A Whispered Name (26 page)

A waxen
light seeped through two vents. He turned to the fragment of sky the cusp of a
cloud. He felt ill with shock — the same feeling he’d had when the bodies of a
neighbour were washed up near Meg’s cove. Two brothers. They’d gone out for the
lobsters. The only warning was a lift in the waves, when it was too late to
avoid the storm. That was Flanagan’s first experience of unnatural death. The
bodies had been black and bloated and slimy like the lustrous weed around their
feet.

‘What’s
to be said?’ he begged of himself.

He saw
his father, eyes on the barley; his mother, dreaming of Boston; Brendan
shouldering his first currach; Mr Drennan checking the wine beneath the slate.
And he thought of what had brought him to this cellar, and why he would never
see Inisdúr again. At once he dragged back the chair and picked up the pencil.
It was sharp.

There
was not sufficient light to see clearly but Flanagan didn’t look at the page.
He didn’t care if he left the tramlines. No, he looked ahead, feverish and
concentrated, citing and writing the remembered line.
Ba thaise ná an
fhearthainn do shódhantacht, Ba dhaingne ná an charraig do chrógacht.

With
wild capitals he then scribbled a plea in English. A strange notion had settled
upon him as he’d trekked from Abeele across the steaming grassland to Elverdinghe;
but now, at this stark moment, it seemed no longer strange but profoundly right
and proper. When he’d finished the letter, he folded the paper in half, put in
an envelope, and wrote on the outside:
Lisette.

‘Joseph, would you come
into the parlour,’ said Lisette, one afternoon.

This
was only the second time that Flanagan had entered that room. As he passed
through the corridor, following her steps, he sensed her openness to him and he
feared her purpose. Taking a seat, he glanced around him: at the grandfather
clock; the carved wardrobe with a brass lock; the roll—top writing desk; a book
case jammed with tall volumes; the side table holding a decanter and small
glasses housed in a glass box, all painted with golden lines; and beside it a
photograph of a boy in an oval silver frame.

‘My
son,’ said Lisette. ‘Louis.’

Flanagan
could see the ambience of the mother in his face: a long neck, a straight nose,
that thick black hair; but the boy had low, level eyebrows, features perhaps
drawn from the father’s line. He was about Brendan’s age.

‘Where
is he now?’ asked Flanagan. She’d never spoken of him for long, save to say he
was at the front, fighting for France and Brittany.

Lisette
tied a bow with the black silk ribbon on the collar of her blouse. It had
fallen open, showing her throat and the whiteness of her skin. Flanagan saw a
vein; its winding course roused his blood. ‘He’s dead.’

Flanagan
wanted to cross the room but his feet seemed nailed to the floorboards.

‘I killed
him.’

He
stared at her, expectant and unbelieving.

‘A few
years after the photograph was taken he joined his battalion … at the age of
fifteen,’ she said, quietly ‘He went in the name of his father, to honour his
memory. I could have stopped him but I didn’t. Far from it. I encouraged him.
With these hands I blessed him on the second of January nineteen fifteen.’ She
held them up as though they were ruined tools. ‘Five months later, on the
eighteenth of May he fell at Artois.’

Lisette
fiddled with the black ribbon, arranging it on her blouse. She sat upright,
resuming the posture of reserve that they shared. But he knew that she was
desperate to explain her own reticence, to tell Flanagan that in keeping back
she was not rejecting him.

‘I want
you to know, Joseph,’ she said, as if describing how the cooker worked, ‘I
cannot love again. It’s not the war and what love might do to anyone I might
meet; it’s not even what I have done. It’s what has become of me. My heart is
like these wrung out hands. There is no life beating there. I’ve nothing left
to give. So I look after all these boys who come back from the front. I wash
the floors and clean the glasses and peel the potatoes and crack the eggs —’
she lifted her hands helplessly — ‘that’s all that’s left of me, Joseph.’

Flanagan
never entered the parlour again, not until the night he came back with Owen
Doyle. And when that lad was upstairs, fast asleep in Louis’ bed, she’d knelt
at Flanagan’s feet and begged him to stay She’d crossed that awful, fiery divide
and called him Seosamh.

‘Are you free now,
Lisette?’ whispered Flanagan to a summoned shape in the cellar. ‘Are you free
to love again?’

He
looked to the vent. The edge of cloud had drifted away and the sky showed the
first glamour of the night. Before the sun rises high I shall be dead, he
thought.

Chapter Thirty.

1

Anselm took a train to
Bolton, surprised not so much that the Prior had required him to make the trip
but that he asked him to leave the next morning. It revealed the pressure behind
the Prior’s calm acceptance of events. Anselm duly arrived at an Augustinian
Friary where, warmly welcomed, he obtained a room, a local map and a telephone
directory.

Anselm
walked first to the cemetery at Blackburn Road where he discovered that, try as
they might, people aren’t always as helpful as they might think, After an hour
of pacing between the neat graves, he found an angled black cross — but not in
the far left-hand corner as reported to Sarah Osborne, but in the nearside
right,
rather close to the main gate. For several minutes he studied the little
name plaque attached with a screw that recorded the deceased’s particulars:
Owen Doyle 1896—1908. The Prior had suggested, and Anselm agreed, that there
were only two possible hypotheses.

‘First,
the dead boy was known to whoever assumed his identity — let’s call him X — and
the use of his name was a careful decision, or an impulse towards something
personally significant; either way not a random choice.’

That
scenario, they both accepted, would be problematic: if X had been a friend of
Doyle there would be no clue left behind to tie the two individuals together in
the one document. If X had been a family member, similar difficulties would
arise, because a search would have to cover all Doyles within the family tree,
along with those holding a different surname: it would be a massive
genealogical enquiry that might take years to execute.

‘Second,’
the Prior had said, ‘the dead boy was
not
known to X. But someone
important to X, and bearing his surname, was buried nearby and that is how X
came across Doyle’s name and grave in the first place.’

With
these two hypotheses in mind — and banking on the second — Anselm noted the
details engraved on eight tombstones, four on either side of Owen Doyle’s
resting place. He read them over in the breeze, the sound of traffic behind
him, hoping that one of them had been close to X; that X had come here out of
affection and respect; that his eye had caught on the tragically young age of
Owen Doyle at the time of his death.

A
further supposition shared by Anselm and his Prior was that X was a runaway This
young man had left the northwest of England for London, where he’d joined The
Lambeth Rifles. If he simply wanted to run to the Colours under a pseudonym,
for whatever reason, he could have done so just as easily with the local
regiment, the Lancashire Fusiliers. But he hadn’t. He’d gone south. On the
basis that X was a fugitive of sorts, Anselm and the Prior made a further
assumption: that somebody local to Bolton cared; that they’d kicked up some
fuss and left behind a trace of their distress. Anselm’s plan was to check the
archives of the
Bolton Evening News
— a paper with a long history and
widely read (according to a Friar born in the suburb of Astley Bridge). A call
to the paper’s reception sent Anselm to the Bolton Archives and Local Studies
Service located in Le Mans Crescent where, to his enormous pleasure, he joined
the twenty-first century. He’d expected bound volumes covered in dust. For the
remainder of the day he examined Microfilm copies of the paper, checking for
personal notices, his eye sharp for a ‘Come Home All Is Forgiven’ plea. Not one
of the names on his list surfaced.

2

After breakfast the next
day Anselm followed his map, on foot, to 359 Leyland Park Avenue. With every
step he thought the project increasingly hopeless, such that, by the time he
knocked on the door, he was embarrassed. How would the occupier have any idea
about the Doyles of the earlier twentieth century? The thought rather blanked
his mind, and he stared at a young mother holding the wailing baby as if he’d
lost his voice.

‘Sorry,
Father,’ said the woman, clearing strands of blonde hair off her face. ‘I don’t
go?’

‘Pardon?’

‘To
church, I don’t go.

Anselm
told her not to worry and that frequent attendance was sometimes a problem for
him, too. He then said he felt an utter fool but would she by any chance know
anything about the Doyle family who’d once lived in this house. She didn’t. But
there was an old woman in 459 who had a bomb shelter in her garden and she knew
everything. Her name was Mrs Spencer.

‘And
she goes.

‘Sorry?’

‘To
church. She goes.

Anselm
went along the cobbled street, past neat terraced houses until he reached 459.
A young man chewing gum pulled open the door. Having listened, he shouted over
his shoulder, went back inside, shouted some more and then returned with a
beckoning hand.

Mrs
Spencer did indeed know everything. She sat in an armchair, a tartan blanket
over her knees, describing all the families of her childhood. She’d been born
upstairs and her husband had run the corner shop until he got the gout, though
God knows, it wasn’t from the good life. He’d loved tripe, grown his own
radishes and stuck to a pint of mild on a Friday Anselm stayed for roughly two
hours without any detail coming forward that remotely touched on anyone called
Doyle. It was only when Mrs Spencer said that everyone had gone to Saint
Stephen’s round the corner that a glimmer of light came from an unexpected
quarter. School records. There was a slim chance that they’d been retained.
Profuse with his gratitude, Anselm made his escape. He stepped out into the
street and looked left and right, sensing a vanished universe, a whole history
of memory spilling out of the door behind him.

When
Anselm got back to the Friary he rang up Saint Stephen’s Primary School and
made an appointment with the Head Teacher, a Mrs Holden. She was a local woman
(she explained) and even if the available records were of no assistance, she
might know of individuals Anselm might approach, or other places he might go.
That evening, he sipped a glass of scotch and listened to a friar tell a very
funny story about a priest who fell into an open grave. It seemed apposite,
somehow.

3

Mrs Holden was what
Dickens would have called an ‘ample’ woman. Small and compact in a brown skirt
and yellow cardigan, she filled her clothes so the stitches had to work. Her
face was cheerful, made up of soft lumps of flesh, well pressed together around
an indomitable smile. Swirls of brown hair, perfectly groomed, suggested that
very little indeed could ruffle her feathers. A jolt of a handshake told Anselm
that this was a woman of efficiency affection and inspiration. She led him
through the foyer, past a display cabinet containing oddments from a bygone era
— sepia photographs of Bolton’s mills and mines, a pen, a watch, a book — and
into her office. On the table was a selection of large, thin volumes, all open,
all marked with slips of paper.

‘Owen
Doyle was a pupil here,’ said Mrs Holden, her Lancashire vowels
uncompromisingly flat. ‘Attendance was not his strong point.’

A
finger touched the list of absences, week on week throughout 1904. She went
deeper into the pile, to 1907. ‘By the age of eleven, he’s doing rather better,
though there’s still considerable room for improvement.’

The use
of the present tense showed that Mrs Holden never lost hope.

‘And he
was dead from TB the following year,’ said Anselm.

‘Yes,
these were hard times in the north, Father,’ said Mrs Holden. ‘Most of the parents
crawled underground or stood over the cotton machines. You’ll be familiar with
the critique passed by Engels on the Manchester situation?’

‘Vaguely’
replied Anselm, glad of teachers and their never-ending expectations.

Anselm
asked if he could examine the registers on his own for a while. The
headmistress left him to his research, quietly closing the door while summoning
a child who’d run down the corridor. With his list of graves, Anselm checked
the registers between 1903 and 1912. Several of the surnames occurred and he
began noting their frequency drawing up another list, gradually realising, to
his irritation, that the entire project was doomed to failure. He’d hoped to
find one particular name that stood out, establishing a potential link with Doyle.
But he was awash. There were several McCarthys, Nolans, and Kellys … along
with all the other names on Anselm’s list. They were scattered all over his
notebook. He stared at them, noting for the first time that most of them were
Irish … that these were the immigrant families who’d left Ireland in the
nineteenth century, searching for work, sending money back home. He tapped the
names with his pencil, losing heart, thinking — hopefully to Mrs Holden’s
approval — of the Great Famine which, like Engels’ critique, had not been a
prominent feature in Anselm’s education. Trying to salvage something worthwhile
out of the previous hour and a half, he concluded that X was Irish.