A Whispered Name (19 page)

‘Hullo, Old Timer.’

The
gatekeeper raised a wavering hand in salute. ‘Your trip to London was fruitful?’

‘Yes
and no. The trial’s out of reach. Too long ago.’

‘Water
under the bridge.’

‘Exactly’

‘Let
the dead bury their dead.’

To
build up tension for the coming release, Anselm decided to say nothing for a
while. He rustled in his pigeon hole for letters. Finally he began with
hesitation, ‘Have you found Kate Seymour’s address?’

Sylvester’s
eyes seeped regret and Anselm reproached himself harshly for not having spoken
out at once. Quickly wanting to bestow peace on the scamp’s venerable head, he
said, ‘Rejoice, Keeper of the Gate. Her details are held at the Public Record
Office. I’ve sent on a message.
She
can contact
me.

Sylvester
hooked his thumbs behind the orange twine that served as a belt. He slumped
back as if beaten by a straight flush and, with a scowl, threw down his
disappointment. ‘Bully for you.’ And with another wave of the hand, curt this
time, he dismissed Anselm from the room.

No amount of repeated
viewing helped Anselm understand what had taken place. It belonged on the
cutting room floor, because there was no need for Sylvester’s continued
depression. The address was to hand. But, like Bede, he was unreachable. And
Anselm knocked on his door but Sylvester would not answer. He could only look
on while the Gatekeeper limped around reception. His feet were fine but he was
bowed. A weight was pressing down his shoulders. His eyes seemed bruised and he
moaned about the cold. Entanglements of memory, worse than usual, left him
miffed. Irritation fused with sudden flights of humour that were difficult for
everyone to gauge. Worse, the pensioner who’d never drawn down his years had
finally become an old man.

3

Anselm was filling a
bucket with hot water in the scullery when the telephone call came through. At
a shout from Bruno, the cook, he went into the kitchen and took the receiver.

‘I’ve
good news and bad,’ came Martin’s fine voice. ‘First the bad. When Kate Seymour
left the PRO she insisted that her details be removed from the database. It’s
her right.’

‘Blast.’

Martin
was again the loquacious host that Anselm had first encountered on the
telephone. It must be all that close-up living, he mused. You withdraw inside
and then pour out familiarity through a mouthpiece. It’s safer that way He’d
moved on to the good news. An appointment had been made with Sarah, the great-great-granddaughter
of Ralph Osborne, the general who’d recommended clemency for Flanagan. ‘Her
father, David, will be there too. They’re chalk and cheese, oil and water …’ The
character sketches, while opposing, described a close family with a deep and
personal interest in military history. Anselm jotted down the Cambridgeshire
address and returned the receiver to its cradle.

Confused
and irresolute, Anselm returned to the scullery.

Now
that Kate Seymour was out of reach once more, the onus fell back on Sylvester
to find that little business card. Perhaps he’d wanted to find the wretched
thing himself. Maybe he’ll feel better if the ball bounces high, back in his
court, so he can whack it down a tramline to the astonishment of the whole
community. Do I tell him, now that he’s stopped looking?

Decisively
Anselm clattered into the refectory with the bucket and mop. It was his turn to
clean the floor. And he recalled the Prior’s own, inimitable strategy. If
things follow their usual course, he’d said, Kate Seymour’s address will turn
up just when we need it most.

Chapter Twenty.

The Company of Strangers

1

Flanagan felt no
resentment against Mr Moore, not because he’d taken those swipes at poor old
Elliot — who’d nearly killed himself — but because Flanagan had noticed that
the Captain stared at the wallpaper as he, Flanagan, had stared at the mirror.
Both of them were strangers in some way Islanders can sense these things, for
they know what it is to belong and to be excluded. And that aside, Flanagan had
chosen to put himself in that court: he could hardly blame the people who were
obliged to jump through the hoops afterwards.

The
football practice nearly reduced Flanagan to tears. True, the off-side rule was
baffling, but it wasn’t the laws of the game that unsettled him, it was the
lads of his old section. He hadn’t seen them since the advance near Black Eye
Corner. Pickles, Stan, Tommy and Chips. And the RSM. He’d expected a rebuff,
but while no word had been spent on the trial, they’d passed him the ball, they’d
tidied up his many mistakes. He’d wanted to tell them all, ‘Fellas, I didn’t
leave you, it’s more involved, so,’ but he couldn’t — Mr Moore was there with
his whistle, banging on about the off-side rule.

That
night, Flanagan lay locked in the cellar, his limbs aching as they’d done as a
boy when he’d helped his father make the fields. He couldn’t sleep because the
sounds of Inisdúr were all around him: the conversation with Mr Moore had
released the many prisoners in his memory. No one had asked him about home —
not since the Rising of 1916, when the Republicans had made a bid for power in
a Post Office (as one English officer put it). Now, like birds uncaged, they
swooped wildly in the darkness, seeking a window to freedom. Mr Drennan was one
of the heavier gulls. What had become of him? Had he left the island to
shoulder the Cause in Dublin? Or was he teaching little Brendan that yawn of an
elegy by Feiritéar? Fifty-seven verses of desolation and woe written for a pal
who’d died in Flanders. Mr Drennan had considered Piaras Feiritéar to be a
symbol of Irish history, a guide to its past and a light to the future. A
Norman-Irish Lord, respected in England and Ireland, he’d finally sided with
the Irish when it came to rebellion. He’d been court-martialled and executed by
Cromwell’s boys. Flanagan could still remember some of the verses. Reciting
them made him drowsy, and as he slipped away to the sound of Mr Drennan’s heavy
incantation — he’d always joined in, stamping his foot in time — Flanagan
thought of … Lisette, whose thick hair he’d only ever touched once.

She,
too, had been a stranger among her people.

2

Flanagan had first met
Madame Lisette Papinau in early 1916. He’d been on five days’ leave with
High-Pockets O’Brien and a group of lads from their platoon. One of them said, ‘We
have to go to Pap’s’. Flanagan had often heard talk of the place, though he’d
never passed through the front door. The boys loved the proprietor. She looks
after you, they all said. She just cleans up the mess. Never throws you out,
never calls in the redcaps, never makes you pay for a broken glass. She
understands the war. She understands soldiers. She’s wonderful, is Pap.
Flanagan had thought she must be a woman who’s punishing herself, one of those
unhappy angels that appear near a battlefield.

And so,
one night, Flanagan and his pals joined the rowdy boozers quaffing cheap white
wine, only Flanagan didn’t drink, so he’d asked for tea. ‘Tea?’ repeated the
mistress of the house with wide, astonished eyes. Though in her mid—thirties,
she possessed the dazzling gravity that comes with grief. A frightful brew she
made him, but he banked it with sugar and sipped it slowly while the boys got singing
drunk, some of them staggering in the dark hours to spew in the toilet, to
disgorge the war from themselves. All the while, Flanagan sipped tea on tea and
those sorrowful eyes kept flashing in his direction. He was the only sober man
in the house. For three nights he drank tea and as the darkness grew outside,
she watched him from afar, until, finally she called him over to her table — it
was more of a plant stand covered in receipts and napkins — and among that riot
of self-cleansing, chants and sickness, they talked, easily: him of Inisdúr,
her of Brittany She, too, had learned the King’s English.

Madame
Papinau had a fine nose, sharp without suggesting brittleness of temper. Her
eyebrows were high and her lips were sad. Thick hair was tied back with a black
ribbon, Widowed at twenty-one after three years of marriage, she’d left the
salt flats of Guérande in 1902, and come east with her only child, to start
afresh in Étaples. A girl who knew the sea, its many smells and sounds, she’d
simply found another coastal town. That night, at closing time, High-Pockets
and the boys waddled off, singing in the street, but Flanagan stayed behind. He
made a wood fire in the parlour while she carved slices of boiled bacon from a
hock. Striking a match on his boot he told himself he’d been right: this woman
accuses herself. He felt it in the shared silence while he ate with contentment
and while she watched with pain. And Flanagan perceived something tragic in
this ritual: she’d been at her plant stand sipping water, watching soldiers and
cleaning up since 1914.

‘Let me
sing my kind of song,’ he declared, putting his plate on the table.

His
voice began uncertainly but he closed his eyes and thought of a lost love he’d
never known — Mr Drennan always said it gave edge to an air.
‘Siúl, siúl
siúl, a rún, Siúl go socair agus siúl go cíúin
…’ ‘Come, come, come, my
love, Quickly come to me, softly move …’

Like
one of the elders back home, he leaned one hand on his knee and sang to the
reluctant flames. It was the plea of a young woman, begging her soldier boy to
stay at home and not to go to France. When he’d finished, Lisette did the
decent thing; like an islander, she wept.

‘You
must call me Lisette,’ she said, wiping her eyes. But the tears kept falling.
She covered her face with long fingers and gently shook her head.

‘I’m Seosamh,’
he replied, abashed, aware that something had gone wrong. ‘Joseph.’

Flanagan
left Pap’s that night with an uneasy step. The song had been a Drennanesque
lurch towards sentimentality, brought on by the bacon, but like an invocation
it had summoned feeling — in Lisette and himself And feeling — that
immeasurable range of subtle responses from joy to sorrow — had, for Flanagan,
been a brutally reduced universe. With the exception of High-Pockets, all the
lads who’d joined up from the shipyard were dead. Flanagan’s heart had become
numb. It had become a muscle that pumped heat when he was scared. But another
kind of warmth had returned … so he walked briskly down the street, away from
that fire in the parlour. Away too, from Lisette, and the warmth in her tears.
In the barrack room, surrounded by the frightened moans of sleeping men,
Flanagan felt something dangerous had happened, for him and Lisette; dangerous
for their survival of the war. Each of them for different reasons couldn’t
afford to feel anything. But Flanagan tingled with the thrill of being alive,
and it kept him awake.

The
next morning High-Pockets winked, making a bawdy remark — the ordinary stuff of
soldiers — but Flanagan suffered a flash of feeling, so intense he saw stars.
He shouted him down, rebuking the filth in his mouth. And then, in the stunned
silence, Flanagan laughed and roared. He giggled, even. But then tears blurred
his vision. He fought them back and staggered to the toilet where he was sick. The
war was in him too.

Flanagan
made his peace with High-Pockets. On their last evening of leave, he went again
to Pap’s, but with a profound detachment to his manner: he imitated his mother’s
reserve for the mainland priest. And Lisette did something similar, appearing
to be bruised by some unmentioned slight. But they talked while the boys got
drunk. And later, though it was reckless, Flanagan again lingered past the
locking of the doors. After they’d cleared up the mess in the toilets, they sat
in the empty café talking of dead lives that each of them had lost: she, the
raking of salt in Guérande; he, the making of fields on Inisdúr.

Both of
them were wary, but unable to avoid the fascination of the living; each of them
was quickened by the return of banished emotions. They were coming back in all
their varieties. They were as fresh as fear.

Thereafter,
whenever Flanagan had some home leave, he came to Étaples and stayed in a
first—floor bedroom at Pap’s as though he were a paying lodger in a Dublin
boarding house. Without being asked, he did odd jobs. He made a drawer run
smoothly and opened a jammed window. He changed the washer in a tap that had
dripped since 1911. One glorious October — the only one, in fact — they picked
apples together in the small walled garden at the rear of the premises. After
they’d cleared the fruit within reach, Lisette climbed one tree and Flanagan
climbed another. While reaching dangerously Flanagan stalled, his hand left
stretching out. Lisette was looking at him. She was quite still, in a very
particular way as though her portrait might be taken at any moment. Her eyes
were full and dark, frightened of the coming flash. They seemed so very far
apart. Two people in two trees, surrounded by heavy fruitfulness.

No
matter what they did, or where they were, she called him Joseph and never
Seosamh. It was artificial, but the formula allowed each of them to return to
their duties, though at every sound of that distant label he felt pain, a pain
so very different from all the other injuries of war. He saw the same wound in
the returned glances of Lisette. And whenever Flanagan left her to return to
his unit, his mind swirled with confusion because he didn’t know where this
strange friendship might lead. His consolation — and it explained why he would
never cross the room and touch her — was that after leaving he would probably
not return. He’d lasted a long time at the front, had Flanagan. His number was
coming up, as the superstitious liked to say.