The Photographer of the Lost

by Caroline Scott

  She feels his eyes on her, and has to look down at her feet before she can meet his gaze again. ‘You mean the suspicion that Francis himself might have sent it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It both relieves and disturbs her that he has voiced that thought too. ‘And do you think he might? Could Francis have sent it?’

  ‘You know it’s impossible.’

  ‘Do I?’

  They walk on through the tumbledown streets. A troop of schoolgirls moves along the pavement ahead of them in white blouses and green hats. Edie watches the brims of the hats circling as the girls look about. She looks at the schoolgirls walking ahead, watching their reactions to this broken-down town, because she doesn’t want to look at it herself. On the corner a man is turning the handle of a barrel organ. He raises his hat to the schoolgirls, but might as well be invisible.

  ‘This is us,’ says Harry.

  There are flags flying outside the hotel. They look absurdly victorious. ‘Ever catch your mirror image and wonder how you got here?’

  When she looks ahead they are reflected side by side in a shop window, he and she, framed in Gothic architrave. It looks like a portrait of two alarmed people. They stare at their mirrored selves.

  ‘Frequently,’ he replies.

  39

  Harry

  Ypres, September 1921

  Harry lies on the bed in his hotel room. The woman on the desk downstairs had bragged of hot water and electric light, but the walls of his room are patched over with brown paper. It reminds him of a nursery rhyme – Jack and Jill tumbling down the hill and vinegar to draw the bruises out. He can hear Edie unpacking in the next room, her footsteps moving back and forth from suitcase to wardrobe. Light comes through a join in the paper walls, which her movement now and then blocks.

  ‘We can talk through the walls,’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ says Edie’s voice.

  ‘I used to hear the sound of snoring through Francis’ bedroom walls at home. It wasn’t you, was it?’

  ‘You’ll find out tonight.’

  He works to slow his breathing, still a bit in disbelief she is there, in the next room. He hadn’t expected her to put her arms around him at the station. He wasn’t prepared for that, or for just how difficult it would be to pull away. He has to keep it light and bright now, to joke and tease, and make them brother and sister once again, because it could all too easily, too quickly, become something else. He can’t let himself look through the gap in the paper walls.

  *

  The stairwell is all shadows. He follows the light down and then sees her from the turn of the stairs. As arranged, she’s waiting by the door. He watches her for a moment before she realizes he’s there. She is silhouetted in profile against the window and staring down at her hand on a chair. The pose reminds him of the woman that he’d seen topping a war memorial four days earlier. Edie’s circling ankle is the only thing that gives away that she isn’t an allegory cast from concrete. Like the memorial figure, her eyes aren’t focused; her face gives the impression that her thoughts aren’t in this room. But then a moth starts to flicker at the window, the insistent throb of wings seemingly bringing her back into the here and now. She puts her fingers to the glass.

  ‘ “And when white moths were on the wing, and mothlike stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream and caught a little silver trout.” ’

  ‘Harry! It’s you. I didn’t see you,’ she says as she turns. ‘Yeats?’ Her whole face changes when she smiles.

  ‘The trout became “a glimmering girl, with apple blossom in her hair, who called me by my name and ran and faded through the brightening air”.’

  They step out into the evening. Swallows are plunging through the overhead blue. They swoop, as one wing, between the tattered rooftops.

  The hotel is off the square. It is a wide square and must once have been prosperous, only now it is all brought down. It surprises him again, when they walk into it, how little remains. There’s much less of it than he remembers there being in 1917. The levelling of the buildings, the flattening of it all, makes the sky seem very wide and rather heavy.

  ‘It’s like a half-excavated Roman town,’ Edie remarks. ‘Don’t you think? Where’s the bathhouse? Which way to the barracks? Where’s the ditch to keep the barbarians out? Doesn’t it strike you how quickly we can roll back to that?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answers.

  ‘It’s like something left by an ancient civilization,’ she says. ‘A collection of all the clues that remain at the end of a civilization. I know that I’m staring, and yet I feel as if I ought not to look, as if it’s impolite to let my eyes linger on it. Irreverent, almost. I don’t know whether to whisper. Should I whisper?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Is this the square in that photograph, do you think?’

  ‘It is.’

  Wreaths have been placed against the ruins of the cathedral, as if it is a grave or a tomb. It is circled in barbed wire. They stand to look at the notice that has been placed there. ‘ “This is holy ground,” ’ he reads aloud. ‘ “No stone of this fabric may be taken away. It is a heritage for all civilized peoples.” ’

  Edie raises an eyebrow. ‘Would anyone really want to? Would someone seriously want to pocket a chunk of it as a souvenir? It looks entirely un-holy to me. Civilized is a bit of a stretch too.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘You’d already been posted here when Francis came home on leave, hadn’t you?’

  ‘Not far away. We were in a camp up to the north-west.’

  ‘I wish that I could have understood it then, that I could have had some notion of what this place was like.’

  ‘When Francis came back?’

  ‘I didn’t seem to be able to connect with him. It was as if part of him had already gone. Maybe that part of him was here? If I’d seen this, perhaps I could have understood him better. Perhaps I might have known how to start a conversation.’

  ‘But you couldn’t have made it better. How could you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The lights are starting to come on in the cafés, which seem to be making a great effort to be cheerful. The bars and hotels brag their resilience in confident names – they are the Grand, the Victoire, the Splendid and the Excelsior. It seems to Harry that they’re overstating their claims. They take a table outside and order glasses of beer. She smiles at him between sips. Harry gets the impression that Edie too is making a great effort to be cheerful, though her hand shakes, he sees, when she lifts her glass.

  ‘Don’t you draw any longer?’

  ‘Occasionally. I live my life surrounded by cameras now. They make me feel rather inadequate as a copyist.’

  ‘You were ambitious once. You were more than a copyist.’

  ‘Would you write that down for me?’ He raps his knuckles on the table and can’t help but grin. Edie shakes her head and her smile is gone when she looks back. ‘That photograph,’ he says. ‘Can I see it again?’

  ‘Of course.’ She retrieves a brown envelope from her bag and passes it across the table to Harry. ‘I keep looking in the envelope, expecting to find a letter that I’ve missed, but there’s nothing.’

  ‘It is a French postmark. Saint-Christophe de something? It’s blurred. I can’t read the remainder of it.’

  ‘Do you know how many villages in France are called Saint-Christophe? I took it into the post office in Arras. It could take you ten years to travel round them all.’

  The photograph slides out of the envelope. It is peculiar to see Francis’ face again in this place, with Edie sitting across the table from him. It is a version of Francis’ face that he has tried to forget, a version he never wanted Edie to see. ‘He’s taking it of himself.’

  ‘He’s here, isn’t he?’

  Harry stands up with the photograph and circles until the background slots into place. ‘Yes.’ He hears her intake of breath.

  ‘He looks older, don’t you think? Much older?’r />
  He remembers the rain falling down Francis’ cheeks. He remembers the whites of his brother’s eyes turning towards him as they lay in a shell hole. He remembers the noise of the barrage, how it throbbed through his own body, and how Francis’ lips had trembled. ‘He does.’

  ‘But I saw him in September 1917, Harry. He was reported missing at the end of October. Yes, he didn’t exactly look his best when he came home in the September, I was shocked when I first saw him, but the face in that photograph isn’t one month older than the man who sat in my house that week. This man is years older.’

  He looks at her. How can he tell her? ‘It must have been taken towards the end.’

  ‘I can hardly believe that,’ she says. The liquid in her glass shakes as she puts it to her mouth. ‘I’m grateful to whoever sent it. I can’t say that I like it, that it didn’t shock me, I’m not exactly going to put it in a photograph frame, but I’d rather have it than not. I only wish I knew who it was that sent it and why now.’ She takes the envelope and returns it to her bag. ‘Don’t you? Don’t you wonder what it means?’

  ‘Things just surface.’ He considers what is making her hands shake, what has surfaced for her with this photograph, why she is looking at him that way. ‘I saw it with Rachel. There are rooms full of personal effects. You could fill cathedrals with all of this stuff. It’ll be decades before it all shakes down and makes its way to the rightful owners.’

  ‘Your Rachel woman sent me a postcard of a cathedral.’

  ‘I told her that you like a nice topographical feature.’

  ‘Only it was all toppled down. You’ve had some odd post. The postman probably wonders what’s going on. A man somewhere in France is sending you postcards of war memorials.’

  ‘That would be Gabriel.’

  ‘And then another woman sent you a saucy postcard. There was a poem written on the back in French. I looked some of the words up. It was terribly vulgar.’

  Harry laughs. He is glad to finally see a smile twitch across her face. ‘It’s all right. Cassie was a nurse.’

  ‘That makes it all right? And this?’ says Edie. She rummages in her bag again and passes a card across the table. ‘What cryptic mischief is this?’

  It is a postcard of a William Blake watercolour, a shepherd and his sheep, an image from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, he thinks. He smiles as he turns it. The reverse reads: ‘Didn’t I tell you that I’d be useful to you? Your mystery ceiling is in Ypres. Ask for the Blue Angel.’

  ‘Does it make sense to you?’

  ‘Not in the slightest. Cassie’s husband works for the war graves people. He’s making some enquiries for me. I have to call him at the end of the month.’

  Edie nods, but looks unconvinced. ‘That’s very kind.’

  They eat steak and fried potatoes. She prods at the meat with her fork and accuses it of being horse. The waiter brings them an unlabelled bottle of white wine, serving madame and then monsieur with no compromising of ceremony, and they drink it even though it tastes strangely sour. When she shivers he gives her his jacket. The café has a corrugated-iron awning and looks very temporary. It calls itself the Grand Hôtel and it is evident that it has grand plans – or a sense of humour. The shape of the cathedral looms ghostly behind Edie. Jackdaws croak from the tops of the ruins.

  ‘I never expected that he’d come back,’ she says suddenly with her fork paused in her hand. ‘I didn’t have doubts. It never nagged at me. But it all changed when that envelope came. Now, whenever there’s a knock at the door, I start. Whenever the telephone rings, I’m waiting to hear his voice. When the train came into the station here, I expected to see his face on the platform. Well, don’t you? Didn’t you? I can no longer quite believe that he isn’t here, that everything that Francis was can just have been snuffed out. Nullified. Neutralized. Nil. I mean, it can’t, can it?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘He isn’t here? He won’t come back?’

  Harry shakes his head. ‘I can’t see how.’

  ‘I want to go to the place where he was wounded and to Tyne Cot cemetery. Fingers keep pointing there. People keep telling me that if he’s buried anywhere, that’s likely to be the place.’

  ‘I’ve been told that too. And I’ve gone through all the burial registers already. He isn’t there. His name isn’t on the list.’

  ‘But you said that there are so many nameless burials. If I go there, I might know if he is one of those. I might feel it.’

  ‘You honestly think so?’

  ‘Don’t look at me like I’m foolish.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m truly not.’

  From inside the restaurant comes the noise of scraped chairs and china. The waitress collects bread crusts from the next table and pours salt where the wine had run red through the tablecloth. Her mouth recites a silent ceremony. In truth, being here, he sees Francis everywhere. He’s there in shadows and at shuttered windows, in movements, in memories, in his own reflection. Francis’ name is in the shape that the waitress’ mouth makes. But he can’t tell Edie that.

  ‘You were right in what you said: I do think that he might have sent that photograph himself. You don’t think he did?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But are you certain? Can you be absolutely sure?’

  ‘Edie, I was there.’

  A moth flickers at the candle flame. She licks her fingers and snuffs it out. ‘Of course. You know, I think I might be losing my marbles.’

  They walk slowly through the dim streets. Waiters are taking the chairs and tables in and emptying ice buckets on the potted plants. At night, with so few lights at windows, it’s all the more a city of backless facades and ghosts. Bats are streaking between the ruins, arrowing across the night-blue sky. They listen to the sound of the town: a motor engine starts up, a shutter closes, the wind seems to hum as it moves through the ruins. They are the only people on the street.

  ‘Twenty thousand people used to live in this town,’ he tells her.

  ‘Don’t you find it all terribly lonely?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She says that she’s glad she’s not here on her own now. She tells him that she needs him to be here. She thanks him by her bedroom door.

  Harry stares at the ceiling. A vehicle passes with a sudden roar and its headlights strobe across the walls. For a second he tenses. When it is gone it leaves behind a thin sliver of light through the paper wall. He can hear her crying in the next room. It takes all his willpower not to walk to the wall.

  40

  Edie

  Ypres, September 1921

  ‘Did you sleep?’ Harry asks.

  ‘Not terribly well. My brain was all in a fizz. I kept imagining that I could hear crunching shells and marching feet. Are there armies of ghost soldiers out there?’

  ‘Only armies of builders.’

  She listens to him talk about masons and carpenters, and a 6 a.m. percussion of chisels and saws that had drilled into his dreams, but he looks as though he hasn’t slept at all either.

  ‘We need tea. Shall I be mother?’

  He smells of peppermint and shaving soap as he leans towards her, and for a moment it is the long-ago scent of his brother’s skin. Just for a moment she wants to close her eyes and put her face to Harry’s neck, to breathe him in and forget the rest.

  ‘What?’ he says.

  She shakes her head and watches as he folds away his newspaper.

  ‘You’re folding breadcrumbs into it. Can you understand much of it, then?’

  ‘Some of it. A little. I stumble through. My French is survival-grade, really. I’m better equipped for restaurant menus than international politics.’

  ‘How like you to feel the need to try.’ The tea is scaldingly hot and tastes of nothing much. ‘Are tea leaves still rationed here?’

  ‘Quite. It makes you quickly develop a taste for coffee.’

  The rattle of his teaspoon seems to clatter in her head. She wonders if she had too much to drink l
ast night. The barrelorgan man has started up again. The piped waltz is slightly too fast and somehow insistent.

  ‘Strauss? Is Strauss still allowed?’

  The waitress sings along as she clears crockery from the next table. Edie thinks about sitting in a café in Arras and how convinced she had been then that Francis might be there. Is he any more likely to be here? Across the table, Harry’s fingers are breaking bread into pieces. She notices that he doesn’t eat any of it.

  His eyes meet hers. ‘Penny for them?’ he says to her.

  She shrugs and looks down at her hands. ‘You’re not eating. You should eat. I worry that you’re not looking after yourself.’

  ‘I am. You mustn’t worry about me.’ He pushes the plate of broken bread away. ‘Do you want to go to Tyne Cot today?’

  The too-hot tea scalds her mouth. ‘They’re in time with each other.’ She points to the street beyond the window. A woman is sweeping the pavement in front of her shop, the broom working to the rhythm of the waltz. ‘It will never be real unless I see a grave. I won’t ever believe it otherwise. Your friend Rachel was right about that part.’

  ‘Do you want it to be real?’

  ‘Can it be real tomorrow? Can we go for a walk today instead?’

  *

  They clamber up onto the ramparts and take in the panorama. Weeds are growing through the stones, softening the jaggedness of it. There is clover in the crumbling mortar. Yellow grass and slender saplings are reclaiming the ramparts. It strikes her how determined nature seems to be to take it all back. The town – or what remains of it – is laid out before them.

  ‘ “Few names awaken more memories than that of Ypres,” ’ Harry reads aloud from his guidebook, ‘ “a city of incomparable splendour in the Middle Ages, and of which nothing now remains but a heap of ruins. History furnishes few examples of such grandeur followed by destruction so swift and so complete. Ypres is now but a memory.” ’

  She turns and looks at him. ‘What memories you must all have. It makes me feel rather inadequate. I don’t know how to begin to comprehend it.’