A Whispered Name (29 page)

‘Because
there’s things to be seen beyond three green fields?’ added his father, like a
man citing a learned poem he’d never understood. And yet, in that slight
mockery Seosamh discerned a refusal in his father: a refusal to look upon an
unknown that had perhaps once attracted him.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s
that teacher, isn’t it? This is Drennan’s doing.’

‘No,’
shouted Seosamh, rising high, and angry ‘This is
my
doing.’ He stabbed
his chest with each word, and then his hands fell. He was penitent, but
resolved to sin.

Until
then, when left alone — for his father stooped beneath the door’s beam and trod
heavily away striking the walls with his fists — he hadn’t realised the great
gulf between the rough and the smooth, between Muiris and Róisín.

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 limo 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.