A Whispered Name

by William Brodrick

  With a gesture of slight impatience she put the paper with the letter, as if it were important but irrelevant to her confusion. To comfort her, Herbert said, ‘I’m told the first line applies to you, and the second to Joseph,’ but Madame Papinau was still adrift.

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said. ‘He wrote something else.’

  Abruptly, with tears running free, she offered Herbert coffee and then disappeared through the door that had been left ajar. A tap ran in the distance. Crockery fell to the floor and smashed. Herbert listened to the sound of a pan and brush, determined to be honest with this woman; to tell her of his own decision. Ten minutes later she returned with a tray, her face flushed from being rinsed and dried too roughly. Once again, the door had been left ajar.

  ‘There is something I have to tell you, Madame,’ said Herbert.

  Madame Papinau poured coffee from a pewter pot into two small cups.

  ‘Joseph asked me to come here, but I’m the criminal.’ Herbert placed his arms on his knees, bringing his face close to the edge of the table. ‘I condemned him to death.’

  He waited for something to strike his head; he lived out an imaginary attack, accepting each blow as he was beaten on to the red and white polished tiles. But there was no sound or movement. Emotion welled up from his depths. Guilt, weariness and self-loathing burned him like the whisky at General Osborne’s. He pulled at his collar as though Madame Papinau’s thumbs were pressing hard on his throat.

  ‘He knew that I had done this,’ Herbert managed to say, ‘and yet he asked me to come here, to explain why he couldn’t stay, to tell you why he’d gone back … and I don’t know; I don’t understand anything any more – not what he did, not what I did … nothing.’ He coughed but got no relief from that imagined grip. His windpipe seemed to have twisted. ‘I will not go back. I’m not part of the army that did this to him … or to me.’

  Herbert longed to feel a blow, to see his own blood spurt hot on to the table. But it was as though Madame Papinau had quietly left the room. Not sure that she was there, he glanced up. Her eyes were wide, as when she’d read Flanagan’s letter. There was no rage or blame whatsoever. Only a vast compassion … something predatory and more frightful than the sympathy of Father Maguire. Seeing her face and her hungry eyes, he said, ‘I’m sorry … I’m so sorry …’ and flushed with self-hatred he cried, not wanting to bring his own cheap remorse into this cold palace of glass.

  ‘In early nineteen fifteen,’ said Madame Papinau, quietly, ‘I condemned a boy to death. There was no court. He’d done nothing wrong. But I sent him away from home to die. And do you know why I did it? For France, yes. And to buy the respect of my neighbours. Because everyone else’s son had put on a uniform. I don’t condemn you … not with these hands –’ she held them up as if they didn’t quite belong to her – hands that blessed her own son’s going.

  Herbert drew a sleeve across his cheeks and looked aside at the frosted window. Shapes passed against the light, people who would have this war end, who bore with its awful, relentless consequences.

  ‘I don’t think Joseph sent you here to explain why he went back,’ said Madame Papinau. ‘I knew already. I’d always understood. He sent you here so that I could say something more important.’

  Herbert wiped his eyes again, attentive and exhausted.

  ‘Please listen to me,’ said Madame Papinau very clearly. ‘I once said something to my son when I shouldn’t have done so, when it was wrong; but now I say it because I must, because it is right: you have to stay with your comrades. You cannot stay here, or anywhere else; you must go back.’

  She was uncompromising and supremely confident. ‘If you don’t, Joseph’s return means nothing; his death means nothing. You have to continue … step on step, and I know how appalling it is, I see and hear the boys when they come here night after night … but you, like them, have to maintain the pace, putting one foot in front of the other until the guns stop –’ she held up her hands at the word – ‘and when they do finally stop, well … then you can go home, and I’ll find a way of honouring the memory of Joseph.’

  2

  Herbert squeezed himself on to the troop train that had brought regiment after regiment to Abeele. There he joined a convoy of reinforcements heading to Oostbeke, all prepared to support the eighteen brigades that would attack the Gheluvelt Plateau. He’d left a great weight behind at the estaminet in Étaples, without any discharge of responsibility. The release occurred at a very deep level, and Herbert couldn’t quite understand what had happened. But he’d not been condemned by someone who had the power and authority to do it. And in opening the door on to the street he’d found himself light-headed and eager to see Duggie and Joyce and the boys. And even Elliot who would never forgive him. Above all, he’d hoped to catch Chamberlayne, just to enjoy any last minute dig at the pedantry of the administration.

  Herbert’s billet was, of course, as he’d left it: mild to moderate disarray but with a tidy shaving kit. Outside the clouds above Flanagan’s woods – the name just appeared in his mind – were darker and lower. A mist rose off the fields and the road out of Oostbeke seemed to vanish in the air. Herbert walked resolutely towards the abbey spire and the school, though these markers in his life were not his destination. He went instead to his battalion’s makeshift HQ, quite sure that he would continue along that misty road and die in the next few days. That he’d join good old Glanville who’d been clipped around the ear. But at least the mess in his life had been broadly cleared up. And his parents would be proud.

  ‘Glad to see you,’ said Duggie. There was just a trace of relief in his voice. He sat astraddle a chair, cleaning his revolver with a cloth. His hair, like that of all the men, had been shaved off in preparation for the battle. ‘Edward has gone and taken the dog with him. He thinks the level of medical care for nervous disorders is likely to increase with sophistication the further he gets away from the front line. He really is a disgrace and I shall miss him. And the dog, I suppose.’

  Duggie held the barrel towards the light, one eye closed. ‘You missed the worst football match in regimental history. We won six-nil.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘The Fusiliers scored four own-goals on our behalf. The other two were accidental, though Joyce thinks otherwise.’

  Herbert couldn’t imagine such a rout.

  ‘The Irish lads gave us the Lambton Cup,’ said Duggie. ‘I’ve never seen such self-sacrifice and inter-battalion unity.’

  Herbert settled himself down at Chamberlayne’s empty desk. He fiddled with an abandoned pencil. ‘I forgot to pass on your sympathies.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ He span the chamber, listening for scrapes or clicks. His face was still red from the lice bites and the scratches of his nails. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘That we all have to carry on to the end, through sunshine and rain.’

  Duggie snapped the chamber into place and pulled the trigger several times watching the smooth rotations. ‘She said that?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  Duggie paused to think, divining, perhaps, what had transpired in Étaples. Busy again with his cloth, he said, ‘Maybe Flanagan died as an example after all.’

  ‘I agree, Sir,’ replied Herbert. Wanting to make an admission of sorts, he added, ‘For me, at least.’

  After being shorn that evening, Herbert retired to his billet but he couldn’t sleep. And not simply because the regiment would pull out of Oostbeke the next morning, or even because of Lisette Papinau’s haunting face. No, he’d left something else undone. Just as he’d forgotten to pass on Duggie’s sympathies, he’d left the estaminet forgetting to throw some words towards that gap between the door and its jamb. Everyone had been reciting them to Herbert, but it had occurred to him with a flash while listening to Madame Papinau that the person who needed to hear them most was Owen Doyle. ‘This is not your fault,’ he said to the darkness of his billet. ‘There’s no room for guilt. If Flanagan’s
death means anything, you of all people have to live a long and happy life.’

  Chapter Fifty

  1

  When Anselm answered the telephone in Saint Hildegard’s there was a note of suppressed jubilation in Martin’s voice. His self-reproach was too severe, revealing both his high professional standards and his humility.

  ‘… so I was completely wrong and your Prior was absolutely right,’ he said, finally. ‘I checked the borstal files and I confess to being entirely self-satisfied. There was nothing there. I hadn’t the slightest intention of pursuing the matter any further. But then I half wondered if the probation people had ever had any contact with Lindsay … and that the files had not been linked up afterwards. And there it was. Under my nose, so to speak, only – of course – one never looks there.’

  The reason for the separation of records highlighted what had come to pass. And peculiar it was, too. The entire affair was laid out in a detailed report prepared by the probation officer who’d been assigned to the case: Mr Gerald Slater. On the 19th February 1923 John Lindsay had presented himself to the officer on duty in Bow Street Police Station, London. He identified himself as an absconder from a three-year sentence for shop-breaking, imposed by a court in Bolton in 1915. He was duly charged with a cluster of further offences, including the assault of the policeman from whose custody he’d escaped eight years previously. The case came for plea and review of sentence before a judge in the Bailey and Middlesex Sessions, who confessed himself to be pleasantly bemused by the defendant’s conduct. His surprise was all the greater because guilty pleas were entered in relation to charges unsupported by any evidence, save for the account volunteered by the defendant himself. The learned judge was further impressed by the defendant’s offer of monetary compensation to a family butcher situate at and known as Albert Powick’s of 149 Baxendale Street – the one victim in respect of whom the defendant had a clear and undisturbed recollection. As a token punishment that reflected the gravity of his previous conduct, the judge confined Mr Lindsay to Wandsworth Prison for a period of five days. And this explained how the borstal file was left ‘incomplete’, said Martin: that system only dealt with boys up to their legal majority – aged twenty-one – and Lindsay was now twenty-three. The Wandsworth episode therefore floated free from the existing borstal paperwork, probably through oversight, given the lightness of the sentence.

  ‘How very interesting,’ said Anselm. ‘Lindsay presents himself years later to answer for his past, but says nothing about the more serious matter of two prison sentences imposed by military courts during the war.’

  ‘Exactly,’ replied Martin, ‘and they amounted to fifteen years hard labour. Lindsay was holding his hands up, but not for everything. But there is something else … something even more interesting in the report of Mr Slater.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mr Lindsay had come all the way from Étaples to submit himself to the law of England, and once his sentence was complete it was to Étaples that he intended to return – to a café where he lived and worked, and in which he had an interest.’

  ‘An interest?’

  ‘Yes. Lindsay had built a life in France.’

  ‘Did Mr Slater record the address?’

  ‘He did. During the war it was known as Pap’s. Several diaries refer to the place. Ranks only, no officers. And it seems that once he’d completed his sentence at Wandsworth, he went back to France and stayed there.’

  ‘Why stayed?’

  ‘Because Lindsay’s name is nowhere to be seen in the British military lists for the Second World War. He didn’t serve and he wasn’t a conscientious objector. In short, it seems that after young John Lindsay left England in nineteen fifteen he never came back, except to face an old punishment. More precisely, after he left Ypres and travelled the sixty-odd miles to Étaples, that’s where he stayed – at least until early nineteen twenty-three. And somehow, I don’t think he moved again. He’d arrived at something like home.’

  2

  The Prior showed no gratification on having guessed where John Lindsay might next leave his mark. Instead he observed with a smile that he’d been completely wrong in his reasons. The recidivist offender was nowhere to be seen. Whatever happened between 1917 and 1923, Lindsay was a changed man. He’d found work. He’d earned money and saved up the necessary funds to compensate at least one victim of his criminal behaviour. The coming back to England was only explicable as an act of self-imposed rehabilitation, for the sentence served no purpose whatsoever, save in Lindsay’s mind. So the Prior was not especially pleased. He was, in fact, troubled.

  Anselm and the Prior followed the banks of the Lark where it ran between the Old Abbey walls and the orchard in St Leonard’s Field. Larkwood’s flock searched the grass for windfalls, several raising their heads to contemplate what may be a mystery for the thinking sheep: their masters were dressed remarkably like themselves: a bulk of white with some black bits here and there.

  ‘Given what you witnessed in the cemetery,’ the Prior said, ‘and given what Kate Seymour revealed to you, John Lindsay is not in fact a man at peace with his past. It’s an awful thought, Anselm, but has he punished himself continuously since nineteen seventeen … for the death of Joseph Flanagan?’

  It was possible.

  Anselm had met this kind of self-hatred before and it was unforgettable. No doubt the Prior had, too. People can harm themselves and all who approach them because they won’t or can’t allow themselves to hear a message that places love over the law which condemned them. It’s a kind of integrity that ultimately saps away their life. Mr Lindsay exemplified something so very human and so very tragic: the greater one’s sense of guilt, the harder it is to forgive oneself, to live completely freed from past debts.

  The Lark raced between its failing banks. Anselm stopped to check the shoring with his foot, nudging the rotting timber, and remembering Mr Shaw. He had not closed his eye to what he had done, and yet … the names scratched on his sticks revealed the nature of the pilgrim: he was a man who had loved much, and was much loved. Where did Lindsay stand between these extremes of visionary peace and blind torment?

  ‘What now?’ asked Anselm. ‘How do we find Mr Lindsay? The café must have changed hands years back.’

  Interesting as Martin’s discovery might be, 1923 was a long time ago. France was a big place: if John Lindsay had stayed there, he’d probably moved. Few people stay in the same spot for decades. And he could easily have come back to England any time after 1945.

  ‘Call Les Ramiers.’

  ‘Why?’ Anselm couldn’t see the point. And he couldn’t imagine what he’d say.

  ‘It is a silent presence in this entire affair,’ replied the Prior. ‘No reference is made to the community in any of the papers you obtained. And yet, this is the monastery to which Herbert returned after the war, and he never left it, save to come here. Mr Shaw was driven past its spire on his way to the barn. The execution site is only a mile from its walls. I simply don’t believe that John Lindsay – this strangely reformed payer of past debts – could live nearby and never come to the place where Joseph Flanagan was executed. And if he did go there … well, maybe those walls of ours provided a refuge from things no man can understand. Isn’t that what a monastery is for?’

  Anselm made the call after lunch. He wasn’t quite sure how to frame the question without sounding foolish. When Père Sébastien, the Prior of Les Ramiers, came to the phone, Anselm said the bare minimum, which was all that was necessary.

  The Prior had been right again; and this time for all the right reasons.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  In Memoriam

  1

  Herbert did, of course, march up the misty road that vanished into the air, but he did not die – not in the following days, during the attack on the Menin Road (though Joyce did), nor in the following month (early October) when the 8th supported the Anzacs at Broodseinde – when Elliot said, ‘Excuse me, Sir,’ extinguished a cigarett
e on his boot and shot himself in the head. It was the dreadful fulfilment of a promise made long ago, when he’d stood in front of a flare gun.

  No one on the ground knew the full cost but most of the Gheluvelt Plateau was eventually secured. All they had to do was press on. German morale had to collapse. It was a matter of certainty. That was the word from Intelligence. So the 8th, like the rest, kept the faith. And still Herbert did not die, not even in late October during the hail of rain and metal, when his Company drowned in shell holes that filled with water as they were made, or were shot in the mud like Quarters, or were simply blown off the earth, like Stan Gibbons, ‘Pickles’ Pickering, Tommy Nugent and ‘Chips’ Hudson. Herbert lived, though his pistol and rifle were jammed with mud, though his ammunition was covered in slime. He crawled into battle, up to his elbows in a kind of putty that clung to his skin and clothing. He lived, though strafed, and pounded by rain and debris; he kept moving forward, his hands finding a shattered root, a house brick, or the soft corruption of the dead.

  The Canadians took Passchendaele in November. That was where the blood-letting slowed to a drip. When Duggie took the battalion out of the line, it was down to half its strength. At the command level, all the new OC Companies who’d come to Oostbeke were dead. By a hideous irony, there was no one left to punish for the refusal to organise Flanagan’s execution. Expcept for Duggie. The whole debacle hardly seemed important now. Chamberlayne paid a visit to the rest camp. He didn’t have any jokes left. He said that, according to one report, there was no chance of holding the Passchendaele Ridge if there was an organised counter-attack. Apparently ninety thousand men had simply disappeared – no bodies, no tags, nothing. Altogether, casualties were over two hundred and fifty thousand. ‘What now?’ asked Duggie. A new show, further south: an attack at Cambrai. ‘Blimey, it just goes on and on,’ said Duggie. And the dog? Not very well. Keeps slobbering in public.