The Photographer of the Lost

by Caroline Scott

  ‘Tilt your chin up slightly, would you?’

  It’s a strong face, a kind face, an intelligent face, good bones and good skin, but it is not Edie’s face.

  ‘Like this?’ Cassie strikes a haughty pose, somewhere between a countess and a greyhound, but then collapses into laughter. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not used to this.’

  Harry smiles at her. ‘Don’t worry. Who is? Just try to relax.’

  He is glad of her laughter to break the tension and with the first brief lines he has started, he is in, and he relaxes into the curve and the sound of his own pencil strokes.

  ‘You’ve broken your nose at some point.’

  ‘Goodness. I’m not accustomed to such scrutiny.’ Cassie puts her hands to her face as if newly aware of its shape.

  Ralph laughs. ‘There, you see – revenge! A taste of your own medicine!’

  ‘Yes.’ She narrows her eyes at her husband. ‘I was a terrible tomboy. My mother despaired. I had three older brothers and was very keen on following them up trees.’

  Cassie’s eyes are grey and heavily lidded, but with a lively sparkle. Her eyebrows have a high arch, so that she constantly looks either doubtful or amused.

  ‘From Venice. A honeymoon present,’ she says, pulling at the link of beads around her neck, turning them in her hand.

  ‘Is she fidgeting?’ Ralph asks from behind a newspaper.

  ‘Terribly.’

  ‘She always fidgets. Anyone would think that she had fleas.’

  ‘Is there a Mrs Blythe?’ Cassie asks.

  Harry’s pencil stops. For a second he falters, thinking that she means Edie. ‘No. I’m really not much of a prospect.’

  ‘Cass, don’t pry,’ says Ralph, emerging from behind a headline about ultimatums being issued to Germany. ‘Cassie always wants there to be a hidden-away romantic storyline. She tries to rootle them out of people – and, if they’re not there to be rootled, she’ll impose one.’

  ‘Not a prospect, indeed!’ Cassie’s beads twirl round in a circle. ‘You’ve got a wonderfully old-fashioned face, like a shepherd boy who might point at a miracle in a painting, or an innocent in a William Blake watercolour. There’s something beautifully melancholy about you.’

  ‘Steady on. She’ll be pairing you up next, have you quaking beside a woman in white before you know it. You will be beautifully melancholy then.’

  Harry thinks of the white nightdress at Rachel’s feet, and then of Edie’s face as she described his mother’s black nightdress rising from the vat of dye. He’s not sure that he’s up for being paired off.

  ‘Oh, shush,’ says Cassie.

  Ralph replenishes glasses and peers over Harry’s shoulder. ‘He’s being kind to you,’ he says to his wife.

  ‘And so he should.’

  They sit quietly for a while. Cassie’s eyelids droop further and Harry wonders if she is going to fall asleep. The only noise is the lazy clink of beads through her fingers, the occasional crack from the fire, and the scratch of his pencil on paper.

  ‘I have a photograph of my brother’s grave,’ Cassie says suddenly. ‘My mother has a framed copy up on the wall, only I’d rather hide mine in a drawer. I do visit him from time to time, though. Keeping him in the sideboard doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten him. He’s in Tyne Cot. The cemetery, I mean.’

  ‘I should go there too,’ Harry says. ‘I do intend to. I’ve been told that, if Francis has been buried anywhere, it’s likely that’s where he’ll be.’

  ‘You’ve already checked the registers, I take it?’ Ralph asks.

  ‘We’ve done all the conventional paperwork trails, but found nothing. It’s all blanks and dead ends and more questions.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Francis’ wife, Edie, and I. We’ve both been chasing paper trails. She has never wanted to come over here before, but last month she sent me a postcard from Arras. I don’t know if she’s found something.’

  He recalls Edie’s face through the viewfinder, her hand extending towards him with the bag of peppermints. The flight of geese moves across the sky above Edie’s head. What has changed since then? What new motivation has pushed her to make this journey now?

  ‘Why Arras, if he’s likely to be around Ypres? Is there any significance?’

  ‘Possibly. Maybe. She might have been on her way to Ypres. She might only have been passing through. I honestly don’t know.’

  ‘You’ve no way of getting in contact with her?’

  ‘I’ve called her at home. I keep trying the telephone, but it just rings out. I can only assume that she’s still over here.’ He tries to imagine Edie in Ypres, amongst all the plunging masonry and the too-close groan of the guns, but he can’t quite pull her into that picture.

  ‘What’s your own feeling?’ Ralph asks. ‘Do you believe that he is probably dead?’

  ‘For a long time I assumed that he had to be, but then I see him everywhere. I go through life grabbing strangers’ elbows and calling their backs by his name. I don’t know if Francis is haunting me, or whether my wiring has gone awry.’ His eyes connect with Cassie’s. She smiles sympathetically and shakes her head. ‘And now I’m picking over his old photographs looking for clues. As if his experience was something removed from my own. As if it was someone else’s war. Only I was there. I was by his side all that time. I honestly start to wonder if I’ve misremembered it all.’

  ‘Would you let me see the photographs?’ Cassie asks.

  *

  Harry watches her flicking through the album, lowering her face to the pages, pointing occasionally and sharing familiar images with Ralph.

  ‘Were you here when they took the village?’

  ‘No, we never saw it. We never made it in. Today was the first time that I set foot there. We shifted up to Arras at the start of September.’

  Cassie turns the page. ‘Some places are strangely beautiful in their ruination. Some aren’t. So you never returned to this area after 1916?’

  ‘We moved south in the spring and took over the French lines.’ He sees glimpses of flooded trenches as she turns the page and then bootprints in snow. ‘March 1917. The Germans had withdrawn and we were pushing forward. It seemed surreal, suddenly to be walking across the enemy lines.’

  There are photographs of empty enemy trenches, blown bridges and recently vacated billets. Harry remembers walking into the room that Cassie is looking at in a photograph. There were letters on the floor and a glass by the side of the bed. He had almost expected the sheets to still be warm.

  ‘I was a little further north,’ says Ralph, looking thoughtful with a corkscrew in his hand. He pulls the cork from another bottle and pours the wine. He fills Cassie’s glass right to the top, so that she has to bend to the table and carefully apply her lips to the rim.

  ‘Bloody man,’ she says.

  Ralph stares into his glass and says, ‘Péronne. We seem to have been near neighbours for many months.’

  Cassie is quickly turning through pages. ‘The people have all gone.’

  ‘It was quite eerie. We expected them to be hiding around every corner – and for there to be booby traps everywhere.’

  ‘Not just that. Not just the enemy, I mean. You’ve all gone too. I haven’t seen a face for five pages. It’s all objects and landscapes now. He doesn’t take photographs of people any longer.’

  He watches as she turns. She’s right. He hasn’t seen it before. It suddenly strikes him that he had also never taken Francis’ photograph again.

  ‘I’d worry for the photographer,’ says Cassie. ‘For his state of mind. I know that it’s hindsight, and maybe I’m reading too much into his choice of subjects, but looking at these pages I feel that this story isn’t going to have a happy ending.’ She stops and shrugs her theory off. ‘Oh, no. I’m corrected. Here we go again. Who’s the pretty girl?’

  There is a photograph of Edie on the next-to-last page of the album. Francis took it on his final leave. She is standing in the door frame and looking as
though she doesn’t want to have her photograph taken.

  ‘That’s Edie.’

  ‘She doesn’t look very happy,’ says Cassie, peering closely at the photograph.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose so.’

  ‘And the men on the last page?’

  ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I’m writing in the locations for Edie, but I don’t know where that is.’

  Harry can’t annotate these images for Edie, he can’t write in a place or a precise date, because there is a gap in the chronology, there is a piece missing – and, as time passes, he can’t help but feel that there is something important about this missing piece. After all, it was in the days that followed that everything went wrong.

  ‘Your wars went off in separate directions at that point?’ Cassie asks.

  ‘Briefly. Unofficially. My brother went missing for a while. He went home on leave in 1917 and didn’t come back.’

  ‘He went absent without leave?’

  ‘For ten days.’

  ‘Golly. I can’t imagine that had a good outcome?’ Cassie shifts in her chair. He sees her eyes widen.

  ‘No.’

  ‘So did he just stay at home?’

  Harry shakes his head. ‘I don’t know where he went. I asked him, of course, but he wouldn’t tell me where he’d been or why. He wasn’t really talking much at all by then.’

  And so, it was simply a blank, and remains so. Harry suspects that these images might fill that blank, that this is what Francis did with those missing days, but he would like to know exactly where they were taken, why Francis needed to be in this place at that time, and what happened there that made things change afterwards.

  ‘Did something go wrong while he was at home? Something that would have caused him to go absent?’

  ‘I wish I knew.’

  He has asked Edie about Francis’ period of leave, as delicately as possible, but there didn’t seem to be much to tell. Harry can’t help but wonder if there are parts of that week that she’s chosen to edit out; just as, in turn, he has chosen not to tell her about Francis’ subsequent absence and arrest.

  Cassie points at a slice of townscape in the background of an image. ‘If I were a betting woman, I’d say that it’s somewhere in Ypres. And there, that’s quite a distinctive ceiling with the vaulting. Are those faces carved on the ribs? This looks as though they’re carousing in a crypt.’

  Beneath the ceiling vaulting there are other faces. Harry looks again at the last page of photographs. Men around a table stare at the camera. The table is cluttered with bottles and glasses, but the men’s faces don’t suggest that this is any kind of celebration. Carousing isn’t the word for it. The light carves hollows in their faces and they all have the same bleak, empty look. Harry has seen that look in another photograph recently.

  ‘Ypres could make sense. We were in a camp at Proven, near Poperinghe, so I suppose it’s not impossible that he could have been in Ypres.’

  ‘Albie would know where this is.’

  ‘Albie?’

  ‘My brother’s friend. He’s still up there, working on the cemeteries. He knows every cellar and every spilled stone of that town.’

  ‘As I recall there’s a lot of spilled stone to know.’

  ‘Could I perhaps borrow one of these photographs? I’d like to find out for you.’

  ‘Of course. I’d appreciate any help. Thank you.’

  When Edie had shown him that new photograph of Francis, the one that had come through the post, he’d considered whether it could have been taken at this same time. Do other photographs of this missing period exist then? Are there more images out there that might yet be sent to Edie?

  Cassie shuts the album and pushes it towards Harry. ‘Did Francis take William’s death badly?’

  ‘He felt responsible, though he wasn’t at all. There was absolutely nothing that he could have done. If anything, I was the one who ought to feel responsible; I was the one who was with Will.’

  ‘Did it make things difficult between you?’

  ‘Yes. At times.’

  ‘Mercy!’ says Ralph. ‘Cass, how you pry! Don’t you think that the poor chap might have had enough grilling for one night?’

  ‘Harry might want to talk,’ she says and looks enquiringly towards him. ‘I wasn’t grilling you, was I?’

  He would like to talk to Cassie. He would like to tell it all to her. He is used to carrying it around, but it is a weighty burden. It has become like a sin that he can’t confess. He can’t even say it to a stranger. ‘Not in the slightest,’ Harry replies.

  21

  Edie

  Albert, Somme, August 1921

  When she leans out of the window she sees wooden huts with corrugated-iron roofs, lines of washing and lettuces, wire fences and chicken runs, and then all the fallen stone beyond. She had walked past the ruins of the basilica as she had looked for somewhere to stay for the night; with its nibbled stone and empty arches, it resembles a forgotten Greek temple, awesome with age, epic with antiquity, and it might well have stood like that for millennia. It is only the lines of spent shell cases by the roadside, the duckboards and the brick dust that give the game away. Albert is a sad-looking place, Edie thinks, somehow much bleaker than Arras with its determined resurgence. She turns and shuts the window.

  They had spent three days camped in that wood, she knows, waiting for their turn, before they had been marched south and then east, towards those place names that were being mapped out in the newspapers. She had feared for them as she read all those reports, and guessed how their co-ordinates were matching up with the newspaper arrows. But she hadn’t been ready for the news that Will had gone.

  When she thinks of Will he is still a boy with a blond fringe, winking at her across the table, over his mother’s baked custards and trifles and steamed puddings, and her voice saying the words of grace. It hardly seems to make sense that Will could have been in this place of levelled woods and flattened churches, and that his brothers could have left him here.

  Francis had written to her afterwards, and told her how he felt responsible, how he should have been there to look after Will, how Will was only there because of him. Reading those words, she could almost feel his guilt. His frustration. His desolation. How fiercely and desperately angry he was with himself. She had barely known how to reply to that letter. What was she supposed to say in response? She sometimes wonders, if she had found the right words, could she have helped him and changed what came after? But, even now, she hardly knows what the right words might have been.

  ‘It’s my fault.’ She can picture his handwriting still. ‘All of this is down to me. Will would never even have been here, Harry neither, if it wasn’t for me.’

  Francis’ letters had changed after that; his voice changed key, and she knew then that he had resolved to stop telling her things. His letters became more formulaic, lighter, inconsequential, like he’d decided only to show her the parts that he thought she ought to see. She knew that he had stopped sharing, that he was censoring himself. And didn’t that imply that she’d already failed him in some way? That he thought she wasn’t up to the task? He had let her talk after her mother died, let her pour all that upset out, and how grateful for that she had been; she realizes now that Francis had held all of his grief inside, that he hadn’t been able to let it out.

  She leans against the window and looks around this sorry hotel room. None of the pieces of furniture match and the bedspread has been patched. The walls look to have been newly papered, but with the tell-tale undulations beneath the blowsy roses, she’s not altogether sure that the paste and paper aren’t the only things holding it all together.

  She thinks about Mrs Blythe and the animal howl that she had made in the night when she knew that her youngest son was dead. Edie had heard that noise through the walls again and again in the weeks that followed. Even with that cry coming out in the nights, Margaret Blythe spent the days curled into herself and shaking, as if she must kee
p it all in during daylight hours. Edie had never told Francis about how his mother had suffered – after all, what could he do? But, she considers now, had she told him more, might he have felt permitted to share his own pain? Was Francis too curling in on himself and trembling at that time? If he had let a cry out, if he had been able to spill it out in his letters, might it have made things different?

  She cannot associate the places that she has seen from the train with the blue-eyed boy that Francis had been, and she feels the light on that memory going out. His smiling whisper fading away. What with seeing that landscape, and the background it gives to those difficult months after Will’s death, she now understands more of how Francis had become the man that she met again in 1917, and why he had turned his head away from hers on the pillow. But she doesn’t yet understand how the man in the photograph fits, and why he has arrived in an anonymous envelope. Is it that Francis means for her to come and see all of this? Does he need to make her understand?

  In the weeks after Will’s death, Margaret Blythe had cleared out his room, boxing up her son’s books, birds’ eggs, and football boots. Apart from the crows on the kitchen dresser, everything of Will had moved up into the attic, where Edie supposes it is still. Then Margaret had done it all again in November 1917; there had been so little of the child Francis left when Edie had moved back into his boyhood bedroom a month later. In those difficult days Edie had been glad to let his mother take that responsibility, not to have to fold away Francis’ shirts herself and parcel up his handkerchiefs and hairbrush, but sometimes as she looks around Francis’ room now, she misses his atlases and poetry books and cameras. The marks on the wallpaper reveal where his maps and his photographs once were. There are spaces on the shelves where his books ought to be, and empty drawers in the dresser, and sometimes that room feels to be so full of Francis’ absence. And, yet, could she still have got it wrong? Could she have misunderstood? Is the absence that she senses not quite what she has assumed it to be?