A Whispered Name

by William Brodrick

  2

  All the furnishings in the small sitting room huddled together. Even the walls seemed to lean in towards the plump armchairs, the low table and another murmuring fire. Heavy condensation ran down the windows. The walls were bare and whitewash clean. Roughly cut timbers like spars ran across a dipped ceiling.

  ‘You’ll have tea,’ ordered Brendan. ‘And bread to build your strength. We don’t give stone in this house.’

  Despite his age, he was an imposing man and filled his chair completely. His thick beard grew high on weathered cheeks. The blue-green jacket carried the warmth of the hills, his hazy blue eyes the immeasurable distance of the sea. He regarded Anselm closely, weighing him up. He wasn’t altogether sure.

  Myriam laid bread and butter on the table, poured tea from the pot and then slipped out. An island way, thought Anselm. He’d barely seen her. But she, too, had a strong presence: in slow, decisive movements, with that firm hand of welcome. He’d seen delicacy, too, in the pale skin sprinkled with freckles; like Kate, who sat close to her father like a protecting angel.

  The men from Inisdúr needed no invitation to speak, no preamble to set the scene. Brendan simply started talking, his aching eyes on the fire, a remembered island fire. He chose his words carefully, as if there was no rush, as if he was building one of those strange walls to a pattern no one could summon in their dreams.

  ‘I was twelve years of age when Seosamh stepped on that boat and off the memory of the land,’ he said. ‘With these arms I rowed him to the lee. From then on, his name was only ever whispered. And spoken once out loud.’

  He nodded solemnly at his daughter and then returned his gaze to the low flames. Rituals ran within his blood. They were a way of understanding experience. Each person had their place, including the educated Kate. At the nod, she went out of the room and came back with an envelope. Anselm took out a flimsy sheet of paper, folded in two. Dated 18th September 1917, it was more distressing to handle than anything he’d touched on this, his long journey to a sharing of bread, not stone.

  Dear Mr and Mrs Flanagan,

  You will no doubt have heard from persons in Authority as to the unfortunate manner of your son’s death. He was held in great esteem by his comrades. None of us believed he was a deserter. I hope it is of some consolation when I tell you that he rests now in a place of considerable beauty, among trees untouched by war.

  If there is ever anything I can do to be of assistance, please remember, Sir, Madam, that I remain,

  Your humble and obedient servant,

  RSM Francis P. Joyce, 8th (Service) Btn. NLI.

  Feeling a swell of tears, Anselm put the letter on the table, grateful that it was his place to listen.

  ‘My mother and father didn’t utter a word for a week,’ said Brendan. ‘We hadn’t known Seosamh had joined the ranks of the British Army. Now we knew he’d been executed by them. We didn’t know why. We didn’t know where. And we didn’t have his body.’

  Brendan let the last word escape through his breath so quietly that Anselm shivered. It was as though Seosamh’s flesh – all human flesh – was intrinsically holy and had to be handled with fear and reverence. But Seosamh’s had been heaped on straw …

  ‘My father slowly died,’ resumed Brendan, still looking towards that island fire. ‘He worked the fields but there was no will left in him, no desire. The passion that had made them, that had brought up the weed and sand, had gone. He willed himself to death. We buried him two years later. As for my mother –’ emotion came heavy upon Brendan’s face, he thrust out his jaw in silent pain; mastering himself through inner violence, he continued – ‘she’d always wanted to leave the island, to travel to Boston, that mysterious place of opportunity and enchantment, to find her sister, Úna … but after Seosamh’s death she wouldn’t even go to Inismín. She was cursed. Cursed because she looked upon devils and would not turn away.’

  Anselm wholly understood Brendan’s meaning. He meant regret and remorse, and their tormenting, mesmerising power.

  ‘For the next thirty-six years she never mentioned Seosamh, though I knew she thought of him every day. And then we left the island. She was to die within nine months. There was no illness to come, no accident. She made a decision, like my father. That was when she spoke of Seosamh once again, though she didn’t utter his name.’

  Brendan took his eyes off the hearth. Leaning forward, he compressed all his age and remembrance into one, alarming expression, fixed on Anselm. ‘Before she went to bed to start the dying, she said, “Brendan, bring your brother home. Hold the Following. And bury him on Inisdúr.”’

  Brendan relaxed, releasing Anselm from his stare. Possessed by the same force that had mesmerised his mother, he turned inward, a massive physical presence, somehow absent.

  Kate explained that Brendan tried to find out why Seosamh had been condemned and where he’d been buried. He wrote to the army and government offices in Dublin and London. No one could tell him anything, save that the trial papers had been retained in the War Office archives. A Whitehall official observed that the Army Act was quite clear on the issue: such papers could only be released to the subject of the court martial; and since that person had not made the application, the matter could not be taken any further.

  Only a dead man could ask to read the transcript of his life’s undoing, thought Anselm, marvelling at the poise of the legal mind; thinking of the blocked road left for those who’d loved a man found wanting.

  On that basis, resumed Kate, all capital court martial files were closed to public inspection for seventy-five years. But then she came back from Bosnia and found Seosamh’s Field, and the name of an uncle whose papers had just been released at the Public Record Office in London.

  ‘And as soon as I opened the file,’ said Kate – after her father had stepped outside, wanting air. He’d sunk away, into his beard, his clothes, the sea – ‘I realised that this was no ordinary trial … that something had happened between Seosamh and Owen Doyle. The situation was laughable. Here I was, a specialist in reading bones, and I couldn’t understand the fragments left behind by my own uncle –’ she joined her hands earnestly, dishevelled by feeling – ‘we are so very grateful to you. For finding Seosamh; and the wonderful meaning of his life … it drove out whatever feeling we had against Father Moore.’

  Brendan was large against the misted window. A gale was lifting against him, cleaning out his mind. He was preparing for the Following, when darkness would give way to light, when he could be released from the grip of demons.

  3

  Anselm struggled back along the beach towards his hotel, hardly noticing the cold, colossal roar from the sea. He was thinking of Brendan, who’d never told Kate about his brother, who’d made a field to his memory; and of Kate who’d gone to the national archives, unable to confide in Martin Reid, or, later, Sarah Osborne. Father and daughter were tracked by the shadows of Muiris and Róisín. A deep privacy covered them both like a shroud. Unable to make sense of the trial papers, they’d gone on a pilgrimage to Étaples, Elverdinghe, Ypres and Oostbeke. A display on the Gilbertines at Les Ramiers had caught Kate’s eye. She’d read the name of Herbert Moore. And a brief reference to Larkwood had brought Brendan to the edge of a copse of trees where, remembering the words of Francis P. Joyce, RSM, he’d wept. Maybe Seosamh was laid in such a place, he’d thought. A beautiful place untouched by war. He’d never know.

  ‘The Following begins at nightfall, Father,’ Kate had repeated, having shown him the chosen room, a parlour facing the sea. She’d given him the time, too, but had then slipped back to the language of the island, where commitments were judged by the placement of the sun. ‘At first light, we go to Inisdúr. Would you find a reading, please? Something for this long-awaited moment?’

  In the peace of his room, to the rattle of windows, Anselm opened his pocket bible at the Apocalypse, that book on the wrath of the lamb. He quickly turned the pages, his eyes sharp for two words. Like a bird of prey, he flew i
nto an abysm of thunder, over burning lakes of sulphur, beneath a moon red as blood. Finally he found what he was looking for: the gifts bestowed on the Victor as he enters the Kingdom of Heaven: manna and stone.

  This was the passage that Herbert would have chosen, Anselm was sure.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Nothing Happens by Accident

  Herbert had been at Larkwood over fifty years when he met a prowling lawyer called Anselm.

  Years previously, in the sixties, a green Cortina had been found crashed into the enclosure wall. The owner couldn’t be traced so the police gave it to Herbert on the express understanding that he never drove it off the monastery grounds, because he had no licence. In time it became a sort of wheelchair, and Herbert enjoyed trundling here and there, whenever he wanted to be on his own.

  On one of those warm November days where summer and winter meet to confuse any sorting of the seasons, Herbert drove to the very extent of Larkwood’s boundary. Taking a lane too sharply, he skidded into a ditch. The instantaneous terror roused by the scraping and final thud was altogether exhilarating. Herbert whistled and tapped the steering wheel with satisfaction. He caught his breath and looked out of the window. It was a lovely afternoon. Oaks and chestnuts were shedding their modesty. You could almost hear them fall. Herbert started laughing, because he was stuck: an old leaf among other old leaves. A knocking by his ear made him turn towards an enquiring face. He had light brown hair, tired eyes, and he looked far too serious. Herbert wound down the window and quipped, ‘Do you want a lift?’

  The young man smiled woodenly and disappeared into the woods. He came back with a large branch. After jamming it under the back wheels he issued authoritative instructions on what Herbert had to do. ‘Father, accelerate gently, and I will push.’

  Maybe part of becoming old is that you don’t listen very well. For whatever reason, out of excitement or playful desperation, Herbert pressed the pedal to the floor. Mud sprayed high and the car swivelled as if it wanted to get deeper into the ditch. With some jolting and jamming, more instructions, and some gentleness this time, the car slid back on to the lane. When Herbert turned in gratitude to the voice at the window, he almost cried out. The young man’s face was splattered … and for an horrific instant Herbert saw Quarters looking back, desperate and terrified, out of the swamp at Ypres … the banks of the Zenderbeek had collapsed, shells soared and crashed on Passchendaele, the mule sank, its mouth open, the tongue hideously long and blue. ‘Hop in,’ Herbert chimed, to bluff his panic. ‘I’ll take you back.’

  But Herbert couldn’t stop his hands shaking. He locked them tight on to the steering wheel, while the old Cortina just stayed put in the middle of the lane. To calm himself he asked endless questions, while the young man wiped clean his face and hands on a handkerchief. Gradually Herbert found his footing in the present, and he began to hear the answers. ‘Bix Beiderbecke … it’s hard to say, Teddy Wilson or Art Tatum … the incomparable Maxine Sullivan … London … Gray’s Inn … Criminal Law …’

  Herbert’s saviour was a barrister, dear God.

  ‘The Lord wasn’t that fond of lawyers,’ he said with a groan. ‘Law and love … it’s not always a happy marriage.’

  Herbert couldn’t think of what to say next; and he wished he’d kept his mouth shut, for while it reflected his own experience the remark was, if anything, a touch rude. But he was a tough nut, this prowler, and he fought his corner.

  ‘Might I suggest something?’ he began, all lawyerly. ‘Love without the law would be licentious and the law without love would be ruthless.’

  Herbert could almost hear the fellow sit down in court with a flourish and a bang, and for a moment Herbert was left blinking at the trees, unable to reply. He couldn’t quite keep pace with his breath. He snatched for air … and his eyes smarted: in the darkest place of his memory his old mind discerned a strange light.

  Herbert had been the ruthless hand of the law, he’d always known that; but he saw something else, now: of all the lives Herbert’s hand might have touched out there on the Western Front, of all the many broken men who’d been condemned by the savagery of a wartime dispensation, Herbert had touched … love. Rough justice had met a saving mercy. Herbert’s participation in a monstrous crime had been part of that mystery. In Joseph Flanagan, Herbert’s ruthlessness had been purified.

  He glanced sideways at the young man, whose name he did not know, grateful for this precious, accidental gift given in the autumn of his life … while copper leaves fell from the oaks and chestnuts he’d planted in 1925. He’d received a word of mercy, from a man who looked so terribly like Quarters.

  ‘What do you do here?’ asked the prowler, suddenly. ‘At the monastery, I mean.’

  Herbert gave a slight start. He’d asked the same question, in much the same way. He, too, had crept around an enclosure. With an old longing, he said, ‘We tend a fire that won’t go out.’

  The young man frowned, not satisfied by half, but inside Herbert smiled. This fellow wasn’t simply curious. He’d spoken out of a longing, a homesickness … a kind of hidden misery. The answer he sought would only come to him in the living: he would, one day, knock on Larkwood’s door.

  ‘I’m Herbert,’ he said, to celebrate the moment.

  ‘And I’m Anselm.’

  After a shaking of hands, neither one truly understanding the other, Herbert gave the ignition a savage turn, randomly pressed the pedals with his dancing feet. With a bang they were off, birds leaping deranged from the trees. He cut through a field to the Priory, sliding like he used to as a boy, feet in socks along a corridor. The wheels span frantically but the old Cortina levelled out on a gentle slope, and it easily made the road, finding traction on a collapsed fence. Herbert drove slowly to the car park, quietly exultant.

  ‘What would you have done if I hadn’t turned up?’ asked Anselm, again lawyerly.

  Herbert sensed the eyes of a jury upon him, and a reproving, worldly judge. But he looked, instead, to his puzzled interrogator, the prowler who’d unwittingly brought the light with him.

  ‘Nothing happens by accident,’ he replied, rattling free the keys.

  Herbert stayed in his Cortina, watching Anselm walk away with his hands behind his back, a young man slightly lost, though not as lost as he imagined. As the unhappy lawyer stepped through the guesthouse door, Herbert felt a completely new type of fear, alluring in a way, possibly exciting, but frightening all the same.

  He realised that he’d just given to that young man all the wisdom he possessed: it wasn’t much but it was all Herbert had to give: on an understanding of accidents and faithfulness. And, speaking for himself, after today there was nothing left to receive.

  Yes, thought Herbert, I’m frightened because soon I will die.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  1

  Anselm lifted the latch on to the Following of Seosamh Ó Flannagáin. He gently opened the door and stepped inside. When his eyes had become accustomed to the obscurity he saw six chairs arranged within arm’s length around a long table. At one end sat Brendan, a hand spread upon each knee. At the other, facing him, sat John Lindsay, head bowed. Kate and Sabine were side by side along one length. Anselm joined Myriam on the other. The circle was complete. Three men and three women. Three blood relatives mingled with three strangers.

  Myriam struck a match and lit two candles, one at either end of the table. Flickering light fell upon a wonderful covering, a fabric of purple and orange and blue and gold. A Joseph’s cloak of many impossible colours, woven, Anselm was sure, by Róisín. The space between the two flames was agonisingly bare. It was the length of a man. In the centre, upon the vibrant cloth, very small and just catching the light, were two discs, one red, one green.

  ‘Now is the time of memory,’ announced Brendan with a gruff whisper. He’d trimmed his beard, giving it shape and a kind of bristling softness. His short white hair was thin, parted cleanly, like a boy’s. ‘Speak if moved.’

  The
darkness was strong and bore down from the rafters. Outside, the wind had drawn back. Soft exhalations upon the harbour made the pennants lightly flap and the main lines clink. The smell of oil and salt filled the room.

  ‘I was for ever following you,’ began Brendan after an age, his voice both strong and weak. ‘Did you know, brother?’

  All eyes rested on the long, burdened table.

  ‘Of a night time I followed you, often enough, to the teacher’s door, and listened to that other learning. Of the pink lands and another tongue. Did you know, Seosamh?’

  Brendan paused, swelling his chest.

  ‘I heard my mother’s voice that night, when she gave you her secret blessing. When she told you to fly, boy, and bring back wonderful tales from far away places.’

  Anselm shrank into the folds of his habit.

  ‘I stood at the door when my father begged you to stay, when he said there was one more field to be made. I heard that, Seosamh, did you know? Well, I made it, brother … in your name, with these hands.’

  Anselm’s prickling eyes found the two stamped tags, the remains of an executed man on a robe for an island king: name, number and religion.

  ‘I followed you to the slip. I rowed you away from the crowd. Did you think of me afterwards, as I thought of you?’

  Brendan stared ahead, as he might have done when the boat pulled away from Inisdúr. It was a hungry stare, and helpless. And unbearable to witness, because there was nothing else to be said. This was the moment when friends and neighbours should have raised their own voices of remembrance – old people who’d once been young in that crowd. But they’d passed on themselves. Myriam had never met Seosamh. Neither had Kate. There was no one left. Anselm closed his eyes, reaching wildly for prayers or hymns, anything at all to drive back this encroaching emptiness … but then John Lindsay’s voice broke the silence.