‘How would you know?’
‘Because you always get over it and I’m here to look out for you.’ Francis took the cigarette from his lips. ‘Do you remember when you went under the reservoir?’
The shock of the icy black water was so vivid in Harry’s memory it made him gasp. Even here. Even now. Even after last night. He rewound nine years and was a boy again, following Francis out onto the ice. The reservoir was epic when it was frozen and it drew them; there might well have been woolly mammoths in its black unfathomable depths. To step out onto the water, to take that dare, to test their courage and their weight was too tempting. And they had pushed each other. They had catcalled after him, Will and Francis, daring him to follow, and so his feet had trailed theirs. He remembered their three sets of footprints on the frozen reservoir, the creak of the ice beneath his boots, the shift of the bubbles below the surface, and then the sudden certainty that it would go.
‘You looked like a waxwork when we got you out,’ said Francis. He blew smoke at the memory. ‘Even worse than you look this morning. Your lips were blue.’
‘I remember going under. I remember the shock of it and panicking, but have absolutely no memory of getting out.’ He had woken up in their mother’s bed, aching and trembling all over. ‘How did you get me home?’
‘We dragged you. Will and I lugged you like a sack of spuds. An almighty sack of spuds. You weighed a bloody ton. We did think you were a goner.’
Harry struggled to make a struck match connect with his cigarette. His hands were shaking again. He dropped the match and swore.
Francis retrieved it for him. ‘It’s all right, we’re all in this together,’ he said. ‘We’re all scared. Don’t think it’s just you. But you’ll be okay. I will always be there to pull you out of your grave.’
11
Edie
Arras, August 1921
The morning light is creeping across the rooftops. Once upon a time this skyline would have been spiked with belfries and church steeples, but today the towers have all come down and the roofline is tattered. The white shape of the cathedral is a ghost of a building. Smoke starts to rise from the chimney opposite Edie’s window and a flight of starlings streaks along the street below and then wheels above. She envies the birds the lift of their wings as she turns away.
There are prints of Madonnas and saints all around the walls of this rented room and a black wooden crucifix is suspended above the bedhead. It is wound around with a string of rosary beads and crumbling sprigs of heather. When she wakes in the night she can see the beads slowly rotating above and imagines that an elderly woman might have lingered on the verge of death in this bed. She has spent enough nights lying awake in this awful bed trying to match the photograph silhouette of a broken-down town to the streets through which she has spent the day walking.
She splashes her face at the washstand. In the mirror she is surrounded by lithographs of suffering martyrs, but she barely sees the jewels of blood and gilded agonies. Perhaps she has stared at it for too long, but like a double-exposure, that photograph face now seems to be imprinted over everything. Francis is here in this room, there behind her own reflection, and he is all over this town. And yet, she is certain now, he isn’t actually in Arras.
She had taken the envelope into the post office the previous day. The staff behind the counter had huddled around it, poring over the blur of ink. They debated, gesticulated and laughed as if this postmark were a puzzle, a riddle to be solved, a code to be cracked, but then all three had turned to face her and had shaken their heads. It is always the same. With the authorities there have been more headshakes, more rooms full of awful remainders of other men, more ledgers full of names that are not his. She returns the photograph to its envelope and places it on the top of her suitcase. It is time to move on. He isn’t here.
They start work early in the masons’ yard. Edie can hear the rhythm of striking chisels and see the blocks of white stone waiting. She places her feet carefully on the treacherous cobbles, but up above workmen whistle songs on scaffolds. They are standing in the empty spaces that once glowed with cathedral glass, sawing out the cracked stones so they can put in the new. It all looks so precarious, this work; she can see more hope and determination than engineering. What has been brought down by machined steel and high-explosive is being replaced with mortar and sweat and courage and care. It matters, she sees, that all of this is made right. This town is fixing itself. They are putting it all back the way it was. She thinks of her husband’s photograph face. Could she put all that back too?
A wagon passes in front of her loaded with scaffolding and she walks on. The houses of the Grand Place look ragged, rickety, brittle. They are propping each other up like a staggering row of closing-time drunks. Most of the roof tiles have gone, so that the skyline is a zigzag of rafters. It is as though the houses are showing their skeletons and it makes them appear terribly vulnerable. Arras is no more than a model built from matchsticks, she thinks, and the breath of one more big bad wolf could blow it all down.
The gaps in the facades show the fringes of lampshades and the patterns of bedroom curtains. These rudely exposed fragments of lives once lived – the wallpaper choices and the glimpses of wardrobes – are the most moving. It is these details that make these sad stones into ravaged homes. It fills her with such a sense of pity to stand here. It is all so immediately, forcefully tragic, but looking around here, she is finally certain that this is not the place: however ill-used Arras has been, the town in the background of Francis’ photograph has suffered worse.
The square is filling up with voices and footsteps and journeys weave across it. There are advertising signs on the pockmarked buildings and beneath the painted lettering (vins et spiritueux – beurre et fromages – vêtements femme) shutters are opening and wares are being shown to the morning street. There are men in straw boaters and women in white weekend dresses and the crowd has a sense of direction and purpose. A young girl skips, a boy points and a family group together to have their photograph taken by the ruins.
As she stands and looks around the square, his whispering voice is there in her head again, telling her to tread softly. She sees a smile curling at the corners of his mouth, and the glimmer of his long-ago eyes through the bookshelves. She turns and the arcades and crowds spin. Could Francis be watching her even now? Are his eyes there, just out of sight? But she knows that he’s not here. She would feel it. And yet, if he’s not here, where is he? Edie turns in the middle of the square, with the crowd surging around, and feels that she doesn’t know which way to go or what she is meant to do next.
She stands with her suitcase and looks up at the station frontage. Many of the panes of glass are yet to be replaced, so that when it catches the light it seems to twinkle malevolently. The railway station looks rather Gothic in its glittering raggedness, she thinks, like some sort of monstrous fairy palace.
A man in uniform is chalking up departure times on a board and every destination is a question and a possibility. She tries to pull her mind back through Francis’ letters, to remember the significant place names, all the places that mattered to him and where he might now be. A year ago she had been so certain that he was quietly in his grave, but every town on the map now has the look of a maybe.
All the destinations on the departures board are names that she knows from newspaper headlines. They are all memories of battles and fronts and big pushes. Did he want her to follow him to these places? Did he need to show her these things? Did he mean to make her understand? She hears her own intake of breath as she steps up to the ticket desk.
She is certain of one place where he will have been.
12
Harry
Arras, August 1921
‘I’m going to take a train south,’ Harry tells her.
Rachel butters her toast and nods. She has come down to breakfast late. He wasn’t sure that he would see her again at all.
‘Your graves?’
‘Yes.’
<
br /> ‘Good. It’s a good thing that you’re doing. A kind thing. You ought to have more confidence in that.’
She pours tea and raises an eyebrow at him.
‘Yes, please.’
‘It’s horribly weak,’ she says and dabbles in the pot with a spoon. ‘The French really don’t know what they’re doing with tea. I wish I’d packed tea leaves.’
‘Will you be all right on your own?’
‘Quite well. Thank you.’ She bites toast and he looks away from her mouth. She is wearing a high-necked black blouse today and jet earrings that swing as she chews. She gives the appearance of having dressed very deliberately this morning, as if she doesn’t mean for there to be any doubt. ‘I’m grateful to you for being here with me, Harry, but helping me doesn’t move her forward, does it? It doesn’t get her any closer to the truth. I mean, it doesn’t work by proxy, does it?’
‘No,’ he says, considering what that truth might be and what Edie moving forward might mean. ‘Only I’m not sure how to help her. Will you write to me if you have any news?’
‘Would you want to know?’
He watches her tidy fingers briskly cutting the toast into smaller triangles. ‘I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it. I want you to find him. You’re here for the next fortnight?’
‘I have a diary full of hospitals and cemetery records and meetings that will probably go nowhere.’ She looks up from her teacup. ‘But where will you be? Where do I contact you?’
He considers and, at length, writes Edie’s address on the back of a spare postcard. There is an image of Arras Cathedral in ruins on the front. A Tommy in a tin hat is poking gloomily at the fallen stone with a stick.
‘It’ll get to me there.’
‘You should tell her,’ says Rachel.
‘I can’t,’ he replies.
*
At the station he sees there is a train going to Béthune. The place name brings back inter-battalion cricket matches, sessions of practising their bowling actions with Mills bombs and the journey out of the Richebourg trenches. They had moved to the rest area at the end of February 1916, marched, eight miles away from the war, back to where the snow glistened rosy and blue again and their boots once more crunched. Harry turns through the album as he waits for his train and sees himself and Will posing in the snow for Francis’ camera.
Smile for the dicky bird! Francis’ voice echoes across the years and miles.
As they marched west, there were garden gates and overblown cabbages. There were painted shutters and shops that sold postcards and chocolate. The lacquered shoots of the overhead branches, glossy with promise of new life, had a fresh beauty, Harry remembers. To no longer strain to listen, to take it as it came, was liberating, and civilian sounds beguiled Harry’s ears: a girl’s laughter, a baby’s cry, a dog’s bark. Domesticity looked bright and kind and he put all of its colours down on paper. Francis had photographed roadside shrines and ox-carts, staring children and the splitting seams of their boots. Will is laughing in a goatskin coat by a sign that says No Loitering.
He writes down the place names and the dates for Edie, wondering as he does so whether she might presently be in any of these places. The snow had turned to rain by March. The villages were dirty and straggling. ‘Grim weather,’ he writes. He turns on, fitting photographs into brackets, and it is June and they are again billeted near Béthune. There are football matches and boxing tournaments and they swim in the canal. There’s a Brigade horse show and concert parties and they sleep in the sun under the trees. He can still picture the light moving through the branches above and hear Will’s voice at his side.
Harry takes the train south to Albert. He watches it all pass by the window and tries to see the wood where they camped and waited to move east. The countryside is all rather trampled hereabouts; he looks out and sees collapsed masonry, strewn timber and corrugated iron. Letters in plasterwork threaten, Suspicious persons will be shot on sight, while the wall all around the words has crumbled to lath. There are tell-tale hollows and mounds of earth. Tree stumps line a lane. Black thistles grow. The barbed wire is mangled and rusted, and, like the plasterwork words, has lost its menace. It is only ugly now and sad to see.
There are duckboard tracks along the roads through the town and piles of debris on either side. It is all coming down and rising up new. He has seen construction sites on the outskirts. Rows of wooden houses are being built. Their design reminds him of the cowboy towns that he has seen on the cinema screen. One of these new properties has a sign outside announcing itself as the Villa d’Espérance; the name had struck him and then he had wondered if he was right to be surprised by it. How could hope better be exemplified than the effort to make this place a home again?
He had been told about the town’s leaning Virgin, how she had gazed down all askew from the top of the tower, threatening to end the war for whichever side made her plummet. He had seen newspaper images of her at ever more precarious inclines. It had seemed as if hope and meaning were invested in those angles. A new church is being built now beside the old. It seems that Albert is trying to right itself, to rise and look forward. The golden Virgin is long gone, though. He looks up at the basilica and it is gnarled and scabbed and sorry-looking. Some ruins have a romance, but this is a gloomy pile of stones.
‘Before the war as many as eighty thousand people made pilgrimages to this basilica yearly,’ he reads from the guidebook that Rachel has given him, ‘to see the ancient statue of the Virgin, discovered in the neighbourhood by a shepherd, in the Middle Ages. Today the immense building is a shapeless heap of stones, bricks and debris of all kinds.’ Looking up, he finds it hard to contend this statement.
He eats bread and cheese in a much-patched and scaffolded estaminet called the Café de la Victoire. There is brick dust on the tabletop.
‘Pilgrim or tourist?’ asks the waitress as she polishes the bar.
He sees through the window that a day-tripper party is huddled around the ruins now. A man is addressing them through a megaphone. ‘I’m not sure that I’m either,’ Harry replies.
‘They stand too near.’ She points towards the basilica. ‘The weather keeps bringing the bricks down. They ought to put a fence around it but people want to look. I really don’t know why people want to look.’
‘When did the statue fall?’
‘The whole tower came down in the spring of the last year. Boom!’ She brings the palm of her hand down hard on the bar. The unexpected force of the gesture makes Harry jump. A man looks out from a doorway behind and laughs.
‘Which side brought it down? Was it finally us or them?’
‘Does it matter?’ she asks, and shrugs.
*
He finds a cheap room for the night. The proprietor wants paying up front and Harry understands why when he views the accommodation. The windows are patched with paper and the plaster has fallen from one of the walls leaving only a wattle lattice that looks medieval. There are scorch marks on the bedsheets, but he supposes that this at least indicates that someone has made an effort to launder them. When he snuffs out the candle stars push through a crack in the wall. He struggles to get to sleep in his shaken-apart room, to trustingly shut his eyes upon it. He feels as if at any moment the rest of it might fissure and the ceiling come plunging down. Each time he manages to let go and give in to sleep he jolts awake with the recalled slam of the waitress’ hand on the bar. He bites his fist to stop the shaking. Brick dust grinds against his teeth.
13
Harry
Aveluy Wood, north of Albert, Somme, July 1916
The guns were louder now. Will had to raise his voice. With the volume and his newspaper enunciation, it sounded as though he were making a speech.
‘ “The public had for some days been led to believe that we were on the eve of a great advance,” ’ Will read aloud, ‘ “and the fact that the British report was so cheering has caused the greatest joy. British casualties are not heavy. There have been exube
rant demonstrations of delight in Manchester.” ’
‘Forgive me if my exuberance is somewhat subdued this morning,’ said Harry. ‘I wish that newspaper contained less cheering and more hot chips.’
‘This cake is stale,’ said Francis. ‘And she knows that I can’t abide currants. I mean, have you seen? I could break rocks with that.’
‘Dunk it in your tea then.’
Harry watched as his brother’s dirt-ingrained fingers picked at the fruitcake. ‘Jesus, Frannie. Have you misplaced your cake fork again?’
‘Ye gods, spare me brotherly discernment.’ Will held out his hand and ate discarded dried fruit. ‘At least we got something. Poor Wilkinson here got a jar of insecticide powder and a religious tract.’
‘Bugger all,’ confirmed Wilkinson with a nod.
‘Ever wish that you’d been orphaned?’ asked Francis.
‘Dear God what art in heaven, please spare me from thy creatures all greatly bitey and small.’ Will put his hands together and raised pious eyes skyward. His hair was plastered to his forehead. The smile glowed white in his grimed face.
Wilkinson shrugged and scratched his crotch. ‘It’s a rum do when you need the Evening News to know what’s going on,’ he said. ‘Incidentally, I’m not averse to currants.’
‘Here.’ Will passed both the newspaper and the cake. ‘It’s ten days old, mind.’
‘The newspaper or the cake?’
‘Both.’
A shell landed some distance ahead. Mud rained down. The earth seemed to lurch and Harry found himself gripping hard on to his mug.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Will. ‘If I’d wanted shit in my tea, I’d have ordered it.’ He rubbed his face, leaving stripes of mud down his cheeks.
‘If Mother could see you now, you’d be sent to bed without cake.’
‘Think of the colour of the sheets.’
‘Oh! Think of white, dry, hot-water-bottle-warmed sheets!’
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