What memories return to him as he gazes out across the moat? What version of Francis does he see in those memories? She can’t help but feel there are some memories that Harry has chosen not to share with her. They stand side by side and swallows’ bellies glimmer blue over the water. A man is sculling, concentric circles stretching out from his quiet blades. Harry skims a stone. It skips three times.
‘Ducks and drakes,’ she says.
Beyond the ramparts there is an area of new housing. It is a township of huts, yellow wood walls and pitch roofs. These streets look as though they are made of matchsticks, she thinks, like something that a strong wind might easily level.
‘It’s called the Plaine d’Amour,’ he tells her. ‘The plain of love! It’s not very lovely, is it?’
‘I remember reading that it was all going to be preserved,’ she says. She has followed all of the stories about Ypres in the newspapers, knowing that this is the area where Francis was. ‘That it was going to be left as untouched ruins, that the town would be made into a symbol and a souvenir and war memorial.’
‘This was home to people, though. They wanted that back more than they wanted a monument for the British to visit. I read in the paper yesterday that five thousand men are presently employed in construction in Ypres.’
‘What great days these are for joiners and carpenters.’ Her foot strikes against a piece of metal then. ‘What is it?’
‘An airshaft.’
Edie crouches and peers down. There is only blackness and a smell of stale air below.
‘The ramparts were full of dugouts,’ Harry says. ‘We sheltered here one night in 1917. I remember an earth-floored cellar, furnished with a salvaged velvet armchair, a long-case clock and needlework alphabets on the walls.’ He widens his eyes and smiles. ‘It was a long night. I was down there with an Australian, a second-lieutenant from Melbourne, who swore each time the clock struck the quarter hour and kept standing up to straighten the pictures. We finished a bottle of Benedictine together, and talked about spin bowlers and parrots and wild flowers, but the shells were splintering the walls outside.’
‘We? Was Francis there? He was with you?’
‘No. This was after.’
‘After,’ she repeats. She is no longer sure what after means. A church clock somewhere repeats the hour.
‘Will you tell me again? About that last day, I mean.’
‘Edie, please—’
‘It’s all I have.’
‘I’ve told you a hundred times.’
‘But there might have been something that we’ve missed. Some possibility that you’ve overlooked which, in the one-hundred-and-first telling, might jump out at me.’
‘Edie, he was dying. He had gunshot wounds to the chest. We were ordered forward. There was no one to help him. And it was too late. At the time I had absolutely no doubt about that. I wouldn’t have left him, if I had any doubt. It was too late.’
‘I’d like to get rather drunk,’ she says.
*
‘Can I draw your picture?’
‘It’s a very long time since you last asked me that.’
‘Isn’t it? Too long. For old times’ sake, then?’
‘I’m not a girl of eighteen any longer.’
‘And I’m not a boy of seventeen, who only dares to look you in the eye when he’s given permission to draw your portrait.’ He looks at her then. ‘But don’t make me remember that. Please. I’m not sure that it’s manly to blush.’
She smiles, and nods, and he draws her there in the café. She watches Harry’s eyes and his moving hands, as she has done so many times before.
‘It’s the sketchbook that I gave you, isn’t it? I thought you’d lost all of that.’
‘It’s the only thing I didn’t lose. It was in my pocket at the time, when everything else went.’ He looks up and closes the book. ‘What was it that you said to me – “Hand it back to me one day full of pictures”?’
‘I did! And will you? May I?’
He gives her the book and she turns to the first page and sees her own likeness. ‘Denham Hall?’ It’s her, standing in the door frame of the red gallery. ‘Four years ago? It seems longer, doesn’t it?’
‘It does.’
‘Goodness, you always flattered.’
‘I never did. Not one bit.’
‘ “If I cling on to you, will you help me not to bounce back down?” ’ She smiles as she recalls his voice. ‘That’s right, isn’t it? That was your line?’
He stares at her. ‘You remembered that?’
‘I did. Of course I did.’
She leafs through the book and her own face flickers at her. Again and again. It’s there so many times. She looks up and catches his eye and there’s suddenly something difficult in that connection. Why does she feel like she’s overheard him whispering a secret? Like she’s listening in to him making a confession?
‘There were no other women to draw,’ he says. ‘I like female faces, and I’d drawn yours so many times before that I could do it from memory.’
‘I understand.’ She looks at Harry’s face, his obvious embarrassment, and feels she needs to be cautious about what she says next.
‘We were a bloody ugly lot. A real rough bunch. You’ve never seen so many unlovely faces.’
He swirls his drink in his glass, will look at everything but her face now, and she feels so desperately sorry for him at this moment. ‘I wish there’d been more pretty nurses for you, or barmaids, or farmers’ daughters, or conveniently proximate winsome nuns.’
‘Nuns?’
It’s a mercy when at last he looks up and smiles, but as she puts the book down on the table, the breeze catches the pages and then Francis’ face is there. ‘I didn’t tell him that I’d been to see you in hospital,’ she says. ‘I don’t know why. It was an omission, though, not a lie – and we didn’t do anything that we need to feel guilty about, did we?’ She tilts his brother’s likeness towards Harry.
‘No.’
‘When did you draw this?’
‘Not long after I’d got back from England. Our journeys crossed. I saw him on the station as he was coming home on leave. It’s the last time I drew him.’
‘What would that be, then – the September?’
‘Yes. Towards the end of the month.’
She looks closely at Harry’s drawing and can’t help but think that this isn’t the man in that photograph. Francis would be declared missing within a month of Harry drawing this picture, but the man in that photograph isn’t just one month older. She leans across and unwinds Harry’s fingers from around his cigarette. ‘You do miss him, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘It’s just that you didn’t seem shocked by that photograph.’
‘The one that was sent to you?’
‘Yes. You didn’t seem surprised by Francis’ appearance in that photograph.’
There was something about the way that Harry had looked at it. When she handed the photograph to him back in May, she had watched as he turned it to the light. Why hadn’t he seemed more disturbed by it, as she had been? Why didn’t he see that the face of the man in the photograph was much older? Why did Harry look as though he’d seen that face before?
He shakes his head, as if he’s not sure what to reply. ‘We saw each other at our worst.’
She responds with a nod, feeling she daren’t press him. But it doesn’t silence her questions.
*
He returns from the bar with a piece of paper in his hand. He passes it to her across the table as he puts down the drinks.
‘What is it?’
‘The Blue Angel. My mystery. Apparently, it’s some sort of drinking dive.’
‘This is the place that you don’t recognize in Francis’ photographs? You think he might have been there – that he was there some time in the October?’
‘It was a cellar full of gloomy drinkers then and seemingly it still is now.’
‘S
ounds just my sort of place,’ she says.
*
He finds the street in his tourist guide and reads the description aloud. ‘ “The fine double-gabled houses markedly illustrated the transition from fifteenth- to sixteenth-century architectural fashions – irregular arches to the lower floors, full semicircles framing the regular window bays above. Today little but rubble remains.” ’
‘How terribly twentieth-century of it.’
Evidently the carpenters and masons have been busy in the two years since Harry’s guidebook was published and wooden buildings now stand in many of the gaps that were seemingly formerly admirable stone. Where old walls remain, they are shored up, the protected plasterwork terribly nibbled and pitted.
There is no sign to indicate that it is a drinking establishment (of dubious repute, or otherwise), but there are flecks of blue paint around the carved wings above the door.
‘Is it a secret club, do you think?’ she asks. ‘Will we be expected to whisper a password and to give a special handshake?’
‘Nothing so fun.’
They are momentarily light-blind. From the brightness of the street they flounder into black.
‘I can’t see a thing,’ he says.
In the dark, just for a second, it is Francis’ voice at her side, his voice that had once whispered unseen through library shelves, but then he strikes a match, light bounces off a low curved ceiling and a stone staircase descending, and Harry’s face is there again.
‘I’m glad you’re here with me,’ she says.
Harry goes ahead. She feels the temperature drop as they go down.
The staircase bends round and opens onto what seems to essentially be a cellar. Light flickers off a vaulted roof and damp fluoresces on the red-brick walls. It might as well be midnight outside. The air is thick with cigarette smoke and there is a sour-sweet smell of old dirt. A dozen or so men sit at tables, candlelit and crouched over glasses. Nobody is talking. A gramophone plays a jazz track that seems entirely inappropriate with its forcible jollity. Edie knows which photographs Harry is talking about, and she recognizes the curve of the ceiling and the bottle-cluttered tables. She imagines the flash of Francis’ camera and needs to reach for Harry’s arm to steady herself. Has Harry pored over those photographs too, then, unable to date and place them? Has he too sought meaning and explanation in those images?
A man looks up from beside the gramophone. He seems to be the only person who has registered their presence. It is as if everybody else in the room is in a trance. Have they realized that the war is over, that it is 1921 and summer outside? She feels that she has walked into Francis’ photographs. The faces might well be the same. But why had Francis been in this place? What was he doing? What was he feeling here? And why does this seem to matter so much to Harry?
‘I can’t decide whether this was a chapel or a beer cellar,’ he says.
She nods. There are columns of swirling stone, incised at the top with grapes and grains, and saints and angels on the bosses. ‘Why was he here?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I do know that he shouldn’t have been here.’
The gramophone man places a bottle and glasses on their table and returns to study his records. Blues is blaring out now. A brassy lament. It sounds like a New Orleans funeral. Edie clinks her glass against Harry’s. She imagines the candlelight dipping and dust dropping from the ceiling as artillery roars in, pulverizing the street above; she imagines the floor lurching and the bottles clinking; she pictures Francis stumbling. When she looks up at Harry, she can see how the surface of the wine in his glass quivers.
‘Is that really a funeral march?’
‘I think so.’
Harry is staring at the scarred tabletop, as if he expects to find some meaning in it. There are names gouged into the wood, branded monograms and scorch marks and his fingers trace these shapes. Is he expecting to find Francis’ initials? What meaning is Harry looking for here?
‘Good God,’ she downs her glass. She clenches and unclenches her hands. ‘This is probably the most depressing place I have ever been. Have you seen enough?’
‘For a lifetime.’
*
Harry returns the bottle to the gramophone man and says the name as he places coins in his palm.
‘Blythe?’ The man doesn’t look up from his newspaper.
‘Francis.’
‘Ask Dillon. If he was here, then Dillon would know.’
‘Dillon?’
‘The Wunderkammer – it’s a shop – Mr Dillon’s cabinet of curiosities.’ The man looks down at his paper and laughs.
*
They blink as they step back into the light. It seems too bright. She hears Harry take a deep breath and sees him shut his eyes. What does he see behind his eyes?
‘Why was Francis here? Why does it matter that he was here? Was he in trouble? Is he still in trouble?’
The shake of Harry’s head is not the answer that she needs.
41
Harry
Ypres, September 1921
Edie wipes her sleeve on the shop window. They are building above it, new plaster and lath rising up, and all the dust of old Ypres falling down.
‘Is it open?’
‘There’s a light on in the back.’
Through the window Harry can see a curious accumulation of items for sale: tourist guides, maps, books about the region before, chunks of architecture, items of uniform, shell cases, helmets of all nationalities and fragments of coloured glass. A handwritten sign proclaims: Souvenirs of Ypres. Authenticity guaranteed. All currencies accepted. Something to suit every purse and every palate! It resembles the haul of the most almighty trench raid. He is momentarily startled by the ring of the bell as Edie pushes the door.
Inside it is arranged into classes of curio. On the first table there are stone heads, fragments of carving and shards of letter-cut marble that look like sections of a blown-apart tomb. Edie holds up a piece of stained glass to the light. It is a lively gem blue, the lead around it horribly bent and buckled.
‘Beautiful blue,’ she says. ‘Ecclesiastical blue? A fragment of sky, do you think, or the Virgin Mary’s cloak?’
A triangle of refracted blue light trembles on Edie’s throat. It takes all of his willpower not to extend a finger and touch it. ‘Supernatural blue. The windows of the cathedral, I guess.’
She raises an eyebrow.
The next table is all variations of shell cases. They are worked into napkin rings, ashtrays, money boxes, vases, tobacco jars, milk jugs, inkwells, dinner gongs and crucifixes. They are engraved, embossed, beaten into patterns and emblazoned with slogans. The metal workers of Ypres cannot be faulted for any want of variety or inventiveness, it seems. Stacks of copper driving bands and aluminium nose caps (on promotion at two francs apiece) look almost abstract.
‘Am I odd in thinking it all rather grim?’ she asks.
‘Not in the slightest.’
There are smaller items laid out for more modest budgets. As he watches Edie’s hand glide over the brooches, bracelets and rings, he recalls the touch of Rachel’s ringed fingers.
‘Who would want such things now?’ Edie grimaces as she holds earrings either side of her face. They are worked from bullet cartridges and engraved with the words Vive la France!
He dips his hand into a bowl of brass buttons (bon marché, says the sign, at fifty centimes) and pulls out one that bears the insignia of a Yorkshire regiment. A trestle table at the rear is lined with helmets, an arrangement of rusty-bladed bayonets and a collection of variously twisted pieces of metal. Edie shakes her head and turns away.
‘You mean you don’t want a souvenir Pickelhaube? I can’t tempt you with a lump of shrapnel?’
She moves ahead of him, her steps slowing as she peers into the display cases down the right-hand side of the room. She is standing on her tiptoes. She leans closer and he can see her reflection and her breath misting the glass. The cases are ful
l of salvaged personal belongings. He sees pipes and tobacco tins, cigarette cases, shaving sets and propelling pencils. There are penknives, rosaries and a row of spectacles, looking poignantly fragile. There is something terrible, he thinks, about these spectacles, the light blinking off their blind ownerless eyes. Edie’s reflection moves over tie pins, framed photographs and wedding rings. She turns to Harry and wrinkles her nose. He thinks about Rachel moving around the room of identifying objects. What price would her rings fetch? Are these things too the property of missing men? He both looks for – and doesn’t want to see – items that might have been his own.
‘Can I help you young folks?’ says the man at the back of the room.
Edie gasps and then laughs.
He steps forward out of the shadows and smiles. He is wearing an army greatcoat over a smoking jacket that has seen better days. Licking the palm of his fingerless gloves, he smooths his yellow hair and then offers the hand to Harry. Damp wool presses against his palm.
‘Michael Dillon at your service, sir. A pair of redheads, eh? There’s trouble ahead!’ He whistles through his teeth and touches a joshing fist to Harry’s chest. ‘Is it a souvenir for your lovely girl that you’re after?’
‘Not quite,’ says Harry.
‘Anything that you want, we can get it for you. A trinket? A jewel? A keepsake? Or perhaps it’s something more personal? No request too exotic or too awkward. The world begins again here and we can make it what we want it to be.’ Michael Dillon’s eyes narrow as he grins.
‘We were told that you might be able to give us some information,’ Harry says.
Edie steps forward. Harry is aware of the pressure of her fingertips on his shoulder.
‘Information, is it? And what would that be, then?’
‘You might know someone,’ says Edie. ‘Or might have known someone.’
Dillon tilts his chin. ‘Well, I might! Did the particular someone have a name, or is it a guessing game?’
‘Does the name Francis Blythe mean anything to you?’
‘Blythe?’ Dillon speaks the name slowly. Harry watches his mouth shape the word. His eyes slide to the ceiling. His mouth looks as though it’s about to make an answer, but he shakes his head instead.
The Photographer of the Lost Page 22