A Whispered Name (23 page)

Herbert,
on the other hand, felt the increasing pressure keenly He’d got nowhere in
understanding the trial, and time was running out. And he’d got nowhere because
Flanagan only spoke about his life
before
he joined the army Everything
after enlistment was vague, as if it hadn’t really happened, or as if Flanagan
hadn’t been there. In rest moments during training, or on the way to the
football field, Herbert had talked innocently of Étaples or Abeele and the
tremendous bond between Irish lads in the army but Flanagan had left the bait,
in each case, completely untouched. On the other hand, when Herbert had asked
him, again, why he’d left labouring to join the army he got a comprehensive
answer.

When Flanagan got to
Tyneside he knocked on the door of Mr Drennan’s friend: a fervent nationalist
named Power who loathed England. Mr Power gave him a room in the attic and a
job at a shipyard where he was foreman. Of a night, Flanagan would join the
family at table. Talk turned frequently to the war and the men from the docks
whose names had appeared on the casualty lists. Many of them were Irish. In a
strange way Flanagan was moved by these countrymen, away from their country,
who’d died for another country. And it struck him that these people somehow or
other fell outside the Drennan code of honour; that his old teacher, for all
his revolutionary credentials, had, in fact, turned his back on a great struggle.
He’d barely mentioned the war. Here, in Tyneside, that was inconceivable.

Shortly
afterwards, Flanagan met Eamon O’Brien. He was a tall Kerry man with flaming
red hair. Everyone called him High-Pockets. He was going to enlist, he said.
This was a world war, he said. There were Turks involved. Germany was
expansionist, he added, getting his mouth stuck on the length of the word. But
he understood what it meant. And High-Pockets was going to do something about
it. ‘Fine, so’ said Mr Power, when he told him, ‘but I can’t keep your job
open. To Mr Power’s astonishment, Flanagan resigned too. There and then. And
with High-Pockets and four lads from Kerry, all shipyard men, he went to a
recruitment booth on Grey Street and joined the NLI.

Only it
wasn’t that simple … for Flanagan wasn’t that simple. Herbert had listened,
noting once more that characteristic, profound disobedience. Just as the
islander had cut loose from his people’s expectations, so had he cut loose from
Mr Drennan’s. Flanagan had become his own master, a rebel and a freeman; a
soldier before his chosen Colours. But Herbert had also listened, wondering how
events could unfold such that this man, of all men, would one day be tried for
desertion? Flanagan had given no clues. He’d only mentioned the trial once,
stunning Herbert by his abruptness. ‘Sir,’ he’d whispered, when Herbert had
awarded a penalty against him, ‘I hold no resentment against you.’

The
guns thundered over Ypres and Herbert’s stomach rolled. Fear was always a fresh
emotion; it always brought a pure havoc to the mind and body Holding himself
tight, he closed his eyes. And there, plain as day he saw Quarters, helpless
and expectant. Herbert shot bolt upright, his chest pounding. The farm
machinery seemed ready to pounce, the angled limbs spiked and sharp. After he’d
calmed down, he lay slowly back, remembering that night in August when he’d
seen Flanagan and Father Maguire huddled in the rain. They’d spoken Gaelic in
hurried tones. And Flanagan had then gone to Étaples with Owen Doyle.

‘What
happened over there?’ whispered Herbert. ‘Why did you come back?’

Chapter Twenty-Five

Parting Words

1

Lisette crouched by
Flanagan’s chair, the candlelight bright in her eyes. They were alone now.
Doyle was asleep upstairs in Louis’ bed. A grandfather clock ticked in the
corner, the heavy strikes sounding hollow in its box.

‘Is it
true?’ she whispered. ‘Will you stay?’

Exhaustion
laid hold of Flanagan. He wanted to lie down for ever.

‘Won’t
you run to me?’ said Lisette, touching his hand.

Her
skin was warm and Flanagan couldn’t take his gaze off her nails. They were cut
short for the serving and cleaning, though some were still split and ragged.

‘I have
to go,’ he muttered, at last. ‘The boys are waiting at Black Eye Corner.’ He
struggled with another explanation, because it was so obvious, but it was
important. ‘The war hasn’t ended.’

Lisette
folded herself over until her knuckles touched the floor. ‘Don’t join Louis, I
beg you. There are plenty of other soldiers for the front. They don’t need
another one.’

Flanagan
looked down upon the woman he’d never touched. When he’d first met her, he’d
been deadened by the war. The very sight of her had drawn him back to the
sensations of ordinary living. But it was because his sensibilities had
recovered that his nerve snapped during the burials last spring, and again
after the mines at Messines. He’d been defenceless. But, being exposed,
important truths had slipped home; and they’d brought him here, on this night,
with a purpose: a purpose that would save Lisette as much as Doyle. Slowly
Flanagan reached down towards the bunched black hair.

If
you leave the land, Seosamh, death will claim you.

Meg had
warned him in a dream. And she’d been right. Flanagan had taken a boat to the
shattered place of trenches and broken roots like God’s dead fingers. He closed
his eyes and, in his mind, heard the crunch of seashells as he ran away from
the black cove. He heard Lisette crying, refusing to rise off her knees.

Flanagan
loved her. And he always had done, from the days when Feiritéar had put a
phrasing on desire. No … from before then, when he’d first seen something
frail in the sea’s strength, when he’d watched the grasses shiver and mist rise
off the rocks; when something violent in him had leapt out to touch what could
not be touched. Somehow all these sensations had been gathered into Lisette,
like the rain off the sea. He loved her.

A
charred voice bounced off the cliffs behind Meg’s cottage.
Seosamh, don’t
leave the land.
The terror had been a dream, that’s all.

Flanagan’s
arm fell lower still, and one hand lightly touched Lisette’s head. Her hair was
soft, like the push of a breeze; and at that instant of touching, an anguish
greater than any suffering he’d known entered Flanagan; and it seeped into the
pure place prepared for loving.

‘I have
to go,’ said Flanagan, harshly He came to his feet. ‘I’m expected at Black Eye
Corner.’

Lisette
rose, too, and brushed down her knees. Embarrassed, she took out a handkerchief
from her sleeve and dabbed her face. ‘You’ll need to explain yourself’

‘Can I
take some wine?’

Lisette
entered the darkness beyond the sitting room and came back with three bottles
in a cloth bag. ‘Let them breathe for an hour beforehand.’

Flanagan
went swiftly upstairs to the first floor bedroom where Doyle was sleeping, the
room he’d known since he’d spent all his leave at Pap’s. The sheets were bright
in the darkness and smelled of soap. Flanagan sat on the edge of the mattress …
and thought of Brendan at home … and Muiris downstairs, smoking his pipe in
the corner, and Róisín sitting opposite, hands in her lap, dreaming, perhaps of
the wonderful things Seosamh had seen. He touched Doyle’s head as if he were
his little brother, wondering if he should wake him to explain that he’d never
intended to stay His profile was just discernible against the pillow — the
boyish side that had first roused his confidence. One arm lay on the blankets,
the palm cupped as if to receive a hand-out. Flanagan left him be. He drew
Doyle’s army book from his breast pocket and put it on a washstand.

Lisette
was waiting for him in the shadow of the stairwell. In silence, she led him
through the kitchen to the back door. Flanagan stepped outside into the night.
The rain had stopped and the sky seemed to throb. He turned around. She was on
the other side of the frame, he knew, but he couldn’t see her. It was as though
she’d already gone. He struggled to manage the swell between his heart and his
mouth.

‘Watch
the till,’ he mumbled, ‘The lad’s a thief.’ The presence in the darkness didn’t
move.

Grief
choked Flanagan and he stepped backwards. ‘Goodbye, Seosamh,’ came the gentle voice
…

… the
voice from the sea and the grass and the mist.

A voice
that followed him through the rain … back to the station and on to another
goods carriage; a voice that said ‘Goodbye, Seosamh’ again and again as he ran
through the dawn, mile after mile from Abeele to God knows where, utterly lost.
He was back in the shattered land. The abandoned land.

‘The
fields will die,’ Meg had said in his dream.

2

Flanagan had acted with
such conviction on meeting Doyle that he hadn’t given any clear thought to his
route back to the front. Like all people going in one direction, he’d thought
all he had to do was turn around and retrace his steps. But that wasn’t
possible. He had to avoid the streams of wounded and dying, for he was one
against their flow, now, straggling in daylight. Gathering his wits, he sought
the position of the sun, to give him compass. A glimmering through the cloud
and rain sent Flanagan northeast. He ran on lanes and across hedged fields, an
eye to the light. This area had not been shelled but the earth around him
steamed as if it had been poached: yellow scum clung to the edge of khaki pools
and his feet slid through a pulp of grass and clay Dripping cattle watched him
from firmer ground.

‘Goodbye,
Seosamh,’ murmured Lisette.

‘I
shall save the other glass for your homecoming,’ snapped Mr Drennan, ‘however
bitter the grape might turn.’

‘Death
will claim you,’ said Meg, whispering now.

A
widow, a dreamer and a seer: two banshees and a Fenian: each, in their own way
intoning the one song. Their voices rose out of the mist and sucking of the
mud.

In the
mid-afternoon Flanagan saw a barn by the side of a road. Exhaustion wouldn’t
allow him to go any further. He stumbled through an open door and collapsed
among dung and hay.

He woke with a start.

The
gate had creaked. Flanagan just caught sight of a wrinkled face and a huge
beret. Feet splashed through puddles, falling dull on reaching the grass.

With a
pocket knife Flanagan quickly opened all three bottles of wine. And then he
paused. A sense of ceremony gripped him, as if Mr Drennan had kicked open the
door with that full second glass in one hand, and his own, empty, in the other,
waiting to be filled.

“Tis a
sacred drink, boy’ Flanagan recited and, slowly like a ritual cleansing, he
poured the wine over his head. It ran down his cheeks, cutting into his eyes.
His lips were folded in, and he breathed through his nose, When the first
bottle was empty he moved on to the second and then the third. The strong smell
brought back the fishermen from Brittany men who would have known the flats of
Guérande where Lisette had heaped salt with a long wooden rake. At the sound of
a horse’s canter he put the bottle down and walked towards a kind of
accomplishment.

Chapter Twenty-Six

On Parade

1

Shortly after lunchtime on
the 14th September 1917, a signal from the legal boys at GHQ arrived on Duggie’s
desk. Herbert sank on to a stool. Chamberlayne stared over the top of his
typewriter.

‘I’ll
read out the relevant passage,’ said the CO. “‘The point raised on drunkenness
and intention — that a drunken frolic may evince a lack of intention to evade
duty in an otherwise reliable soldier — has no merit in this case. Flanagan did
not absent himself because he was drunk but because he was sober. The episode
with alcohol came after an absence of almost forty hours. This was implicitly
accepted by Flanagan, though it was not formally brought out at the trial by
the prosecutor. That officer might be reminded of his duty to adduce all
relevant facts in a clear and comprehensible fashion. The review process should
be concluded shortly” It is signed by a Staff Major of no fighting consequence.

Chamberlayne
began typing: slow, light taps with a finger held like a dipstick. He said, ‘We
go back into action in six days.’

The men
would be warned the night before, hopefully when flushed with victory against
the Lancashire Fusiliers, or enraged at having lost — either way emotionally
prepared for the onslaught. How did Flanagan’s fate fit into that schema? Would
he be the example to buck up the men’s resolve? Especially the new lot from
Blighty, Canada, Australia, New Zealand … the four corners of the Dominion.
They’d yet to find out what some men ran away from. The thought made Herbert
tremble.

‘It’s
in the hands of the Field Marshal, now,’ said Duggie, putting on his cap. ‘I
need some fresh air. Edward, I’m expecting a call from Brigadier Pemberton at
any moment. He’s a natural teacher, and he’ll want to satisfy himself that I
understand the nature of “intention . Unfortunately you can’t find me.’