A Whispered Name (18 page)

The
skin around Flanagan’s eyes creased slightly.

‘Tell
me about home,’ said Herbert, no longer distant like Tomlinson. ‘I could do
with a tale of a faraway place.’

Strangely Flanagan
described Inisdúr from the sea, seen as he was leaving it. He’d stood at the
stern of a hooker looking back at the misty rocks. Shadows thrown by the cloud
hid the coves and the tiny fields — neat compartments framed with chunks of
stone, marvellously laid. The dark wrangled with the light, as they struck the
white gables and the fissures on the flat expanses of rock. The speckling of green
and ochre glowed and died. As Flanagan drew further away the island itself
seemed to move west, trails of smoke rising from the houses as though they were
a fleet of tiny boats, a whole community leaving him to his chosen future.

Flanagan’s
parents had a farm near the slip — a small harbour in a cove where the men of a
morning landed their lobster pots and the catch of the night. He had a brother,
little Brendan, a tyke with chestnut hair and blue—green eyes, like the sea. He’d
come late to the family when Flanagan was too old to be a true companion.
Brendan would follow him around, though, looking for approval, just as he
followed the men as they trod to the shore, their currachs shouldered as if
they were huge, black beetles. Flanagan had been the same. All the boys wanted
to carry their own boat, and to find their true place in the island’s hierarchy
There, on the slip, among tradesmen from the mainland, Flanagan had picked up
his first phrases of English.

Muiris,
Flanagan’s father, had only left Inisdúr twice, and on each occasion it was to
visit Inismín, where he met Róisín. Over twenty years he’d made the three
fields that surrounded the family home, their soil made from sand, smashed rock
and seaweed. That was the history of the island, said Flanagan. Men and women,
on their hands and knees, had slowly made the ground fertile. They were bound
together: man and woman and earth.

Herbert
drifted into something like a trance. It was the way Flanagan talked of the
land. His respect was almost fearful. While speaking, he occasionally stretched
out both arms, his fingers spread wide, as though to approach something that
had to be felt to be understood: a blaze in the ground.

‘Róisín,
my mother, was famed for her quilts,’ said Flanagan. (He’d begun to relax,
forgetting — as Herbert had hoped — that he was talking to an officer.) ‘She’d
scrub her hands in the pail, to wash off the milch cow, and then she’d set to
work, sewing by the light of the fire … a marvellous thing it was, of blue
and yellow and green and brown, the pigments of the island. Without a clock or
a timer, she knew when to pause for the bread that was baking beneath the sods
—’ he glanced aside, adding by way of explanation — ‘back home, Sir, you can
bake with a peat fire, if you know how’

This
was Flanagan’s inheritance. He loved it. Whole lives were played out to the
sound of the wind and the sea. He wanted no other future. But then a school was
built in nineteen hundred and one, and a teacher came from the mainland.

‘I
learned my letters and numbers fast enough,’ he said. ‘A Blasket poet became my
companion, Piaras Feiritéar —’ he waved a hand —’sure, it was all desolation
and dismay you know, but it works up the blood like nothing else. War, distant
horizons, love. What else do you want?’

The
teacher, Mr Drennan, was a travelled man from Cork with a water butt for a
chest and bruises round the eyes from the porter. His short legs had been to
America, to England, to France. He told stories of Boston high society, where
he’d tutored, and of painters among the slatterns of Marseilles, where he’d
played. Flanagan listened in awe. He wanted to walk those streets and hear
those other voices. But by aligning himself with the teacher, Flanagan was
risking the suspicion of his elders. ‘Island folk dwelled in the shelter of
each other, as we say in Gaelic, and books — the notion of writing itself —
somehow ruptured the scheme of things. For many of them, the teacher was a kind
of necromancer … a
draíodóir.
They didn’t trust his spells, which was
crazy because they’re a poetic people —’ he paused at the thought — ‘you know,
some of the older folk, they speak as many would like to write, without a trace
of planning, just off they go, peeling the language. Putting phrases on paper …
well, it’s against the telling, the oratory the freshness of the word … do
you follow?’

Herbert
nodded. He’d withdrawn into himself, fearing Flanagan slightly as he’d feared
the singing in the abbey There was a kind of heat in the soldier, a crackling
in the air around him.

‘Now,
Mr Drennan had loads of books, piled this high —’ Flanagan raised a hand level
to his smooth chin — ‘all over his cottage. Books to stop the door, books to
jam the window open, books to level the floor under the table. And they were
all in English. “There are wide fields out there,” he once said, “and people
rare, but unfortunately they don’t have the tongue —” he meant Gaelic, and he’d
pointed to a huge map pegged to the wall — “look, Boy it’s an English-speaking
world; look at the spread of Empire pink.”‘ Flanagan gazed at Canada, India, Australia
… little Ireland, and Inisdúr.

For Mr
Drennan it was a history lesson about oppression, ‘the politics of tenure’. But
for Flanagan it was an invitation to break loose. So one night he went by
stealth to the teacher’s cottage (there was no need, he could just as easily
have walked down the road in broad daylight, but he wanted to clamber through
fields as though he were a fugitive) . Little Brendan followed him and Flanagan
sent him back home with a playful clip to the ear. When he was out of sight,
Flanagan took a first step towards the island’s harbour: he asked Mr Drennan to
teach him the profane language of the subdued nations.

They
met every evening, when Flanagan should have been learning the knack of those
long oars, when he should have been out at sea with the others and, like them,
attuning himself to the moods of the wind, and the meaning of a sudden wave —
that other
instinctive
manner of living. But his mind had lifted like
one of those gulls over the slip.

‘In a
way’ said Flanagan, ‘it was a betrayal without treachery. A turning away from
my father’s soil to those pink lands beyond the cliffs. But, you know, it wasn’t
an
empire
I saw. Sure, I don’t know what it was … more land, I
suppose.

Flanagan
stopped talking but Herbert was left with the drift of his own thoughts. He,
too, had come from a close-knit community: each side of the family had worn a
uniform for the empire. Military service had been followed up by civic
responsibility, at home or in India. His father’s connections ran to the
fringes of government, his mother’s to those titled by birth. Herbert had not
rebelled; he’d just failed at the first hurdle …

The
sound of a bouncing ball on the road behind them brought the conversation to an
untidy end. It was as though a bubble of soap had popped. They were back in
Flanders, not far from Ypres; and the guns, which had seemed subdued, rumbled
louder with something like scorn.

Chapter Nineteen

1

‘My oh my’ said Father
Andrew, the Prior, with a shake of the head. He ran a finger down the column of
offences endorsed on the regimental crime sheet of Owen Doyle, covering
infractions between the date of his enlistment in 1915 and his voluntary
departure two years later.

‘Unshaven
on parade, improper conduct, losing by neglect his trench waders … the list
is endless.’ He frowned. ‘With a little imagination, those would apply to
Sylvester. But he soon gets into gear … insubordination, absent without
leave — eight times — drunkenness, malingering, insolence to an NCO … it just
goes on and on … until he’s court-martialled for desertion … twice … then
he gets drunk again.’ He looked up and showed his pity. ‘Not bad for a man of,
what, twenty?’

Anselm
nodded. He leaned against the window that looked on to the cloister garth below
When it rained, Herbert had liked to sit down there, wrapped in a blanket
beneath an arch, simply watching the rain spill from the loaded guttering.
Anselm sighed and turned away He wasn’t quite with the Prior, though not
because of Herbert. Since returning from London his meditations had drifted
endlessly over the mass burials of spring 1917 and Joseph Flanagan’s way of
talking. His way of describing the land and the sea. His disquieting admission
to the court:
And cold I was and wet.
The collision between reality and
language was so dramatic that Anselm could not forget it. Flanagan’s nerves had
been shot, without a gun being fired …

The
Prior, not getting a full response, buried himself again in the paginated
bundle. Anselm had prepared it. On the front sheet he’d set out three central
issues: the relationship between Flanagan and Doyle; the outcome of Flanagan’s
review process (as a door to his disappearance); and the link between these
questions and Herbert. ‘Solve these,’ Anselm had said, feeling very tall, ‘and
we find the meaning of the trial.’

The
Prior turned back a page.

‘With
two reprieved death sentences to his name,’ he said, smoothing an eyebrow, ‘this
fellow would have been shot … had he been caught. “Absent at Ypres. Age
twenty, height five feet six inches, dark brown hair, clean-shaven, rather brown
complexion, blue dot tattoos across each knuckle. Believed to have taken Field
ambulance to Abeele.”‘

Anselm
recognised the description. It was from a roster of absentees reported to the
Provost Marshal and annexed to the War Diary of that office, a copy having been
placed in the Doyle file. Two other documents were attached to it with a rusted
staple: the first, a curt memo dated November 1917, revealing that pursuant to
the King’s Regulations the same details had been sent to Scotland Yard on Army
Form B 124 for publication in the Police Gazette; the second, dated September
1917, rendered the first a total waste of time: a letter from Doyle’s Brigade
HQ reported the soldier killed in action on the 15th of that month. The system
had obviously fallen out of step: the right hand did not know what the left
hand was doing.

‘His
offending began as soon as he joined the Army’ resumed the Prior, ‘but I’m not
persuaded his behaviour can be explained by that fact alone …’ Anselm had
always thought the Prior would have made an awful judge, though admired in
certain quarters. He always looked
outside
the evidence, for something
to
explain
the evidence. The Court of Appeal would have pulled their
hair out, faced with his extramural fairness.

‘His
wrongdoing is too widespread … it adds up to an unhappy youth; to a manhood
charged with vague grievances and specific antagonisms. Someone very difficult
to live with.’ The Prior whistled, as though thinking of one or two names close
to home. ‘I’d be interested to know if he’d troubled the magistrates before he
troubled his King:

The
idea had not occurred to Anselm but he nodded again, to affirm that their minds
were, as ever, one.

‘Herbert
said Doyle’s tags
represented
who he was,’ went on the Prior,
pronouncing each word slowly ‘Can you make any sense of that?’

‘None
whatsoever:

The
Prior was at Anselm’s side. Beyond the monastery wall, they could make out the
bluish path that hugged the Lark. It veered away towards a copse of aspens, the
hives, and Herbert’s white, slanting cross.

By
Anselm’s judgement, he’d got nowhere at the Public Record Office, though Martin
did not agree. The idea that Flanagan had been in control of his own trial was
both novel and persuasive. Only a lawyer would have seen that, he’d said by way
of compliment. Sipping more beer in The Wheat Sheaf, he’d added, ‘I’d assumed
Doyle led Flanagan astray Now I’m not so sure.’ It was an inference, a next
step in the thinking process, that Anselm had not in fact taken, but it made
sense. If Flanagan had run the trial, so to speak, then it would be odd if
Doyle had run the offence.

Maybe
the Prior had been tracing similar territory in his silence, because he picked
up Anselm’s own line of reflection. ‘Something momentous happened between these
two soldiers.’ Then he made a squint and mumbled as if he’d found himself on
the wrong track, puzzled because the trees on either side looked so very
familiar.

‘Both
of them came back. That’s the trick. And, you know, Anselm, it doesn’t feel
right.’

2

Anselm had stepped into
the nettles of community living within minutes of his return to Larkwood. No
jubilation at the return of the prodigal, and so on. No fatted calf and
minstrels in the gallery. ‘Receipts?’ snapped Cyril, as if it were an obscure
kind of greeting. ‘A gift,’ Anselm snapped back, putting the Friendship Plant
on the table.

Bede
made a point of being very busy He was desperate to know what Anselm had
learned at the PRO, but he wouldn’t ask. More, he wouldn’t show his interest.
He aped indifference. He wanted Anselm to seek him out in the archives, to
knock on the door and subordinate himself to an office of importance. Perhaps
it was a small thing to ask, but Anselm wouldn’t play ball. His real and
abiding concern was for Sylvester. He’d been to see him before taking off his
coat, his bag still in hand, his papers yet to be bundled and paginated. For
days afterwards Anselm ran the scene in his head, wondering what had gone
wrong: