turned sour. After the row by the fire, his father went out into the evening light and his mother leaned forward and gripped Seosamh’s wrist. He flinched for the hand was strong from the sewing; on her lap was a quilt of russet, green and brown.

  ‘Go, Seosamh,’ she said with hushed urgency. ‘Spread your wings, like Úna.’

  Young Úna had gone to Boston, he learned; an act of rebellion for which there’d been no forgiveness. Seosamh looked out of the window at the bulk of his father.

  ‘Go, my son, go for me,’ she said, her face bright with excitement. ‘And tell me what you see.’

  So when Muiris had come with the money, his damp consent, and sat on the bed beneath a roof of spars, Seosamh had known all along that his mother had blessed his going; that he would leave for her, and for all the women who’d dared not step off the sand.

  Father Maguire repeated his question. ‘Have you written to your mother?’

  ‘Sure, what would I say?’ replied Flanagan helplessly.

  He’d left Inisdúr with a sense of wonder, freed from the limitations of the island; he’d joined the army with High-Pockets, and entered a conflagration beyond his expectations. What could he tell his mother? The sights he’d seen? For all the wrong reasons, perhaps, his father had been right about the land; and so had Meg. And this was the soldier who’d met Lisette, another mother who’d blessed her son’s going. And who would have him back.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Mrs Holden’s brown leather shoes made a loud clip-clop down the shining lino of the corridor. Pupils stared at Anselm, shyly. Quite a few laughed and one of them opened the door that led to the foyer. Outside, Anselm following, Mrs Holden crossed a quiet road and rattled loose a bunch of keys from her handbag. Facing them was a tall building of forbidding brick. It had the feel of a foundry or a workhouse. The walls were high and blackened by the smog of another time. Several windows were covered with plywood above stone lintels like hard bottom lips.

  ‘This is the old school,’ said Mrs Holden, opening a padlock and letting a chain fall. ‘It’ll be demolished next year, and then we’ll build a gym.’ She pushed open a rusted gate and they stepped into the playground, a sloping expanse of ribbed concrete with patches of asphalt, claimed here and there by clumps of dandelion and strong wild grass.

  ‘This is where John Lindsay learned the basics,’ said Mrs Holden. ‘Don’t knock it too hard, Father. I think they did their best.’

  ‘They’ being the staff who’d carried an enormous responsibility: to instil the values of a parish, a nation and an empire. Clean hands, punctuality, hard work, counting, spelling, and Englishness. It must, indeed, have been difficult. The photographs in the display cabinet gave a glimpse into that world: hundreds of mill towers, tightly packed houses, women in clogs, men’s faces blanked by coal, wide smiles for the camera; and, of course, the Punishment Book.

  Mrs Holden rattled another key and opened a side door into the school. A long corridor stretched ahead with classrooms on either side. The ceiling was high, but not high enough to contain the rush of memory between the flaking walls. Anselm was entranced by the imagined hum, the fall of feet, the shaved heads …

  Lindsay was the younger, following Doyle, the big lad. John and Owen. One looks up; the other looks down. They’re bound as strong as blood. They run outside, with a kick to the door. They’re off, before the Head catches them. They’re always running and laughing … until Owen falls ill. He dies aged twelve and John looks up to an empty sky to mumble his name.

  Walking down the corridor, past the half-open doors, Anselm told Mrs Holden the full explanation behind his visit to the parish of St Stephen, beginning with the encounter among the aspens. Her feet landed precisely, clip-clopping up stairs, along other corridors and past other doors. The entire building seemed to be listening and watching. Hundreds of tiny ears and wide eyes. They all remembered Doyle and Lindsay. Who could forget them?

  Doyle died in 1908. Kenneth Spinks LMSSA said so. The father, Colum, had been present. But what had happened to little John Lindsay? For a while he keeps up appearances in the Punishment Book but by 1915 he’s no longer a local boy. He’s gone to London. He joins The Lambeth Rifles. But it’s ‘Owen Doyle’ that’s stamped on his tags, the one true friend he ever had, dead seven years earlier.

  ‘He’s in a right bit of bother, then,’ said Mrs Holden, jingling for another key. ‘Otherwise he’d have used his own name. Didn’t want anyone to find him, did he?’ She opened a large door, the old main entrance to the school, and said, ‘The top step.’

  The top step. The two boys had known it well.

  For a moment, Anselm lost his bearings. He paused to catch hold of a sudden outpouring of pitying comprehension. Lindsay followed Owen Doyle even to the gates of hell, the top step at school; and when he got to Belgium he followed Joe Flanagan out of the fire. It’s the same story, a lost boy forever being led. But you wouldn’t have known. He’d got manly tattoos on each knuckle. He’d have been a bragger, more than likely. To hide the pit of insecurity and self-hatred that comes with misfortune, stunted talent and public humiliation.

  Anselm went outside into the cold, on to the stage where the unruly and disobedient were admonished to change their ways. They’d been given every chance. The rules were on the notice board. The rest could do with a damn good warning.

  ‘Each time it’s two Irish lads against the world and all it can throw at them,’ said Anselm, surveying the concrete, seeing the host of boys and girls neatly lined up, class by class with their teacher. Mr Lever had probably given a little speech.

  ‘I don’t want to break your stride, Father,’ said Mrs Holden, kindly, ‘but I don’t think “Lindsay” is an Irish name.’

  Not caring, or at least not registering the significance of the remark, Anselm looked to the new school and the sound of children at play. We are making progress, he thought, fierily. Things do get better. We don’t beat or shoot those who fail. He watched the bobbing heads and listened to the cries.

  And then, as if a friend had popped out of the crowd, Anselm recognised an important truth. He’d seen it once in his sleep, but it had vanished when he woke, leaving him reaching out to a sort of banging window.

  ‘Mrs Holden,’ he said, controlling his excitement, ‘do you have a record of John Lindsay’s date of birth?’

  ‘It’ll be in a register. Everything’s in a register.’

  Anselm all but led the way back to Mrs Holden’s office. He walked quickly, wanting her to rush with the locks while he fanned the flames of a growing certainty. They passed through the foyer to more children’s shyness and laughter, and moments later Mrs Holden opened a ledger from 1907, the year John Lindsay enrolled at St Stephen’s Primary School. After some flipping of paper she pointed to the day, month and year, written in black ink.

  They looked at each other, soberly understanding another facet to a boy’s life. Anselm felt surprise, too, because Mrs Holden seemed deeply moved. And that moved Anselm. For this woman, like all great teachers, carried close to her heart the life and aspirations of a community, the open future of its children and the tragedies of its past.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The Nightingales Sang

  1

  Herbert pushed past the sentry at the top of the steps without even a nod of acknowledgement, as if his presence was an offence to his eye. He averted his head while the keys rattled in the lock. As soon as he entered the cellar, Flanagan stood up, clutching his trousers. He was bowed like a dog struck for having barked, his head low to one side.

  ‘Please, please, don’t stand for me, ever again,’ said Herbert.

  Father Maguire spoke low in Gaelic over the table. His arms lay flat, one on
either side of the candle, reaching across to Flanagan’s side. The priest rose and pointed at his chair: it was almost like an instruction to Herbert and he obeyed.

  ‘Private,’ said Herbert looking through the flame, ‘there is something I must know.’

  He wanted to call him Joseph but that simply wasn’t possible – not because of their difference in rank, but because the executioner’s lance-jacks don’t call a victim by his Christian name; it offends the nature of their relationship. But Herbert spoke as a penitent.

  ‘We both know that I condemned you.’

  Flanagan’s face was only partly visible because Herbert was hiding behind the brightness of the candle. But at the heart of the penumbra he could clearly see the closed lips, the uneven growth around the chin and cheeks.

  ‘Please don’t die without telling me what I’ve done,’ he pleaded, covering his face with one hand. He’d meant to ask directly about Étaples, but a deeper incomprehension had leapt from a dark, anxious place of Herbert’s mind.

  Father Maguire’s footsteps sounded on the flags. He leaned over the table and drew the candle to one side, clearing the space between Herbert and Flanagan. His feet sounded again and he moved into the darkness of a corner.

  Flanagan leaned on the table, arms folded. His head remained drooped and angled.

  ‘I came to France with a bunch of Irish lads. They’re all dead, now. I watched them go, one by one. High-Pockets O’Brien was the last. A tall fella. I found him sitting on a shell hole like a man reading a book. Then I saw he’d been halved at the waist. He looked a bit surprised, you know, as if to say, “Jasus, I’ve lost some height.”’ Flanagan licked his lips and cleared his throat. ‘Yes, he was the last. And then, in the spring, we buried a field of men. English, Scots, Irish, Germans. We put their tags in baskets off a mule. A pannier. It was my job to count them. I moved them from one bag to the other. Two thousand three hundred and fourteen. Clink, clink, clink –’ Flanagan moved a hand from left to right, his eyes wide with pain – ‘and when I got to the end, and the bag was empty, I looked inside … and I knew that I was going to join the pile. That it was only a matter of time.’

  Herbert, too, had lived for a long time with the expectation of dying. It was numbing. And, for many, ultimately depraving. The bouts of drinking and sex in the base camps were just so many last gasps, brutal outbursts from a desire to live. Since Herbert’s upbringing discouraged any conduct that might produce embarrassment, he settled for depression in the Officers’ Club. But he hadn’t gone as far as Flanagan. The Irishman had crossed a line from expectation to a kind of certainty.

  ‘And then, back in June, Sir, we were in the front line trenches, ready to fight for the Messines Ridge,’ said Flanagan. ‘It was three o’clock in the morning with a high moon. Major Dunne lay beside me and whispered, “Look ahead Flanagan –” his watch was in his hand – “you’re about to see something wonderful, something beyond your imagination.” We’d only just been told about the mines beneath the German front line. “Any second now …” said Mr Dunne. And do you know, Sir, then, at that moment … I heard nightingales singing in a wood. I heard a song. I stopped breathing to listen. It was like a sound from another world, real like this one, but only just out of reach. Surely someone’s warned them, I thought. Surely they know … nothing can sing like that in a place like this … and then the ground began to tremble and shake, pitching like a boat between waves, and whaaaaaa …’ Flanagan whispered the explosion, his hands rising from the surface of the table, his mouth gaping. ‘Whaaaaaa … the land lifted up. Do you remember it, Sir? The flame and the smoke and the wind? I’d never seen anything like it in my life. The land high in the sky, and then falling slowly back …’ Flanagan’s arms came down, till they were flat, one hand on top of the other. ‘Later in the day, after we’d taken the Ridge, I looked into a crater the size of a lake without water. The clay was blue. Gas from the cordite was still rising from its veins and everywhere lay men with their eyes open, dead men with their limbs bent in strange angles, like clowns … bunkers the size of houses back home, upturned and split open … it was hell without demons or a devil … just smoke and grey uniforms and all these eyes wide open like moons.’

  The men in Herbert’s Company had been aghast with exhilaration. The war had to end, someone had said. Their own dead had been avenged. One spoke of planting a flag. The German front line had literally disappeared in a matter of seconds.

  ‘That day, Sir, I discovered something else,’ said Flanagan, head sinking slightly lower. ‘The war has to be fought, I don’t doubt that, Sir. I never have done. But it was the sight of the land torn up like that, and men who hadn’t blinked lying among lumps of clay … I couldn’t see them as enemies any more.’ His confusion made him shift on the stool. ‘If I was going to join them, I wanted my death to have a meaning.’

  Flanagan couldn’t finish. He joined his hands and Herbert almost grabbed them, to squeeze out the connection with Étaples.

  ‘Tell him, Seosamh,’ came Father Maguire’s voice from the darkness. ‘Go on, son.’

  Flanagan for once looked at Herbert – as he’d done at his trial: with the tentative confidence of mutual understanding. ‘After I left Mr Dunne with the RMO I was on my way back to Black Eye Corner when I came across one of The Lambeth Rifles. He was finished, Sir, couldn’t stand up. He’d twice run off already and been sentenced to death. But this time he’d strayed into our lines. He’d easily have been picked up.’

  Herbert frowned. He flushed hot. He’d been there, in the rain … when Flanagan had spoken to Father Maguire while some kid crouched weeping against the trench.

  ‘You helped him escape?’ said Herbert, in disbelief, his voice straining over a whisper.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You took him to Étaples?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So he’d avoid another court martial?’

  Flanagan nodded.

  ‘So he wouldn’t be shot,’ Herbert shouted.

  Flanagan didn’t respond.

  ‘And then you came back … knowing that you …’

  Bewildered, Herbert bent his own head to look up into Flanagan’s face, but Flanagan’s eyes were lowered. Squinting towards the darkness, Herbert tried to find Father Maguire, to understand what this wild story really meant because it still didn’t make sense to him, but the priest was a vague shape within the shadow, a presence with arms folded tight.

  ‘But why him?’

  ‘Joseph, speak,’ said the priest.

  Herbert lost his patience. He kicked back his chair and stumbled towards Father Maguire. ‘Tell me yourself,’ he whispered. ‘If there’s the slightest chance I can help this soldier I need to know what happened and why.’

  ‘You can’t do anything,’ said the priest.

  ‘I’m not waiting until dawn to see you proven right.’ His desperation made his whispering lower but harsh. Leaning forward, he felt the rasp of the priest’s cheek. ‘Please tell me what this death really means.’

  * * *

  By the time Herbert reached Chamberlayne’s office it was midnight. The adjutant was clearly drunk though his speech remained as smooth as ever. He guessed that Army HQ was about an hour and half away and produced a map, identifying the location of a chateau outside a village. Twenty minutes later Herbert was galloping down a lane skirting more fields of hops, their frames high and crowded by foliage. The moon was bright as it had been at Messines. The stars flickered like phosphorescence in water. The entire landscape was like pewter with etchings of woods, low farmhouses and drowsy cattle.

  General Osborne had helped the Moore family once before; hopefully he would do so again, and this time for a cause more worthy.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  To Break a Vow?

  Clasping his trousers, Flanagan shuffled to the bed. He lay down, weak from fear, wanting to vomit but having nothing to draw up from the pit in his stomach. He closed his eyes and wrapped both arms around himself. Ah, I would
be held, he thought. I would have arms around me, now.

  As a boy, his mother had stroked his hair at night, brushing it back off the forehead with her hand. She’d never spoken, they’d just watched each other in the darkness, the sound of the sea crashing on the rocks below, a wind whistling over the young fields that held the seed. Her warm hand, soft despite the farm work, had slowly smoothed his forehead and to this sacrament of touching he had fallen asleep. The sea’s thunder had roused him in the morning and he’d always been surprised to find that he was alone. It had been a lesson: that one day this hand would be withdrawn, and he would meet the night as a man.

  ‘Move over,’ said Father Maguire.

  Flanagan edged towards the wall. The priest lay down beside him.

  ‘Give me your hand, son.’

  They held hands. Father Maguire’s touch wasn’t as firm as usual. When he’d gripped Flanagan’s shoulders he’d been a sculptor managing clay, but now he was tender, as if his strength had always been a bluff.

  ‘You said nothing to Mr Moore of Lisette,’ said the priest.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you like me to explain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He thought of Lisette on her knees, begging him to stay. She had a brother who worked on the docks in Boulogne. Flanagan could have hidden in the cellar with Doyle and waited for a safe passage to England. But the boys had been waiting for him at Black Eye Corner.

  ‘I’ll go to Inisdúr,’ said Father Maguire, his grip tightening.

  ‘Thank you.’ Flanagan thought of the rocks near Meg’s cove. From the cliff top, on a misty day, you couldn’t see the waves below. The ocean was like a basin of milk near the boil. ‘Will the army tell them I was shot for desertion?’

  ‘No. They’ll say you died of wounds. Nothing more.’

  ‘Good.’