*
She watched as he washed his hands and face at the sink, saw his eyes looking all around his mother’s kitchen.
‘I am permitted to make a fool of myself because I might die tomorrow,’ Harry had said to her in August 1917, as they had stood together on the driveway of the hospital. He had put his hand on the sleeve of her green velvet coat. Two months later, Francis was gone. She noticed, as Harry turned now, how he stared at her green coat draped over the chair. Was he remembering that moment too?
‘What happened to your hand?’ he asked.
‘Munitions. I did fuses for a while. Your mother wasn’t at all happy about it.’
‘I can imagine. It must have made her hate the war to see your hands like that. It makes me hate it.’
‘But I can work a lathe. And I can ride Frannie’s bicycle. I rather enjoyed all the greasy camaraderie and I liked feeling independent. We used to sing sometimes. Though, when I think what we were making, I’m not certain that singing wasn’t awful.’
‘Depends on how despicable your songs were.’
‘Dreadfully so. And we swore like soldiers. We were gleefully vulgar and we laughed at it. But you’re not here to hear my new swear words, are you? And what about your hand?’
‘Munitions.’ She saw him smile as his words echoed hers. ‘Shrapnel. It ended it for me. I was in hospital in London for two months.’
‘I didn’t know that. You should have told me that. You should have written to me. I would have come and seen you.’
‘Would you?’
‘You know I would.’
‘Perhaps that’s why I didn’t write.’
He leaned back on a chair, kicked off his boots and lit a cigarette. She watched his fingertips moving over the surface of the kitchen table, refinding familiar textures, knowing that he was remembering his mother placing down saucepans here, the flash of her working knife, his mother’s hands scrubbing soap into circles of bubbles on this tabletop. He had moved all around this room touching things, and Edie knew that in doing so he was reconnecting, pulling the detail into focus, putting the memories into place.
‘I don’t remember these teacups. I don’t remember the bluebells.’
‘They were my mother’s,’ she said. ‘It’s all jumbled up now. When I moved in I brought everything from next door with me and the two houses got all muddled up together. This house used to be so full of voices, but now it’s just me and all these cupboards full of other people’s china patterns.’
‘I have never known this house so quiet.’
‘Isn’t it? You’re all still here with me, though. I hear your voices every day when I enter rooms, and then I have to check myself. I sound quite mad, don’t I? But I keep opening doors and fully expecting you all to be there. It’s oddly comforting to have all your possessions around me. All your things are in your bedroom, by the way, all your paints and pencils.’
Harry’s room was exactly as it had been when he went away six years ago. That was how his mother had left it, and it was waiting for him now, as if he might yet come home. Edie didn’t often go in there, because she didn’t feel that she had the right. Occasionally she asked herself if he hadn’t come home because she was here, in his mother’s house.
‘Can you still draw?’
‘Yes. Though it’s taken some time to get the control back. And it’s different to how it was.’
He dabbed his cigarette out. She remembered a boy who had paint under his fingernails. The version of Harry that she had known before the war always seemed to have hands creased in ink or charcoal or paint. She had often wanted to walk him to the sink, put the bar of soap and a nailbrush in his hands, but she was almost sorry to see his clean fingernails now.
‘You haven’t thought about going back to college?’
‘No. It’s too late for that.’
In the summer before the war he had applied to Manchester School of Art. He had told Edie before he had the conversation with his mother or his brothers, had shared all those ambitions with her first, and it had delighted her to see the excitement in Harry’s face. How could he then have let all of that go? How much had that sacrifice cost him? She used to think that she could see Harry’s soul in the way that he painted, and she remembered how the light used to shine through his colours. Had that light gone out too?
‘I’m sorry to hear you say that. Did you start taking photographs because it was difficult to draw?’
‘It’s a job,’ he said. ‘It’s money. I needed the money.’
‘It surprised me when I heard you were working as a photographer – mostly because it was always Francis’ thing.’
‘It’s because of Francis that I knew how to do it. I’m only a photographer in a back-street studio. I take photographs of children on their birthdays, engaged couples and hopeful spinsters.’
She smiled. ‘You don’t have to qualify it. You don’t have to explain yourself to me.’
‘Would he begrudge me the hopeful spinsters?’
‘Perhaps he’d be glad for you.’
‘Perhaps.’
She could see, when she looked at Harry, that something was amiss. There were new shadows around his eyes and he looked as though he wasn’t sleeping. Occasionally something trembled around his mouth, as if he wasn’t entirely in control. She saw how the cigarette in his hand shook. She felt such pity and tenderness towards this sad, damaged young man, who she had known as a bright, ambitious boy, and who suddenly looked so very like Francis. She didn’t want Harry to be sad, but she hadn’t known what to do when she had seen those same flickers pass over Francis’ face, and she hardly knew what she might do now for Harry.
‘Are you sleeping?’ she asked.
He nodded.
‘I’m not sure that I believe you. Are you eating?’
He smiled, pulled his eyes away from hers, and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I’m grateful for your concern.’
‘Of course I’m concerned. You’ve lost weight. You look as if you haven’t slept properly for weeks. I’d admit that I can smell whisky on your breath, only you might tell me where to go.’
They had been such a unit, the three of them; they were a team, they were linked, their voices always joining and their wordless looks saying even more. They communicated with their eyes, these three brothers, and she wondered how Harry existed now without the sustenance of all that wordless language. She missed her mother’s voice and her understanding, but how much worse must it be for Harry to have had all that closeness taken away? She imagined that it must be something like deafness, or blindness, or losing a limb. As brothers they were such a fundamental and overlapping part of each other. How did he cope with that part of him gone? Perhaps, she thought, as he watched the match flame flutter between his fingers, Harry wasn’t coping?
‘You have blue irises,’ he said, nodding at the vase on the windowsill. ‘Francis used to buy you a bunch of irises every spring, didn’t he?’
‘He did.’
‘It’s odd when I look around this room: everything is the same, and yet it’s all different.’
‘It is.’
‘You don’t have to keep things as they were, though, you know. This is your home now, and if you want to change anything, you must.’
‘You mean the crows?’
The crows on the kitchen dresser watched them with beady eyes. She had always thought them too laughable to be menacing, with their cocked heads and glass button eyes, but she had noticed how Harry was repeatedly glancing at them now, and then looking away, as if he didn’t want to see them.
‘I didn’t expect them to be here. I’ve never pictured you in this room with the crows still in the background.’
‘I’m strangely accustomed to their company. I have been known to talk to them on occasion.’
‘God, we’ve trapped you in a Victorian ghost story! Burn them, or bury them, if you feel inclined. It feels as though we’ve imprisoned you in a mausoleum. I’m developing sensations of
guilt.’
His eyes connected with hers as he smiled, and for the first time since he walked through the door, he was really looking at her. She remembered how Harry would smile at her when he was a young man. He was so often the dreamer, his eyes in the skies, as Francis put it, but when Harry smiled it was like the sun coming into the room. Only those smiles seemed to be so fleeting and so much more complicated now.
‘Are you working in the shop again?’ he asked.
‘I’ve been back for over a year now. Of course, it’s all black now. It’s all the colour of these crows. I did six months at the station as well. I worked in the soup kitchen there and watched through the hatch as they all filed in.’ Such a long line of faces. Only none of them had been his. ‘I looked out for you, but you were never there.’
‘I’m sorry.’
She watched his fingers tapping cigarette ash amongst the bread crusts, his downcast eyelashes, his mouth looking as if it was going to say something, but holding its silence. She didn’t want Harry to be sorry, and yet there had been so many times when she had needed him to be here.
‘She dyed her clothes black, your mother. Everything. Here in this room. Right down to her underclothes and her nightdress. There was a vat of black dye in here. I can still see her underskirt rising up steaming from that vat. I can’t be in this kitchen without seeing that again, without remembering the smell of that black dye. I thought about looking for you, only I didn’t know where to start.’
‘I can’t stay, you know. I don’t feel I could live in this house again.’
‘With all my heart I wish it wasn’t like that, but I do understand,’ she said.
10
Harry
Richebourg, Pas-de-Calais, February 1916
They were told that they would proceed to the trenches, and so they advanced towards names they knew from 1915’s newsprint.
They marched past winter-bare orchards and beet fields and roadside shrines. They passed thatched cottages and waterwheels and weedy canals. The road’s straightness reminded Harry of the Roman road over Blackstone Edge, where he and Francis had so often walked together, with a history book or binoculars or a camera, photographing the stones worn smooth by the passage of centuries of packhorse trains and the ghosts of old soldiers. He reheard the cries of lapwings and his brother’s voice singing long-ago ballads, but Francis wasn’t singing today. The route ahead was demarked with the debris of passage: an either-side litter of bent metal and trampled paper.
‘I feel like we’re late for the party,’ said Will.
The road’s curiosities sustained them for a while; they marched past a dressing station, anti-aircraft guns and redbrick redoubts. Chickens scattered from their feet in Le Touret and children lined the roadway to stare. Poplar colonnades stretched away and a blackbird sang as they crossed a farmyard. Francis whistled a reply and made it whimsy. The houses were sand-bagged in Richebourg and the church a fascination of rococo ruin. Pausing for a rest, they peered into the splintered tombs and saw the antique black bones.
‘This place is full of ghosts,’ said Francis.
They moved up through the old front line, which was all wattle and hurdle and rotting wood. Harry was struck with how makeshift it all looked, how amateur and improvised and vulnerable. It felt like walking through ancient history and the sweet-rotten smell of it – medieval and full of warning – gagged in his throat. Split sandbags spilled and other people’s rubbish striated the earth walls like archaeology. Harry looked at the mud-streaked fragments of candle wax and glass, the crumbling rust and the folds of hessian, and wondered who these people had been. Something about the old derelict trenches made them whisper.
‘Ah, the bastions of Troy.’ Michael Rose’s voice didn’t sound entirely steady.
‘What a shithole,’ Francis replied. ‘What a shambles.’
Honeysuckle tangled its claim, where barbed wire had failed, and, further up, they had to negotiate their way through a sagging tent of telegraph wires that caught in their packs and rifles (‘Mind the wire!’ came echoing along the line, too late). All of Harry’s senses seemed to have pushed to the surface with the goosebumps on his arms and he took in every precise sight and sound and smell of it. He had never placed his feet more carefully. He had never been more aware of all the textures that his fingers touched or the sound of his own breath.
‘I feel as though I’m walking over somebody’s grave,’ said Will.
They picked across pontoons in the fading light, across silent expanses of water, and into the impenetrable darkness of a communication trench. They heard and felt the height of the water and it flickered liquid reflections in movement. It was late by the time they arrived in the line. It was all black but for the sudden flash of matches and the clustered fairy lights of fag ends. They fried up bully beef, breaking open iron rations for the first time, and talked of Trafalgar and Transvaal. Over the top, the flares lit entanglements of wire and pickets. The blackness beyond was Goya and Blake and Bruegel.
*
The first crack of rifle fire came at dawn.
‘Jesus!’ said Will.
‘That’s the way it is,’ reflected the Welsh corporal, with sing-song unconcern. ‘This is a 1915 sector and we like to nod to the old conventions. We exchange fire at dawn and dusk. Call and reply, see. We observe manners. That’s the way it’s done.’
The Welsh, who they’d been put in with, had the vocabulary of veterans and told them that they should be grateful not to have arrived a year earlier. This was a nursery sector, they said, and laughed. ‘Fritz’s snipers are the very devil, mind.’
‘Some schooling,’ observed Francis.
It all solidified with the rising light, but the sandbag ramparts seemed to diminish and Harry found himself moving at a crouch.
The snow came in the afternoon. They marvelled, briefly, at the crisp, innocent, cleanness of it, but the fall began to thaw where it was trampled and left them with wet boots and curses.
‘I need volunteers for a working party,’ said Lieutenant O’Kane. ‘We need to get that gap in the wire fixed tonight. Are you with me, Blythe?’
Harry looked up. He couldn’t avoid the lieutenant’s eyes.
‘Can I count on you?’
It didn’t seem to be optional. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Volunteer?’ laughed Francis to O’Kane’s retreating back.
They dirtied their faces with grease and wood ash before they went out and Harry’s fingers smelled like a bonfire. There was something schoolboyish about this action. It felt as though they were breaking the rules of grown-up behaviour, and they joked as they smeared their cheeks and widened their eyes to one another. But there was an edge to the jests, a forcefulness to the humour, an overly heightened excitement, and Harry felt his heart beat faster.
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ said Bartley as they waited in the sap.
Harry nodded. He tried to steady his breath.
‘Keep low. Keep quiet,’ said O’Kane. ‘We get it done and we get back.’
Harry could hear the bandolier of barbed wire around his chest chattering. All the processes in his body seemed to be running too fast. His nerves didn’t feel right. He wiped his sweating palms on his tunic and took a clutch of snow in each hand. It ached coldly but concentrating on that sensation took some of the rest of it away.
‘Silently now.’
He held his breath as he climbed over the top. His limbs felt clumsy. As he looked up, he braced for the returning crack of rifle fire, but there was only the glittering blue-white and silence beyond. He followed Bartley’s boots, sliding out on his belly. He tried to crawl in small, low movements, but the wire bandolier around his chest wanted to snag on everything and his rifle felt heavy as an anvil.
‘You see it?’ Corporal Gibbs whispered at Harry’s side. He could smell whisky on Gibbs’ breath.
‘Yes.’ The snow had settled on the tangle of wire out ahead and made it more material, but there was such a lot of gr
ound to cross to reach it.
He could hear Gibbs’ laboured breathing and the creak of their bodies over the snow. It seemed to highlight every movement, heighten every sound, and fell away under Harry’s hands. A cavity opened up beneath him and for a moment he expected to plunge down.
‘Fuck’s sake!’ said Bartley.
Harry clung on. He put his cheek to the snow and lay still as he got his breath back. The rifle in his hand seemed to be the only solid and sure thing in the world.
That was when he saw the face. A movement. Eyes glinting. Out beyond the wire. The man’s exhales hung around him like a halo, betraying life. They stared at one another and time stretched. Harry saw him bite his lip and somehow he knew that he would run. He would let him run. He would let him go. But then Gibbs shouted and it all changed. Suddenly everyone was screaming and the gun in Bartley’s hand was going off. When Harry looked again the glinting eyes were gone.
*
Harry watched morning roll in through a frame of barbed wire. Mist wreathed the in-between, giving an air of antique times, of ancient campaigning. It might well have rolled back and shown Charlemagne in camp. The wire’s gilded brambles dripped caught light. The trenches steamed. Blue smoke began to rise from the enemy line, washing through the white sky like watercolour. Harry stretched in the raw, numbing cold, yawned and beat life into his limbs. He hugged his aching fingers in his armpits. His throat was raw from how he’d retched.
Francis stood at his shoulder. ‘Their dugouts have rugs and curtains, I heard, electric light and hot running water.’ He sniffed. ‘I can smell the bastards’ sausages and sauerkraut. Why didn’t you bring me a sausage last night?’
Harry turned his back. He couldn’t blink away the face he’d seen last night. Was he still out there in the cold and the mist?
‘Are you feeling any better?’ Francis persisted. He was cutting kindling on the fire step. ‘Will said you threw up. You looked like shit when you got in last night.’
‘I feel like shit. I haven’t slept.’
‘You’ll get over it.’
The Photographer of the Lost Page 7