Harry looks down at the page, which seems to have neither rhyme nor reason.
‘It was his last,’ she says. ‘The next thing was a typed note saying that David was missing. When I look at this letter, I think that part of him was already missing.’
‘Yes. I can see that.’ Harry thinks about flinging this sad letter into the wind, pictures it floating away, a white speck retreating into the water, but he hands it to her instead and watches as she folds the paper.
‘It’s the third time that I’ve been back,’ she says. ‘It’s not enough: “Missing”.’
‘No,’ Harry replies.
*
The boat is full of Rachels – women who touch their lockets when they speak, travelling to gravesides and searching. It is a ship full of hope and fear. Hers is the fifth portrait that he will draw on the boat and they are all much obliged. He is curious to see these walls full of the seeking and the missing, all of these faces that require pairing together again. He imagines their photograph faces, Edie and Francis, side by side on a wall, coupled and completed again. He recalls twin portraits, his and hers, painted by his own hand, intended for the walls of their house. He remembers the day that he painted Edie’s portrait, how he had watched as she curled her fringe around wetted fingers. He can see it even now. The silvering was flaking from the reverse of the mirror, so that sections of her reflected face were cracks and absences.
‘There. I’m ready for you now,’ she had said, her mirror smile focusing in on his own face.
He throws his cigarette away as the port comes into sight and takes Edie’s postcard from his pocket. The engines check and he feels the vibration of the boat change. Dunes and ramparts and piers emerge. There are the shapes of chimneys then, the dome of the basilica and the holiday colours of the quayside cafés. Light cuts through the gathering rain clouds and the flags on the casino pull in the wind. As Boulogne slides into view now, he wonders whether Edie is still on this side of the Channel and whether she has found Francis dead or alive.
2
Harry
Boulogne-sur-Mer, August 1921
Francis had been here taking photographs five years ago. Harry had watched from behind as his brother had focused in on the patterns of the rigging and nets and ropes, and all of it reflected on the wet dock. The disembarking passengers tread through those same reflections today, and Harry hears and knows the sound of the rain in this place, the cries of the seagulls and the stevedores and the screech of the wheels of the railway wagons. He remembers the mass of masts and chains and cables scribbled against the rain-filmed sky, the shapes of cranes, the funnels of sailing barges and the names of the grand hotels beyond. This dockside is all so familiar, and yet the memory of it feels so far away.
It had been such a momentous thing to see the French coast approaching for the first time, to finally be on this side of the Channel, but then they had stepped onto a workaday quayside, with canning sheds and tea huts and old-fashioned fishing boats with red sails. Now, on that same dock, Harry watches a man piling suitcases into a pram. Barrels are being rolled along the cobbles. A horse and cart clatters past loaded with baskets of herrings. There is a strong smell of diesel and fish. So much is the same, five years on, and so much is different.
Harry shoulders his luggage and walks on into the town, past warehouses, hotels and shop windows. He catches glimpses of his own reflection against the displays of butcher’s and baker’s and ironmonger’s, and half expects to see Will and Francis there at his side. He remembers Will’s voice haltingly reading all the shopfront names aloud and laughing; their surprise that here too there must be grocers selling cabbages and corsets and colanders. Their eyes had been all over it that first time, he remembers, expecting foreignness but finding familiarity, as they walked through the streets of an extraordinarily ordinary town. When they had stopped pointing at things, the three of them had linked arms, that wordless action needing no acknowledgement, seeming the most natural thing.
‘Where’s this war, then?’ Francis had asked.
‘Bothering some bugger else,’ Will had replied.
He can almost hear their voices, their laughter, their footsteps at his side, but Harry’s reflection is alone in the shop windows today. He has to stop and check that it is so. In the display of a milliner’s shop, plaster mannequins tilt their chins under a selection of variously embellished cloche hats and a mirrored sign says Qu’est-ce vous cherchez? What are YOU looking for? Harry finds, as he stands here, that he can’t quite put it into words.
He takes a table in a corner café and watches, through the steamed windows, as trams slide past. He carves his initials in the condensation. Beyond his dripping letters, posters are advertising day excursions and the benefits of taking the water. Painted ladies loll in the shallows around bathing machines, smiling like sirens at the procession of umbrellas. He takes a shot of eau de vie with his coffee and turns Edie’s postcard in his hands.
‘Something for your photograph album,’ her handwriting says on the reverse. ‘Isn’t this a bit back-to-front?’
Harry sees her photograph face ask the question; sees her mouth speak the words; hears the inflection in her voice. His focus pulls out and it is the day before he returned to London, a full three months ago now; Edie is standing by the spillway of the reservoir in his image, framed by his lens, the water rushing down the steps to her right, and her head angled as if she can’t decide whether she wants to look at him or not. She had told him about the photograph of Francis minutes earlier. So much had seemed back-to-front at that moment too.
‘I’ve been looking through Francis’ old photographs recently,’ she had said. ‘The photographs that he took during the war, I mean. I’ve been trying to sort them out, put them all in order, only none of them make sense to me. It should be a rule, I think, that no one should be permitted to take photographs unless they mark them with the date and the location. What use are they otherwise? How am I meant to understand what I’m looking at?’ She had looked towards Harry. ‘Of course, you’ll know one ruined village from another. Perhaps you’ll catalogue them for me?’
‘I will, if you wish it.’ He had rewound in recalled clicks of the camera lens. He had reeled back through in snapshot instants. It left him in Épehy in August 1917. His older brother was sitting across the table from him cutting photographic paper down into rectangles. Around them a bar full of soldiers roared into song, but Francis was concentrating on the angle of his corners. Two months later he was gone.
‘I didn’t know that you had his photographs,’ he had said to Edie.
‘I’ve got a whole box of them. He brought some of them home when he came back on leave, and Captain Rose sent on another parcel at the end. I’ve always meant to look through them, to sort them all out, but have never had the heart.’
‘Why now then?’
‘Because another one turned up a couple of weeks ago. Or, rather, a photograph of Francis. It came in the post.’
‘In the post?’
‘By itself in an envelope. A photograph of him and nothing else. I suppose that somebody must have found it, and thought to send it on to me, but it’s odd not to put a letter in, isn’t it?’
‘It is,’ he’d replied. ‘And the postmark?’
‘French. It was sent from France. Do you think it strange too? I’m glad that it’s not just me.’
‘As you say, someone probably found it.’
‘Perhaps.’ Edie had shrugged. ‘What happened to Captain Rose?’
‘He died at Cambrai. I saw it in the newspaper.’
She’d nodded. ‘It was peculiar to see Francis’ face fall out of an envelope. It shocked me. I wasn’t ready for it. I’ll not lie – I had to pour myself a brandy. It was almost like seeing a ghost.’
The eau de vie hits the back of Harry’s throat now and he coughs. He has seen so many ghosts today. For three months he has put off this task, he too hasn’t had the heart, but he has begun working his way through the old
photographs today, ordering them chronologically, replaying the memories as he tries to put it all back to the way that it was. They are lined up on the café table in front of him now, in rows and sets, like some peculiar game of patience.
The first image in the top row is taken in Morecambe, in the January of 1915. They make cakewalk poses outside their billet, aligning themselves by size – Francis, himself and Will – a set of end-of-pier minstrels. A newspaperman had taken their photograph, in a more sober stance, minutes earlier. His mother had posted the cutting from the Manchester Courier to them and they had laughed at the caption – Brothers in Arms. They are waxed and buffed new soldiers here. Harry recalls the stiffness, the itch, of that uniform. The smell of it. He can almost taste the Brasso and the boot polish. He is struck now by how very young Will looks.
Harry props Edie’s postcard against his glass and starts to place the photographs in the album that he has purchased for her, fitting them into their paper brackets one by one. On the first pages they are doing Swedish drills on the promenade, bayonet exercises on the golf links and digging trenches at Torrisholme. There are inter-battalion sports days and dances and concerts. They grin, standing on either side of their landlady, Mrs Faulkner. She twists a white handkerchief in her hands. Crowds (and handkerchiefs) wave as their train pulls away. Harry annotates, as Edie entreated, adding dates and details with the pen that he has bought for the purpose.
There are group photographs at Parkhouse Camp then, Will smiling with the woman who sold oranges from a basket, and views of columns marching over Salisbury Plain. Biplanes curve low over Stonehenge. He sees himself, six years younger, leaning against the stones. His younger self squints into the sun. It is like looking at a different person. He thinks of the photograph of Francis that Edie had showed him three months ago. Where has it been, this image of his brother, for the past four years? Why has it surfaced now? Could it simply have been lost in the system somewhere? But for four years – could that be possible?
He looks out at the street and half expects to see Will and Francis there, linking arms again, walking away. Fat raindrops slide down the glass. He imagines Francis’ name on a grave and considers how that could connect with Edie sending him a postcard from Arras. What could have taken her there? Have there been more anonymous envelopes? Could there really be a connection between Edie’s postcard and Francis’ photograph face?
Francis had sent Edie a postcard on that day they first docked in Boulogne, Harry recalls. A chap with an extravagant moustache was peeping out from behind a bunch of giant pansies and pointing at the motto Gros Bisous de Boulogne. Francis had covered the reverse with crosses for kisses. No words. No name. Its meaning would be understood, Harry knew that, but there was something mischievous in the lack of signature, he had thought. He had recalled that crosshatching of ink kisses again, and its teasing anonymity, when Edie had shown him the envelope in which the photograph of Francis had arrived.
Harry reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out the postcard that he has just bought for Edie. Baskets of herring are being landed from sailing boats in a pastel-tinted once-upon-a-time version of the harbour in which he has landed. The sky above the quayside is tinted an improbable blue.
‘I am here. I am looking. I am trying,’ he writes on the reverse – and a PS: ‘But are you here too?’
3
Harry
Boulogne-sur-Mer, February 1916
‘I thought you’d stopped drawing,’ said Will. The wind whipped his hair around his face. He squinted into the low sun. ‘I haven’t seen you painting for ages. I thought you’d given all of that up.’
‘So did I. I tried.’ Harry smiled up at his brother. ‘I haven’t done this for months.’
It had been odd to open the sketchbook again. For nine months he had told himself to leave it closed. After he’d made the difficult decision not to take up the place at the art college, he’d told himself that he must put all of that behind him; he’d chosen to be here with his brothers instead, and he must now look forward, not back. But today the wind whisked and whistled across the dry sand ahead, planes were scribbling over the sea, and Boulogne-sur-Mer was oyster grey, umbers and rose. How could he not test that on paper?
‘I’m glad,’ Will said. ‘You were miserable when you weren’t painting.’
‘Was I? Did you notice that?’
‘You kept looking at the sky moodily and glowering at trees. Francis said that you were pining for your paintbox, and we had to cheer you up, or else you might artistically top yourself.’
Harry laughed.
The blue-green of the sea pooled on the enamel of his palette, curling into paint approximations of sand and sky. He tilted his paper and breathed steadily as he let the colours run. Harry wasn’t sure about glowering at trees, but he did admit that today he felt himself again. Fully himself. Calm. Whole. He sat back, smiled at Will, and lit a cigarette.
‘I was collecting seashells.’
Will sat down next to him. His fingers uncurled to show a handful of cockleshells. He spilled them out and then busied himself planting them in a neat line in the sand. A squad was drilling up on the promenade. Harry could hear the rhythm of boots and barked orders.
‘Can I?’
‘Of course.’
Harry watched his brother’s sandy fingers turning through his sketchbook. The wind flickered through studies of his own mirror features, his brothers’ eyes and smiles, and Edie’s face there, over and over. He felt conscious of that suddenly, watching Will’s fingers turn the pages.
‘They haven’t told us where we’re going yet.’ Will skimmed a shell down the beach.
‘Do you want to be going anywhere? How about we just stay here?’
Will laughed and then frowned. Harry watched his younger brother consider the question. In the bright beach light he was only a boy.
‘No,’ he replied at length. ‘You know, I don’t think I would mind too much. I enjoy playing football on the sand and going in the cafés for ice creams. Francis has found one that does chips and gravy. It’s like someone else’s war, isn’t it?’
Harry nodded and smiled.
‘Frannie says we’re missing out, though. It’s all happening elsewhere and we’re just stuck in another seaside town. It’s all rushing forward, all going on further south, and he’s still here, taking photographs of fishermen and beach huts and café terraces, and he’s done all of that already.’
Harry could hear Francis’ inflections in Will’s voice. ‘There are worse things.’
‘Tell him that.’
Harry looked at the shifting liquid landscape ahead. An old woman was raking for cockles down the beach, doubled in reflection. Clouds scudded across. He could make out the movement of a cluster of wading birds at the water’s edge. He shut his eyes to the glitter of it and lay down on the sand, breathing in the hot smell of seaweed, tasting the salt on his lips. The saline wind sharpened his senses and made him feel intensely alive. He considered that he could quite happily see out the war here, painting busy skies and beachscapes, with the warmth of the winter sun on his face.
‘Come on,’ said Will. ‘I promised Francis that we’d meet him up on the hill.’
They picked their way up the beach, the wind tugging at the roots of their hair and making sails of their clothes. The clouds were moving fast and shadows shifted on the sand. Flags and music pulled in the wind. The dunes were full of khaki camping, like a scouts’ jamboree. As he turned to look towards the sea, Harry felt a sudden reluctance to leave the littoral light, which lent itself to watercolour. It suddenly mattered that he found the time to paint the sand dunes, the saltmarsh and the maritime pines. He needed to draw the cliffs and the herring boats and the moonlight silvering the shingle. Suddenly he felt that he had lost nine months and the need to put it all down on paper was urgent.
*
As they climbed up towards the Calvary, Francis was there, leaning over the railings, taking angles on the plunging rooftops
and the busy port below. Will waved and then Harry could tell that Francis was watching them through his lens. He smiled behind the camera as they approached.
‘Is that noise the guns?’ Will asked. ‘It’s louder from up here, isn’t it? Is it closer today?’
‘Fret not, mon petit frère. It’s only the wind playing tricks.’
Francis put his arm around Will’s shoulders and Harry pushed his hands down into the pockets of his greatcoat.
‘It’s colder up here,’ he said.
‘Is it meant to be seen by the sailors coming in to the port?’ Will looked up at the crucifix.
‘I guess so,’ Harry replied, ‘to watch them as they go out to sea and return them safely home again.’
‘ “Such was the wreck of the Hesperus, in the midnight and the snow! Christ save us all from a death like this, on the reef of Norman’s Woe!” ’ Francis exaggerated his enunciation and made exclamatory arms for Will’s benefit.
‘Norman who?’
‘Never mind.’
‘Your man up there looks like he’s only bothered about sailors, though, doesn’t he? I mean, don’t you get the impression that he’s a bit exclusive?’ Francis proposed. ‘I might take my landlubber prayers elsewhere.’
The face on the cross looked steadfastly out to sea, eyes fixed on the horizon and seemingly unmoved by the whispered prayers of the women who were kneeling on the ground below.
Harry nodded. ‘I don’t think he can hear them. He doesn’t look as though he knows they’re there.’
Beyond, other men in uniform were sitting on the hillside staring out at the flint-grey sea. It struck Harry how so many of them had made this climb on such a windy day, only to stare back at the way that they had come, in silence. It was as if they were all mesmerized by the sea. Harry committed the oddness of the image to memory.
‘But I almost forgot.’ Francis threw his cigarette away and Harry looked at his brother in profile at his side. A curl of smoke left his lips and then he was turning to Harry and grinning. ‘I saw it in a shop in the town. It’s from both of us.’
The Photographer of the Lost Page 2