A Whispered Name (41 page)

Throughout
the meal.’ Herbert was like a man deep within a pool of water, listening to
voices from high above the surface. There was such a gulf between what he’d
seen and done, and what anyone who wasn’t there could reasonably imagine, that
he could barely speak. His participation in the slaughter separated him not
just from ordinary people, but from history his understanding of the past, the
very culture that had brought about the conflict. He felt adrift in a cold
place, haunted by millions of faces. And he thought of the monk prodding a pile
of burning leaves. While the cheese plate was being passed around the table,
Herbert announced that he would shortly return to Belgium.’ resolved to become
a monk.

The
considered view of many was that Constance and Ernest’s son had shellshock. And
that, thought Herbert, was a fitting memorial.

4

Those at the monastery
charged with discerning a vocation were more lukewarm than pleased. They hummed
and hawed and suggested he work off the idea, as if he might be slightly drunk.
But he kept coming back, drawn by the rhythm of life; its focus on something
beyond the matter in hand. Finally the novice master suggested he meet the
Prior to discuss his intentions. There, by the compost heap, he was introduced
to Père Lucien Koopmans. Herbert had met him once before. He was the gardener
with the rake; the monk who’d no doubt ordered that the bells be rung after
Joseph Flanagan had been shot.

Over
the following months, the Gilbertines slowly but judiciously opened their doors
to him. However, the more they did so, the more Herbert realised that he could
not go on, that he’d been deceiving himself and the community. He packed his
bags and told the novice master that he belonged in England. That evening Père
Lucien asked to see him where they’d first spoken together, by the compost
heap. After a long, awful silence, Herbert began to shake.

‘I
condemned Joseph Flanagan to death,’ he finally whispered.

‘I
know,’ he replied.

Father
Maguire had told Père Lucien long ago. Nothing more needed to be said.

Abruptly
Herbert blurted out another name. ‘Quarters … Jimmy Tetlow … he was a
fisherman from North Shields … I said I’d meet him on the Green Line.’

Digging
his nails into the scar on his arm, he spoke of the mud and the drowning of a
beast and the hesitation — the long, unending hesitation — before he pulled the
trigger. And he spoke of the other dead he’d seen: the blank faces from all
corners of the world.

Père
Lucien didn’t reply until Herbert had stopped shuddering, until his breathing
was completely normal. Quietly but with the force of a prophet, he said, ‘Herbert,
you are forgiven. But you have wounds that will never heal. They are part of
your loving. Use the suffering, your immense suffering, to heal others.’

Within
the hour, Herbert had unpacked his bags.

Herbert frequently
pondered upon these words. With a new kind of freedom, greater than anything he’d
known in his life, he ran to his chosen future, tripped occasionally by those
who knew the territory and what it meant to live there. But his progress was
relentless: he moved into the guesthouse until, on a sharp November morning in
1920, Herbert was captured by the stillness of a cloister garth.

Herbert’s
entrance into monastic life, at one level, owed something to Flanagan’s talk
about ‘the land’. It was as though the enclosure wall marked out a plot of
ground, part of humanity’s shattered expectations, and gave it back to God.
This land could never be the same again, never simply ordinary. It was a sign
for everyone, of another possibility beyond all walls: a new, restored
creation. And as if in tribute to the dead soldier, Herbert’s first significant
act as a novice was to make a contribution to Gilbertine cartography He
suggested an English name for the bank of trees a mile beyond the school:
Flanagan’s Wood. It was adopted by everyone at Les Ramiers. And everyone
understood its meaning. While Herbert immortalised the location, he didn’t dare
venture along the road out of the village, let alone enter the clearing.

That
changed in 1922.

Herbert was on his hands
and knees, one of six monks digging potatoes in a field. Looking up he saw
Madame Lisette Papinau on the road that led out of Oostbeke. She walked past
him without a glance but he recognised her profile instantly Her black hair was
tightly braided. In her arms was a sack that she held across her chest. A long
blue dress reached to her ankles.

Herbert
scrambled from the field and shadowed her progress, keeping well back. When she
reached the wood Herbert panicked. He did not want to go down the track; nor
did he want to meet her, especially in
there
… but now she was out of
sight, so Herbert cut through the trees, intending to hide but watch. He moved
slowly not wanting a branch to snap and give him away It was so very like the
morning of the execution, when he’d crept upon the firing party. The ferns were
thick and the branches low and charged with leaves. He saw her blue dress
through the foliage. She was in the centre of the clearing. Slowing, he tiptoed
behind a tree, as he’d done when a soldier. Again he was present to that
moment, but also to the one unfolding before him: the two events occurred at
the same time: the drop of the handkerchief, and the fall of Lisette Papinau to
her knees.

She
opened her sack and took out a trowel. Slowly she untied the braid so that her
hair fell loose and thick around her shoulders. Then she began to dig, leaning
forward. Her hair tumbled over and touched the ground. It was like a pall and
Herbert could not see her face. A strong desire moved his hands: he wanted to
touch her and a terrible awkwardness made him blench, for this impulse was new
to him, and came out of his growing identity: he wanted to bless her. Boldly
with humility.’ he raised both his hands.

When
the hole was finished.’ Madame Papinau reached once more into the sack. She
took out a small bush and planted it. Rising, she brushed her knees clean with
her hands and compacted the soil with her feet. Stepping back, she looked not
at the place where the chair had survived in the flames, but all around, high
into the branches. After a short while she braided her hair, picked up the sack
and left the clearing.

Herbert stayed alone in
the woods until the bells rang for Vespers. When the pealing found a regular
strike, singing over the fields, he stepped into the open and approached the
memorial to Joseph Flanagan. It was a mulberry, that most English of trees, and
a symbol of lost love.

Chapter Fifty-Two

1

Anselm thanked the Prior
of Les Ramiers warmly for his help and put the phone down. He then walked
rapidly to Father Andrew’s study beginning his account even before the door had
clipped shut behind him.

John
Lindsay
was
known to Les Ramiers and he
did
run a café in Étaples
— or he used to, for the management had passed to his family upon his
retirement. He’d been a regular visitor to Les Ramiers for about twenty years.
Of late he’d always been accompanied by one of his children or grandchildren.
They were a very private family and volunteered nothing of their purpose in
coming, though their routine suggested a ritual of some importance. Each year
they arrived on the evening of 14th September in time for Compline. Mr Lindsay rose
very early — something like five in the morning — and went out somewhere,
regardless of the weather. He was back for Lauds at seven. After lunch the
family left, and Les Ramiers didn’t see them again until Compline a year later.
An interesting family Père Sébastien had said. Spoke together in English and
French with relatives in both countries and further afield.

It was
obvious to both Anselm and the Prior that John Lindsay’s habit was to make a
pilgrimage to the woods where Flanagan was shot on the date of the execution.

‘Go to
Les Ramiers on the fourteenth,’ decided the Prior. ‘That is the place for you
to approach him with Herbert’s message and
these.’

He held
up the tags and for a moment they both watched them swing. Time was about to
lose its momentum and its control over the ordering of events. They knew that
when Mr Lindsay reached out to take them back his youth would reappear, as
frightened and desperate as ever.

The period of waiting was
peculiarly charged for Anselm. He fulfilled his monastic duties mindful that,
long ago, these mild September days had been an interregnum between two very
different kingdoms, one of life and one of death. The thousands of names for
the many many monuments had not yet been determined. And he was about to meet
someone who’d been smuggled out of the reckoning.

‘So
where is it now?’ asked Bede.’ in the cloister.’ ‘Barbados?’

Anselm
stared back from that forgotten September and simply waved goodbye. He took the
train to Folkestone, the ferry to Boulogne and a coach to Poperinghe, where a
taciturn monk drove him the remaining twelve kilometres to Les Ramiers. Throughout
the journey Anselm felt a subdued presence at his side: this was the route
Herbert had taken long ago when he’d first left England in a uniform. At the
end of Compline Anselm sang the Salve Regina with his brothers in the nave,
wondering where Herbert had once stood, acutely aware that among the handful of
guests were an old man and a woman. They sat at the very back, close together,
apart from the others, hidden by shadows.

2

Anselm’s alarm went off at
4.30 a.m. He washed and dressed and then waited among a scattering of fruit
trees planted not far from the guesthouse. At 5.30 a.m. two dark shapes
appeared on the top step. Both were well wrapped to meet the cold of the
morning. Mist came from their mouths as they whispered to each other.
Arm-in-arm they descended the short stairs, left the enclosure and began
walking along the main road out of the village. After a few minutes Anselm followed
them.

The man
and woman were about a hundred yards ahead, etched black against the first
indications of the dawn. Anselm slowed, his senses sharply tuned … larks were
singing in the fields on either side; and ahead, from a low line of trees, came
yet more birdsong.

It was
like a secret festival, gathering voice with the coming of the light.

They
came to a school with quaint shutters, slowing for a moment before moving on.
At a copse — the copse described by Mr Shaw —the man and woman turned on to a
path and vanished from Anselm’s sight. When he reached the same spot, he
paused, struck by the speckling of flowers. Looking up, he made a soft gasp.

The
track was flanked by aspens, oaks and chestnuts. But straight ahead grew a
glorious, tangled Mulberry tree … all on its own, its roots sunk deep into
the middle of a clearing. And like pilgrims before a shrine Mr Lindsay stood
motionless before its branches, the woman at his side. The birds’ song had
become a riot. Anselm couldn’t move a hair. He watched and prayed knowing that,
in 1917, at roughly this moment.’ Harold Shaw had fished out an envelope from
his mother, and that shortly afterwards Joseph Flanagan had been shot among the
secrecy of the trees.

When Mr Lindsay and the
woman turned to leave, Anselm remained where he was, waiting at the mouth of
the track. The morning light had given colour and depth to the woods. He could
see the two guests clearly now And they saw him. But Anselm was the more
astonished … because he’d never seen either of them before.

When
they came level.’ Mr Lindsay said, in French.’ ‘Now you know my secret, Father:
He held out his hand warmly his eyes assured, his manner calm. ‘You’re new
here.’ aren’t you?’

Anselm
drew out the tags from his pocket, gripping them tight as if he might squeeze
some guidance from Herbert. ‘I’m a monk from England,’ he said. ‘I live in the
monastery where Herbert Moore spent sixty years after he condemned Joseph
Flanagan to death.’

His
words stunned Mr Lindsay He placed a hand on Anselm’s shoulder, not for need of
support but out of … what was it? Anselm knew it was
pity.
The old man’s
head fell low He remained like that, quite still, as if he were back before the
mulberry tree.

For a
man of advanced years, Mr Lindsay — like Sylvester — possessed remarkable good
health. And like Sylvester, he seemed ageless and had a certain childlike
quality. His ears were pink, his face lightly tanned. One eyebrow rose higher
than the other, suggesting more mischief than surprise. Looking up he said, ‘I
do hope he lived a happy life?.’

‘He
did,’ replied Anselm.

‘And
without any guilt.’

Anselm’s
failure to reply immediately unsettled Mr Lindsay so he hastily explained that
Father Moore had founded Larkwood, had been an inspiration to many but had
secretly longed to meet the boy saved by Joseph Flanagan. ‘And he wished upon
you what you have wished for him.’

Mr
Lindsay’s mouth fell open, and he looked to the young woman by his side to
share the wonder of this strange happening. She was in her early twenties. A
hood covered her head and, within it, thick black hair framed an oval face.
Fine black eyebrows arched to a low fringe. She was shy but her silence was
heavy and protecting.