The Photographer of the Lost

by Caroline Scott

  ‘You were a soldier. You saw it. I guess that, as far as they’re concerned, you’re more able to sum it up than someone who wasn’t here.’

  ‘Do you think? I wish I had your confidence.’

  ‘I have confidence in you. Will you send me a sketch when you get there?’

  ‘Of course. I must give you my address for the photograph,’ he says, then pauses. ‘Or you can bring it – you can deliver it by hand. If the weather holds, I’ll get a second cut of hay by the end of the month. Come with me. Another pair of hands would be very welcome. It is heavy work, but lighter than all of this.’

  ‘I am tempted. Believe me, I’d love to leave this place behind, but I have sixteen names in my pocket and I’ve promised to deliver these photographs.’

  ‘Well then, cross off your sixteenth name as soon as you are able and get on a train.’

  Harry thinks about the possibility of crossing the last name – Francis’ name – off his list, and what the likelihood of being able to decisively do so would entail. It would require a grave, or to stand face-to-face with Francis again. Both scenarios seem remote at this moment, and their consequences beyond contemplation, but he watches Gabriel writing out the address on the back of a used train ticket, the foreign name forming in his copperplate letters.

  ‘Calvaire du Quercy? As in Calvary? The place of the cross?’

  ‘The place of my childhood is all crosses and saints’ bones and shrines.’ Gabriel shrugs. ‘We hope fiercely and are probably fools.’

  Apples are ripening in the field at the side of the road. These young trees look to have been newly planted and the stumps of the old trees in between are almost indistinguishable now. Harry remembers how buds had broken on the old trees’ severed limbs in March 1917. Though they had been cut clean across at the trunk, green leaves had sprouted from the boughs. They had stared at this inexplicable show of new life. That too had once looked like hope.

  ‘Rebirth. It all goes round. It all carries on.’ Gabriel points at the name painted above the door of a roadside shack. It is called the Buvette de la Renaissance. A man is smoking as he leans in the doorway. He raises a glass to them. ‘When I have completed my memorial, I intend to stop remembering. I will work hard at forgetting all of this. I will work until my bones are tired each day and not dream. I will breathe in each new morning and be glad of it and I will not look back.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  ‘And you should too.’ Gabriel offers him his hand. ‘We will meet again, my friend. I know it.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Harry replies.

  29

  Harry

  East of Chaulnes, Somme, March 1917

  ‘Why did they have to cut down the orchards?’ asked Bartley. They were standing in a field of newly felled trees. Bartley was a corporation gardener at home and this destruction seemed to strike him as profoundly as if he had found himself surrounded by a field full of felled men.

  ‘Why are the bridges blown? Why are there craters at every crossroads? It’s the same reason: they didn’t want to leave behind anything of any use.’

  It had seemed like a strange dream to be climbing up out of the trenches, out of the line that they thought they might have to hold forever more. Then they had marched down roads that, hours earlier, had been behind the enemy lines. They had stared at the belts of wire, the enemy dugouts and the green grass beyond. They had laughed, linked arms, felt almost giddy with it. It had seemed like the first day of a holiday. It had sobered them, though, when they had seen the cans of petroleum and the cottages that were still smoking. It was the small inconsequential things that had touched Harry most: the smashed greenhouse, the goldfish floating in the pond and now this field full of felled apple trees.

  ‘But trees? There are new buds,’ said Bartley, holding up a severed branch. ‘At home I prune at the start of March.’

  ‘These have been well pruned,’ said Pembridge.

  ‘It’s barbaric.’

  Harry sketched them as they lolled in the levelled orchard, Bartley holding branches to his chest, Pembridge dozing amongst the rotting apples, Fearnley and Robertson crouched over hands of cards. The bright spring light gave the fallen trees sharp shadows. He could smell the sweetness of the new cut wood. A collared dove took off from amongst the grass. He was startled at the sudden flash of wings.

  ‘Jumpy?’ laughed Fearnley.

  ‘Too bloody right!’ He put the sketchbook away and stretched. ‘Where’s Frannie?’

  ‘In the house, I think, with his camera.’

  The nearside of the farmhouse remained standing, though the windows had gone and floral curtains billowed out from the upper floor. Harry trod through broken glass and fallen tiles. The door was swinging on a hinge. He stepped inside. The furniture looked as though someone had taken an axe to it. A kitchen dresser had been pulled over, spilling an avalanche of plates and bowls and a porcelain coffee service. The floor was all splinters and smashed willow-pattern china. It was silent now but for the noise of the wind. There were moony woodland glades in the design of the wallpaper. What orgy of destruction had roared through these walls? What loud violence had filled this room only hours earlier?

  Their portraits were still above the fireplace, facing photographs of him and her, their side-by-side faces angled so that their eyes seemed to triangulate upon Harry as he approached. She had braided hair, pale eyelashes and a hydrangea flower in her hands. He had last-century side whiskers and was holding out an open book. Harry thought them rather mannered images; they were slightly forced and awkward, as if they were trying to be Pre-Raphaelite portraits. Were these unsmiling faces those of the couple who had chosen the willow-pattern china and the moony wallpaper? Was this their home? Harry heard his brother’s tread on the floor above and remembered twinned portraits of him and Edie that he had once painted long ago.

  On the landing there were chunks of plaster that had come down from the ceiling and a child’s perambulator. He pushed a door and saw a room with papers all over the floor, like an explosion in a library. He stared at the pages around his feet, most of which seemed to have been torn from travel books. He stepped over maps of Abyssinia and images of Arctic expeditions and wondered why it was so important that these pages be wrenched from their spines. What crime had this litter of words committed? The next room was full of feathers and clothes and his brother taking photographs.

  ‘Has someone had a pillow fight in here?’

  The white feathers were everywhere. They trembled as he stepped into the room. He could smell the spilled powders and perfumes. Francis laughed behind the lens. ‘Happen that’s how we’ll finish it.’

  All of the drawers had been pulled out of the dressing table, as if someone had been searching. Francis was photographing the scent bottles and hair brushes that had been left by the mirror, things of quiet femininity, and the room’s angry reflection. Harry stood in the doorway and watched his brother trying to find the right angle.

  ‘You’re in my shot,’ he said.

  He took a step back onto the landing and lit a cigarette. Had they laughed as they tore this house apart, he wondered. Or had they felt anger and hatred for these people and their possessions? Had they looked the downstairs portraits in the eye? He heard the click of the camera shutter.

  ‘Done?’

  Francis was sitting at the dressing table. There was a vase of violets doubled in the mirror, the freshness in the petals indicating that they hadn’t been picked many hours earlier. Harry had seen violets growing under the hedge and was struck with how fast time moves; was it really only hours since the man with the earnest mouth had picked these stems and presented them to the woman with the pale eyelashes? The intactness of so fragile a thing seemed surprising amongst the wreckage. There was something suddenly terribly poignant and important about this small vase of flowers.

  ‘Most of this stuff is rubbish,’ said Francis.

  Harry refocused. He could see his brother’s fingers in the
mirror going through a box of buttons and trinkets. He pulled out a brooch and held it to his own chest.

  ‘It’s only paste,’ Francis said, his mirror eyes meeting Harry’s. ‘Only a cheap thing, but still . . .’

  ‘We shouldn’t be in here.’

  ‘ “I will make you brooches and toys for your delight. Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night.” ’

  There was something disturbing about Francis’ sing-song voice and his eyes in the mirror. Did he mean to provoke? Did he want to start a fight? Harry watched as Francis buttoned the brooch into his pocket.

  ‘You shouldn’t be touching that stuff.’

  ‘Don’t look like that. It’s for Edie,’ he said. ‘I’m going to give it to Edie when I go home on leave.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘It’ll look pretty on her, won’t it?’ Francis’ eyes in the mirror challenged Harry.

  ‘You can’t take it.’

  ‘Who has seen? Who will know? It’s only you and me. And you wouldn’t tell on me, would you? Edie will wear it and think about me.’

  ‘You can’t just take things.’

  He didn’t see Francis’ hands move. He didn’t see him throw the box, but suddenly it was all in the air. Buttons and beads and trinkets leapt. He put his hands over his face and crouched as cufflinks and buckles and bobbins of cotton struck him. Thimbles, bracelets and embroidery scissors hit his arms. The vase exploded as it connected with the wall behind him. When it all finally stilled, there were violets around his feet and he could hear Francis laughing.

  30

  Harry

  Épehy, Somme, August 1921

  Image order: Miss Winifred Uttley requests a photograph of the grave of her fiancé, Pte. William Horace Stubbs (27891, East Yorkshire Regiment), KIA 22/03/1918.

  George Bartley is just feet away from Private Stubbs. Harry stares at the name on the cross. When he shuts his eyes and recalls Bartley’s face, he’s still sitting in an orchard in 1917. Harry had drawn him that day, quickly, surreptitiously, struck by Bartley’s depth of feeling for the fallen trees and the way that it had shown on his face. He recalls the symmetry – and the not quite symmetry – of the orchard and looks at the lines of graves that now multiply behind George Bartley. He leans in to see the date on the cross; it is five months on from that day when Bartley had cried for the felled trees and Francis had stolen the brooch from the room that smelled of violets.

  Remembering the apple in his pocket, Harry takes out his penknife. Bartley had told him about the five-pointed star at the centre of an apple, how it represents atonement and immortality. ‘A symbol of both sin and of eternal life,’ he had explained to Harry that day in the orchard, the former notion at that moment seeming more convincing than the latter. Harry carefully cuts the apple and pulls out the pips. He pushes them into the earth around Bartley’s grave. He likes to imagine that one day Bartley might be under an apple tree, its own fruit falling and forever beginning again. He wishes that he could offer something more to William Stubbs other than to tell him that Miss Winifred Uttley is thinking about him.

  There is nobody else in the cemetery. It is not the same here as it is in the headline villages of the Somme; the pilgrimages and parties of excursionists don’t come this far east. He stands and looks along the row. They are mostly men from September 1918 here, their graves closely packed together. When Harry had known this area it was green with copses and hedges. The summer of 1917 had been all fights for posts, over hills and farms and woodlands. Was it still green in September 1918? With the numbers of dead in this cemetery, he can’t imagine how it could have been.

  ‘I didn’t know that you were here,’ he says to Bartley’s cross. He does recognize the date on the grave, though; the day that Bartley died is the same day that Harry had been wounded. His memories of that day are of the panic on the wire, the wire being everywhere and it all shrieking and bursting over his head. Many of the graves in the cemetery are decorated with woven wire wreaths. The tangling trap of the barbed wire, and the journey back in an ambulance train, had taken Harry to a garden in Cheshire. Just for an instant the recalled sound of a blackbird and the smell of new-cut grass push into the here and now. She is saying his name, the gramophone is playing and Edie is shutting her eyes as it all spins around her. But this isn’t a place that he’s permitted to return to and he blinks the memory away.

  Bartley liked to pass around a photograph of a girl called Jane whom he one day meant to marry. Harry recalls the girl’s photograph face. Has she ever visited him here? Does she have a photograph of his grave? Will she ever marry anyone else? He puts his hand to Bartley’s cross. He will write to his family later and let them know that he has been here. He will ask them for the address of the girl called Jane, so that he may tell her about the day in the felled apple orchard and how, even through the worst of it, he would catch Bartley smiling at her photograph.

  There is a man selling wire wreaths by the cemetery gates – the same wreaths, Harry recognizes, that are on so many of the graves here. He thinks about buying one for Bartley, but on reflection decides that he would be happy enough with his ring of apple pips. He watches the wreath-maker’s hands work, admiring his dexterity. There is speed and sureness in this man’s fingers as he weaves the metal wire. The meshed wire makes Harry think about the trap of barbed wire, but there is skill and art in the geometric forms that this man is conjuring with a pair of pliers. He is in control of the wire.

  ‘Je peux prendre votre photographie?’

  ‘I’m not much of a one for posing for photographs,’ he replies in unexpected English. He has a soft, courteous voice and strikingly pale eyes when he looks up. ‘But if you must.’

  ‘I promise not to steal your soul.’ He offers the man his hand. ‘Harry Blythe.’

  ‘East. Daniel East.’

  He frames Daniel East amongst his wreaths. His fingers never stop working. He wears the old blue French army overcoat and a pink chrysanthemum flower in his buttonhole. Harry wishes that he could capture the colours – the coat and the flower and the barely-blue of the man’s eyes. On film his irises will look like an absence.

  ‘I’ll send you a copy if you want.’

  ‘No fixed abode,’ replies Daniel East and shrugs. He wishes Harry ‘Bonne route’.

  He walks from the cemetery towards the village. It’s now another township of huts, rising up in corrugated iron and prefabricated panels between the ruins. He can hear the noise of a saw. Old foundations are being flattened. Children are chasing a dog through the new-made streets, laughing and banging a can.

  There is a statue amongst the tumbled masonry, bright and crisp in clean new-cast concrete. Harry leans on the railings, which are threaded with red, white and blue ribbons, and reads the words Monument aux Morts. Dedicated to the dead of the village, Nos Enfants, the figure of a woman embodies the sense of loss. Her eyes are cast down upon a poilu’s helmet. She touches it with the flat of her right hand, while with her left hand she holds a palm leaf to her breast. The way that she is holding the palm, the tenderness of the gesture, reminds Harry of Bartley with the apple branch. Whose face was the artist resisting thinking of, he wonders, when he put this statue’s classically Greek features down onto paper? Wreaths and garlands and simple bunches of flowers have been placed at the base of the memorial. Harry counts the carved names: there are fifty-eight of them. It seems a heavy cost from this small village. The children and the dog chase around the railings.

  He sits outside a street-corner bar and shuts his eyes into the sun. A gramophone inside is playing something with a jazz beat. Harry thinks about the apple pips around Bartley’s grave wriggling into life and reprimands himself for his melancholy. He reminds himself that he is lucky. He orders a beer from the barman and asks him if there is somewhere in the village where he can buy a postcard.

  ‘Vous voulez un souvenir de ce coin?’ The barman looks at him with surprise and laughs. But he places two picture postcards on Harry�
�s table with an apologetic shrug.

  ‘C’est tout que je peux vous offrir. C’est d’avant. Before the war.’

  Harry offers the man a palm full of coins, but he shakes his head. It is as if what came before now bears no relevance, is obsolete, and can be of little value to a traveller requiring a memento.

  ‘Merci bien,’ says Harry.

  The first card is emblazoned with the motto Souvenir de Notre Village. Swallows swoop, each of them bearing a pastel-tinted image in their beaks – a chateau, a schoolhouse, the columned frontage of a church – all now gone. It is an offering of memories. The second postcard is a photograph of three men standing in a field, paused with a plough. In the background a valley slopes down towards the canal. Harry knows the slope.

  At the sound of laughter he looks up. A woman with a jazz voice is arm in arm with a man in a white apron, dancing their way out of the bar and circling between the café furniture. ‘ “Now I got the crazy blues,” ’ sing Mamie Smith and the dancing woman. She has dark plaits twisted around her head and silver bangles that clatter up her arms. Harry thinks of Rachel’s ringed fingers, of the wreath-maker’s weaving fingers, and it is only at that moment that it strikes him.

  31

  Edie

  Poperinghe, August 1921

  Edie remembers Francis’ photograph of this place: all the men crowded onto the platform of Poperinghe station brandishing their leave papers for his camera. The men in the photograph squint into the sun and grin. They fill every inch of that image with the flourish of their papers and the flash of their smiles. But today she is the only person on the station platform and at this moment she can no longer recall what her husband’s smile looks like.

  Harry had told her that he had seen his brother on that day in September 1917. Their paths had crossed on this railway platform; as Harry was returning to the battalion, so Francis had been on his way home on leave. It was the last time that he would come home, the last time that she would see him, but she wasn’t sure that she knew the man who had sat and stared at the fire for hours and curled in the sheets of her bed.