The Last Summer of the World

by Emily Mitchell

  “Smells bad,” says Kate. “I don’t want to go in there.”

  “You have to,” says Clara. “Now sit down and be good, for God’s sake.”

  “My photographs,” Edward says. “They’re still in the cart. I have to go and get them.”

  “Is there time?” Marion asks, as she follows Clara inside the car.

  “I’ll be as quick as I can,” he says. He sprints down the platform and back to the cart where his case is right up on the front seat. He hears the sound of the train whistle signal its departure. He grabs the case and heads back toward the platform. It is heavy, because of the glass negatives, and he doesn’t want to jostle it too much for fear that some of them will break. As he is climbing the steps to the train, he hears the whistle sound again, and with a clunk of pistons, the train begins to move. He sees the door to the carriage where his family is beginning to slide away from him.

  “Papa!” Mary is leaning from the open door and waving frantically. Edward picks up his pace, but the train is moving now faster than he can walk. When he reaches François, the old man says, “You won’t make it on there with those.” He taps the case, which Edward has clutched to his chest. “Leave them. I’ll make sure that they get back to the house safely.” Edward hesitates for an instant. François says: “Go on. Put them down and run!”

  Edward pushes the case into his hands and takes off down the platform. He catches up with the carriage door and jumps inside, just as the train begins to gather steam. He lands in straw and topples forward onto his knees. When he looks up, he sees Clara and Marion seated near each other opposite him; there are Kate and Mary. They fling their arms around him from either side. Beyond them there are other faces, curious and frightened. He can just make them out in the swaying light of the single lamp that hangs from the roof of the car.

  WHEN THE TRAIN reaches Paris, she will leave them. She will disembark and attempt to catch another train going north so that she can get a boat to England to meet her parents there. After that Marion does not know what she will do.

  Thinking about what it will be like to depart from Edward and Clara at last, Marion anticipates tremendous relief. She can hardly wait to get away from them. Oh, to be free from the constant anxiety of the last few weeks, from the waiting and watching and measuring her words before she speaks. To be among people who do not blame her, who do not want anything from her. She will stay in London for a while and rest, she thinks, before attempting the voyage home. She will be with her mother. She starts to cry quietly, thinking about it, but that is all right. In the darkness of the car, no one can see her well enough to know.

  However, it is not only relief at this ordeal ending that she feels, but also something that pulls against it. She wants to stop time, go back to the beginning; to make different choices that don’t lead here, to Clara’s cold silence, to the memory, which in spite of everything she cannot shake, of how it felt to touch his hands and feel his face against hers. She wants things to be as they were before this terrible summer. But where was the beginning? Was it this June when she drove out of the city full of high spirits to spend the summer with her friends? Was it one of the many evenings that they spent together in Paris, at Leo’s or at Judith Cladel’s? She can’t tell. She doesn’t know thinking back when her feelings for him started, only that after a certain point they were evident to her, undeniable.

  When they reach Paris, she will climb down from the train and he will help her take her bags from the floor here. They will stand on the platform and they will say goodbye, and after that she will probably never see him again. She will not see either of them, not as friends, not as they have been until now. For her own sake as much as theirs, she realizes that they cannot write and they cannot see each other. They cannot keep up the pretence of polite acquaintance. The train lurches as it starts across a trestle. She puts a hand out to steady herself against the wall.

  How much is being lost right now. She feels very small compared with the terrible changes that are taking place around her, so much light is vanishing from the world, and what can she do to stop it? She is only a single tiny person sitting with her knees pulled up under her chin on the floor of a windowless carriage going west. All she can do is try to remember what she has loved so that it does not entirely disappear. She closes her eyes and feels the motion of the wheels beneath her as the train goes on, rocking across the face of the darkened land.

  ELEVEN

  August 10, 1918

  IT WAS THE first heavy rain in weeks when Edward arrived, alone, in Esbly. Early in the afternoon he stepped off the train onto the nearly deserted station platform. There was the small station office, its wooden walls, its sloping roof, just as it had been the last time he’d seen it. There were the narrow houses with their walled gardens lining the road that climbed away from the railway line until it disappeared over the crest of the hill.

  He had written to François to tell him when he would arrive, but he’d received no reply and didn’t know what kind of reception to expect. He had been in touch with the old man periodically since leaving Voulangis, a few letters in a few years, in which François had given him news of the house and the town.

  So he was relieved, almost delighted, to see the familiar figure seated on the box of his trap waiting for him when he came down the station steps. François raised his hat and his face cracked into a broad grin.

  “Your journey was comfortable?” he asked.

  “Yes. Much better than when I left here last time,” Edward said.

  “Climb up. We’ll go to your house. You’ll see that not much has changed. Thank God.”

  They drove up the hill and along the road that curved around the valley’s western side. When they turned off the main highway, the dirt road was uneven and its hollows had filled with rain; their wheels flung up sheets of water behind them. The country here was so lush—tree trunks black, leaves bowed and dripping. It was this that had first drawn him here to paint, the feeling of everything wanting to grow and be alive. Soon they were coming over the hill, passing through the crossroads where four years before Claude Perrine had announced that war was beginning. They rounded the last bend and there, looking more worn than when he last saw it, was his house.

  The steep angle of its roof cut dark out of the white sky, a silhouette, gaunt and imposing, surrounded by the swaying arms of the fruit trees he had planted years ago. How overgrown they were, unkempt and untended, and then as they drew closer he could make out slurs of damp down the walls, cracked paint on the woodwork of window frames, shutters and doors. The front gate was beginning to bloom with rust; all the plants had overtaken their beds. The smell of green damp. One of the windows on the ground floor was broken and patched.

  François stopped opposite the front entrance, and Edward jumped down. When he reached the gate, he paused. He had been here so many times in his imagination. The way he pictured this return had evolved over the years with the changing circumstances of his life, so that at first he’d pictured coming back with Clara and the children, resuming their life as though they had never left at all. The girls would go back to school; he could return to work in his studio; they would have guests in the summer and visit Paris for parties and theater. At dinner they would tell stories about the time they’d had to leave because of the war of 1914. Then, when Clara left him and returned to France, he’d imagined following her and finding her here, penitent, sobered by her experience, ready to mend the breach between them. In other moods, when he had been too angry to desire reconciliation, he pictured showing up unannounced and taking Kate away with him, back to New York to her sister, to the greater part of her family, to safety.

  He had not thought of coming here alone, to be greeted by an empty house, unused for many months and wearing the soft signs of its disintegration. But he found, standing there in the doorway, that he did not mind it. He had let go of those other hopes. By himself he could feel the place, its effect on him, undisturbed. It was something like vertigo, h
e thought, the experience of coming at last to a place one has longed for, so that the arrival was like stepping into a dream, not in the sense of a wish fulfilled, but because the objects in the place seemed to be carrying a message for him that he could not quite read, that disappeared just at the moment he was about to decipher it. The sounds of the place were nearly solid, the wind dissected by the buildings, the protesting shriek of the gate as he pushed it open. His footsteps, muted by the grass that had overgrown the path. The door in front of him: he turned the handle and pushed. It swung slowly back.

  Inside, the smell of damp was even stronger. The things of his old life crowded in on him: there was the wooden breakfast table in front of the window to the left and before him the fireplace flanked by bookshelves, the books still in them, the chairs arranged before it, and against the far wall, Clara’s piano, her scores still stacked on top. He crossed the room with automatic steps and began to leaf through them. François came to the door, and Edward stopped, feeling as though he’d been caught stealing something.

  “It is not too bad,” François said. “The condition of things. Since Madame left, I have come to check on it maybe once in a few weeks. There were some English staying here. Officers. But other than that, it is quiet.”

  “Thank you,” Edward said. François shrugged.

  “The keys are behind the door,” he said. He started to go. “I’ll bring you some supper over later.”

  Edward found the keys hanging on the same hook where he’d always kept them, the back and front doors, the study, attic and cellar. And with them a second set: keys to his studio in Paris. He moved through the house, room to room, opening each and letting in the light, taking stock of what was left and what was gone. In the cellar he found his wine rack empty; the kitchen, too, held nothing perishable. In one corner of its ceiling, by the pantry, there were brown and purple blotches spreading from the corner like bruises. He brought a stepladder and looked at the marks more closely. Wet rot. It was spreading across the room from its outer wall. Well, if that was all the structural damage to the place, then he should be grateful. It would not take much to fix it. It was in the kitchen that the window had been broken, the one he’d seen from the road; François must have patched it with boards. Again, nothing that couldn’t be repaired.

  He climbed the stairs and found the bedrooms tidy. There was no sign of the damp in the floors in any of these rooms. It crossed his mind that this was odd, since the damage in the kitchen had clearly come through the ceiling. Which room was directly above the kitchen? Mentally, he sketched a map of the two stories and realized that over the kitchen was the study. Of course. The study, which he hadn’t looked at yet, because he would have to spend some time sorting through the photographs that were stored there, in the wardrobe that stood across from the window …

  With rapid steps he crossed the hall and fumbled at the study door for the right key, his fingers suddenly clumsy from hurrying. He found it, slid it into the lock, turned, pushed open the door. A cool cross draft hit him even before he entered the room. Across from him the window stood open, and the curtains, discolored and bedraggled, waved listlessly back and forth. A huge damp stain spread in the shape of a smile beneath the sill, reaching all the way to the skirting board. Against the right-hand wall the door to the storage closet stood open. And on the floor in front of it, torn and crumpled and heaped chaotically on top of each other, lay hundreds of photographs.

  They covered the floor in the far corner so thickly in places that he couldn’t see the boards underneath. Some of the edges flickered in the breeze. He started forward, thinking he ought to close the window, then stopped: to get to it he would have to climb over the pile of photographs and he didn’t want to step on them. But then again, what did that matter? Close the window, don’t close the window, stomp on them or not, it made absolutely no difference now. So instead, he remained rooted where he was, taking in the room as he found it, trying to etch it into his brain so that he would be sure to remember it. Look, he told himself; keep looking and don’t turn away. It was all he could do.

  Eventually, he went over to the open closet and looked inside. One of the upper shelves had collapsed. From what he could tell, the rain had come in and waterlogged the wood until it could no longer support the weight of the boxes it held. And when it gave way, it took the shelves below down, too, so the contents of all of them spilled out onto the floor. There were a few boxes of negatives still in the bottom of the closet, but these too were rain-damaged.

  He knelt down and started to go through the photographs that were strewn furthest out. He pulled them one by one from the mass of papers and turned them face up, so that he could see what was left.

  Pieces of Fifth Avenue at night. Almost fifteen years before, when he and Alfred had begun taking pictures of New York after dark, testing what was possible to capture without daylight. Streetlamps surrounded by haloes; their light sliding across the forms of cabs and late-night walkers, the façades of buildings, with their ranks of shadowy windows; all the different qualities of darkness. Or on nights after it had rained, light ribboning the streets silver. Or here: woods in New Hampshire, midwinter, the trees black characters written against the snow. The Brooklyn Bridge on a hazy day and the angle looking up so the bridge flew out into the sky until it disappeared. There were portraits he’d done on commission, and portraits of friends, of Lilian and Carl, of his parents Mary and Jean-Patrick, of Clara and Kate and Mary, of all of them together, each image torn or buckled, their illusions cracked by white fissures of paper, or their dimensions warped out of proportion. Edward took each one and gently smoothed it against the floorboards. Then he stacked them up, laying them carefully down, one on top of another.

  As he moved through the mass of papers, he found the condition of the prints became worse nearer to the open window. Here, many were water-damaged, their subjects so blurred that only he could have known what they had been: a series of nudes, the figures of the models pitted with raindrops, or smeared so all that could be distinguished of them was a limb here, a torso, the arch of a back. Gardens that seemed to evaporate, pieces of houses, faces, and streets suspended in gray mist. Nothing left whole. A portrait of Clara. He remembered taking it one day in his Paris studio nearly seven years ago. She had been quiet that day, pensive, had watched people passing in the street below the window, and he’d found her solemn expression intriguing, like the look of a person watching a boat pull away from a quay. Look up, he’d said, look at me, love, as he took the photograph. Now all that could be distinguished was her left eye, staring at him out of the disintegration around it.

  He worked his way toward the open door of the cupboard, stacking and sorting, feeling at once the necessity and fruitlessness of this labor; that he had to do it; that it would do no good. He did not notice the time that was passing until he heard the door open downstairs and François’s footsteps, and looking up, he realized it was evening.

  “THERE IS BREAD and beer.” François put the basket down on the kitchen table. “Some lamb and potatoes.”

  “You didn’t have to do this.”

  “My wife insisted,” François said. “She thought you would be tired after your journey. And there is nothing to eat here.”

  “Well, thank you. It is nice to have food cooked for one instead of for one hundred.” Edward sat down at the table and began to unwrap the parcel. He pulled the stopper from the bottle of beer. “Will you stay and have some?” The old man nodded. He took two glasses from a shelf and sat opposite, straddling the bench. Edward poured the honey-colored liquid and pushed one of the glasses toward François. Then he set out the food. Although he’d gone all day without eating, he was not very hungry. He felt sick, almost dizzied by his discoveries of that afternoon, too restless to think of food.

  When he had eaten a little, he asked: “Have you seen upstairs in the study? Did you know what happened to my photographs?”

  François shook his head. “I never unlocked any of the
rooms—I only came to make sure nothing had been disturbed.”

  “The window was left open. It ruined all the prints I left behind.”

  François looked confused. “They are destroyed?”

  Edward nodded.

  “I didn’t know,” François said. Abruptly, he stood up. “Let me see?”

  “All right.” They went upstairs and Edward opened the door of the study. He had managed to clear about half of the photographs from the floor.

  “They were all over,” he told the old man. François looked aghast.

  “I did not know. I would not have left them like that.”

  “I know you wouldn’t. I don’t know why Madame didn’t write to tell me that she’d found them like this. She was angry with me, but that would not have been too much to ask.”

  François was silent for a minute. Then he said, “Madame didn’t find them like this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When she arrived, the photographs, were fine. They were locked away, just as you left them. I remember, she told me she was relieved to find they had not been damaged. Also, I saw the study once or twice while Madame and the little mademoiselle were living here. Madame used the desk for writing letters.”

  “Then the English soldiers who were staying here after Madame left, could they have left the window up when they were here?”

  “That is possible,” said François. “Yes, that is likely.” He rubbed his hand over his forehead. “It’s terrible.”

  “Yes, it is. But there is nothing to be done about it now.”

  “I suppose that is right.”

  “Let’s go down and you can finish eating.”

  “All right. I can help you drink the rest of the beer.”

  They went back downstairs.