A Whispered Name (39 page)

Herbert
gave her Father Maguire’s translation.

‘“Softer
than rain your innocence,”‘ she read, quietly ‘“Unyielding as rock your
firmness.”‘

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.