The Photographer of the Lost

by Caroline Scott

  ‘Captain Fielding was our commanding officer,’ says Alfred. ‘We were cleaning up here in 1919 and there seemed too much to do to go home.’

  Ralph Fielding takes out a white handkerchief and polishes his glasses. He is a large man, big hands, broad shoulders and a somehow open face, with deep creases at the corners of his eyes as if he smiles a lot. Looking around the field, Harry wonders what he finds to smile about.

  ‘There are ten of us,’ Alfred goes on. ‘The old guard. Ten Robinson Crusoes on our odd little island, squatting in a sea of mud.’

  ‘Are we stubborn, do you think?’ Ralph Fielding asks. ‘Are we obstinate old relics?’

  ‘Something of the sort,’ Alfred replies.

  Harry looks around the field. The graves stand in orderly lines, quite straight, and the grass is neatly cut around them. Most are marked with a standard wooden cross, a metal strip stamped with the details of the man they represent. He wonders, looking at the stretching lines, how long it is going to take him to find his brother. He thinks about the furrows of the ploughed field.

  ‘I am glad of your stubbornness,’ he says. ‘I am grateful for it.’

  ‘Barnes was our battalion carpenter, Dobson our quartermaster, Alfred here is a scholar with a shovel, Edwards is a wonder with a lawn mower and I’m good at making lists and waving my arms around.’

  ‘All the scattered graves are being rounded up,’ says Alfred.

  ‘You make it sound like sheep.’

  ‘That might be easier. Mr Blythe here has been floundering around in the fields with an old trench map.’

  ‘I can’t find anything that I recognize.’

  Ralph lights a cigarette and offers the packet around. ‘Turkish,’ he says. ‘My one vice. Do you think it terribly unpatriotic?’

  They share a match. Harry shakes his head. ‘Will you help me?’

  *

  From the window of Ralph Fielding’s office he can see piles of iron shards and barbed wire pressed into bales. There are stacks of wooden stakes, corkscrew pickets and a great tangle of telegraph wire. It looks like some sort of satanic scrapyard.

  ‘I’m a great one for paperwork,’ he tells Harry over the ledger. His now washed finger is working along the lines. ‘I love a bit of alphabetizing and an index card. It makes me feel efficient, you see. It’s a pity that my handwriting is so godawful.’

  There are a great many names in the ledger. Harry can’t help but scan the page. ‘A battalion’s worth?’ he asks.

  ‘And more. The problem is the ones who we can’t name – the un-listable, the non-categorizable, the untidy non-compliers with alphabetical register, those who refuse to stand in A-to-Z line. There are far, far too many graves to which we can’t attach a name strip.’

  Harry thinks about Rachel. Is her David one of the rebelliously non-compliant? Is he lying in a field somewhere under a nameless cross? He thinks about Francis. Could it really all be as simple as an administrative omission? Is he simply sleeping silently in an anonymous grave?

  ‘Far, far too many,’ repeats Ralph, his eyes entirely unsmiling. ‘But mercifully your brother isn’t amongst them.’ He looks up from the ledger and nods.

  *

  Harry walks along the line. Ralph has directed him to the third row of Plot 8, fourth grave from the far right, besides Captain Watts who is wearing a wreath. Harry is aware that they are watching him, leaning on their shovels and smoking, but then forgets as he starts to look at the names. He sees service numbers close to his own. There are a lot of Manchester men under Edwards’ well-mown grass. He counts the crosses along the line and thinks about the line of men ahead of him moving down the sunken road with the banjo playing behind. On some of the crosses there are flowers and ribbons. Captain Watts’ wreath is made from paper roses and oak leaves. Harry feels short of breath as he looks at the cross beside it. His knees give way and he sinks down by Will’s grave.

  19

  Harry

  La Briqueterie, Somme, July 1916

  ‘It should have been me,’ said Francis. He looked up with red-rimmed eyes. It was the first time he had spoken that morning.

  ‘How do you come to that conclusion?’

  ‘We crawled into shell holes when we should have carried on forward. If we’d carried on, if we’d completed the thing, you wouldn’t have been sent up.’

  ‘If you’d carried on, I’d possibly be burying two brothers today.’ Harry flicked his cigarette away. He’d tried to sleep but couldn’t. The images convulsed. Somebody else’s blood was underneath his fingernails. He had worked it out with a matchstick, until determined working made his own blood run. He wrote it down, as well as he was able. Red fingerprints illustrated his account. The whistling noise was still there in his head. His head ached with it now and he wasn’t in the mood for a show of remorse.

  ‘I was meant to look after him,’ said Francis.

  ‘We were all meant to look after each other.’

  One minute Will had been at his side and then he wasn’t. In the chaos and the eruption and the adrenaline of the instant, Harry hadn’t seen him go. It was only when he fell into a shell hole too that he looked around and Will wasn’t there.

  At dusk they had all crawled back and the relieving battalion had started to bring the dead in. He had found Francis crouched in a cubbyhole in the communication trench. They had barely exchanged a sentence before Will was being carried in. His lips were white and his teeth were red. In their grief and shock Harry and Francis had kicked and clawed at one another.

  ‘You and I have to watch out for each other now,’ said Harry.

  Francis looked away.

  The chaplain had barely mentioned God. There was no Nobility, no Rightness or Justice or Sacrifice. He talked about having trained with them, about Morecambe and Masham and Salisbury Plain. He talked about the space that they would leave. His voice faltered through the psalm. ‘ “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,” ’ he spoke. ‘ “From whence cometh my help?” ’

  They had been sewn into their own blankets. Harry had cursed at, and been amazed by, his brother’s dead weight. Will’s name was pronounced and a mute, crude shape that was, and was not, him slumped into the earth. They had all taken up handfuls of soil and thrown them in, only Francis hadn’t seemed able to release his. He gripped the dirt as the chaplain spoke the words of the committal. Harry stared at his brother’s tensed hand. ‘Lord, give him peace,’ the chaplain spoke. Francis stared at the earth in his fist.

  They had taken up their spades and filled it over. Fragments of brick and chalk weighed down the soil. When it was done the burial party scraped the blades of their spades until they gleamed bright again. There was care in that act.

  Harry wondered if it was wrong of him to have minded that the symmetry of the crosses was not true. Were his priorities misplaced that he even noticed? They leaned on their spades. It didn’t seem real that he had just buried William. He didn’t quite feel as if he were in his own body. It was like looking at the actions of a different man.

  He looked across at Francis. ‘One of us needs to write home. One of us needs to tell her.’ Rose had given Francis a bottle of whisky and he was progressing through it rapidly.

  ‘You’re better with words than me.’

  ‘In the circumstances, I can’t say that I’m grateful to you for that.’

  ‘Write what you want. However nicely you phrase it, it’s the same. He’s dead. She’s lost a son. How can words make that any better?’

  ‘We shouldn’t have to write it,’ said Harry. ‘It’s not something that should be put in a letter.’ With the prospect of fathoming a way to put it down on paper, imagining his mother opening that letter, he wished that Francis would pass the whisky bottle.

  ‘They’ll send a telegram anyway.’

  ‘It’s not how she ought to find out. Can you imagine it?’

  Francis shrugged. ‘If it had been me, would you write to Edie?’

  ‘Of course.’ />
  ‘Darling Edie. Guess what?’ Francis laughed sourly. ‘How inconvenient. How disappointing for you that it’s not the case.’

  ‘By which you mean?’

  ‘You’d be in there before I was cold.’

  ‘Jesus, Frannie. How can you say that? How can you be thinking about that now?’ He’d landed a good punch on Francis the day previously. His eye was swollen with it and the cut on his cheekbone would leave a scar. As he watched his brother now, smirking and picking at the label on the bottle, Harry felt an urge to hurt him again.

  ‘Well, tell me it’s not true.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Exactly. Don’t think I don’t see it.’

  ‘I don’t want to have this conversation.’

  ‘And I don’t want you to have her. If I die, I’ll come back and haunt you.’ Francis’ lips were wet with whisky and grinning. ‘Poor Harry,’ he laughed.

  ‘You’re drunk. I’m not listening to you.’ He stood to leave.

  ‘What the fuck does it matter anyway? We’re all sunk, mon frère.’ Francis threw the empty bottle away. It smashed as it hit the pile of bricks. ‘Everything is lost now,’ he said.

  20

  Harry

  Guillemont, Somme, August 1921

  ‘Are you all right, old man?’ asks Ralph Fielding. He hands Harry a whisky.

  ‘Nothing that the services of a laundry and some shoe polish won’t put right.’

  ‘That’s the spirit.’

  He had stayed there by Will’s grave for a long time. He didn’t speak any words, silent or otherwise, to his brother. He didn’t even particularly feel a sense that Will was there. But there was something very basic and oddly comforting about being so close to his bones. The wood of his cross had weathered to a silver-grey, but it was entirely straight and exactly the same as every other cross on this row. A piece of metal tape embossed with the letters R.I.P. had been nailed above the strip bearing his name and number, his rank and regiment, and the date of his death. Harry had put his fingers to those letters, so small and yet saying so much, felt the texture of them under his fingertips. It was exactly the sort of aluminium tape that is punched out for a penny on slot machines in railway stations.

  The sun reflected off the nameplates. Beyond the barbed wire fence he could see the skeleton trees. It struck him suddenly that he was standing in the no-go flat expanse between the wood and the village. The enemy had sprayed bullets across it from the higher ground near the quarry. They had been ordered to try to sprint across it a week after Will’s death. Harry remembered the noise and the fear, the roar of their voices and his own blood banging. Today it had been completely quiet. Camomile, charlock and poppies nodded silently. It was truly peaceful. The only noise was the crows in the field behind and the sound of his own unsteady breath.

  ‘Did I make a fool of myself?’ he asks Ralph. Finally he had come and put a hand on Harry’s shoulder.

  ‘You’re not even on the scale. People howl, people rave. We’ve had families pulling up the crosses and trying to dig their boys out. We’ve had wives and mothers arrive with secreted spades and plans to smuggle them across the Channel. You’d be staggered at what we see.’

  ‘I was here, though. I’ve stood by his grave before. I wasn’t expecting it to hit me like that.’

  ‘I have a theory: there’s only so much that the human brain and heart can process. We were all emotionally switched on to the minimum ticking-over setting then. We had to be, just to get from day to day. Now, when we don’t have to subdue ourselves against the all-around ghastliness, when we don’t have to be constantly clenched against it, small things can trigger a man and all of that pent-up emotion floods out. I’ve seen some chaps flood terribly, downpours and tidal waves of tears.’ He clinks his glass against Harry’s. ‘I’d barely rate you a light shower.’

  ‘Ralph told me. I am sorry,’ says Cassie Fielding, stepping out onto the terrace. Like her husband, Cassie is tall, but she is narrow with a head full of curls, reminding Harry of a Corinthian column. She squeezes his arm, flops into a wicker chair and closes her eyes. He notices that, in the interval since she opened the door, Cassie has put on lipstick and a string of glass beads. She winds them through her fingers, which are flashed with white paint.

  ‘Cassie is painting window frames,’ says Ralph.

  ‘We have windows!’ Her eyes flick open and she grins. ‘I must apologize for our informality. Our house is full of holes and our hospitality somewhat likewise. The glazier has not long finished. You’ve no idea how exciting it is to finally have windows.’

  There is something of the pioneer about Cassie. It struck Harry immediately. She makes him recall those newspaper stories about women who go off to Egypt to manage archaeological excavations, or who decide that they’re going to get a pilot’s licence and learn to loop the loop.

  ‘This place was just walls when we bought it,’ says Ralph, looking up at the house. ‘Alfred said that I was a fool to lumber myself with it: four walls, two chimney stacks and an awful lot of rubbish in between. The farmer who owned it before is building himself a house of bright red new bricks. Mercifully, it’s on the other side of the hill.’

  ‘Ralph put the roof on himself. He gives every spare hour to it. The boys helped him with the timbers, but everything else is the work of his own hands.’

  The couple look at one another and smile. ‘Listen to us prattling on. Can you forgive us, Mr Blythe?’

  ‘Call me Harry. Please. And there’s nothing to forgive.’

  ‘Ralph says that you’re taking photographs?’

  ‘I’m working as an agent for a photographer. I’m here to take photographs of graves on behalf of bereaved families.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Cassie wrinkles her nose. ‘What a sad task. And you called in to see your brother en route?’

  ‘I can’t help but think of them as I photograph other families’ graves.’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘I lost two brothers. My other brother, Francis, doesn’t have a grave. I don’t know where he is.’

  ‘You poor boy. You must give your brother’s details to Ralph. He has contacts. He can pull strings, make things happen, find things out.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ says Ralph, his hand again on Harry’s shoulder. ‘Write it all down for me and I’ll do my best. If he’s findable, I’ll find him. But come on, for this evening at least, let me seize you away from graves and my wife’s interrogations. I’ll give you the interior tour.’

  *

  Harry walks around the room. The ceiling, rising to new beams, is high and the walls are white plaster. It’s a room in which monks, or knights, ought to be lined up along a table. There is a huge fireplace at the far end of it, broad enough to roast an ox. Logs smoulder white in the grate. Either side of the fireplace there are arrangements of teasels in old army-issue rum jars. He has a strange taste in his mouth when he looks at the jars. Their furniture, which is somewhat threadbare and diminished by the proportions of the room, is mostly clustered around the fire. Harry smells wood smoke and new plaster.

  ‘Is the house very old?’

  ‘Thirteenth century, or thereabouts, as far as we can tell. It appears on some military maps as Brokenback Barn, but according to locals it was once some kind of convent. Poor old house. Imagine standing quietly in a field for seven hundred years only to have the twentieth century hurl explosives at you. It was full of rusted barbed wire and water bottles and horse bones and you don’t want to know what they’d done in the cellar. This is interesting, though.’ He walks Harry towards an area of the wall that hasn’t been skimmed smooth with new plaster. ‘Names, you see? And dates and regiments. We know who has been here. It’s as if they all signed the guest register.’

  Harry puts his hand to the plaster. There are regimental numbers and insignia and monograms and initials. There are place names and nicknames and crudely carved faces.

  ‘Good God,’ he says.

  ‘Precisely. It reminds me of
being a boy in Durham Cathedral. Do you know it? Have you ever been? There’s graffiti all over the columns and the tombs. I was fascinated by it as a child. Cromwell incarcerated Scottish prisoners of war in there and threw away the key. Can you imagine? Three thousand men left to die in a cathedral. So they carved their anger all over it. They left behind their marks.’ Ralph puts the flat of his hand on the wall. There is something in the gesture, in the gentleness and reverence of it, that reminds Harry of Rachel placing her palm over her husband’s photograph. ‘These walls don’t resonate anger, though. I don’t think so, anyway. Do you? I see pride and a determination and that rather appeals to me. I don’t struggle to sleep within these walls.’

  Harry recalls the rasp of a penknife on the wall of a barn, the weight of it in his hand. He remembers them carving their three initials together, Francis’ finger instructing the design and Will laughing at his side.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ he says.

  He also remembers taking a knife out of Francis’ hands. Francis’ fingers are trembling around the handle. He is afraid of Francis having the knife and what he is about to do with it. He uncurls Francis’ fingers carefully, slowly, one by one. For a moment the recalled image is as sharp as his own fingers now around the glass, but then Ralph’s voice and the present push in.

  ‘Shall I top that up?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes. Please. Thank you.’

  ‘Do stay for dinner,’ says Cassie, holding out her glass. ‘It’s not much, we don’t eat lavishly, but it’s nice to have a new face at the table.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Utterly certain,’ says Ralph. ‘I might make one condition, though. Will you take a photograph of Cass for me?’

  ‘A photograph?’ Harry looks at Cassie’s expressive eyes, her eloquent hands, the playful smile now stretching on her face. ‘Wouldn’t you prefer a portrait instead?’

  *

  Harry lays out his pencils and chalks. There is always something of a ceremony at this stage, like a meditation in the preparation. It is when he feels both most and least in control, when it is all possibility. It is this moment that has always excited him, and also the moment when he always expects to look up and see Edie’s face.