‘We think that he might have been here in October 1917 – in the place called the Blue Angel.’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Dillon. ‘So many names. So many faces. Blythe? October 1917? It was hardly blithe times. I can’t put a face to the name. Why is it that you want to know?’
‘Only to fit together a piece in a puzzle.’
‘Fair enough,’ says Dillon and smiles.
Harry feels Edie’s fingers release. She turns away behind.
‘Could I maybe leave you the address of our hotel, in case anything comes to mind?’
‘I doubt that it will, but it can’t hurt, can it?’
Dillon has long yellow fingernails, Harry sees, as he hands the piece of paper over. He folds the paper and winks as he stows it in his smoking-jacket pocket.
‘Harry?’
When he turns, Edie is pointing at the display cabinet.
‘Harry, this is mine.’
Her finger is pressed against the glass. Beyond it is a lozenge of grey metal suspended from a tattered brown ribbon.
‘It can’t be,’ he says.
‘Would you like to see the item, miss?’
Dillon unlocks the cabinet with a key and then dangles the object from his finger. Edie watches it as if it is some kind of power-issuing amulet.
‘It’s mine, Harry. It’s my Saint Christopher.’
Dillon twists the ribbon round in his fingers. It spins in the light and the relief shows on the metal. Harry feels inexplicably repulsed by the thing.
‘Patron saint of travellers – happen it’s travelled back to you, miss? Would you like me to find you the price?’
‘It could be anyone’s.’ Harry looks beyond the turning medal. Edie seems to be mesmerized by it. ‘It’s not yours,’ he says.
*
‘You think he knows something, don’t you?’ The bell rings behind Edie as they step out onto the street.
‘Yes.’
‘Why is it that you want to know about this?’ Edie repeats the question that Dillon asked of Harry. ‘Why does this Blue Angel business matter? What exactly is it that you want to know?’
‘There were some days, towards the end, when we weren’t together, when I don’t know where Francis was. I’d like to know where he went. Who did he talk to? How was he feeling? If he came into Ypres, what for? It would satisfy my curiosity to have the pieces complete.’
‘Your puzzle might have just got more complicated. That was my Saint Christopher and you know it.’
42
Harry
Ypres, September 1921
‘When did you last have it?’
Harry turns his glass. The table is gritty beneath it. Edie puts her hand to the other side of the glass, jamming his movement, forcing him to look up. The tower, behind her, is gnarled into a shape that looks feudal, like a relic of the twelfth century. It all seems so long ago.
‘October 1917.’
He remembers the feel of the ribbon around his neck, the sensation of that moment as she had put it over his head. Seconds earlier it had been against her skin and it had held her warmth, he recalls. Could it be the same? He had felt himself blush on the station in Poperinghe, under his brother’s appraising gaze, a hot rush rising up from the red ribbon. As he had walked away from the railway tracks, he had taken it off and buttoned it into his pack.
‘It can’t be yours,’ he says again.
‘How can you be so sure?’
He’s not certain that he is.
She shields her eyes with her hand, cuts out the glare. He follows the direction of her gaze. A fairground has been set up in the square over the course of the day. There are charabancs in from Ostend and a determined show of gaiety and animation. Children are riding on a merry-go-round. Green horses with flaming red nostrils are gently ebbing and rising to a plucked metal rendition of an old song about love and roses and Colinette with the sea-blue eyes. Men are taking their chances on the shooting gallery. The crack of the rifles makes Harry jump.
‘Steady,’ says Edie and smiles at him across the table. She stretches, points her toes and extends fingertips to receive a sky that is uncomplicatedly blue, as pure and unblemished as a robin’s egg. ‘Have you got a cigarette? I’ll permit you to appease me with a cigarette.’
‘Do you never buy your own packet?’
‘No.’
‘Did you see his fingernails? He reminded me of a rat. I bet he goes out picking over the ground. I can picture his busy fingers – scrit, scrat – scratching in the ground.’
‘You didn’t like him much, did you?’
‘All of that stuff belongs to other people. I could almost feel him digging in my own grave.’
‘Only you’re not in your grave, are you?’
A Neapolitan tune is jangling out from the merry-go-round. He remembers Caruso’s gramophone voice crackling over the lake. Edie’s fingers tap the beat on her glass.
‘Don’t worry, I wouldn’t dream of making you dance.’
She turns her glass and the prisms spin. A stall is selling waffles and its smell of burnt fat and sugar makes him feel slightly sick.
‘It’s a bit like a carnival in a graveyard, isn’t it?’
‘Just be grateful that there isn’t a chorus line and clowns.’
He hears American accents above the jangling music. White grins cluster together in front of a camera lens. He can’t imagine wanting to take Edie’s photograph in this place. A wasp is drowning noisily in the bottom of his glass. He tips it out, rinses the glass with water and refills it with wine.
‘You’re drinking a lot now,’ she says.
‘And so are you.’ He touches his glass to hers.
‘More now, though.’ She raises her glass to him. ‘What will we do, Harry?’
She exhales. He watches the smoke curl from her lips. ‘I don’t know.’
*
They leave their coins on the table and set off towards the hotel. They pass a bag of fried potatoes between them and Edie links his arm. Her eyelids are drooping slightly and he wonders if she is perhaps slightly drunk. Ahead of them a woman pushes a man in a wheelchair.
‘It is a good and noble and proper thing for a widow-woman to take on a damaged man,’ she says, ‘to come to a mutually beneficial arrangement, to betroth him a lifetime of care, as it were.’
‘And where did you read that?’
‘In a newspaper. Do you think they resent each other?’
‘Sometimes. They probably also need each other.’
‘I did love him, you know,’ she says. ‘I never stopped loving him. But he’d changed when he came home on leave. It was difficult. We didn’t know how to talk to each other. When I read that word damaged in the newspaper recently, I thought of how he’d been that week. I mean, it’s not just walking sticks and wheelchairs, is it? I’m not wrong, am I?’
‘No. I understand. I know how he was, and I worried for you when he was coming home. I guessed that it might have been that way for you.’
‘That doesn’t mean that I want it to be this way, though.’ She waves a chip in emphasis. ‘We would have found a way through it. I would have looked after him. If I could have him walk down this street towards me now, I would.’
She says it a little too forcefully to be convincing. Harry stares down the street. The houses ahead have all been shorn up with scaffolding to make them safe. ‘Of course.’
‘I cried in a department store after the letter came, when they told me that he wasn’t coming back. There was a vase of irises on the counter, and suddenly it struck me that he would never again be there with a bunch of flowers in his hands. The smell of them! The poor shop assistant didn’t know where to look.’
He thinks of the blue irises in her kitchen. How long after the letter had she made the decision to start buying flowers for herself? He looks at Edie and considers what conclusions that decision process must have contained. ‘Francis wouldn’t want you to cry,’ he says, and wonders if that is true.
&
nbsp; ‘Sometimes I look up at you and it’s him. It catches me out. I forget sometimes how very alike you are.’
Her words catch him out and he looks down. When he shaves he is aware of his bones, how they are more visible now, how they more obviously determine the shape of his face. He sees Francis in the shape of his bones, in the angle of his cheeks and the line of his jaw. He considers what Francis would look like now, four years on. It more troubles than reassures him that he sees Francis in his own face.
‘Occasionally,’ she goes on, ‘in a certain light, it’s as if you’re him.’
‘I’m sorry, Edie.’
It surprises him that she laughs. ‘Sorry again, eh? Why sorry?’
‘That I’m not him.’
‘And that’s just it. The bones and the muscles are all the same, but your expressions are completely different – what’s going on below the surface is completely different – and the worst of it is that I’m not sure whether I’m glad of that or not.’ She looks up at him as if she expects his judgement. He looks down at the bag of chips. ‘Oh dear. I’ve had too much to drink, haven’t I?’
‘It’s this place,’ says Harry.
He’s noticed that she looks at him a lot. He catches her sometimes, sees her reflected eyes following him in mirrors and window panes. He does the same to her. He is frightened sometimes that if he takes his eyes off her she won’t be there when he looks again.
‘We should go home,’ she says, ‘and pretend all of this never happened. Not look back. Refuse to remember. Make ourselves deaf to the doubts. Just start completely new lives.’ When she turns to him her eyelashes are full of tears. She blinks and they fall.
‘You need to sleep.’
She leans her forehead against his shoulder as they stand at the bottom of the stairs. He can feel the rhythm of her breath and wants to both break away and stay like this forever. He remembers her laughing mouth spinning in a long-ago garden and the confusion of feelings that had whirled around him in that instant. There is no laughter in her face now though as she looks at him. He watches Edie’s up-close eyes scan across his face. Is she searching to find Francis there?
‘I have to phone Mr Lee tonight,’ he says.
Edie nods slowly. ‘You must do what you have to.’
He leans against the wall as soon as he is out of the hotel door and lights a cigarette. The match shakes in his hand. He kicks at the wall.
Mr Lee’s faraway voice spells out names and regimental numbers and issues directions to cemeteries. Harry draws merry-go-round horses and angels around the names and numbers. He draws question marks around Francis’ name.
The sound of her breathing is slowing, he can hear it through the paper wall, that fine line between his dreams and hers, and so Harry makes tentative steps around the unfamiliar floorboards, not wanting to disturb her sleep. Careful movements. Shallow breaths. When he closes his eyes, he sees the cabinets full of framed photographs and shaving sets and penknives. He sees Francis’ photographs and razor and knife – and the lucky charm that perhaps ought to have been his.
43
Harry
Ypres, September 1921
Harry whittles a pencil to a point and goes to retrieve the sketchbook from his bunk. He treads carefully on the stairs. It is dark in the dugout and his fingertips stretch to find the walls. He curses as he kicks at a fallen-over stool, kicks it into Alfred McCabe’s suspended shins.
He staggers back. Hanging from the beam, his belt about his throat, Alfred McCabe creaks. His tongue protrudes horribly. There is a crust of blood in his beard. His eyes bulge, but there is no brightness of life behind them. Only the red ribbon, wound through McCabe’s dead fingers, stirs. A silver-plated Saint Christopher spins.
Harry vomits. McCabe is their old contemptible, their regular, their warhorse; he is all swagger and soldiering lingo, is all talk of Boers and cavalry and Mafeking medals on his chest. It doesn’t seem right that McCabe should be dead. Harry straightens and wipes his mouth on his sleeve. Now they are all as good as dead. ‘Old soldiers never die,’ he whispers. ‘Young ones wish they would.’
The electric bulb dips and buzzes and suddenly Harry sees that McCabe’s face is not his, but his brother’s. Francis Blythe, wrongly and rightly, is hanging dead in a dugout south of Cambrai. Harry stares. He gulps for breath, his chest shudders, blood bangs in his ears, but his brain and his eye cannot align. Gravity jolts. He is transfixed by the face of his four-months-maybe-dead brother. He scans the dugout. All is as it was: he touches the iron-clad walls, the wooden props, the pressed-earth floor, the mirror and the pin-ups and posted poems, and McCabe’s boots, suspended still six inches off the earth. He hears water drip and smells damp clay and tastes blood where he has bitten his lip.
He takes a step closer, his legs unsteady. Francis’ lips are cracked and all the colour has gone out of them. But his lips are parted, as if he does yet have something to say. Harry doesn’t want to hear what his brother’s dead mouth might have to say. He doesn’t want to look at his dead face up close like this, but fear fixes him to the spot. Francis’ hair sticks to his forehead in damp curls. Dirt accentuates the contours of his cheeks. Fatigue hollows his eyes. But then Francis’ eyes flash open, pupils dilated. His wide, dark-lashed, blue eyes address Harry’s own.
*
Harry screams. Terror tears out of him and then there is the shock of black silence. The black is the dilation of a pupil barely an inch from his own. When he gasps his breath mists the mirror. His eyes refocus and the mirror is breaking. He watches the fissures spread. It is a sigh and then a crackle and only the shattering rush of noise right then at the end. His own reflected face falls in fragments.
‘Harry!’ It is her voice through the paper wall. ‘Harry, what’s happening?’
He slides down to the floor and sits amongst the splinters. There is glass everywhere now. The half-lit lines of the room are alien for a second. He puts his head between his knees and tries to remember how to breathe. He hears her door open and close and then she is banging at his. He watches the handle turning. She keeps banging. He reels away, retracks.
‘Harry! Please let me in.’
He cuts his hand on the glass as he stands. There is blood on his shirt and now hand-printed on the door. Edie looks pale under the electric light. There are other voices and faces on the corridor. She pushes him into the room and shuts the door behind them.
‘Harry, what’s happened?’
She holds his hands between hers and steers him towards the wash basin. Harry watches as she pours from the jug. His blood swirls pink in the white basin. The water is cold. His hands are trembling. He can hear Edie breathing.
‘Harry?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
She takes his hands from the water and dries them on a towel. She turns his hands over, runs her fingertips over them and pulls a piece of glass from his palm. Her fingers tremble, he sees, and she gasps at the same moment that he does, as if that sharp flinch of pain is her own. There is a smear of red on the shard of glass. He recalls her, earlier in the day, holding a piece of blue glass up to the light, the quivering triangle of blue light on her throat.
‘You’re shivering. Talk to me,’ she says.
‘I broke the mirror.’
‘But why?’
‘I didn’t mean to.’
He thinks about Francis’ face in the mirror of the ransacked house, their eyes meeting in the mirror and then the trinkets and violets raining down on his head. The memory makes him want to put his hands over his head. Don’t look like that, he hears Francis’ voice again. It’s for Edie.
‘I had a dream,’ Harry says. ‘A nightmare. I must have sleepwalked.’
‘Have you cut your feet?’ She pulls her shawl around her shoulders. It is embroidered with Indian flowers, he sees. The fringe of the shawl brushes softly against his hand. Harry imagines that he can smell the musky silk roses.
‘I don’t think so.’
He sits on t
he edge of the bed while she washes his feet. His eyes keep closing. He’s not sure that he isn’t still asleep. She sweeps the glass together and folds it into a newspaper. His hand aches where she pulled the glass from it. Her hands lift up his feet and pull over the sheets. She puts a finger to her lips and then there is nothing but the black.
‘It will be all right,’ says Edie’s voice.
He shuts his eyes and briefly believes her.
44
Harry
Proven military camp, west of Ypres, October 1917
‘You’ve heard nothing from him?’ asked Captain Rose.
‘Not a word. I last saw him on the station in Poperinghe – that was on his way out.’
Rose was writing in a book. Harry could see that he’d drawn a pair of eyes and a dog in the margins. The dog had forlorn hound eyes and its tail between its legs. ‘That would be the twenty-fourth of September, then?’
‘Yes, sir. I suppose so. Nearly three weeks ago now.’
‘So tell me: how come Corporal Butterworth reported seeing him in the vicinity of the camp ten days ago?’ Rose checked the notes in his book. ‘Butterworth swears that he saw him here on the fourth of October – the day that he was due back from home-leave. He says that your brother came into the camp, but then left again.’
It was the first that Harry had heard of it. ‘I don’t know anything about that, sir. Could Butterworth have been mistaken?’
‘He’s made a sworn statement. He says that he saw Francis going out through the gates.’
Harry shook his head.
‘Why would he come into camp, but then leave again?’ Rose asked.
‘I can’t imagine why he’d do that. It doesn’t sound right. As I say, I’ve heard nothing from him.’
Rose looked up. ‘All right, Harry. I believe you. But this isn’t good for him, you know. We can’t have men wandering off. It isn’t tolerated.’
‘I understand that,’ said Harry, wondering what that non-toleration meant.
The Photographer of the Lost Page 23