‘What you got there, Howard?’ Finian Ó Dálaigh asks him.
‘Nothing, nothing…’ Howard flashes him a cursory smile, refolds the uniform and stows it rapidly in his locker.
Later, when they have the room to themselves, he shows it to Jim Slattery. The older man studies the coarse fabric intently, as if the story of the campaign were inscribed there in the twill. ‘Seventh Battalion,’ he says. ‘There’s a story. You haven’t come across them before? “D” Company? Gallipoli? Suvla Bay?’
Howard is vaguely aware of Gallipoli as an infamous disaster in which thousands of Australians were killed, but no more than that. ‘It wasn’t just the ANZACs,’ Slattery tells him. ‘I have some books, if you’re interested.’
That evening – having been granted a special dispensation from his wife – Slattery meets Howard in the snug of the Ferry, and proceeds to relate the tragic history of ‘D’ Company, from their assembly in Dublin at the outbreak of the war to their near-annihilation on an obscure mountain on the Gallipoli peninsula. Howard, without knowing quite why, has brought Molloy’s uniform in his bag, and as the story unreels he becomes increasingly aware of it as a presence, an olive-drab ghost attending their conversation.
‘They were volunteers, among the first, who joined up from rugby clubs around the country. Most were professionals, who’d gone to well-known schools, Seabrook included, and worked now as businessmen, bankers, solicitors, clerks. They actually became quite famous in Ireland, even before they went off to fight, because they could have been officers if they’d wanted, but they preferred to stick with their friends. They were known as the “Dublin Pals”, and the day they set sail for England huge crowds turned out to watch them march through the city.
‘Now, they’d joined up expecting to be sent to the Western Front, and it wasn’t until their ship sailed that they discovered they were en route to Turkey instead. Churchill had this plan to force a passage through the Dardanelles, create a new supply route to Russia and draw the Germans away from the Front. The previous attempt to land, at Gallipoli, had been a total catastrophe. They’d tried a Trojan horse trick – packed up a division in an old collier that was to run right up onto the beach and catch the Turks by surprise. But the Turks were waiting, with machine-guns. Supposedly the whole bay turned red with blood. This time round, the commanding officers were so paranoid that they kept their plan completely to themselves – to the point that nobody else knew what they were supposed to be doing. “D” Company and the rest of the Dublins were landed in the wrong place, with no maps and no orders. Temperatures were in the hundreds, the Turks had poisoned the wells, it was raining shrapnel. They waited there on the beach while their general tried to work out what to do…’
On the dismal story goes. From this distance, the bloody ending seems inevitable, and the Pals’ adventure – voluntarily leaving good jobs, easy lives, wives and children, in pursuit of some tally-ho vision of honour and glory – painfully naive; as if they’d imagined the war to be no more than an extension of their clashes on the rugby pitch, the heightened danger merely guaranteeing the glory there to be won.
‘But the worst of it was what happened afterwards,’ Slattery says, turning his glass about on the table. ‘I mean, they came home and were forgotten about. Not just forgotten about, banished from history. After the Rising, the War of Independence, suddenly they found they were traitors. The struggles they endured, the horror, the hardships, all for nothing. That must have been a real knife in the back.’ He looks over at Howard. ‘Hard to believe that something that big could simply be buried away like that, as if it had never happened. But it can, that’s the tragedy of it. There’s a terrible cost, but it can.’
‘Yeah,’ Howard says, feeling his cheeks flame.
‘Although things do change, I suppose…’ The old man runs his hands over the cloth of the uniform again. ‘Anyway, it’ll be a great story for your boys.’
Howard makes an indistinct sound. As a matter of fact, he has already decided that he will not tell the boys about the uniform. It would mean nothing to them; there is nothing to be gained from exposing it to their indifference. Slattery is surprised to hear this – even, Howard thinks, a little offended. ‘I thought they’d enjoyed studying the war…?’
Howard had thought so too; but recent events have brought home to him just how greatly he’d misjudged them. Every day he watches them yammer to each other about the revived concert, swarm obliviously around the empty seat in the centre of the room, the events of – what, three weeks ago? long vanished from their memories, and eventually he understands that they simply do not have the capacity to relate to the past, their own or anyone else’s. They live in a continuous sugar-rushed present, in which remembering is a chore left to computers, like tidying your room is a chore left for the Third World maid. If the war briefly caught their imagination, it was only as another arena of violence and gore, no different from their DVDs and video games, the movie clips of car accidents and mutilations that they swap like football stickers. He doesn’t blame them for it, the mistake was his.
The old man swirls the ice in his drink. ‘I wouldn’t write them off just yet, Howard. In my experience, when you can show them something tangible, bring them out of the classroom so to speak, it can have quite an amazing effect. Even a recalcitrant class, they can really surprise you.’
‘They’ve already surprised me,’ Howard says curtly, and then, ‘I just don’t think this is something they care about, Jim. I don’t know what they care about, frankly. Apart from maybe getting on TV.’
‘Well, you have to teach them to care, don’t you?’ Slattery says. ‘That’s what it’s all about.’
Howard does not respond to this, other than to wonder how the old man can have stayed so sentimental for so long. Does he simply not see the boys, is that it? Does he not hear what they say?
He takes Slattery’s books with him; when he gets home, he checks the photograph of Molloy in the company history against a team picture in one of the old school annuals he’s been going through for his programme notes. There he is, grinning from the centre row, carefully lacquered hair giving him a brawny, equine look, the same man that appears in the portraits of the Pals, as if he had simply hopped from one book to the other, ready to charge the Turkish trenches on Chocolate Hill just as he charged Port Quentin in Lansdowne Road. How could he have known what lay ahead of him? Catastrophic defeat, pointless obliteration, disappearance from history, that’s not the fate you expect for a Seabrook boy –
Thinking this brings back Juster again, that empty seat in the classroom like a tile missing from a mosaic. He studies the photograph in the book again. Is he imagining it, or can he see a family resemblance there, between Molloy and his great-grandson? Over the generations the set mouth has grown uncertain, reticent, the blue eyes dazed, as if the genes themselves had never recovered from the disintegration of Suvla Bay and its aftermath, as if some infinitesimal but vital part had got lost in the churn of time. And yet it seems that Daniel Juster, or the man he might have become, is there, gazing out of the soldier’s face like a reflection on glass; and gazing back in the candlelit living room, Howard finds the hairs on his arms and neck stand up. The uniform floats on its hanger; alone in the candlelit room Howard is suffused by a curious sense of convergence, as if he’s been appointed as one terminal of a mysterious circuit.
Maybe Slattery was right, is what he’s thinking. Maybe this is what the boys need to wake them up; maybe this is a way of bringing Daniel back into the classroom, and forcing them to see him. Two ghosts, briefly rescued from oblivion; a small act of reclamation, a chance to make amends.