The Pieces of Ourselves

by Maggie Harcourt

  I open my eyes, and there he is beside me, watching me. He rolls onto his back and tucks his hands behind his head, looking up at the ceiling. Without stopping to think about it, I shuffle closer, resting my head on his arm and stare up at the beams and the back of the roof slates above us.

  “Okay. But he must have told her he was going to do it.”

  “What? Join up?”

  “It’s not the kind of thing you just do, is it? Wake up one morning and decide you’re going to leave everyone behind.”

  Hal’s eyes take on a faraway, hooded look. “Sometimes people just have to do things, I guess.” He shakes his head gently. “Besides, look at the way he’s talking. He felt like he had to do it. It doesn’t read like he feels he’s got much of a choice.”

  “Of course he had a choice!” Because from where I’m sitting, it doesn’t sound like he’s being called up and forced to go – he’s talking about how he should go. That’s a choice. A choice he made; choosing to leave Iris behind. “Do you think she ever saw him again?” The need to know, wild and desperate, climbs up into my throat. I have to know. I have to. It – they – can’t end like this. They loved each other enough to risk everything, didn’t they? They had plans. They had a future.

  If Hal picks up on my desperation, he doesn’t respond to it – or maybe I just hide it well. “We’ll figure it out. All I…we…know now is he was killed somewhere along the line. It all comes from that, or the house wouldn’t have been sold and changed its name and ended up being a hotel, would it? But maybe he got leave and came home before that. One last time, you know?”

  “And your grandfather never said when he was killed?”

  “No. I don’t even know if there was any more to the story than he’s told me. But if he’s joining up in 1915, and he’s upper class, he’s going to be a junior officer – and if he’s in France, he’s going to have to make it through the Somme in 1916. And from what I’ve learned, not many of them did.”

  Sunlight creeps across the attic floor, the passing of time marked in the dust like a sundial, as piece by piece and letter by letter, we unpack what’s left of Albie Holmwood’s life.

  “What does this mean?” I pick up an envelope – opened like all the others, with the letter tucked carefully back inside – and try to make sense of the pencil marks on the outside: a sequence of letters in an unfamiliar hand. Hal leans over for a better look and his arm brushes mine. The slightest touch makes my skin fizz and, instead of the letter in my hands, all I can see is him standing on my doorstep and all I can hear is him breathing my name. When I pull myself back to now, to the attic, his face is achingly close to mine, his eyes on me.

  Somewhere below us, a bedroom door slams, and we both jump. The spell is broken. He runs his hands through his hair, pulling ever so slightly away from me and looking back down at the letter shaking in my hand. I put my other hand around my wrist to try and stop it wobbling. It doesn’t help.

  “The writing on the envelope?” His voice is low and breathy, and he has to clear his throat before he can speak. “It means it’s been censored. To make sure he wasn’t saying anything a spy could use. I think most of the letters soldiers sent home were checked. The officers – like him – usually did it, but maybe if he was new, his would have been read too, to begin with.”

  “Other people read their letters? Isn’t that kind of…”

  Hal is holding a bundle of letters in his hand. He looks from me to the letters and back again, raising his eyebrows.

  “I mean, they were alive at the time,” I mumble, feeling stupid. “But do you ever think that maybe we’re better off not knowing? That maybe it’s just too sad?”

  Hal tips his head to one side. “When I started, it was more about the story than them. They didn’t feel…real. More like characters in a book, and I was just trying to find out if the book actually existed.”

  I know exactly what he means. It was just another puzzle to solve. But now I’ve held Albie’s letters in my hand, touched the same pages that he touched, seen the marks left by Iris’s tears; now I know I’m walking in the same places she walked every single day, even after he left…I’m not so sure.

  Hal drops the old newspaper he’s been looking at and folds his hands on top of it. “You think we should stop?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Because if we leave them here, if we stop, we leave them suspended in this moment and they aren’t finished. Another thought flickers through my mind – quick and sharp and shiny. They aren’t finished, and neither are we. Not while Hal’s still here.

  “We can’t change the past, Flora. Nobody can.”

  “I know, but…”

  “So look at it like this. If it was you, if it was…” He swallows, and his voice softens. “…if it was us, wouldn’t you want someone to know? If it was our story? Wouldn’t you want someone to find it? To know that we were here – even if it wasn’t for long?”

  To know that we were here. That somehow, we left a mark.

  Albie and Iris calling through the dark and across the years.

  And Hal answered.

  If it was me, lost in the dark, would he answer?

  I look at him, sitting with his legs half-crossed and a smudge of dust on his cheek, his grey T-shirt flecked with shreds of old paper and dead woodlice and whatever else has been hiding in the bottom of these trunks and boxes for a hundred years…And his eyes meet mine in reply.

  Yes.

  Yes, he would. He already has.

  “You do it. My hands are shaking too much.” I flap the envelope at him.

  Hal takes it and slips the letter out, unfolding it and passing it to me. It’s so light, so thin, that it feels like tissue in my hands. But when I actually read it, it’s not the beautiful note I was expecting – not the kind of letter I thought Albie would write. It’s not much more than a typewritten form with Albie’s signature at the bottom.

  “Is that it?”

  “Two minutes ago you wanted to give up. Now you’re disappointed it’s not juicy enough?” Hal laughs. “What’s the date on it?”

  “Uhhh…” I find a handwritten scrawl at the top. “May 1916.”

  “Then it’s probably the standard form soldiers were given to send home to say they’d finished training or moved from one place to another.”

  “Again, how do you have all this stuff in your head?”

  “That’s Pa. He liked the Imperial War Museum a lot and it was our thing, you know? Just him and me. So I liked it too. And then I guess I liked it because I liked it.” He makes a whistling sound, thinking about the note in my hands. “May 1916.”

  “Yep.”

  “The Battle of the Somme started in July 1916. That’s where he’s headed.”

  “That’s bad, right?”

  “It’s not good.”

  We both reach for the next letter in the pile at the same time, shuffling closer – and our arms don’t just graze one another, they’re pressed together. Our shoulders, our hips align, so close we almost occupy the same space. He smiles, wrapping his arm around my waist as I pull out the letter – a real one this time, not just a form or a note. His fingertips brush against the small of my back, trailing sparks behind them.

  Albie’s handwriting blurs, then flashes a thousand colours as I force my eyes, my mind, my heart and my body to focus. And not on Hal…whose hand is still resting at my waist.

  “I think this is something.”

  “Let’s have a look?”

  “There’s none of the censor marks on it – not like most of the others.” I skim the paper. No pencil squiggles. “Does that mean nobody read it?”

  “Maybe. Could be that he’d learned a way to get it out without being read, or maybe his commanding officer didn’t want to censor it. Maybe there were just so many new troops arriving that they didn’t check them all? And soldiers got leave sometimes, and were sent home for a few days. Maybe Albie gave it to someone going home on leave and they posted it for him? It w
ouldn’t have been military post, so wouldn’t have been checked. There’s a dozen possible reasons, and we’ll never know for sure. Read it – let’s see what it says and just be grateful.”

  We walked for hours on a long, straight road, flanked at first by trees and fields. A couple of the chaps started singing. We all thought it was a bit of a lark, not so different from summer at home really – but then we heard thunder in the distance. Not a cloud to be seen for miles around, and thunder. Someone said it wasn’t thunder, but guns.

  The sound of it was enough to split the sky open.

  Of course, we officers put our best faces on, but everything stopped feeling quite so jolly after that. The further we walked, the further I felt from home, from Holmwood, from you, until at last we rounded a corner and saw what sort of world we had walked into.

  The only way I can explain it, that sight, is to imagine a great blade had come down from the heavens and split the land clean in two – along the very road we walked. On one side there were fields and farmhouses, flowers in the hedgerows and leafy trees, just as there must always have been. But on the other side it was all a twisted vision of the world, like a dark reflection. I think for a moment we believed we had seen hell. I think I still believe it. The earth was churned into peaks and troughs the like of which I’ve never seen before, the trees blasted to nothing, and the hedges we had so taken for granted had become monstrous coils of wire. The unending wires, the craters.

  No one spoke. The jokes, the whistles, the songs, they died on our lips and – I fear – in our souls. I have never known silence like it. Not stillness, the kind I have always loved so in the gardens at Holmwood at night, but silence akin to that of a tomb. There was not a single bird in the sky, no sound of one singing nearby. There was nothing for them to sing about.

  When I put the letter down, Hal is watching me – carefully, seriously. Everything in my heart after reading Albie’s letter must be etched on my face, because he shakes his head gently and twines his fingers through mine.

  “I’m glad it’s you,” he says quietly.

  “Glad what’s me?”

  “Here. This. I’m glad it’s all with you. That I’m not doing it on my own.”

  “It didn’t need to be me, though, did it? Anyone would have done. Your grandfather – he’d have been even better, wouldn’t he?” I squeeze his hand back.

  “Nah.” And he smiles. “It had to be you.”

  The air thickens and fills with a million tiny bolts of lightning – they strike all over me, crackling across my skin. There is lightning in my hair, in my fingertips, running up and down my arms. Hal feels it too – I know he does. It’s in his eyes, still locked on mine. It’s in the way he tilts his head, in the way his lips soften and part so slightly as, gently, he takes Albie’s letter from my hands and sets the past aside on the floor, pulling me to a place where history – Albie’s, the hotel’s, his, mine – can’t reach us. Closer to here and now.

  I run to it with open arms.

  The more of Albie’s letters I read, the more I feel I know him – and the more I like him. There’s something easy about him, familiar. Kind. How could Iris not fall for him? How could anyone not? Maybe it’s just that he’s in my head now. After all, he didn’t mean these letters for anyone other than Iris (and maybe not even for her, not always – some of them feel like they’re more to get the thoughts out of his head, like a diary…or a therapist) but they speak to me.

  Whatever trick he had to get his letters out, it seems to have worked – most of this batch are uncensored. Reading them is like listening to him speak; I can almost hear his voice if I try. He talks about the soldiers, mostly, what so-and-so said or did, where they’re from and who they’ve left behind. In a few, he describes the horses the senior officers have – the ones they ride or the ones that pull the huge guns ranged around the network of trenches and fields that are the front line. It makes me think of War Horse; of seeing that story play out on a big screen in front of a hotel that has another story that can easily match it. And how, of all the people watching on the grass, we were the only ones who knew.

  He talks about a little stray dog someone in his unit adopts and feeds scraps to, hoping to keep the rats away. He talks about how suddenly there are birds again – not the swifts he misses so much, but skylarks, barrelling through the sky above the Somme. And he talks about the rain and the strange colour of the sky, the smoke and the silences – and the loss. So much loss. His letters ache with it – friends injured or killed, or simply missing. It feels so fresh, so clear and new, that I want to reach into the past and take Albie’s hand and tell him that everything will be all right.

  Even though it won’t be. Because I know what he doesn’t. That his time is running out too.

  But through all the letters, the one thing he never talks about is the fear. He never talks about it, but it’s there, running through every letter like a seam of coal.

  Hal’s story isn’t just a story any more. The people in it have lives. Friends. Parents. People who loved them. They lived; they even lived here. And they died. And I can’t square it – how they were just like me and Hal and Mira…and they went to war. They walked away from this place, from everything they’d ever known, and they went there and faced that. Guns and bombs and fear and death.

  You can’t even face yourself. Can’t even face the people around you knowing who you really are.

  The thought prickles uncomfortably through my brain.

  “Look. It’s a photo. There’s a photo here.” Hal’s fingers touch my arm.

  “A photo?”

  “It’s him. It’s Albie. It has to be.”

  It had never occurred to me that there might be a photo; that we might somehow be able to see what he really looked like.

  The picture Hal’s found shows a group of men…are they even men? A couple of them still look like kids – younger than us in their uniforms and caps. There are six of them pictured in fuzzy black-and-white: three sitting on wooden chairs, three standing behind. The photo looks like it’s been taken in somebody’s garden – there’s grass under their feet and leaves from a plant at the side of the frame. A stone wall, half-covered in ivy, is behind them.

  They look almost the same in their uniforms, so close that they’re practically identical, staring straight into the camera. Or at least they do at first – because the longer I stare at the picture, the more differences I see. The sitter on the right has his feet tucked together in front of him; the one on the far left has his apart. The man seated between them is taller than the others, and it almost looks like he’s slouching – trying to not be the tallest, just for once. But standing behind them, the guy in the middle is almost smiling, as though that’s what his face naturally wants to do. His tie isn’t quite as straight as it should be, and his hat is pushed back a little and it makes him look less intimidating than the others around him. The picture’s too blurry, too blotchy to see him as clearly as I’d like…but I’m sure that’s him. I point at him.

  “That’s Albie,” I say quietly.

  “How do you know?” Hal’s voice is equal parts serious and curious.

  “He looks like he matches the words. Does that make sense?”

  He makes a non-committal sound. “You can’t even see him properly.”

  “I know, but try to picture any of them – all of them in that photo – writing the stuff we’ve read. He’s the only one who fits.”

  After a long pause, he nods. “Maybe. Or we could just check the letter with it.”

  “Which one?” I wave at the letters that have spread out around us like a sunburst.

  “This one.” He picks it up and starts skimming through it. “He says there was a French photographer taking portraits to send home. Somewhere near where he was based, a farm, I think? It’s smudged. But he says who the others are, so I guess if we eliminate them, we’ll be left with him.” Hal frowns over the letter, glancing from it to the photo. “Sitting down, there’s Bill Foss
e, George Harbutt…”

  The name is enough to snap me back to myself. “GH? The gardener?”

  Hal nods. “I guess so. Or another coincidence?”

  The tall guy, the one trying not to stand out…he was their mystery helper. I stare at him, sitting in the middle of the row in a garden in France – a long way from home.

  “And then there’s Fred Keane. Oh, and here he says ‘either side of me’, see? You were right. ‘Either side of me are Dougie Marton and Charlie Brewer.’”

  I wince at the name as my brother’s face flashes before me. Even if it’s not him…it could have been.

  Hal doesn’t notice – he’s too deep in the past. He sits back on his heels, staring at the photo.

  “So that’s them,” he says, looking up from the letter. “Bill, George, Fred, Dougie, Charlie…and Albie.”

  But my brain has latched onto something – or at least part of it has. The fast part, the manic part. The determined, yappy little terrier part of it that can’t bear to stop moving.

  The puzzle-solving part.

  Something about my brother. Something about those initials – GH. George Harbutt.

  George Harbutt was a gardener.

  GH.

  My brother.

  GH.

  Got it.

  I brush the dust off my knees. “Do you want to get out of here for a minute?”

  He blinks up at me. Probably wondering why I don’t want to stare at the photo some more. After all this, he wants to put a face to the name. A voice to the words that have led us here.

  But I want more than that. I don’t need to hear Albie’s voice – I already know it. I can feel it in every word he writes. I want something more – something that connects them and us, then and now. Somewhere they’ve left a mark.

  And I know just where to find it.

  Some people would call it a greenhouse – and technically, they’d be right – but that makes it sound small and neat, like something you’d find at the bottom of one of the gardens in the village. That’s not what this is. The Hopwood glasshouses are long, broad sheds, but with the walls and roofs made entirely of glass panes held in place by old oak frames. The floor is bare earth, beaten and trampled hard by generations of feet crossing it to reach the wooden workbenches, which stretch most of the length and are loaded with trays of baby plants, or the nursery beds dug straight into the ground. Inside, it smells of damp soil and tomato leaves. Faint traces of mist from the watering system hang in the air.