The Photographer of the Lost

by Caroline Scott

  Francis put his hand to his pocket and handed Harry a parcel wrapped in brown paper. ‘For me?’

  ‘Well, go on, then. Open it. I saw it, and I thought of you.’

  There was a small tin box inside the parcel. Harry lifted the lid and saw sticks of bright rich pigment inside.

  ‘They’re pastels. I didn’t think you had any. Will and I put our money together. We decided that we’d had enough of your gloomy abstinence.’

  ‘Was it that bad? Was it that obvious? Thank you. It’s really kind of you.’

  Francis shook his head. ‘Stand together. Let’s have a souvenir.’

  He stepped back, cradling his camera. Harry put his arm around Will as they leaned against the wall. They both made impolite hand gestures at Francis’ lens. ‘Get a ruddy move on!’

  Francis’ face was all concentration. ‘My chuffing fingers are cramped with the cold.’

  ‘It’s not that cold, you wimp. Frannie, how you whine!’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Will. ‘Look out.’ They watched as an officer approached Francis from behind, saw the alarm in his eyes as he turned, and then the relief with which he shook Michael Rose’s hand.

  ‘You need to be more discreet on this side,’ said Second-Lieutenant Rose. ‘You know it’s prohibited over here now. I’ve shown you the Order. Be grateful it’s only me that saw you. I’d be confiscating it, if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s my own old Kodak and my fingerprints are all over your misdemeanour.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Francis. ‘That was silly of me. I’ll be careful. I know the rules. I wouldn’t get you in bother.’

  ‘Don’t look so contrite,’ said Rose. ‘Go and stand with your brothers. I’ll take this one. You can send it home. Something for your girls.’

  Francis knocked his cap to a jaunty angle and put his arm around Harry. He could feel the pressure of Francis’ fingertips and his pent-up laughter. ‘Smile for the dicky bird, boys!’

  Rose grinned from behind the lens. ‘Something for posterity.’

  4

  Harry

  Boulogne-sur-Mer, August 1921

  Francis had photographed the railway station too, all exotic Gothic and sandbags in those days. He had said that it reminded him of a church organ, Harry remembers. Taking in the detail of the building again, this time through the viewfinder of his own camera, it seems both oversized and over-grand now; the passage of time has left it looking as though it’s overstating its claims. There are crenulations, rampant lions and medieval affectations; corner turrets, stepped spires and classical statues with swords and crowns of laurel leaves. The sandbags are gone, but as the shutter of his camera clicks, Harry fully expects to turn and see Francis there at his side.

  He buys himself a coffee in the cheerless station café and watches as birds lunge through the wires and cables above. Starlings cut curves through the cross-hatching.

  ‘It’s our amphibious portrait artist again, isn’t it?’

  Her feet stop by his table. He looks up and a drawing of a girl with sad eyes and a Forget Me Not locket animates into a crease of smile.

  ‘Mrs West – I hadn’t expected to see you again.’

  ‘Likewise, but I’m glad to cross paths with you, Mr Blythe. My train doesn’t leave for another half hour. Would I be making a nuisance of myself if I were to join you for a coffee?’

  ‘Of course not.’ In truth, he would be glad of a voice other than the ones in his head. He pulls a chair out for her. ‘I’m sorry, I should have asked you where you were travelling on to.’ He puts his hand up for the waiter.

  ‘Arras. The eleven thirty train.’

  ‘That makes two of us. I would be happy to have some company for the journey.’

  He watches as the waiter shuffles cups and saucers on his tray and sorts through the small change.

  ‘I was grateful to you for drawing my picture. We all were. As I said, I would gladly have paid you.’

  ‘Nonsense. I wouldn’t dream of it. It was my pleasure.’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking, but I wondered afterwards – did you draw when you were here during the war?’

  ‘Yes, all the time.’ He lights a cigarette and offers her the packet, but she shakes her head. ‘It was likenesses mostly. I drew them so they could send themselves home, put their face in an envelope and post it to their mothers and their sweethearts. They paid me for it sometimes. Other times it was a trade for a piece of chocolate or a cigarette. Mostly it was because I wanted to. I like faces – how people’s personality and experience show through – and you have to practise.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Francis said that.’ He looks at Rachel West and sees the shadows of her eyelashes, the fine lines at the corners of her mouth. There are freckles under her face powder. ‘And you always have to be looking.’

  ‘Francis?’

  ‘My brother. Although his thing was cameras. He wanted to be a photographer, you see, to do it professionally.’ He knocks back the last of his coffee. ‘I’ve somehow ended up doing it for him, though. It’s what I do for a living now, it’s my everyday bread and butter, but really it was always much more Francis’ passion than mine.’

  ‘Doing it for him? Am I wrong in assuming that he didn’t get the chance?’

  ‘A small matter of a war rather got in the way.’

  ‘It does that, doesn’t it?’

  *

  Rachel has placed a guidebook down on the table, an Illustrated Michelin Guide to the Battlefields. She has moved it aside to make way for her coffee, but flicks through the pages and shows him a photograph of Arras in ruins. There are tips for motoring tourists, he sees, and day-trip itineraries. ‘It looks like Pompeii,’ says Rachel and shuts the page on Arras. ‘I have to be there tomorrow. I have an appointment to look through lost property.’

  ‘Lost property?’

  ‘Lost men’s property. Personal effects. Potentially identifying items found on bodies which haven’t yet been named. Although it’s not officially phrased that directly.’

  ‘No, I expect not.’ Harry picks rust from under his fingernails. He thinks about what items might have been in Francis’ pockets. He considers how that photograph of his brother’s face might have been identified and found its way to Edie. ‘I have some business to do in Arras too. I could accompany you to your lost property office, if you’d like?’

  Rachel plays with her teaspoon. ‘Would you? You wouldn’t mind? Thank you. I’d be grateful for some moral support.’ Her thin fingers are ringed with hearts and flowers formed in tin and brass and aluminium. Harry has seen similar before, worked from spent cartridges and corned beef cans.

  ‘ “Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes. She shall have music wherever she goes.” Did your husband make them?’ He nods at her fingers.

  ‘Yes. David was a silversmith. Always clever with his hands and a pair of pliers in his pocket. He took his pliers away with him, because that’s part of who he was – who he is. He made me some napkin rings too, from some sort of shell casing, and a box with pansies engraved onto it. Pensées in French, you see. He told me that. It meant that he was thinking of me.’

  ‘An artist and a poet and a linguist?’

  ‘Ten,’ she says. She flexes her fingers. ‘He sent me one each month. Ten months in France. I look at my fingers and I know where he was each month. I know the location that each parcel arrived from. The one that matters, though – the only one that really matters – is the eleventh month and I know hardly anything about that.’

  ‘And the eleventh month was?’

  ‘November 1916.’ Staring at her fingers, Rachel suddenly looks as if she might cry. ‘I’ve been here before, you know. This is my third trip. How many more do I have to make?’ She clatters the teaspoon into her cup and the ringed fingers are then in her hair. ‘I should be an expert at this by now, but – once again – I don’t know where to start.’

  ‘You’ve written to your husband’s regiment? He could be in
England by now. Maybe in one of the hospitals?’ There are still twenty thousand men in the special hospitals, Harry has read. Looking for Francis, he has sat in the waiting rooms of many of those hospitals. He has written those letters. Spoken to those doctors and seen them shake their heads. ‘He could be staring down a ward waiting for you to arrive.’

  ‘I told you on the boat, didn’t I?’ She looks suddenly forceful. ‘I wrote to his officers, to the men who had written to me at the time, to all the men who he had ever named in his letters. They couldn’t tell me anything. So many men are missing. That’s what they all say. It’s as if the word missing is a code and I’m meant to get the nod as to what it really means.’

  ‘How about the army enquiry office? Or the British Legion?’

  ‘Yes, haven’t I already told you? They couldn’t help.’

  ‘The Red Cross?’

  ‘I even saw a clairvoyant. She told me that David wasn’t dead. She was certain of it. She couldn’t find him on the other side. It was near Arras that he went missing – in that place, and it all tumbled down to ruin. I think that David might be lost, or might have lost his mind.’

  When she looks at Harry he senses that she expects him to know, as if she expects an answer, and, with the intensity of that look, he finds himself examining his trouser leg.

  ‘You don’t have to help me,’ she says.

  Her fingers turn the Forget Me Not locket. He wonders if it contains her husband’s photograph and if she believes that he has forgotten her. Could Edie too believe that Francis has merely forgotten to come home? Two weeks on from writing that postcard, could Edie still be in Arras? Could she have found reason to stay there? ‘I need to call in at Arras this week, anyway,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, what exactly are you doing here?’ It comes out, evidently, a little sharper than she intends, because she adjusts her tone. ‘I would have thought that this would be the last place that you’d ever want to see again.’

  ‘As I said, I work as a photographer and I’m being paid to be here. I’m here on an assignment, as it were. My assignment is a list of graves. My job is taking photographs of graves.’

  *

  The train is quiet. He leans against the window and watches the suburbs blur. He’s aware of Rachel’s voice, its tone and rhythm and not-quite-heard words. The fields are green. It surprises him that they can be, after everything that’s happened. She fusses with an apple and talks about the price of bread. She talks a lot. Harry remembers other railway carriages, stinking of horse and soldier, and sees it slide by.

  In February 1916 they had entrained inland in cattle trucks, with instructions to keep the noise down. Harry had looked out at France through wooden slats. There seemed to be a lot of empty villages and waterlogged agriculture.

  ‘It feels like sneaking up on the war from behind,’ Will had said.

  But the train had brought them to a town that seemed bypassed by war and time. In between lectures on automatic gunfire and rifle-grenade instruction, they placed bets on turns of playing cards and dominoes and traded tinned rations for silk postcards stitched with sentimental slogans. They paraded in the driving rain, fixed feet at ten-to-two, and dripped. They played mouth organs and tin whistles and tug-of-war.

  ‘Is this it?’ Francis had asked.

  Harry had started to write it all down that spring, long illustrated letters that lingered over the details, and he crammed all that was new and curious into a diary. He drew kit inspection, bombing practice and drill. He drew the lime trees, the red-brick farms and the rippling fields of wheat. He drew Will playing cricket, Francis taking photographs and their hands passing playing cards across café tables. Harry found comfort in committing it all to paper, felt lightened by the act and the concentration it required. He recorded his brothers’ faces in every attitude and expression.

  ‘You don’t have much luggage,’ Rachel observes.

  ‘Luggage?’ Harry refocuses on her face, winds back, and finds himself five years later, on a train heading east again. ‘It’s enough to lug around. I don’t expect to be invited to many cocktail parties.’

  ‘You’ve renounced dinner jackets? How reckless. How austere. You’re not fasting too?’ She offers him a bag of sweets and a half-smile.

  ‘I’m uncomplicating it,’ he says and wonders if it’s true. ‘But I do succumb to caramels.’

  *

  There are potted tulips on the steps of the hotel, a glossy, rich, grotesque red. He looks up to the boarded panes above as Rachel reads the card in the window.

  ‘Deux chambres?’ says the woman on the desk.

  ‘Did you see that eyebrow?’ Rachel laughs as they climb the stairs. ‘Is it humanly possible to look more arch? I’m not sure that I’ve ever felt more scrutinized and doubted.’

  ‘Nice to see that propriety is being policed. She’s marked you down in the register as doubtful, you know. Better mind your manners, miss.’

  ‘Mrs,’ she corrects.

  ‘Of course.’ He is sad to see that the humour in her face has gone. ‘I’m sorry.’

  An English voice down the corridor complains about the quality of pillows and the lack of hot water. Harry shuts the door on it, but they’re all around: there are voices in the ceiling, under the floor and in the walls. This hotel is full of voices. They are all talking, all passing a commentary, all pushing their words through the walls. He props Edie’s postcard beside the bedside lamp and it is her voice that he hears again then, as clear as if she were here, in this room, speaking into his ear.

  ‘It was almost like seeing a ghost,’ she had said, as she told him about the photograph of Francis.

  ‘I can understand that.’

  ‘It wasn’t you who sent it?’

  Did she suspect that? Was that why her eyes had searched his face? ‘No, why would I?’

  ‘And not him?’

  ‘How could it be?’

  Harry had stepped away from her, looking through the lens. For a moment he had been glad to have the barrier of the camera between them, not to have to look her directly in the eye, as he considered his response to her question. In that reeling moment, he had asked himself how she could think that – but then why was it not easier to reply?

  He focused in on her features, but her face told him nothing more. Backlit, she glowed at the edges. He watched her eyes lift following an arrow of geese overhead. Should it not be Francis – her husband, his brother – on this side of the camera? Should it not still be that way round? Did she have any good reason to be asking that question? Harry had leaned against the wall to steady himself. Edie’s photograph image offered him the bag of humbugs.

  ‘I want you to take a photograph of Francis’ grave.’

  She had rolled a sweet on her tongue, he remembers. Her recalled words smelled of peppermints.

  ‘I will try for you,’ he had replied.

  He’d returned to London with good intentions. He would talk to all the appropriate agencies and do all that he could to find some evidence. If a grave existed, he would go there and take the photograph for her. But did it? Could it? He had written letters and waited in offices, checked through casualty and prisoner lists, circulated descriptions and visited hospitals, but all of his enquiries had come to no end. There was nothing. He had tried and failed again, as he had warned her that he probably would. The days went by, the file of correspondence thickening and the possibilities diminishing, and it was only when he received her postcard from Arras last week that he realized another three months had passed.

  ‘Isn’t this a bit back-to-front?’ Edie’s postcard handwriting insists. ‘Shouldn’t it be you sending this to me?’

  There is a picture of the Hôtel de Ville on the card and a July postmark. Could Edie have found something, then? Could she somehow have succeeded where he has failed? Has something of Francis surfaced in Arras?

  Harry tries to block out the voices in the walls. He tries to shut out the photograph faces, and the thoughts of ghosts and graves, a
nd to focus instead on the pattern of the wallpaper. His hotel room has yellow walls and overlarge pieces of furniture that look as though they have come out of a grander house. There is a dead bird on his window ledge. He watches its feathers shift. The sheets smell of stale sweat. The ceiling is watermarked in the shape of Africa. Shadows creep from the corners until he is staring into darkness.

  *

  He meets Rachel at six, as arranged, in the next-door restaurant. The room is full of people who look lost. At the tables all around they are telling each other their stories. There is slightly too much gesticulation to be normal. Conversations are conducted in a slightly higher emotional register. Confidences spill out over the soup. It is as if everyone in the room is slightly drunk, Harry thinks. They eat steaming boiled potatoes and mutton with grey fat. Photographs of the missing are posted on the greasy floral walls. He finds himself looking for faces that he might recognize, that he might himself once have committed to paper. He finds himself looking for Francis’ face.

  ‘He hasn’t gone,’ says Rachel suddenly, after two glasses of wine. ‘David, I mean. He is a robust man, a strong man, a man full of life.’

  Harry feels himself being eyed comparably and not coming up to the mark. ‘There you are, then,’ he says.

  ‘I haven’t shown you, have I?’

  She takes a photograph from her handbag and smiles as she pushes it across the table. The young man staring back has tidy features and strikingly pale eyes. Harry thinks that, if he were taking the photograph, he would focus in on the young man’s eyes. Whatever Rachel’s certainty as to the man in the photograph being full of life, there is something already ghostlike about those eyes.

  ‘A handsome chap.’

  ‘Yes.’ Rachel takes the photograph. She runs her hands over it as if she is reading it with her fingertips. ‘I’ve seen every spiritualist in Sunderland. He’s not on the other side.’