There are two thousand men in this cemetery, the gardener has told her. So many. The crosses are neat, standing tidily in line, the flower beds around them well tended. These men are cared for. They are not forgotten. They have columbines, campanulas and pansies. As the gardener tells her about their work here, she hears both pride and apology in his voice. It is the sheer number of crosses that makes her shake her head.
She had thought about looking for Francis in the first weeks and months of peace and possibility, but it was always a grave that she pictured herself searching for, it was always a place like this. She hadn’t really ever lingered on the alternative possibility. So many of the men in this cemetery have no names; their crosses bear the words A Soldier of the Great War or Known unto God. Francis could have been any one of these men until that photograph arrived. Was that known unto God all along too?
It is all kind and colourful in this square of English garden, but beyond the boundaries the colours change and the trees tell a different story. The wood on the skyline is tattered, tree trunks torn and blackened, and ragged boughs stretch like beseeching arms. In here it smells of grass clippings and tea roses; out there she knows that it will smell of smoke.
She follows the gardener along the line. It is impossible not to look at the words on the crosses, but the names of the men make her cry. There are so many Manchester men in this flower garden, young men full of ambitions and plans and hope, she imagines, like Will and Harry and Francis. Tokens have been left on some of the crosses to show that they are remembered. There are wreaths of greenery and rings of brass laurel and oak leaves.
‘It’s funny that you should be here to see this lad,’ the gardener says, turning towards her. ‘He’s had two visitors in one week. There was a chap looking for him only a couple of days ago.’
‘A man?’
‘His brother.’
‘Francis?’
For a minute it all spins around her, the crosses and the flower beds and the angry trees. For a minute the angles all go askew and the scent of the roses is suffocating, but then the man called Alfred is shaking his head and saying, ‘Harry.’
She laughs, but doesn’t know exactly why. Is it relief that she feels? ‘Harry was here?’
‘Yes, miss. Earlier this week.’
She has seen the barbed wire by the side of the roads, and the corrugated iron crumbling into brown dust, and has thought of Harry in a hospital bed, his chest all torn apart by that wire. She remembers the shock of seeing his pale face that day and the weight of his hand on her arm. The thought of it makes her hate the wire and want to link her arm through his again.
‘I’m glad that he’s been here,’ she says.
‘There you are.’ The gardener comes to a halt and he stands square in front of a cross. He takes his hat off and touches Edie’s shoulder. ‘I’ll leave you with him. My condolences.’
She recalls the blue of a robin’s egg cupped in a boy’s palms. His fingers rubbing away the dirt to show her the pattern on a shard of pottery. She remembers Will’s hands stretching out towards her and showing her flints and flowers, the skull of a mouse, a pine cone, a bronze buckle caked in earth. His pockets were full of treasures and always something that he wanted to share. She remembers his endless boy’s curiosity. How did that end? How did that boy end up in this place? On his grave, William Blythe is nineteen years old. Edie thinks that his grave is the saddest thing that she has ever seen.
She kneels and puts her hand to the wood of Will’s cross, touching the tape that bears his name. She has an odd urge to hug his cross. She feels both overwhelming affection towards it and intense anger. How could this be that boy? There are blood-red petunias growing at the base of his grave, orange zinnias and a black feather. That at least seems right. She would like to bring him fossils and seashells, marbles and caramels and cigarette cards, but all she can offer him today is her tears. She thinks about Harry sitting by his brother’s grave and can’t help but cry for him too.
Knowing that Harry is on this journey with her makes it feel better. She is not so alone. She is not such a fool. And yet, she can’t help but think about why Harry has taken so long to start it. Why has he been so reluctant to come here? But she checks herself: she looks around and knows exactly why. Suddenly she realizes that it perhaps wasn’t fair of her to ask him to come back.
She knows that Francis would have come here, if he could. He would visit Will. She is certain of that. She remembers Francis’ arm around his younger brother’s shoulders, Francis’ fingers ruffling Will’s hair, their gripped fingers as they arm-wrestled across the kitchen table. Francis letting Will win and feigning pain. Will always following Francis. He had followed him to this place. Surely Francis wouldn’t just leave him here? She pictures Francis’ photograph features in this place. The colour of the columbines looks like over-compensation against Francis’ black-and-white afterwards face.
‘Did Harry leave him the feather?’
The gardener is spraying the roses at the end of the row. He smiles at her as he looks up. ‘The feather?’
She twirls it between her fingers. It is a feather from a crow’s wing, she thinks. It is glossy and reflects the blue of the sky. ‘It was there.’ She points. ‘Pushed into the soil at the base of William’s grave. He must have left it.’
‘What a thing,’ says the gardener and shakes his head at the feather. ‘It wasn’t there this morning, miss, I swear it. I weeded along that row and I’d have noticed it.’
‘No?’ She wonders.
‘Perhaps it blew there?’ he suggests.
‘Yes, perhaps.’
She places it back at the base of the grave and stares at it there. It was so deliberately planted in the soil. She can’t imagine how the wind might have done that.
‘Is he still here?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Harry.’
‘No. Ralph took him to the station. The day before yesterday, if I recall rightly. He was going south, I think, and then on to Ypres.’
‘Ypres?’
‘It was something to do with his brother there. His other brother. Something about a photograph of him turning up.’
26
Harry
Rosières, Somme, August 1921
‘ “Après la guerre fini, soldats anglais parti,” ’ sings Élodie as she moves between the tables with soup tureens. Everyone in the café knows her name and the words to the song. The room hums along.
From his table Harry can see the spire. It seems so improbable, this soaring height of brickwork. He had not expected it to be intact. Much of the tile has slid from the roof of the church, and the building to the near side reminds him of a house of cards that has slumped, but the spire is much the same as it had been in a drawing he made four years earlier. They had sought its shape on the skyline as they had marched to Brigade Reserve. He had remarked that it was like a lighthouse then, steering them into safe harbour. Today it looks like a miracle.
‘Monsieur, would it disturb you?’ Élodie is standing by his table, her eyebrows raised in enquiry. She gestures from the empty chair facing Harry to a figure waiting by the bar. ‘I am sorry but we are very full today.’
A family is occupying the greater part of the restaurant with loud bonhomie. They are raising glasses and making toasts to a white-haired woman at the head of the table.
‘No, I don’t mind at all. Please,’ he stands and beckons his arm towards the stranger. As the man approaches Harry’s table, he recognizes a face. He puts out his hand. ‘I think we may have passed earlier today?’
The stranger shakes Harry’s hand. ‘In the cemetery, yes? My name is Gabriel Bousquet and this is very kind.’ He takes the opposite chair.
‘Harry Blythe.’
‘If you wish to be quiet, I will not disturb your thoughts.’
‘No, not at all. I am pleased to make your acquaintance.’
‘Excellent. I am happy to practise my English. I collect English words – like
butterflies.’ His eyes slide upwards as he searches for the word. ‘But, like butterflies, they flap away from me.’ He makes his fingers into a busy flutter of wings. They float down to the tablecloth and he looks up and laughs.
For a second Harry thinks of the catalogue in Arras, the collections of eyes and noses and mouths awaiting identification. His mind flicks through iterations before they still into the features across the table. Gabriel Bousquet’s eyes are green, set widely apart and amused. His face is all triangles, so that he looks somehow catlike. Harry finds himself mentally calculating the angles of Gabriel’s face, thinking how he would put it down onto paper. He grins at the girl as she delivers bread and wine to the table. She blushes in the white glare of Gabriel’s smile.
‘I hope that I didn’t disturb you in the cemetery,’ Harry says.
‘No. Not at all.’ Gabriel rolls up his shirtsleeves before he pours the wine. ‘I saw you taking photographs. Is it the grave of a member of your family?’
‘No. I was taking a photograph for the man’s mother. She cannot travel here.’
‘Ah, so she will be able to see where her son is?’
‘That is the idea.’
Gabriel sighs and blows his fringe in the air. ‘What a thing!’
‘Quite.’
Harry feels embarrassed to explain it. He realizes, as he describes the arrangement to Gabriel, that it is not so much the principle that he has any moral difficulty with, or the taking of the photograph itself, but the fact that he is receiving a salary for undertaking the task. Though he knows that Mrs Evans may find some comfort in finally knowing her son properly buried, he does not like being paid for delivering this sadness.
‘And so you are normally a photographer in England?’
‘I work in a portrait studio. I take photographs of brides and holidaying spinsters and babies. I sometimes find the babies frustrating – they cry and they blur and they leave wet patches – but when I return to the studio, I shall be very glad to see them.’
Gabriel touches his glass against Harry’s. ‘I am sure.’
The girl brings the soup. Gabriel serves, as if he is accustomed to playing this role.
‘And you?’ Harry asks. ‘Is it a friend or a relation that is in the cemetery?’
‘It is my brother.’
The soup is thin and tastes of nothing much. Gabriel stirs in copious pepper and sneezes into a handkerchief that is embroidered with another man’s initials.
‘I am sorry.’
Gabriel shrugs at his soup. ‘We were both here, in the Bois de Chaulnes, in the winter of 1916. It was terrible in the woods. The woods were full of graves. We moved north in February and I had to leave my brother in the woods. It is a long time ago, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. We moved south, to here, that same month. I was here with my brother too.’ He nods to the window. ‘I was just remembering drawing that church spire.’
Harry also remembers the French graves that they had passed along the road. They heard that the roads all around were full of wire entanglements and machine-gun posts and French dead. Mostly he remembers the mud on those roads.
‘It is bizarre to be back, isn’t it? It is the first time that I have visited my brother’s grave. I thought that I should come and see it before I go home. My mother has never seen it.’ Gabriel gulps at the wine as if he wishes to be rid of it and then refills his glass. ‘Would you perhaps take a photograph for me? I would pay you.’
‘Of course,’ says Harry. ‘But only on condition that you do not give me any money for it.’
‘Perhaps I can buy you a bottle of whisky instead?’
‘I am more amenable to such suggestions.’
Gabriel raises his glass towards Harry and smiles.
‘So you are going home?’
‘Yes. Enfin. At last. I am travelling south now. I have been working on building sites in Clichy for the past two years. I am a stone mason.’
Harry nods and takes a mouthful of the wine. ‘There is plenty of work?’
‘Enough. But I must return home. Like a fish on a wire, I am reeled in.’ He mimes casting a line to catch a salmon and grins unconvincingly.
The café behind Gabriel, in the background of his portrait, is loud. A party of workmen, their faces white with plaster dust, all glance at the clock as they drink. They josh with Élodie and roar at her lightly delivered put-downs.
‘Unwillingly reeled in?’ Harry asks.
‘Duty,’ says Gabriel, his eyes widening. He doesn’t appear to have much fondness for the word.
‘To your mother?’
‘She writes letters telling me to return. We have a farm – sheep and tobacco.’ His gestures suggest expansiveness. ‘I was the second son, but Marcellin is dead five years and my father is ill. He has not turned the soil this last year. I go for my mother, for duty to my mother, who now sleeps in the bergerie and worries for bread. I should have returned home two years ago. I am two years too late.’
Élodie clears the soup bowls and presents slices of meat, of undisclosed variety, in a mahogany-coloured sauce. Gabriel replenishes the glasses.
‘I should perhaps have gone back, but I didn’t,’ says Harry. ‘I know that it’s not easy.’
‘My mother wants me to take Marcellin’s place in the fields and in his widow’s bed. But I do not return home with any enthusiasm. It is complicated.’
Harry watches Gabriel attack the meat with his knife. ‘It is always complicated,’ he says.
There are farmers from the market at the tables, traders, shop workers, clerks and the butcher in whites. The chef stands at the kitchen door and surveys the reception of the meat.
‘She writes to me each week, piles of letters, begging me. I do not have a choice.’ Gabriel steers the meat about his plate. There are old scars on his arms. ‘This meat is not good,’ he says.
Harry thinks about the scars that the war has left on Edie’s hands. Would she have accepted him if he’d come home and said that he meant to take Francis’ place? Was that ever a choice? Could it ever be?
‘So you are a stone mason no longer?’
‘Not a poor mason, but I am to be a monumental sculptor.’ Gabriel brightens and then flags. ‘I am to make the monument – the monument aux morts. I have been asked by the commune. I have to make a statue of a soldier and a plinth where their names can be carved. I have to make something which expresses the village’s loss, something that sums up all the men that I left the village with.’ He turns his wine glass. ‘The statue has to summarize eleven dead men – three brothers, including my own, amongst them. They are already preparing the ground.’
‘That must be an honour,’ says Harry, not sure of what else to say.
‘Apparently. Though today it feels like a big weight on my back. I do not sleep because when I dream of it the statue always has Marcellin’s face. It can’t have his face.’
Harry imagines a statue with Francis’ face. He does not envy Gabriel this task.
‘They began collecting for it – the subscription – in 1916.’ Gabriel wipes bread around his plate. ‘It was, at first, to be Monsieur Abanes’ tomb to make. Then it passed to Eloi Alazard, to whom I was apprenticed in 1914. But then Eloi is dead and so it passes to me. It is a third-hand honour and not an inheritance that I would have wished for.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘I make drawings: heroic soldiers, crying soldiers, writhing soldiers.’ Gabriel assumes demonstrative poses. ‘My head is full of dead soldiers in stone. Perhaps our burden is not so different.’
Despite the scars, there is something elegant about Gabriel’s hands. When he talks about drawing, his hands curl and scroll and carve arabesques in the air between them. He has the wrists of an Indian dancer. The girl scrapes together the fat and gristle and stacks the plates. Gabriel attempts eye contact and is rejected. He rolls his eyes at Harry.
‘But I am ignorant. I talk of myself. I have no manners. You are here just for work?’
&nbs
p; ‘Duty too. I’m trying to find some clues as to my brother’s whereabouts. I suspect that he is dead, but don’t know that he isn’t alive. My sister-in-law needs to know either way. Only I’m not sure that I’ll ever be able to deliver that certainty to her.’
Gabriel nods. ‘Even if you find a grave, can you be sure that the right man is in it?’ He peels the skin from a pear with his knife in one deft, smooth, circular movement. ‘When I stood by Marcellin’s grave I wasn’t entirely certain that he was there. I didn’t feel that I was standing next to my brother. I read that the burial records are often incorrect, because the earth has been turned over so many times, because it has all been shaken up. Who can really be sure? But it is very difficult to explain that to someone who wasn’t here, isn’t it?’
‘It is,’ Harry replies.
27
Harry
French communications trenches west of Chaulnes, Somme, February 1917
They went on in silence for a while, with just the noise of the hurdles dripping. The earth had been frozen hard since the start of the month. They had woken with stiff limbs and with ice-rimed beards. It made their eyes ache, their throats raw and it gnawed at their finger ends. They had cursed the cold and prayed for the thaw. It had now set in and the sky looked full of rain. Harry could hear water running under the duckboards.
‘Single file,’ said Lieutenant Rose from further up the line. ‘Quietly as possible now.’
Harry listened to the noise of their boots on the wet boards. He put his head down and his hands in the pockets of his greatcoat. They had been told that the line ahead had been hairy up until a couple of months ago, as the French tried to take the woods. The landscape testified to it. The roads behind were churned and cratered. The village was all ruins. There was no noise of guns ahead now, though. The only sound was the dripping of water and the wet tramp of their boots.
The Photographer of the Lost Page 14