The Photographer of the Lost

by Caroline Scott

  22

  Harry

  Guillemont, Somme, August 1921

  The mist is lifting. Harry watches it peel back and half expects to see tents and horses and howitzers, but all that it reveals is wet green grass and silence. It is this silence, this stillness, which is strangest. It is not peaceful, this absence of noise. He ought to breathe it in slowly, but instead he finds himself holding his breath. It is as if it has stalled – the film reel has jammed and any second now shells will roar their return. A dog howls somewhere in the distance. A pheasant flutters from a hedge. A gramophone starts up somewhere in the house behind. Harry throws his cigarette away.

  ‘Do you want some tea?’ asks Cassie from the door. ‘It’s English tea. The proper stuff. Product of Yorkshire’s finest tea plantations.’

  ‘You’re making a garden,’ he says. He nods at the borders.

  ‘Ralph talks to his seedlings. And knows all their names in Latin. I could get quite jealous.’ She smiles. ‘It’s in the pot. Come in when you’re ready.’

  He steps into the kitchen. She is leaning against the stove, looking thoughtful with a slice of toast in her hands. ‘His mother still sends him food parcels,’ she says, waving the toast. ‘Marmalade, gingerbread, tea leaves, The Times crossword. I half suspect that no one has told her that the war’s over. She used to send him boxes of Craster kippers, only the postal service isn’t what it once was.’

  ‘My mother used to send us fruitcakes. She worked in a bakery, so we got a lot of slightly stale cake. What with there being three of us, and all, our parcels were the envy of the battalion.’

  Cassie licks marmalade from her fingers and stirs the teapot. ‘I talked too much last night. Ralph told me off for it this morning. I’d probably had too much to drink as well. I apologize if I said anything that I shouldn’t.’

  ‘Not at all,’ he nods for her to pour the tea. ‘I enjoyed your company.’

  Her fingers tap on the table in time with the music that’s coming from the floor above. ‘Thomas Tallis,’ she says. ‘He likes a bit of English Renaissance while he shaves. Did I see you with a cigarette? I’m not meant to, but while the cat’s away.’

  Harry lights Cassie’s cigarette and she gives him a wink. They drink tea together, listening to the second-hand chorals. Her portrait is propped against the kitchen dresser. She looks towards it from time to time. ‘You’re wasted as a photographer,’ she says.

  ‘My boss might agree with you.’

  ‘How many do you have to take?’

  ‘Twelve, for the present. I have a piece of paper with twelve names on it. I have to cross them off.’

  ‘Thirteen,’ corrects Cassie.

  He looks up at her.

  ‘Thirteen including your Francis, I presume?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘He’s the reason that you’re here, isn’t he? It’s really about him and her, isn’t it?’

  ‘Only I fear he’s the one name on my list that I’m not going to be able to place. That I’ll never be able to place.’

  ‘Ralph will help you. Let us help you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And when it’s done, when it’s all crossed off, you’ll go home?’

  Harry wonders where home is. He looks around this kitchen, which seems very much like a home. A tabby cat is circling the table legs. Cassie puts down milk in a saucer and the cat arches its back to her hand. He thinks of a kitchen full of crows and Edie in it. Could that ever be home again? Would they ever again sit either side of that table? Should there be another chair at that table? He wonders where she is now. He replays iterations of possibility in his mind, arranges Edie and graves and ghosts, but can’t see what exists beyond. ‘I’m not sure. It rather depends on how things go over here.’

  ‘Number thirteen,’ Cassie reflects. ‘Unlucky for some? I’d wish you good luck, although in this case I’m not sure what that happy outcome is.’

  ‘Neither am I,’ he replies.

  *

  The van rattles along the newly made-up roads and Harry looks out at the strange hillocky land. The fact that the grass is growing over it makes this terrain seem all the stranger. It is as though someone has taken a penknife to a Bruegel landscape. Will it ever be stitched together again and the scars smoothed over? Will time level and soften it? Here and there are piles of rusting debris and groups of crosses. He realizes, as he sees the metal roofs of the village ahead, that they have driven over the rise that they were meant to have taken on 20 July 1916.

  ‘How do you live here?’ he asks Ralph. ‘I’m not sure I could.’

  ‘I couldn’t cope with being in England. The awkward conversations. The comfortable upholstery. The ticking of the clock. My mother’s cooking!’

  ‘No?’ He looks across at Ralph, profiled against the afterwards landscape and tries to picture him in English domesticity.

  ‘But, more than that, the knowledge that all of this was here.’ Ralph pats the steering wheel with the flat of his hand. Harry hears him take a breath. ‘I mean, the job wasn’t finished, was it?’

  He halts at the junction and they turn into the village. Harry looks out at the huts and the vegetable gardens. He sees a flutter of yellow wings within a wire birdcage. A woman is pegging out a line of white washing. A child chases a dog and stops to stare at the van.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose so.’

  ‘I’d just been made up to captain in July 1916. I had four platoons under me, one hundred and thirty-odd men. It was my job to take care of them and to bring them home again, but by the start of September twenty of those men were dead, nearly seventy had been wounded and six of them were missing. I owe it to them, and to their families, to make sure that the missing are accounted for and the dead properly buried. There are going to be cemeteries with white grave markers – gardens of sleep – real English gardens. There will be wallflowers and forget-me-nots and pansies and Bible words cut in stone. They’ll be places that their families can visit and hopefully find some comfort. I was meant to bring their boys home; this is the best alternative that I’m able to offer.’

  Harry watches Ralph’s hands on the steering wheel. He can see the veins on the back of his hands. He thinks that this is possibly the most sincere, and the saddest, speech that he has ever heard anyone make. ‘I am grateful to you,’ he says.

  Ralph turns onto the main road and Harry looks behind them for a last glimpse of the village. He can see the remains of the wood ahead and the bristling lines of the field full of crosses.

  ‘Do you want to stop for a moment?’

  ‘It’s all right. It’s enough now to know he’s here.’ He watches the rows of crosses slide, align momentarily and then stretch apart. A man with a mower raises an arm to Ralph’s van. Harry is not sure whether it is a wave or a salute. The man looks like a last sentry guarding the field and its quiet prisoners. A woman is standing by the roadside. A flock of starlings lifts from the black wood.

  ‘I can hardly believe that there could be birdsong in that place.’

  Ralph smiles. ‘Believe it. There were cuckoos in the spring. We kept hearing them and laughing. They were calling and replying. I think they were nesting in there.’

  Harry pictures a flight of wings through that place of splinters and shrieking and sudden conflagrations. ‘Good God.’

  ‘But that’s how it is, isn’t it? Nature reclaims things. The circle goes round and goes on.’

  They drive through the deleted village, past the hump of earth that once upon a time was a church, over the railway lines, over the old front line and back to the town where virgins plummet and barmaids say ‘Boom’.

  ‘I’ll make enquiries for you,’ says Ralph. ‘There are unofficial channels. I know men on the ground. Leave it with me for a week or two. Say, give me a telephone call in a month’s time? If there’s anything to find, I’ll find it for you. If a grave exists anywhere, I’ll pull all the strings that I can to track it down.’

  Harry thinks, if Fr
ancis has a grave, does it lean like the iron crosses in Montauban? Stand straight, tidily aligned with a thousand others, like a battalion on parade? Or does he have a white marker and Bible words and flowers?

  Or could Francis yet not be in a grave?

  23

  Harry

  Albert, Somme, August 1921

  Harry telephones Mr Lee, as arranged, from the railway station.

  ‘Have you got a pen and paper?’ a faraway voice issues from the Bakelite.

  ‘Do I need it? Have you had many enquiries?’

  ‘Yes, and if you can summon ghosts and solve whodunnits, we’ll prosper in this business. A Mrs Cathcart, a clairvoyant, placed her ad in the paper right below ours. If we could team up, we might do quite well.’

  ‘Ah. Like that, is it?’

  ‘Thus far it’s ten enquiries from families seeking missing, three requests for photographs of graves and two killed-inaction locales.’

  ‘Could you make that sound any more clinical?’

  The station is full of excursionists and pilgrims. There are lots of pale young wives with black trimmings on their hats and French officers with older women on their arms. Harry finds himself pressing the earpiece to his head in case anything unduly indelicate should leak from it.

  ‘A Mrs Bainbridge asked if you would go to Gallipoli,’ says Mr Lee. ‘I’ve only agreed to Picardie and Flanders. I take it I did right?’

  Harry thinks of how many graves there must be between Amiens and Ypres. He wonders what on earth he has agreed to.

  ‘I’ve only said yes to commissions where they can furnish the details of the cemetery. I’ve asked for plot, row and grave number where possible.’

  ‘Good.’ How terribly efficient this all sounds, he thinks. How horribly sensible it all is.

  ‘Can I order you south, then?’

  There is a woman with red hair walking down the platform towards the southbound train. ‘If you must,’ says Harry, as he puts down the receiver and his pen.

  She is wearing a floral print dress and green shoes. Her hair, grown longer again, is pinned up in a tortoiseshell comb. She puts a hand up to shield her eyes to the sun and then is standing on the tiptoes of her green shoes and waving at someone down the platform.

  ‘Edie?’

  He knocks the telephone receiver from its cradle as he steps away, fails to catch it and leaves it swinging. A man turns and swears at him as he catches his elbow. Anger curls at the corner of the man’s mouth, but Harry doesn’t linger on it.

  She weaves through the crowd ahead, her footsteps getting faster now. She swings a woven straw bag in her hand as she walks. There is something in the way that she swings the bag, in the width of the swing that is carefree and unselfconscious, that tells him she is smiling.

  ‘Edie!’

  A porter is handing suitcases down from the train and stacking them on the platform. Harry stumbles to avoid a trunk that’s being lifted down, barely manages to stay on his feet, and when he looks up again she has gone.

  ‘Attention!’ shouts the porter after him. ‘Regardez où vous allez, hein?’

  He runs now down the platform, looking through the train windows in case she has boarded. He scans the waiting room, along the empty benches and, turning, catches the panic in the eyes of his own reflection in the windows. He pushes through a cluster of children and apologizes his way around a pair of arm-linked nuns.

  And then she is there again. A strand of hair has escaped from her slide. It catches in the breeze and strokes her white neck. Harry’s hand is about to reach towards it as she turns and smiles. His mouth is about to make the shape of her name but he stops himself.

  ‘Frank!’ she says with laughter in her voice. A man puts his hand on the back of her neck, curls his finger through the strand of loose hair, and pulls her in for a kiss.

  24

  Harry

  Cimetière des Pommiers, Somme, August 1921

  Image order: Mrs Cora Evans would like a photograph of the grave of her son Pte. George Evans (32049), Lancashire Fusiliers (age 32, KIA 25/02/1917, grave number 186). Flowers requested.

  It is an extension to the village cemetery. Harry walks between the civilian graves, some of which have odd wooden constructions above them, like sentry boxes, and others grander creations in glass and iron. These grave housings remind him of greenhouses and he half expects there to be tomatoes climbing inside. He sees fancy ironwork crosses, timber palisades and ceramic roses. There is something rather showy and competitive about these graves. Something slightly histrionic. He imagines their inhabitants sticking out their chests. The graves are stuck with rosettes, woven metalwork wreaths and votive arrangements of enamel flowers. In some places the ironwork is terribly twisted, the mangled forms communicating great violence. Much of the stonework is chipped. None of the crosses are at quite the same angle. Whatever the original pretensions of this cemetery’s inhabitants, the overall impression is now one of disorder, representative of this village’s suffering.

  He had watched them, the man called Frank and the woman who was not Edie. He had handed her a bunch of pink roses in blue tissue paper and kissed her on the mouth. For a moment it had been her face and then they had turned, both of them, and stared Harry right in the eye. She had a kind, gentle face, a face full of laughter, but she was not Edie. They had looked at him again as they walked away. He had stepped onto the train, leaned his head against the seat, and, as the platform pulled away, wondered what this sensation was.

  A crude arch of bound apple wood has been made at the entrance to the area of military graves, and Harry must pass underneath it. The branches have been roughly severed and no effort seems to have been made to soften that; as if the primitive raggedness of this arch is meant to be unsettling. The first rows of crosses have rectangles of brick around them, seemingly salvaged from the fallen buildings behind. These are all French burials, mostly from August 1914, he sees. He walks the path between the French dead, looking for a Lancashire Fusilier. Camomile and cornflowers grow in between the crosses. He hates the fact that the graves have to be numbered; he is also grateful for it. All that he has received from Mrs Cora Evans are the co-ordinates of her son’s grave and a request for flowers.

  George Evans is to the right-hand side. His is one of three English graves – and the only named one of the three. The crosses either side of George’s are marked Unknown British Soldier. Who do these men belong to? Who has known and who misses them? Who at home is wishing that they could have a photograph of one of these graves? Are there women nearby searching through buttons and belt buckles for these soldiers?

  Harry looks down at the bunch of roses in his hands. Unable to find anywhere that would sell him cut flowers, he had had to beg them from a garden in the village and pay over the odds. Perhaps Mrs Evans would wish for something grander, but the roses smell of summer borders and their redness glows in the drab of the cemetery. He places them carefully on George’s grave, feeling awkward in knowing so little about the man whose grave he is arranging roses upon. Did George Evans care for roses? Was he a man who would stop and comment on their scent? He wishes that he knew how this Lancashire man came to be in this French cemetery, that he had had the chance to meet Mrs Evans to find out more about her son.

  Harry steps back and takes out the camera. It is a pity that the grass around hasn’t been cut more recently. He focuses in on the name on the tape, hoping Mrs Evans will be able to make out the lettering. Behind, the French crosses taper away and the apple trees are ragged silhouettes against the sky. From either side, unknown soldiers nudge into the shot. Harry imagines three lads together pausing to have their photograph taken in an apple orchard. The trigger clicks.

  He considers what Mrs Evans will do with the photograph of this place. He pictures a grave with his brother’s name on it, frames the image in a photograph, and wonders what Edie would do with it. Does she need it in order to move on? And, if so, what would moving on mean to Edie?

  Harry ta
kes his hat off and bows his head to the English boys. He steps forward and takes two roses from George’s grave and places one on each of his neighbours’. He hopes that Mrs Evans would not mind. He decides that he will write to her when he has developed the photograph and tell her about this place. He feels that he needs to give her more than the photograph and, in turn, needs something more from her. If these visits are only a matter of connecting coordinates and the delivery of flowers, too many questions remain and he has to carry all the maybes of who these men were around with him.

  When he looks up he sees that there is another man at the end of the row. The presence of another pair of eyes in the cemetery makes him conscious of the camera. He feels conspicuous with it. It doesn’t feel quite right, quite polite. He imagines a stranger taking a photograph of Will’s grave. He thinks that he would want to put a hand in front of the lens.

  He nods goodbye to George Evans and tells him that he will visit his mother for him. The figure along the line is placing a wreath on a grave. He looks up and Harry touches his hat. He wishes that he knew the right words to say to strangers in cemeteries.

  25

  Edie

  Guillemont, Somme, August 1921

  The sky is blue, broken only by high streamers of cirrus cloud, and the wind comes sweetly across the newly mowed slopes. A skylark is singing and the sun is warm on the back of her neck, but this is not a happy place. Edie had seen cemeteries from the train, but it was another thing entirely to stand here and to know that one of these crosses is William Blythe.

  Harry had written to her from a place called Happy Valley, she remembers. He had told her that Francis had taken it badly. He didn’t seem to be himself, Harry said, like something had snapped in his head. She had heard the distress in Harry’s letters, his sense of panic, how he was appealing to her. He wanted her to write to her husband. He wanted her help to make Francis right. She wished now that Harry was here helping her. Had he not heard the panic in her voice?