A Whispered Name

by William Brodrick

  ‘Ever since Martin suggested that Flanagan was the stronger personality, as opposed to Doyle, I’ve been trying to conjure up the essence of the man. And there’s something extraordinary to be seen, and it’s plainly set out in the court’s transcript. When giving his defence he talked of rain “coming off the sea after weeks of the gathering”; he said, “the land was part of the air” –’ Anselm shook his head in astonishment – ‘this is a trial. The man’s fighting for his life … what does he say? “And cold I was and wet.”’ Anselm rubbed a thumb and finger as if feeling silk, or showing its unearthly cost. ‘There’s an exceptional sensibility to Joseph Flanagan. A frailty. And this is the man who, five months earlier, helped bury two thousand three hundred and fourteen English and German soldiers in four days. Try and picture it. Dragging bodies for hours on end … by the arms, by the legs … in April, the month of early sunshine. The experience must have affected him deeply, this poet who’d seen the land and sky join up and turn to water. Come June his nerves are wrecked by an explosion that removes not his friends, but his enemy.’

  ‘You think April and June lead to the trial?’ asked the Prior, already convinced. His arms were folded tight, his dark eyes trained on the rich grass and moss.

  ‘I do,’ replied Anselm, emphatically. ‘The next time we know anything about Joseph Flanagan, he’s a deserter. Only not in an ordinary sense. He’s been to Étaples and back. And the evidence against him, without any reference to the trip, is like a script. I believe something profound happened to Flanagan in April and it came to a head in September when he met Doyle. But what did they say to each other? More to the point, what did Doyle say?’

  Anselm and the Prior looked at each other helplessly. The trail into the past had come to an end on these, the most important questions of all. There was no way of finding out the answers. And there was nothing else that could be done to advance their understanding of the trial or Herbert’s message.

  ‘At times like this,’ said the Prior, ‘I always sit tight.’

  Like Herbert in his Cortina, thought Anselm.

  They’d swung their legs into the garth. Facing a new direction, they’d left behind the claims of Herbert, Joseph Flanagan and Owen Doyle. Released like boys, they dreamed up excruciating product labels for the jars that would shortly be filled: Honey from the Rock. The Baptist’s Choice. The Promised Brand. While they laughed, freely, Anselm found his face growing stiff. He had a horrible feeling that the Prior might not be joking.

  2

  The Prior cornered Anselm while he was unloading crates of pears off a trolley outside Saint Hildegard’s, the fruit-press shed. In all seriousness, he said, ‘The Dew of Hermon …’

  Anselm raised a hand. This sort of thing happened to Priors. They’re responsible for the livelihood of a monastery. Between reading the Rule and the Fathers, they occasionally get visions of the shelves in Tesco. He was about to say something harsh when Benedict waved from the shed, pointed at Anselm and tapped his ear, which meant that Sylvester had transferred a telephone call from reception.

  The voice took flight without introduction. ‘My research, of necessity, takes me frequently to Saint Catherine’s House in London – where the national indexes for births and deaths in England and Wales are helpfully stored. Many of my great-great-grandfather’s comrades are in the lists and it’s my painful duty to check basic details knowing that they are of marginal importance. In a moment of boredom I decided to enquire after one Owen Doyle.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I rather got carried away. Have you got a pen to hand?’

  Anselm gestured frantically at Jerome who, with Benedict, had just lugged a heaped crate towards the press. The former always carried an ink pen in his top pocket. It had been a gift from his father. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘He was born on twenty-first January eighteen ninety-six.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In the parish of Saint Stephen, Bolton, Lancashire.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘At the time of his birth, his family address was three-five-nine Leyland Park Avenue, of that town.’

  Sarah paused while Anselm scribbled, repeating out loud what he’d just heard. Fruit thumped into the press like heavy rain on a roof.

  ‘The father was named Colum, occupation mill worker, the mother was Alice, maiden name Lowther.’

  ‘This is tremendous,’ said Anselm, not quite sure what he was going to do with the information. But Doyle had been close to Flanagan. He was the absent presence at the trial.

  ‘There’s one hitch.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Owen Doyle died on the twenty-fourth of August nineteen hundred and eight at the age of twelve years eight months.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cause of death tuberculosis,’ continued Sarah in an even, reading voice, ‘certified by Kenneth Spinks LMSSA. The father, Colum, was present at the death.’

  Anselm slumped on to a stool. His brother monks, satisfied that he was all right, returned to their work, leaning on the limbs that lowered the press.

  ‘I made a few phone calls,’ continued Sarah, ‘and people really are enormously helpful if you only ask the right question in the right way. Owen is buried in Blackburn Road Cemetery in the far left-hand corner as you enter the main gates. It’s an iron cross among failing slabs of stone.’

  Anselm noted the details, thinking hard, trying to link this development to Flanagan’s secret crisis … and to Herbert.

  ‘I’ll send you a copy of the birth and death certificates,’ said Sarah, ‘though they’re of little if any use. Whoever enlisted in nineteen fifteen was not baptised Owen in the parish of Saint Stephen.’

  Watching Benedict and Jerome, heads bowed and pushing, Anselm fell into a kind of trance. The pressure fell inexorably on to the soft pears and juice tinkled into a vat. It was a wonderful sound, stirring some forgotten simplicity in his depths. Fountains had a similar effect. He listened, gratefully.

  Part Four

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Preparations

  Herbert drew back the gate and Father Maguire pressed his face further into the wall as if he’d been caught and didn’t want to be identified – like a smoker behind the school sheds. When Herbert reached Duggie’s billet he stepped into a kind of oven. It was as though fires had been laid in every corner, though in fact the grate was cold and the windows were open. It was a lovely, fading evening.

  ‘… then we’ll have to find somewhere else,’ shouted Duggie at Chamberlayne.

  Both men turned in Herbert’s direction. Each was breathing heavily. Chamberlayne thrust out a document and stared at Herbert – his expression telling him that they were comrades; that what was unfolding they would handle as brothers. Herbert nearly sobbed at the gesture.

  ‘A rider just brought it from Brigade.’

  The Order had originated at Division level. Herbert quickly read it, starting after the preliminaries.

  The sentence will be carried out at 5.45 a.m. adjacent to the west walls of the monastery at OOSTBEKE facing the Divisional camp. The exact location should be two hundred yards from HUT 42.

  The following detail from the 8th (Service) Battalion, Northumberland Light Infantry will be selected tonight:

  Regimental Sergeant Major

  Provost Sergeant

  Escort: 1 NCO & 2 men

  Firing Party: 1 officer

  1 Sergeant

  12 men

  Burial Party: 4 men

  The NCO in charge of the escort should be able to identify Private FLANAGAN.

  The firing party should be assembled at 4.15 a.m. in HUT 42 and confined thereto. The men need not be informed of the duty for which they are being detailed until 4.30 a.m. on the 14th instant.

  All other necessary arrangements will be made by this office.

  Please return Proceedings after promulgation.

  Herbert’s head fell back. Flanagan was to be shot by his own battalion. The Regimental Sergeant Major was Joyce. T
he men to be gathered in HUT 42 knew already what they were being detailed to perform. Why else were they expected to get up at 4.00 a.m. and wait in a shed?

  ‘The Abbot won’t let us use his walls,’ said Duggie, trying to be calm. ‘He won’t let us do anything on the abbey’s land. And it stretches for miles around.’

  ‘But, Sir,’ said Herbert, his mouth sticky, ‘we can’t do this, we can’t ask Joyce—’

  ‘Captain,’ thundered Duggie, swinging around, ‘we don’t ask the RSM anything. We TELL him. Do you understand? This is the British Army. Not some Benevolent Society for the distribution of alms. We are at war, and this is part of war. It’s a nasty part of how we WIN. One of the many, many nasty parts.’ Duggie scratched viciously at the flea bites on his face. ‘Look, I’ve done what I could … I’ve tried to get the lad out of the frying pan.’ He sighed as if he’d reached the top of a hill. ‘Pemberton blew my arse off. Said I should never have kicked up that nonsense about intention. Apparently, it’s gone to the top and we can expect a directive on the subject – throughout the BEF.’

  ‘Why shoot Flanagan, for God’s sake?’ asked Herbert. ‘What does Brigade want?’

  ‘What does Division want,’ corrected Duggie. He looked at Herbert as if he were a little slow. ‘They want to give morale a quick kick before we go back—’

  ‘Morale,’ said Herbert, bewildered. ‘We lost eighty-five per cent of our men, and our morale needs a kick.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ Duggie was exhausted and hot. ‘They mean an example. They mean no one can even think of stepping back. We have to take Passchendaele Ridge. Remember, Herbert, this lad took a quick vacation, even if we don’t know why.’ Again he scratched his face, his temper rising. ‘It’s not my job to understand why. Damn it. I’ve only made recommendations to mercy and they’ve all been heeded. I can’t be that surprised if they ignore me for once. You know, Herbert … military law … Wellington’s code, tarted up? Well, it may have been dreamed up for the Regulars and not the Volunteers, but most of ’em are volunteers or conscripts now. And they all have a pocket book with a warning in it, telling ’em what’ll happen if they bugger off. Flanagan’s got what he expected, believe me. He’s less surprised than we are.’

  Chamberlayne poured some whisky into three glasses and handed them round.

  Duggie raised his portion as if he were a connoisseur checking its colour and said, ‘Gentlemen, we have “an unpleasant duty to perform”. That is the term of art. Now, let’s get on with it.’ He drained his glass and dropped on to a stool by the empty grate. ‘Edward, send a chit to OC Companies. Tell them to supply four men each. Inform Father Maguire that he can attend Doyle through the night and to the moment of execution. Tell the RMO, Tindall, that he should join the detail to witness and confirm death and provide a certificate to that effect. I want to see Joyce, on his own, now.’

  ‘Sir, you said Doyle,’ observed Chamberlayne.

  ‘Did I?’ said Duggie. ‘Slip of the tongue. I meant Flanagan, of course.’

  Chamberlayne started typing, swiftly, with various fingers. His jaw was rigid and the dark rings around his eyes seemed to pulsate with shadow.

  ‘God, where are we going to shoot him?’ said Duggie, looking into his glass.

  The problem with the camp was that it was utterly flat, like all the landscape around Ypres. Apart from the hop frames and a few patches of woodland there was nothing on the horizon. The land was a great table reaching to the coast. There were no quarries or farm walls – places to draw up a detail with ‘an unpleasant duty to perform’.

  In his mind, Herbert saw a scattering of mauve and yellow flowers at the mouth of a track. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘if you walk past the school for a mile or so, you come to a wood. It’s fairly thick, but there’s a wide path that leads to a clearing. A barn faces the entrance.’

  Duggie tapped his teeth, thinking. ‘Edward, give the Abbot a ring. Tell him if we can’t do it beneath the trees we’ll do it on the side of an open road.’

  Chamberlayne instantly picked up the phone, dialled, waited and then spoke in fluent French to a Père Koopmans. When he’d put the phone down, he said, ‘The Abbot wishes me to inform you that the woods are not his; that if they were he would forbid you entry; and that wherever we choose to shoot this man – in the light or in a shadow – it will be seen from on high and ring throughout eternity to our disgrace.’

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Duggie.

  ‘I replied that I was most grateful, and that I feared he was right on both points.’ With that, he started swiftly typing the chits for the company commanders. The speed, the sense of time having become vastly important, impressed itself upon Herbert. He began to shuffle on the spot, as if there was something he might do, only not knowing what; as if water had burst in an upstairs pipe and he didn’t know where the stopcock was located. ‘I’ll inform Maguire and Tindall,’ he said, and then chewed his bottom lip.

  Duggie nodded, rasping his forehead and grinding his teeth. Herbert ran outside, past a sleeping general’s dog, and had reached the courtyard gate when Duggie called him back. He’d opened the skin above one eyebrow and his whole face was red from the grating of his nails. ‘Look at me,’ he said.

  Herbert dared not … he knew well enough the frown that revealed restraint and gentleness.

  ‘Look at me, Herbert,’ ordered the CO.

  Herbert faced not the soldier but the man who might have been a teacher, the loved master of a public school, inflexible but yielding when least expected. ‘This is not your fault. Flanagan was finished the moment he met Doyle.’

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  In the Cellar

  Flanagan was marched from the parade ground along the dusty road to the school at Oostbeke. He didn’t know the guards on either side, or the NCO marching in front as if he was on full view to the Field Marshal himself. Each member of the escort had a fixed bayonet. Uncertainly, Flanagan descended the cellar steps. Corporal Mackie was waiting.

  ‘Belt.’ He pointed at the buckle. ‘Remove it.’

  Flanagan obeyed and Mackie slowly rolled it up.

  ‘I’ve got no hard feelings against you,’ he announced, completing the coil. ‘You have my pity.’

  The arched door banged shut and Flanagan was alone. He’d slept in the cellar for two weeks but now everything seemed different. The camp bed, the table, the two chairs. It was as though Flanagan had never seen them before. Arranged neatly on the table were some sheets of paper, a few envelopes, a pencil and a candle.

  ‘What can I write?’ he cried. His mind span. How could he find last words?

  A waxen light seeped through two vents. He turned to the fragment of sky, the cusp of a cloud. He felt ill with shock – the same feeling he’d had when the bodies of a neighbour were washed up near Meg’s cove. Two brothers. They’d gone out for the lobsters. The only warning was a lift in the waves, when it was too late to avoid the storm. That was Flanagan’s first experience of unnatural death. The bodies had been black and bloated and slimy, like the lustrous weed around their feet.

  ‘What’s to be said?’ he begged of himself.

  He saw his father, eyes on the barley; his mother, dreaming of Boston; Brendan shouldering his first currach; Mr Drennan checking the wine beneath the slate. And he thought of what had brought him to this cellar, and why he would never see Inisdúr again. At once he dragged back the chair and picked up the pencil. It was sharp.

  There was not sufficient light to see clearly, but Flanagan didn’t look at the page. He didn’t care if he left the tramlines. No, he looked ahead, feverish and concentrated, citing and writing the remembered line. Ba thaise ná an fhearthainn do shódhantacht, Ba dhaingne ná an charraig do chrógacht.

  With wild capitals he then scribbled a plea in English. A strange notion had settled upon him as he’d trekked from Abeele across the steaming grassland to Elverdinghe; but now, at this stark moment, it seemed no longer strange but profoundly right and proper. When he’d finish
ed the letter, he folded the paper in half, put in an envelope, and wrote on the outside: Lisette.

  ‘Joseph, would you come into the parlour,’ said Lisette, one afternoon.

  This was only the second time that Flanagan had entered that room. As he passed through the corridor, following her steps, he sensed her openness to him and he feared her purpose. Taking a seat, he glanced around him: at the grandfather clock; the carved wardrobe with a brass lock; the roll-top writing desk; a book case jammed with tall volumes; the side table holding a decanter and small glasses housed in a glass box, all painted with golden lines; and beside it a photograph of a boy in an oval silver frame.

  ‘My son,’ said Lisette. ‘Louis.’

  Flanagan could see the ambience of the mother in his face: a long neck, a straight nose, that thick black hair; but the boy had low, level eyebrows, features perhaps drawn from the father’s line. He was about Brendan’s age.

  ‘Where is he now?’ asked Flanagan. She’d never spoken of him for long, save to say he was at the front, fighting for France and Brittany.

  Lisette tied a bow with the black silk ribbon on the collar of her blouse. It had fallen open, showing her throat and the whiteness of her skin. Flanagan saw a vein; its winding course roused his blood. ‘He’s dead.’

  Flanagan wanted to cross the room but his feet seemed nailed to the floorboards.

  ‘I killed him.’

  He stared at her, expectant and unbelieving.

  ‘A few years after the photograph was taken he joined his battalion … at the age of fifteen,’ she said, quietly. ‘He went in the name of his father, to honour his memory. I could have stopped him but I didn’t. Far from it. I encouraged him. With these hands I blessed him on the second of January nineteen fifteen.’ She held them up as though they were ruined tools. ‘Five months later, on the eighteenth of May, he fell at Artois.’