‘Did you have any concerns about his peace of mind when he left? Was Lance Corporal Blythe quite himself?’
He had forgotten about the change of rank. For a moment he wasn’t sure who Lance Corporal Blythe was. ‘I hadn’t noticed any recent change,’ he replied, wondering if that was true. He thought about his brother’s face on the station. How much older he suddenly looked. How his eyes didn’t seem to be there. How he had worried about that man going home to be with Edie. Should he be concerned now for Edie?
Rose twisted the cap onto his fountain pen. There was ink on his fingers and parts of a camera on his desk. He’d had a new Autographic sent out from England, Harry knew, and had recently given his old Kodak to Francis. Wouldn’t Rose himself know if there was something significantly wrong with Francis’ mind, if something had broken in his brother’s head? Rose pushed his notebook away and looked up at Harry. ‘If you were a betting man, where would you say he is?’
‘At home. With his wife. It makes no sense that he’d come here only to leave again.’
‘I can sit on Captain Frean for three more days. You do understand the seriousness of this, don’t you?’
‘I do, sir, yes.’
‘Very well. Let’s just hope that Lance Corporal Blythe’s train has been delayed. By ten days.’
*
Harry walked back across the field. A band was playing behind the huts, men standing in groups and looking on. ‘ “She is watching by the poplars,” ’ they sang along, ‘ “Colinette with the sea-blue eyes. She is watching and longing and waiting, where the long white roadway lies.” ’ Two men in kilts were laughing as their feet picked out dainty steps. The sky behind, which the previous night had rained long-range shells, was now pink and perfectly serene. At another time he might have stopped and drawn the scene.
‘What did Rose say?’ asked Pembridge. He was sitting on the steps of the hut scraping mud out of the tread of his boots with a stick.
‘That Francis is for it.’
‘Do you think he’s still in England?’
He wondered if he should write to Edie. Could Francis be there with her? If Francis wasn’t right in his mind, what would that mean for Edie? Could he find a way to get a message through to her to check that nothing had happened? But what if Francis was there and intended not to be found? ‘Part of me hopes that he’s bribed his way onto a boat and is halfway to Argentina.’
Pembridge didn’t look convinced by this hypothesis. He handed Harry a cigarette and shrugged.
Armstrong, leaning in the doorway, whistled. ‘Is he that keen on corned beef?’
‘He’ll lose his stripe at the very least,’ said Pembridge.
*
Harry sat on his bed. Rose had disclosed that they were likely to be shifting north next week, up beyond Langemarck, where it was all marsh and gas. Perhaps Francis was right to have got away, then? Perhaps that’s all that it was, and how could Harry blame him if he’d made that decision?
Beyond the windows of the hut they were encoring the chorus of the song. There was no noise of guns and stars were starting to show in the pink-tinted sky. He wanted to sit on the steps and draw it, to smoke Pembridge’s cigarettes and to not think about anything more than whether his line was true and his composition balanced. He touched the drawing book in his pocket. The book that she had given him. But, if Francis was there with her now, and not in his right mind, shouldn’t Harry be doing something? Shouldn’t he at least check that nothing bad had happened? He had to write to Edie. His fingers stretched under the bed towards his haversack. It must have been kicked further under. He kneeled down on the boards and peered beneath the metal frame. His stretching fingers found only an old blanket. He lit a match but it illuminated only a spider’s web and a forgotten spoon.
Pembridge, out on the steps still, was singing about shining roses and the hush of the silvery dew.
‘Jack, my bag has gone.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ said the older man.
They searched the cupboards, the latrines and behind the iron stove. Harry thought about his sketchbooks, his pencils, his letters, his diary and Edie’s red ribbon wound around it. They searched the recreation hut, the cookhouse and the laundry.
‘It’s gone,’ said Harry. ‘Some bastard has offed it.’
‘When did you last have it?’
‘I don’t know. A week ago? A week and a half? I haven’t looked for it. I haven’t needed it.’
‘Don’t worry, son. We’ll club together and sort you out.’
Harry thought about his drawings and his private words and the luck token that she had handed him. How could they club together and bring that back? How could that be sorted out?
‘You should go and tell Rose,’ said Pembridge. ‘It’s probably been taken by accident, or some sticky-fingered sod will have pilfered your cash and your smokes and dumped the rest somewhere.’
Harry looked around the dim field. The band had finished playing now and groups of men – faces that he knew and didn’t know – were milling about. He looked at the milling faces with a sudden new suspicion.
Pembridge put a hand on Harry’s shoulder as they walked towards their hut. ‘Happen we head into the village and I shout you a chin-up beer?’
Harry turned to reply, but then a cry was coming from the hut. He recognized Armstrong’s accent. ‘No sign of Blythe’s kit,’ came his voice in the dark, ‘but his brother has just turned up.’
‘Lose sixpence and find a shilling, eh?’ said Pembridge, patting Harry’s back. He couldn’t put into words the sensation that made the lights of the camp suddenly spin around him.
45
Harry
Ypres, September 1921
Image order: Mrs Alice Gray would like a photograph of the grave of her husband, Pte. Percy Gray (46389, 15th Sherwood Foresters, died of wounds 30/10/1917). Grave number 153.
‘I bought it,’ Edie says. The medal is there on the breakfast table. He thinks that it looks slightly unsanitary and moves his coffee cup away.
‘How?’
‘How? I didn’t have to slay lions or walk across bridges of fire. I simply went over to the shop before breakfast and handed over money in exchange for it.’
‘I shan’t ask how much money he made you hand over.’
‘Don’t look like that. I’ll clean it up. You didn’t mind taking it off me once.’
‘But it’s not yours, Edie. It can’t be. Don’t you see? It doesn’t make any sense.’
‘There’s so much that doesn’t make sense,’ she says. She bites her toast and turns away from him.
‘Edie?’
‘Do you always have to be right?’
‘Hardly,’ he says. ‘I lost mine fifteen miles west of here and four years ago. It’s probably been buried under mud since then, all rusted and flaked away.’ He stares at the dull and grimed object on the white tablecloth.
‘Probably, probably,’ says Edie.
‘What are the odds?’
The waitress hovers with a coffee pot and they silently watch as she fills their cups. Edie pockets the medal and apologizes.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ he says.
She shakes her head. ‘How’s your hand now?’ Her cool fingers stretch across the table and take his, turning over his palm. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘It’s nothing.’ He might have believed that he had dreamed it but for the red handprint on the door and the disappearance of his reflection. ‘I cut myself more trying to shave without a mirror this morning.’
‘I’ll ask if they can find you a replacement. I did notice that there was shaving soap in your ear.’ She laughs at him and then stops. ‘Does it happen often?’
‘Shaving misadventures?’
‘That you have nightmares.’
‘No.’
‘No? I’m not sure that I believe you.’ She narrows her eyes to show she’s not convinced. ‘Seven years’ bad luck for breaking a mirror.’
It’s not the first broken
mirror, but in his nightmares he’s usually in the wood. The images come back with the night, with the dark, flickering like newsreel. His dreaming eyes open in the black-green light, under the canopy, amongst the broken and the twisted things, with the live, the dead, and the in-between. The dead walk abroad again in the wood of his dreams, un-whole and unwholesome in rags and black blood. He stumbles with them and away from them over tree roots and brambles. He doesn’t need Edie to know how often he has that nightmare, how he walks in the night, or how often he’s screaming when he lurches awake.
‘You scared me last night,’ says Edie. ‘I was frightened for you.’
‘It’s just being back in this place.’
‘Of course. I understand that.’ She turns her coffee cup and then looks up at him. ‘You dreamed about Francis last night, didn’t you?’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘I could almost see it printed on your eyes – that, and I dreamed about him too.’
He looks at Edie. What image of Francis did her dreaming eyes see? What did she see of Francis in his eyes? The only image in Edie’s eyes now is his own reflection. ‘Do you want to go to Tyne Cot today?’
She shakes her head.
‘You do still mean to?’
‘I do, but not today.’
‘You know that you don’t have to,’ he says. ‘As you said last night, we could just go home and try to forget.’
‘Could we? Could you? What kind of life could we have if we never know? What sort of decisions could we build on that doubt?’
‘We might never know.’
‘I have to try,’ she replies.
*
He puts the flowers on Percy Gray’s grave, as requested by his wife. Edie watches as he takes the photograph.
‘Poor lad,’ she says. ‘How old was he?’
‘Twenty-six, the same age as I am now. I talked with his wife. He had two children.’
‘How terrible for them. I wonder if one day, when they’re grown-up, they’ll make this journey?’
There were hessian sacks laid out by the roadside outside the cemetery. Harry had seen bits of leather that might have been boots, a second-lieutenant’s epaulettes, some unidentifiably mangled pieces of metalwork and what looked horribly like a jawbone. He had steered Edie aside. He hopes that, if this is what they might see, his photograph will steer Percy Gray’s children away from ever making this journey. He hopes that it will be enough to silence all of the questions that he had heard in his wife’s voice. He also rather hopes that seeing this cemetery might deter Edie from wanting to visit Tyne Cot.
He has read about the white cemeteries – God’s Acres, as the newspaper article called them – but this is the first one that he has seen. He is struck by the cleanness of the new-cut stone, the tidiness of it all. They are smart these men, fixed forever more in parade-ground order, well turned out and playing by the rules. He thinks about standing at Edie’s side by the lychgate four months ago and looking into the overgrown churchyard by the reservoir. The tombs in the old graveyard were carved with sleeping angels and acanthus leaves and ivy for fidelity. Lichen bloomed across the In Memoriams and the Loving Memories. Harry could see it all as sharp as a photograph and smell the peppermints in her mouth and the verbena soap on her skin. He looks at her now as she walks along the white line and wonders what it is that she really wants back.
They walk through the rows together. There are English garden flowers planted around the graves – pansies, harebells and columbines. They look strange here these cottage garden plants and clipped lawns, oddly foreign, assertively English, but also somehow not quite right. It is perhaps the straight-lined planting and the clean soil in between. There are rose bushes at the end of the rows, their scent strong. He wonders: does Francis too now have a clean white stone and a smell of roses? There is something about this place that strikes him as a white lie.
‘Five hundred thousand headstones have been ordered,’ he tells her. ‘They all have to be shipped over from England. They sink a concrete beam into the ground and the graves all slot neatly into it, so that they’ll never fall over. Straight and true for all eternity. I suppose that they could all go down like a set of dominoes, otherwise.’
‘I’m not sure I wanted to know that.’
‘There’s something slightly too tidy and practical and decent about it. Don’t you think?’
‘Decent? You mean that it shouldn’t be?’
‘ “The stones will endure for all time and excite the wonder and the reverence of remote generations” – I read that phrase. It rather struck me.’
There are lines of young, flimsy-looking trees planted around the edges of the cemetery. Beyond them are other trees, bent and blasted, with metal splinters embedded in some of their trunks. They are both ugly and beautiful, these stubborn trees; they are both candid witnesses and resurgent life. New growth breaks from scarred trunks, which are older than his brothers might ever be.
At the front of the cemetery is a cross. They pause for a while and look up. Edie links her arm through his. The stone is inscribed with the words, Their names liveth for evermore. He remembers Francis on the post, his arms and ankles tied, the shape of his bound body reminding Harry of a painting of the crucifixion that he had once seen. He remembers Francis then with his arms spread and his face at that last moment. That is the image of Francis that will endure in his mind for evermore. It’s an image that he means Edie’s eyes to never know.
‘Come away,’ he says to her.
46
Harry
Proven military camp, west of Ypres, October 1917
There had been a painting of the crucifixion in Denham Hall. Harry had stood in front of it for some time. It was a gilded panel which, one of the staff had told him, was a section from a fifteenth-century altarpiece; it had been brought back by a member of the family two centuries earlier, a grand tour souvenir from Siena. Harry had stared at the blue receding hills, the curve of the valleys and the flooded low places. There was great serenity and antiquity in that smoky retreating landscape. It was a smooth and still backdrop that he would like to have walked into with a day’s leisure and a Thermos flask. In the foreground, figures in robes of vermilion and ultramarine were making busy gesticulations. In the centre Christ was a small, thin mortal man on a cross too diminutive to inspire awe. His face, eyes cast down, was weary.
Harry hadn’t seen anything divine in this painting, it hadn’t filled him with righteousness or courage; he had just felt pity for the poor pained arms and the quiet sadness that showed in the shadows around his eyes. Looking now, beyond the window of Rose’s hut and seeing his brother slumped on the cross, he felt pity again, but also an anger that had been completely absent from the painting.
‘They’ve taken his stripe off him,’ said Rose.
‘They? None of this is your doing, then?’
‘I spoke up for him, Harry. I told them that he’d been under strain and that this was completely out of character.’
‘It’s barbaric.’
‘It’s two hours per day. It’s not as if he’s being flogged.’
‘Only because it’s been outlawed. It’s two hours a day for thirty-five days! It’s humiliating. Have you seen his face? His disgrace is written all over it.’
‘Regrettably it’s meant to be. It’s a show – a demonstration. He’s being made an example of.’
‘He won’t speak to me.’
‘I am sorry, Harry, but there have to be rules. He was absent without leave for ten days. If Francis isn’t punished for that, what’s to stop everyone from taking a fortnight’s holiday? What’s to stop us all from going home?’
‘But he came back, didn’t he?’
‘That’s not the point,’ said Rose, ‘as you well know.’
‘Did he tell you why he didn’t come back on time? Did he tell you where he went?’
‘He hardly spoke when they questioned him. They might have been more lenient if he’d been more f
orthcoming. It wound Frean up, his silence. He took it for insolence.’
Harry looked down at Rose’s desk. Amongst the paperwork he could see a tin of sprats and a jar of Gentlemen’s Relish. Rose’s fingers worked discarded toffee papers into twists. ‘It’s only a couple of months ago that Frean was putting him up for promotion. You instigated that.’
‘And with no regret. He deserved it. I regard Francis as a friend. I respect him. I think he’s a good soldier. You can hardly imagine that I’m happy about this, can you, Harry?’
‘We volunteered for this. He came back voluntarily.’
‘I do know that.’ Rose pushed away papers and stood up. Harry thought that he could smell whisky on his breath. ‘If you want to know the truth, we’re expecting to move out of here within days. I shouldn’t tell you this, and it must stay within these walls, but we’re going up towards the front next week. He won’t really have to do thirty-five days. This will just get forgotten.’
‘But he won’t forget it. I won’t forget it.’
‘We all must make an effort,’ said the captain.
*
They had tied him to the post, his hands bound behind his back and his legs tethered by the ankles. The camp was thronging with people, but it was as if Francis were issuing some unfriendly energy, creating a circle of green space around him. Harry stepped into the space.
He had shouted at first. Harry had heard him. They had stood and watched from the windows of the hut as Francis was brought out. All of the anger had gone out of him now, though. His head hung down. His eyes were almost closed. He looked as penitent, as humiliated, as disgraced as a man could be.
Harry felt Francis flinch as he put a hand to his shoulder. He kept his face turned away.
‘It’s for another twenty minutes,’ Harry said and looked at his wristwatch. ‘Rose reckons that it’ll stop next week anyway because we’re on the move.’
Francis barely seemed to register his presence. There were dark shadows under his eyes. He looked as though he hadn’t slept or washed for days.
The Photographer of the Lost Page 24