A Whispered Name

by William Brodrick

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Disobedience

  1

  Chamberlayne was not the sort of man to show much emotion. He needed irony and sarcasm to transmit what, for another, would be a rush of passion. Consequently, it was with an air of apparent indifference that he said to Herbert on the afternoon of the 10th September: ‘Duggie has received a telegram from a legal mind at GHQ regarding the Flanagan matter. I don’t know what it says because he’s been summoned to a pow-wow with Pemberton. Who knows, Captain, perhaps your judicial skills are to be required once more.’

  Chamberlayne meant that there might be a retrial and a fresh sentencing process. If Duggie’s argument had found a sympathetic ear, then that was a potential outcome. Herbert could not linger for Duggie’s return to find out. But it was with a lightness of foot that he led his Company in a mock attack upon the mock battlefield. Coloured tape had been fixed to the ground to guide his men forward. They flapped in the breeze, catching the sunlight. The entire setting was like a gigantic board game. ‘Snakes and Ladders, Sir,’ whispered Joyce, making his peace with Herbert.

  During a break in rehearsals, Herbert heard a rumour. Rioting had broken out in Étaples. Major Tomlinson filled out the detail. ‘We’re not using the word “mutiny”,’ he said, enunciating each word precisely. ‘Rowdy troops are roaming the streets at the base camp. An MP was obliged to discharge a firearm. Measures to restore law and order are under way.’

  To Herbert, that sounded like mutiny.

  ‘Obviously,’ confided Tomlinson, as if the German High Command must never find out, ‘Senior officers at GHQ are rattled.’

  The very officers who would decide the fate of Joseph Flanagan. They would open the file and think, instantly, ‘Another instance of drunkenness in place of duty.’ Herbert’s optimism disappeared. His preoccupation endured for the entirety of the afternoon and was still present when, after supper, he walked past the abbey and the carpenter’s shed to supervise another kind of practice. Detached, he observed the team as they planned manoeuvres to outwit the Lancashire Fusiliers. Only Elliot was more introverted. He kicked stones out of the ground, his hands in his pockets. Herbert left him be, not knowing what to say, for he was the one who’d stripped him bare.

  After training, Joyce joked some more (about Tomlinson); Pickles Pickering headed the ball non-stop for eighty-four strikes (until Stan Gibbons pulled his trousers down); and Flanagan listened to Father Maguire explain the off-side rule in Gaelic. Herbert edged towards the Irishman and the priest, his unease growing. They huddled together, as if it were raining. It was a musical, memorable language; and Herbert had heard it before. The chaplain had looked as agitated then as he did now. The more Herbert listened – and Father Maguire was beginning to lose his cool so the dramatic inflections were rising – the more Herbert wanted to press Flanagan with a question that had taken root throughout the afternoon, when the assault brigades had rehearsed their moves under the watchful eyes of Tomlinson and his companions. When the team left the field, Herbert called Flanagan to one side. As the others went down the lane, Herbert set off in the opposite direction, towards the woods. When Flanagan came alongside, Herbert asked his question. He’d forgotten all about that night in the reserve trench, Étaples and Elverdinghe.

  ‘How in the name of God did you ever come to join the British Army?’

  2

  An airplane had droned low over the island, Flanagan explained. In a fright, the people ran from their cottages, their faces turned to the sky, towards a burst of leaflets. Flanagan tore one into strips to use as markers in his copy of The King’s English by the Fowler brothers. As he’d ripped the paper he’d read the call to join Kitchener’s Army.

  ‘No one took any heed,’ said Flanagan, ‘and neither did I. No, if there’s a reason for my coming to France, it’s the doing of my old teacher Mr Drennan, though he’d be flabbergasted if he ever knew.’

  Mr Drennan was a devout nationalist. Or, rather, having travelled wide and far, he’d discovered Ireland – as an abstract heaven – which, to his vexation, he’d been unable to locate with any precision on his return to Cork. He’d woken up to an appalling personal conviction: the Ireland beloved in the Diaspora, the Ireland of merry wars and sad songs, had never quite existed in the first place, at least not in living memory. It was a hope rooted in the might-have-beens of history, if subjugation and hunger hadn’t dispersed a nation’s children. He’d felt a fool, because he’d said that more than once before leaving for Boston, only he hadn’t appreciated the scale of the tragedy. Bruised but unbowed, he’d finally come west to Inisdúr in search of Celtic purity. There, on the salt-bitten grass, eyes glazed, he’d condemned Dublin Castle and the British Rule of Law.

  ‘“Disobedience” was his favourite word,’ said Flanagan. ‘The Irish had to disobey if they were to find their true identity. Defiance was their destiny –’ he laughed softly – ‘and their duty. He’d belt this stuff out while we loaded up the currachs with kelp. The elders just leaned on the wall chewing their pipes. They’d never paid rent or rates in their lives. They’d once stoned the boat of a collector when he’d dared approach the island. That was the last we saw of him. Home Rule? Sure, we had it.’

  Perhaps that was why Flanagan had never been able to get worked up about British domination. Island folk didn’t even think in terms of being Irish, not in Mr Drennan’s sense. There was the mainland. There was the sea. And there was Inisdúr. That was it. The people’s relationship with their rock and beaches was at odds with nationalist thinking, precisely because it was ‘thinking’. An islander was part of his island. There was no link, as with a chain. Man and soil were one. When he’d said that to Mr Drennan, the table banging started all over. ‘That’s why you’re free, damn you. You’re Irish and you don’t know it.’

  Flanagan, however, did learn something from Mr Drennan that he may not have wanted to teach: that freedom is always purchased by disobedience. This wasn’t about the ‘politics of tenure’. It was about personal identity. And Flanagan wanted to break from the island’s ways, if only for a while. He’d seen a map – a guide to other places than the one beneath your feet. It had spoken to him in a way that Lord Kitchener’s appeal had not.

  The moment of decision was not chosen. It presented itself.

  ‘The fields were hemmed in with walls,’ said Flanagan. ‘My father built them to some strange design from his dreams. It was carefully done, balancing the large with the small, arranging the weight in such a way as to bring beauty from strength. They were patterned, like my mother’s quilts, but in stone. When the third field had been enclosed, when the last stone had been laid, my father turned to me and said, “And now we make a fourth field, for Brendan.” I took a breath. For Brendan? He can make the yoke himself, that’s what I thought.’

  At that moment, opposite his father’s exultation, Flanagan decided to leave Inisdúr, though of course it had nothing to do with the making of another field. After supper, in the simple way of an islander, without preliminaries or ornament, he told his parents he would leave for England in a week. Brendan had been sent outside but he was listening at the window. ‘I want to stretch my legs,’ Flanagan had said. There was labouring to be done over there, what with the shortage of men away at the war. ‘I’ll be back in six months or so,’ he’d pleaded, as his father, in the way of an islander, stomped from the room.

  Word went around the low, granite houses: ‘Seosamh is going away.’ No one believed that he’d come back. It was Drennan’s fault, some said. He’d given the boy ideas. There was a kind of fear in their silence towards him. One woman gave it voice. She lived alone on the far side of the island. Her husband had been taken by the sea. Meg was her name.

  ‘The house was alone in a cove surrounded by cliffs,’ said Flanagan. ‘The inside walls were black from the soot. Her clothes were black and smelled of the fire. Even her skin was black, from years of tending the turf in the grate. Sure, she was half gone.’ He tapped his head and
winked. ‘Well, there I was, on the beach. The tide was out and I was gathering shells, something to take with me to England, when I felt this hand grip my elbow. I hadn’t heard her coming. God, she was a sight: all bent over and black and dribbling. “Seosamh,” she said, “don’t go.” She pulled me down to her level. “Don’t leave the land.” Dear God, what’s she been eating, I thought … I told her to calm herself and have some tea. But that night … that night I dreamt of Meg. And it was so … so real. I was back on that beach, running away, and her voice bounced off the cliffs, “The fields will die.” The shells were sucking at my feet. “If you leave the land, Seosamh, death will claim you.” I woke up with a cry, panting and covered with sweat. My mother was there, by the bed, holding my hand. “I’m not leaving, Ma,” I cried, “It’s six months, a fling, nothing more.”’

  He was calm by the time they reached the woods.

  Herbert wasn’t. Agitation had entered his blood. He felt accused: by Flanagan’s story and his own. They’d come to a halt. On their left was a long, low barn. To their right a track ran into the shadows towards a clearing. A mix of trees crowded the verge. For a moment they stared into the leafy space, at the grass, the sifted light, and a speckling of tiny mauve and yellow flowers at the mouth of the path. Abruptly Herbert turned around and, though he walked, he was fleeing the colour, as he’d once run from the chant. He’d no senses left that were fit to receive beauty; what he had was contaminated. He’d been stirred, too, by Flanagan’s mutiny. It had been deeper than the poetry of his teacher, deeper than the nationalist thought-out politics of self-determination, but what had Herbert done? Had he ever reached that moment of necessary, liberating disobedience?

  ‘The night before I left,’ resumed Flanagan, when Herbert dropped back, ‘I went to see Mr Drennan. Again I went by the fields, avoiding the road. He was expecting me. Normally he drank porter or poitín from his own still but this time on the table was a neat white cloth. In the middle were a bottle of burgundy wine and two glasses. I told him I’d taken the pledge, and he gave the table a whack and he fairly flew off the handle: “This is not some cheap forbidden froth. ’Tis a sacred drink, boy. Take the glass and honour our parting.”’

  Herbert’s parents had done much the same thing when he took his commission with the Lancers. His father had opened a bottle given to him by his own father for such a moment. When decanted it was found to be corked.

  ‘I said I couldn’t, that I’d made a vow.’ Flanagan was almost laughing. ‘So Mr Drennan paced around, muttering and swearing, and finally he said, “A vow be damned. Sit yourself down, so, and you can watch.” So I did. Slowly he poured the wine, into his glass and into mine, and he said in a drone, “I’ll drink this one now. The other I shall save for your homecoming, however bitter the grape might turn.” He drained his glass in complete silence and he put mine on a shelf and covered it with a writing slate.’

  Herbert’s father had poured the old vintage down the sink and opened something young and fresh. They’d toasted youth and the coming of age and responsibility. Herbert had been very happy. Time seemed to stop, and Herbert suffered once more the joy of that last night in the dining room, when the road from the front door was clearly marked.

  For some reason, explained Flanagan, with another laugh, labour in England was not a heresy against the Drennan canons of Irish orthodoxy. The teacher had many friends over there. When Flanagan left the cottage, he carried a letter of introduction to a good man in Tyneside who ran a gang of boys on the shipyards. A foreman with the power to hire and fire, a bad Gaelic speaker. The next morning Flanagan left Inisdúr.

  ‘There was a track from the slip to our farm,’ said Flanagan. ‘It wound through the scatter of houses. As I walked away, my mother watched from the window. My father was alone, looking over the fields. Every now and then folk came out and shook my hand. It was only when I got to the slip that I realised Brendan had followed me … he was always following me, you know, and I was always walking away. But I didn’t wait for him. I’d been stunned by the sight of the crowd on the walls.’

  In 1913 Herbert’s mother and father, uncle, two aunts, four nephews and three nieces had all come to the station in Keswick. His father had been speechless with pride. His mother had maintained the firm, distant look that had built India at the cost of immense social and cultural privation – her habitual look, in fact. They’d all shaken hands and Herbert had left to join the regiment.

  Corporal Mackie jangled keys, held high like a lantern.

  Herbert blinked, surprised that they’d already reached the school at Oostbeke. At the sound, Flanagan moved away from Herbert without another word. Obediently, he descended the steps towards the cellar, and Herbert found himself wanting to call out, but there was nothing to say. After securing the door, Mackie said, ‘Begging your pardon, Sir, but why isn’t Flanagan locked up with the other arseholes?’

  ‘An incisive question, Corporal,’ replied Herbert, his limbs heavy with rage. ‘I imagine it’s because within the week we’re going to shoot him, and our CO thinks he deserves some privacy beforehand.’

  ‘Of course, Sir.’ Mackie saluted, content that he’d shown his disapproval.

  He’d swagger about that within half an hour, thought Herbert. He’d tell his mates the officer had gone red in the face. The corporal marched off – he didn’t know how to walk any more – and as he grew smaller, his arms swinging with magnificent ease, Herbert realised his question hadn’t been answered. He still hadn’t the faintest idea why Joseph Flanagan had joined the British Army.

  3

  Duggie Hammond was in the courtyard, walking in a circle, hands behind his back. Angus charged ahead and charged back again, his jaws slack, his limbs shaking. (The view of Tindall was that he had shellshock. He’d been brought to the front on a visit with General Lindsay. A 5.9 came out of the blue and took out the brass hat, leaving the dog behind. He’d been with Duggie ever since.) Herbert appraised the deranged animal with pity. It had stopped running and was staring at the ground as though it were a radio. The chickens stood well back.

  ‘I received this communiqué from none other than the Assistant Adjutant General for discipline, or, more likely, a servant thereof.’

  Duggie withdrew a folded sheet of paper from his tunic pocket and handed it to Herbert, who read the text out loud: ‘“The point helpfully raised on intention and drunkenness regarding the offence of desertion is being considered by my legal team. In the course of discussion on the subject it has been brought to my attention, quite rightly, that the cost of two field dressings ought to be deducted from any pay due to the convicted prisoner. Please make the necessary arrangements.”’

  Herbert folded the page back into a neat square and offered it to Duggie as though it lay upon a platter. Angus slumped exhausted on the ground, growling at the chickens.

  ‘Herbert, do you know the species of this creature?’

  He shook his head, utterly disinterested.

  ‘He’s an Irish Setter.’

  Voices and footsteps approached. The seven other officers of the battalion had come to Duggie’s billet for a nightcap. Over whisky, the discussion quickly turned to the unrest in Étaples. Apparently someone had been killed. An MP shot a Gordon Highlander by accident and the crowd went crazy. Despite the gravity of the subject, Herbert’s mind was elsewhere. He was listening to that Gaelic music. The foreign music he’d heard in the reserve trenches the night he’d shot Quarters as he sank with a mule.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  1

  Sarah Osborne, great-great-granddaughter of General Sir Ralph Spencer Osborne VC DSO, commander of the Ninth Army between 1915 and 1918, lived with her father, David, in the family home purchased by the general shortly after the armistice. Then, as now, it was situated comfortably back from a quiet lane and surrounded by several acres of land rented out to local farmers. This much, and clear directions, Anselm learned from a village newsagent, having got lost on his way to tea at four. The ma
in entrance was beneath a portico supported by two Greek columns. A fire crackled in the hall.

  ‘For chatting and leaning upon,’ said Sarah, stroking a velvet padded rail that framed the hearth. ‘They’re from the officers’ mess of the Cambridgeshires. They became redundant after the MoD obliterated four hundred years of tradition by amalgamating three regiments with nothing in common save an acknowledgement that you can’t reduce an army’s size and increase its responsibilities at one and the same time.’

  Sarah was in her early thirties, thought Anselm. Despite the pastoral calm of her surroundings, she had a windswept look. Her hair was unruly, thick with early strands of grey, held aside by a single wooden clip. When she spoke her face barely moved. Her gait was strangely delicate, as though she were avoiding broken glass on the carpet. Anselm followed her into the sitting room and was immediately struck by the panelling of rich dark oak – all culled, it transpired, from the mess in which several Osborne sons had learned the customs of war. Anselm sank into a wonderfully soft armchair of faded chestnut leather.

  ‘My father’s making the tea,’ said Sarah, propped on the edge of her matching seat, one leg hooked elegantly behind the other. ‘I understand you’d like to talk about the outcome of the Flanagan court martial?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can’t really help, I’m afraid,’ she said, apologetically. ‘But I have a little something for you … something I found among Ralph’s papers after I’d looked at the Flanagan file myself. But first, let’s have some refreshment.’

  The door had opened while Sarah was speaking. A balding, slight man in a shapeless suit bustled in pushing a clinking trolley laden with sandwiches and crockery. His high, dark eyebrows reversed the shape of his smiling mouth, giving his face a jolly appearance.