‘Write to her there, then. Telephone her.’
‘To say?’
‘You told me about going back to the place you were injured. How you thought for a moment that might be your end. Did you think of her on that day?’
‘Yes,’ he eventually replies.
‘Tell her that.’
33
Harry
Canal Wood, East of Épehy, Somme, August 1917
It hit just to the rear. Earth leapt up and showered over them. Harry leaned against the wall of the jumping-off trench and listened to it all falling down.
‘Two minutes,’ said Captain Wear. He peered at the luminous face of his wristwatch.
It was all that Harry could see, the glow of the watch hands and then flashing in the sky. They hadn’t expected the incoming shelling. There had been no preliminary wire-cutting, Captain Wear had been telling them ten minutes earlier, as they didn’t want to give any indication of a planned raid. Did this bombardment signify that they knew anyway?
‘Official report is that the wire is thin. The barrage is going to roll forward and we’ll follow it through. All right? The wire isn’t going to be an issue.’
‘I do have a bit of a personal issue with getting strafed,’ said Pembridge under his breath.
‘At least there’s no moon.’
‘This war has made me hate the moon,’ said Jones, ‘its dozy great silvery beams. Big silvery-beamed bastard.’
Harry felt the earth jolt. ‘How long?’
‘Thirty seconds.’
‘. . . Loving Jesus, gentle lamb, in thy gracious hands I am . . .’ Nicholson’s voice quavered as he worked through the rhymes of a childhood prayer.
‘Jesus, I wish you wouldn’t do that.’
Another explosion hit not far behind. Harry pushed his fingers into the earth. He could hear the rapid whistle of Nicholson’s breath to his left.
‘You know the routine, right?’ said Corporal Wright. ‘In and out. Get an identity if you can, but really this is only a diversion. Is that understood?’
‘Have these, Blythe,’ said Lieutenant Redmond. Harry felt a pair of wire-cutters – the weight and the cold of the metal – placed in his hand. They had blackened their faces and he could barely make out the here-and-there glimmer of the whites of the lieutenant’s eyes.
‘But I thought—’
‘Take them.’
With another lurch of the earth, Harry felt Redmond’s hand momentarily grip his shoulder. He tasted blood in his mouth and realized that he had bitten his lip.
‘All right, lads. Keep low. Keep quiet.’
He saw Captain Wear’s profile as he clambered over. Harry heard his own heart racing.
The land sloped down towards the canal, which was a ribbon of light. Between here and the canal was nothing but clotted darkness, dense and entirely quiet now.
They slid out on their bellies. He could smell the wet grass. There was dampness and roots under his hands. He pushed his fingers into the soft cold.
‘Straight forward,’ hissed Redmond’s whisper.
Harry felt a stone push against his ribcage. His fingers pulled away from the shock of something sharp.
‘Where’s that barrage?’ asked Pembridge.
It started before the end of his question. Suddenly the valley below was all alight. Harry felt the earth beneath him quake as the light leapt. Like white paint thrown at a black canvas, it splattered and stretched. Smoke billowed into the sky and the valley below was full of a flickering phosphorescence that looked almost supernatural. It was completely contrary to instinct, it was an anathema, it was absurd, to crawl towards this rending light, but, to left and to right, they were scuttling, creeping, running forward. His fast breath and startled eyes told him that this was madness, but Harry’s feet were on the slope of the hill and dashing down.
The barrage boomed across again, beyond their wire now. The sky seemed to churn with it. The star shells stretched, white trajectories sliding into the black. It looked as though it was burning beyond. The canal was lost in smoke. He could see the posts and the wire silhouetted against the white.
The ordered silence was forgotten as they stumbled down the slope. Harry couldn’t see the men around him, but he could hear their ragged breath, their oaths and prayers. There was a roar rising from their feet and from their mouths. He staggered in the soft, unseen earth, but they were pushing on as one and plunging towards the enemy wire.
The barrage came down again. Louder this time. Throwing him off his feet. The earth kicked up under him and white light ripped across. It looked as if the sky was tearing ahead. Fragments screeched through the air. He could feel the heat of it, the searing wind on his face, the smell of hot metal. Particles of earth flew up, seeming to fluoresce as they fell.
‘It’s gone forward too fast,’ said a voice that was almost a yelp in the black. When Harry looked behind him all that he could see was an echo of the shape of a starburst, as if the bright light had burnt itself onto his retina. His eyes ached.
It resembled a fairy thing ahead, the glitter and intricacy of it, like some web spun from mischief to catch mortals. It remained that way only for an instant. They were plunging towards the wire. It slid into focus, the pickets and the web in-between, all too real and thick and intact. The sky lit again and Harry looked forward into the belts of wire. He heard the blood pump through his head with a roaring beat. He felt his body accelerate, his rhythms run awry, as if his body were betraying him. He was suddenly vulnerable within himself and he gasped, full of fear as he fell.
‘Keep down!’ A warning voice bellowed as rifle bullets zipped towards them; they left behind lines of hanging light that cut through the wire. Lots of them were cutting through the wire now.
‘How are we supposed to . . . ?’
‘For fuck’s sake!’
Harry heard teeth chattering, a fragment of prayer and a metallic clatter that came to him through his fingers as much as his ears. Their hands were on the wire, pulling, clambering, clawing at it. Cutters were working, rifles trying to push it down. To his left a figure leapt forward, running at it, plunging and then convulsing.
A shell hit just behind. Theirs now. It sent them all rearing up and thrown onto the tangled trap. Harry’s clippers were working. It tore at him as he cut. Its barbs were yanking at his sleeves and scratching at his wrists. He could see that his hands were sticky. He pulled the wire apart, inched forward and began again.
‘In and out, eh?’ laughed a humourless voice to his side.
Shells were landing behind again and he found himself face down in the wire. It was stuck in his puttees and his tunic and his sleeves. He felt like a fly in a spider’s web. It pulled and cut against him when he tried to move. The white arcs of bullets fizzed through the darkness. In the shell light he stared at the clippers in his hand. How could he ever cut his way out of this?
The last thing he saw, as the earth plunged up, was Pembridge’s face at his side. There were tears on his cheeks. Then it was all convulsing up underneath him, as if the wire had an energy of its own, the brambles and the pickets lashing and writhing. He heard the wire whip and felt it rush all around him. His legs were wet and the whistling light rushed to white.
34
Harry
Péronne, Somme, August 1921
Harry isn’t accustomed to lingering on his own reflection, but today something has changed. Today he walked down the field towards the canal. Four years ago the doctor had told him that he would always have fragments of shrapnel inside him; was it just a fancy this afternoon that, returning to the place where it had entered his body, he had felt all those metal fragments tingle? Was it some strange magnetism or merely the memory that had made him tremble? His knees had buckled on the slope, it had all rushed back and he had crouched down in the place where the belts of barbed wire once were, and rocked with his arms around his knees; but then he had got up and walked on. He looks at his arms in the mirror. The scars are white where
the wire lashed around him. The skin is puckered on his stomach where they stitched him together. The hotel mirror has a long crack across it; it is in as sorry a state as he is, Harry considers. But, like him, it is still here.
He can hear the couple talking in the room above. All of the plaster has fallen from the ceiling, leaving only floorboards overhead. The male voice says that the sanitary arrangements remind him of ‘Japan in the old days’; she says that she is going to write a letter to the paper when they get home to Basingstoke. They agree: the standard of accommodation isn’t at all like Bournemouth. Harry smiles. Small showers of plaster follow their footsteps. He watches, over his mirrored shoulder, as they progress across the room. Billows sigh from the ceiling and dust skitters across the pages of the photograph album.
It lies open on the bed. He turned through its pages when he got back here, but he cannot annotate the images after August 1917 for Edie, and he will never know if he has put them in exactly the correct chronological order. Francis had photographed trophies from the trench raid while Harry was in the casualty clearing station. He wonders whether his brother had known, as he was taking those photographs, that he’d been injured. On the next pages of the album there are pictures of the vegetable gardens that they had cultivated through September in the deserted village behind, a bunch of flowers in a dugout and a length of dusty road. At the end of September the battalion had come to this town. Harry, though, has never been here before, has never seen these things. He can’t write dates and locations underneath these photographs because he wasn’t there. He buttons his shirt and steps out into the evening.
A breeze has got up and he pulls his jacket around him. When the wind blows everything seems to rattle; the scaffolds shake, the tin roofs hum and the tarpaulins lash. His guidebook tells him that, in the Middle Ages, this was a proud fortified city, with important ramparts and moats. In Francis’ photographs it is all fallen down. It had all been dynamited. Nissen huts have now been constructed around what was the central square, and everything is patched and impermanent, but he sees signs that that long-ago pride has not been entirely crushed. Today the town seems to be almost entirely inhabited by workmen. The rubble is being cleared away and new bricks are rising. There is a lot of energy and determination and noise. Péronne clearly means to come back.
He orders a beer in a bar and remembers the piece of wire in his pocket. A three-inch or so fragment, twisted and rusted and looking like a relic from the Middle Ages, it was all that he could find. The field had been ploughed and green lines of wheat were showing. He had walked between those green rows looking for an indication that he was in the right place, but this scrap was all that remained of the old barbed wire. There was nothing but the clean new shoots and the canal peacefully glimmering below. Perhaps it was walking down that slope, completing that journey, or seeing Bartley’s grave, or the fact that the wire had gone, but he feels a strangely powerful sense of being alive tonight. It seems to fizz in his veins. He feels more than the sum of his broken parts, and for the first time he feels that he might truly be lucky. Like Péronne, he feels determined. He leaves coins – and the wire – on the table.
*
‘Are you in Spain yet?’ Edie’s voice on the telephone sounds very distant.
‘Spain?’
‘Only your postcards seem to be getting further away. I looked on a map. You’re going south.’
‘Just following orders. I’m heading north again this week.’
‘And talking of postcards, your mail is building up here. People keep sending you cards at this address. I’m not your secretary, you know.’
He laughs. ‘I apologize. I’ll give you a tip at Christmas. Anyway, you’re home! I was fully expecting that the telephone would ring out again. I’ve kept calling and thought I’d take another chance.’
‘I only got here yesterday.’
‘Did you find anything? How far did you make it?’
The line goes silent for a moment, then crackles, and he thinks he’s lost her, but then her voice is back again.
‘Not far enough. Not as far as I intended. Listen, Harry, can I ask you something?’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s a big something.’
He hears her hesitation. ‘Go on.’
‘Is there any possibility that you could be in Ypres on Friday?’
‘This Friday? Yes, I suppose so. Why?’
‘Because, as I said, I didn’t get as far as I intended.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘If you’ll be in Ypres, then I will be.’
*
He sits on the kerb and lights a cigarette. Men are playing billiards in one of the bars and their ease and laughter spills out of the windows. A waiter weaves between the café tables, a tray stacked with glasses carried high and confident in his hand. A girl in a white dress turns and smiles as he places her drink down. With the thought of seeing Edie again, it’s all pushing through Harry’s veins too fast, as if all his chemicals have gone slightly off-kilter; he doesn’t feel as though he’s in control of his own body. He breathes in the smoke and the laughter and the warm breeze. He counts his breaths. But when he opens his eyes again he sees that the cigarette in his hand is shaking.
‘I found an old photograph of Denham Hall recently. A postcard. You sent it to me. I want to see you,’ she had said on the telephone.
He throws the cigarette away and walks through the early-evening streets. The shape of a tank looms in a corner of the square. A plaque has been attached to it informing the onlooker (in three languages) that it is a gift from an English town and a war memorial. A gang of children are chasing around it. He stops to take a photograph and the children grin and wave at the camera. The tank might as well be a lump of stone.
‘I want to see you. And there is a place that I need to visit,’ she had said.
He wants to see her too, he craves seeing her, but the thought of why she needs to meet him in Ypres, and what that implies, leaves him with so many difficult questions. Did she really see something significant in that photograph of Francis? Could there really be some clue that he has missed?
‘Where?’ he had asked.
‘I’ll tell you when I get there.’
Her voice had gone. The line was dead. But he had stood there still with the telephone receiver pressed against his ear. For one moment he had allowed himself to remember her dancing in a garden four years ago. The smell of a summer evening. Reflections in a lake. The grip of her hand on his arm. But then her voice was asking him to meet her in Ypres. Needing to visit Ypres.
His own mirror face startles him as he steps into the hotel room. For a second the reflection in the glass is his brother’s. Francis’ eyes. The shape of his mouth.
‘I’ll come back and haunt you,’ says Francis’ faraway and all-too-close voice.
35
Harry
Denham Hall Military Hospital, Cheshire, August 1917
Harry wanted to tell her to sit still. He wanted to draw her just as she was in this instant, but his hands were bandaged up and she was walking down the ward saying ‘Good afternoon’ to each bedstead that she passed. It struck him that she was completely unaware of how they stared after her. He wanted to tell her that it wasn’t the way to behave. It wasn’t the way it was done. But he couldn’t help but smile as she walked towards him.
‘You look ghastly,’ Edie said.
‘Thank you.’
Harry tried to remember how long it was since he had last seen her. Almost two years? Her skin was very white and her hair dark red. She was not soft and sensuous, like a redhead in a Rossetti painting, he considered, all bowery or boudoired, but she was handsome. She was wearing a knitted green beret over her red hair. There were blue shadows under her eyes.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘I’m full of medication. Can’t you hear me rattle when I move?’
‘The doctor says you’re full of metal.’ She took the beret off. Her fingers played with the comb
in her hair.
‘But only small pieces. I shan’t go around trailing magnets or get rusty if I go out in the rain.’
‘That’s a mercy,’ she said. ‘May I?’
‘Please.’
She took the chair next to his bed and curled her long limbs around. Did she realize, Harry wondered, that every man in the room was watching her?
‘I cut you flowers from the garden. Larkspur. Do you remember?’ She held the bunch out for him to smell. ‘I thought that it might be horrid in here, that it might need cheering up, but it’s a palace.’
‘Isn’t it? Almost worth having a few stitches for, eh?’
She put the flowers on the bedside table. The stems were wrapped in a newspaper headline that pronounced stormy weather in France and Flanders. She picked up the novel at his bedside.
‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles?’
‘I like a tragic heroine,’ he said.
‘Dear me. I bought you this as well.’ She reached to her bag and handed him a tissue-wrapped parcel.
‘A book?’
‘Open it, then.’
The marbled-paper cover was the softest blues and browns and hints of pink and looked as if the paint had been stirred with a feather. He ran his fingers over the leather spine. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘It doesn’t contain any tragic heroines, I’m afraid. It’s a sketchbook. A proper one. Francis says that you’re always scrounging around for scraps of paper. Well, there’s plenty to go at there. Full of pristine white paper for you to spoil.’
‘Thank you. It must have cost you a lot of money. That’s tremendously kind.’
‘Hand it back to me one day full of pictures.’
‘I shall. I will put your picture on the first page.’
‘If I’d known you’d do that I might not have given it to you.’ She stared at his hand on the book. ‘You’ll be all right, though? You haven’t hurt your hands badly?’
‘Only cuts.’
The Photographer of the Lost Page 18