‘It will all get forgotten, Frannie, so long as you don’t take it to heart.’
He laughed mirthlessly and angled his face away.
‘Francis, where were you? Why did you do it?’
He shut his eyes and leaned his head against the post.
‘Frannie, I’m sorry. I wish you’d just talk to me. I wish that there’s something I could do.’
‘Sorry?’ said Francis.
His eyes flashed open then. Harry could see the red veins in the whites of Francis’ eyes.
‘You’re sorry?’
In truth, beyond his pity, Harry wasn’t sure what he was sorry for. He wasn’t certain what act he was meant to repent. But the look that Francis gave him made him feel as if he had betrayed him utterly. Francis stared at him. His gaze was impossible to hold. Harry turned and walked away.
47
Edie
Ypres, September 1921
Edie watches the man hovering in the street down below, retracing his steps backwards and forwards along the frontage of the hotel. When he looks up, his hat tilting, his eyes obviously scanning the floors above, she knows who it is and why he is here, and she steps away from her window.
She had known that there was something more. Something had flashed across Michael Dillon’s face when Harry said Francis’ name. When she had gone back to buy the Saint Christopher, she had half expected him to tell her. It was part of the reason she had returned. But then she had asked Dillon how the ribbon came into his possession, and he had smiled wistfully and told her that things fell into his hands. She knows now, though, that there is more to all of this. That he knows more.
Edie steps to the curtains and glances down again. He is still there, pushing open the door of the hotel now. She sits down on the bed and readies herself for the noise of his feet on the stairs, and then his knock on her door, but why does that cause her heart to race?
She makes herself walk to the washbasin and turn her hands in the cold water. The pale woman in the mirror looks her in the eye, straightens her dress and smooths her hair. Edie tells herself that she is ready for this, that she will cope with whatever comes next. She can do this.
His hand is at the door quicker than she anticipates. She has hardly had time to compose herself before he is standing in the doorway, inviting himself in, his eyes all around her room. She is not sure whether she feels more affronted or frightened, and half wishes that she had turned the key in the lock, so that she might be able to hold her breath, so that she might have been given a choice about what comes next.
‘Mr Dillon?’
‘Mrs Blythe – dear lovely Mrs Blythe! Please excuse the incursion, only the young lady on the reception desk was kind enough to let me have your room number.’
‘She did?’
‘It’s not a liberty, is it? Can you forgive me the liberty?’
His smile fixes on her face. She’s not sure why Michael Dillon’s smile makes her tremble. ‘Do you have something to tell me, Mr Dillon? There is something more, isn’t there?’
‘Oh, well,’ he says. He shrugs. He takes his hat off and turns it in his hands. ‘It might be nothing now.’
It is only at that moment that she notices the bag over his shoulder. It is a canvas khaki haversack, of the sort that Francis came home with all that time ago. She can still picture Francis’ bag waiting in the hallway. He had shrugged it off there when he came through the door, and she had hardly dared to touch it in the days that followed. Could this be the same bag? If Dillon has this, then surely it’s true that he met Francis. Does Dillon now know where Francis is?
‘It’s his?’ she asks.
She watches as Dillon swings the pack off and holds it out towards her. Once again, she finds herself afraid to touch it.
‘I don’t know about that, miss.’
‘The man who gave you that bag – do you know where he is?’ She watches it swing, suspended between them. Eventually he puts it down on the ground.
‘The young chap who you’re with is the spit of him, isn’t he? For a moment I thought it was the same man walking into the shop.’
‘Then you have met Francis.’ She stares at the bag on the ground. ‘He’s here? You’ve seen him recently?’
‘No, Mrs Blythe. Don’t misunderstand me. I was running a store of sorts, back in the day – razor blades, pencils, writing paper, bars of soap, bars of chocolate – all the requisites that your fighting man might need, you see? Well, we all did what we could. I bought and sold and did a bit of barter. I seem to recall that your man exchanged it for a bottle of beer, but it was a rum deal. It was no bargain. It’s only papers inside, see? Apart from your old Saint Chris, there was nothing worth having. The trinket was yours, miss, wasn’t it? Has the old feller found his way home to you? Call me a tender heart, but I do like a happy ending.’
‘When was Francis here? When did you see him?’
Dillon runs his hands through his hair and then shakes his head.
‘Please?’
‘Back end of’ seventeen? Early ’eighteen? In the black days, certainly. I was moving from cellar to cellar. Now those were rum times.’ He looks at her. ‘It’s been in my storeroom for a long time, but it’s where your Saint Christopher came from, and so I figured it might have some significance to you. That it might have some emotional value, I mean.’
She looks at Dillon and realizes that he means her to give him money for it. She looks at the bag on the floor, at Francis’ bag, and is not certain that she wants to possess it.
‘Nineteen-eighteen? Are you sure of that?’
‘There or thereabouts. It gives me satisfaction to return a treasure to its owner,’ he says.
‘Did you see him again? The man who gave you the pack, I mean. Have you seen him since?’
‘Not that I can recall, but a lot of faces have passed through.’
‘Do you know where he went after?’
‘Where did any of them go?’
She knows that he won’t tell her more and she wants Dillon to be gone, then. She hears Harry’s recalled voice saying scrit-scrat and knows this man is a rat. ‘Please. Do have this. For your trouble.’ She takes a note from her purse and puts it in his outstretched palm.
‘No trouble at all, dear lady. It’s my pleasure to reunite you with it. I do like to see a lost thing found.’
He grins as he bends into a bow, and then winks at her as he straightens.
For a moment the winking eye is Francis’ black-and-white eye in that photograph, and then a blue eye that had once watched her through a library bookcase. Has Francis been watching her all along? Is he out there watching her now? She looks at his bag on the floor and suddenly it all seems so much more plausible.
With the close of the door, she stands alone again in her hotel room, and stares at the bag on the worn-down rug. She wants to both tear into its contents, to know what those papers say, and to never have to touch the thing; she is at the same time compelled and repelled by it. She slides down onto the floor and covers her face with her hands until the walls stop moving around her.
48
Harry
Ypres, September 1921
Harry looks out across the water. The old city gate is nothing now, just a grass-grown slouch of stones. He has read that it is to be rebuilt as a great archway, spanning over the road, with the names of all the missing recorded on the vault. He imagines his brother’s name arching over that space, along with David West and all the others. The plan to list them in stone as The Missing implies that they will now never be found, he supposes. Chiselling them onto a memorial implies a finality. It draws a line. But what a difficult line to negotiate. How do they move beyond that?
Bullfrogs croak unseen in the water below. He sees mangled metalwork in the water, fallen stones and limbs of trees. He thinks about the water either side of the duckboard tracks. There had been bloated bodies in the water too. There had been so many bodies. He wonders how the names of all the missing might fit within
the width of the street behind him. And how many damaged lives multiply out of that? How many derailed expectations? How many unanswered questions? How many years of waiting?
He has seen a sign for Boesinghe on the road. Does anything exist there now? Two days after Francis had been put on the post, they were back in railway carriages and heading for that destination. There had been nothing left of the village but ruins. All around it was churned mud and broken stones. The devastated landscape had no mystery and they had exchanged few words as they moved north along the tracks.
Francis had been ahead of him. Harry had seen the marks on his wrists, the red welts where they had been bound. He wanted Captain Rose to see them, to see the shame marked on Francis’ skin, to share his anger. He also wanted to see Francis’ anger. But instead he just seemed to be absent. Francis’ eyes wouldn’t connect with his. It wasn’t that they avoided him. He was simply elsewhere.
A man passes on a bicycle, raising a hand in acknowledgement. The roads are full of potholes. Harry watches the bicycle’s weaving progress, stones skittering under its tyres. An advertising panel by the side of the road offers English breakfasts and motor tours of the Salient.
Only the signpost at the side of the road – This was Langemarck – had told them that they had arrived at their destination. Otherwise it had been completely obliterated. There were no clues to prove that a town had ever stood there; there wasn’t a building or a tree, just a great stretching desolation. Harry considers what there is now for the motoring tourist to see.
They had been shelled as they moved forward to relieve the front-line trenches. They had crouched and ducked and shouted in their confusion. He had seen Francis up in front, moving stiffly, unfalteringly onwards. He didn’t flinch as earth was flung up, metal shrieked and the air rushed with shock. It had been at that point that it struck Harry that his brother no longer cared. With that realization he was overwhelmed with the need to protect Francis.
He stands now outside the hotel and looks up at Edie’s window. There is no light within but he thinks that he sees a face step away from the glass. In this instant he feels an overwhelming need to protect her.
‘We could just go home and try to forget,’ he had repeated her own words back to her that morning.
He had never told her about the marks on Francis’ wrists and didn’t suppose that anyone had ever seen fit to inform her. Should he really try to forget that? Could they really forget and move forward, as Rose had suggested?
He stands outside her door. No light leaks from around the edges of it, but he can hear her footsteps on the other side. The door moves ajar when he knocks and so he pushes it open to find her silhouette against the window.
‘Edie?’
She doesn’t answer him, just stands there, mysterious in the dim light. He can’t determine the expression on her face in the darkness. His finger moves to the light switch.
The room flicks into light and he sees it. It comes at him brightly. There are papers everywhere, over the floorboards and the dressing table and the bed. For a moment he is back in the looted house stepping through torn-out accounts of Arctic expeditions and maps of Abyssinia. But that’s not what these pages contain and Francis isn’t next door in a room full of feathers. These pages are crammed with writing, recorded images of long-ago instants and pencil portraits. The picture of the girl with the red hair is everywhere. Francis is everywhere. It’s a long time since he has seen these images, but Harry knows the work of his own hand.
‘How?’ he says simply.
‘It’s not his, it’s yours,’ she replies.
49
Harry
Ypres, September 1921
‘But how?’ Harry says it again.
‘How indeed!’ Edie laughs, but there is no humour in her face. There are red lines down her cheeks as if she has clawed at her own face. He wants to take a gentle hand to the red marks. He wants to pull her own hands away, but her laughter pushes him back.
‘Dillon had it?’
It all looks to be there, the contents of his haversack, everything that he had lost: his drawings, his notes, her letters, his diary. Harry sees his own life splayed before him, illustrated in a progression of caught instants – in ink, graphite, watercolour and words. There is Will, at eighteen, in sepia pencil and Edie with cerulean-blue eyes. There are sketches of smashed woods and broken towns, dugouts, cellars, billets, groups of once-familiar faces and her face everywhere. He had found comfort in the repetition of her faraway features, like verse rote-learned. It all looks long ago and terribly near.
‘Do you remember what you wrote?’ asks Edie. She stands up and walks towards him with his diary in her hands. ‘Do you remember what you put down on paper?’
He tries – and fears – to recall. Her face is fierce. He has never drawn her that way. He watches as she rifles through pages of his words.
‘How did Dillon have my bag?’
‘Don’t you know?’ Her fingers still. Her eyes lift from the page.
The truth is suddenly all too obvious. ‘Francis,’ he says.
‘Did you never guess that it was him that took it? Was it not obvious? He gave the bag to Dillon,’ she replies with a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Francis must have gone into the camp and taken it from you, then he came back here with it, learned what he wanted to know, and told Dillon to do what he would with the rest.’
‘He told you that?’
She nods but doesn’t look up from the notebook. He thinks of Francis reading the words that she’s now rifling through. Of course, he had suspected that it might be Francis who had taken his bag, but he didn’t want to believe that could be true. Did this, then, account for those missing days at the start of October? Is this what he did in the Blue Angel? Had he seen the ribbon around his neck on Poperinghe station and known that it was hers? There’s a pencil portrait of him on the bed – Francis in gallant profile, put down by Harry’s hand so that he might post himself back to Edie. The thought of Francis going through all his papers, of him knowing everything, makes Harry want to crouch in a corner.
‘ “How I wish that it were otherwise,” ’ Edie reads. She clears her throat and arches her eyebrows. For a moment she’s an actress reciting lines. ‘ “For a few minutes this afternoon I thought how things might be if he didn’t make it back. Am I a wretch that I even for a moment consider that?” ’ She looks up from the diary and her eyes scan across his face. She’s the dispassionate actress no longer.
He remembers recording the thought on paper. It was the day they had danced at Denham Hall. Had Francis then read these words two months on? Had he seen that whole scene?
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’re sorry? How can you have been so stupid, Harry? How can you have been so careless?’
‘I was careful. I didn’t think that he’d ever read it.’
‘But he did read it! And then by the end of that month he was gone.’ She turns her back to him. He stretches his hand towards her. She flinches with his touch.
‘You’ve no reason to feel guilty. You never did anything wrong. We never did anything wrong.’
‘But I didn’t tell him the truth, and once he’d read this, he knew that, didn’t he? I hadn’t told him that I’d seen you in the hospital. If he knew I’d chosen to keep that from him, what else might I have been lying about?’
She turns and thrusts the opened page towards him. He sees his own writing. ‘I fear that I love the one woman that I absolutely shouldn’t,’ he had written.
‘No wonder he couldn’t look at you,’ she says. ‘I’m not sure that I can look at you. Francis suspected me of something that I hadn’t done. You made me a guilty party.’
‘I’m the only one that’s guilty – and only guilty of thoughts, never deeds. There’s nothing written there that implies that you returned my feelings. Is there?’
‘But I did,’ she says. ‘That’s the worst of it.’
He stares at her with the ruins of his war all aro
und her. Might it really have been different? Could it still be?
‘Edie—’
She pushes his hand away. ‘Please, just leave me alone, Harry,’ she says.
*
What is she feeling, he considers, as she reads his hidden words? Does she feel she’s prying? Does she realize that all of his words are addressed to her? Does it strike her that he wrote to her every day?
He watches her through the gap in the wall as she reads the words that he couldn’t – and even now cannot – say to her face. She is sitting on the bed. Quite still. The only movement is the occasional flick of the page.
When she has read it all, will she forgive him? Can she understand how he felt? Could she return it? He is only grateful that the diary ends before Francis returned, before he was put on the cross and fell. She doesn’t need to know that part.
Several times her head rises from the page, as if she is considering the words that she has read. She looks towards the window, and he glimpses her profile, but she turns away from him. Occasionally she puts her finger to the page and he wonders what word it is that her finger touches.
She stands and pours herself a glass of water. Her shadowed face shifts in the mirror as she looks at her own reflection, pulling her hands through her hair. He leans his cheek against the paper wall and watches her in the mirror. He hears his own heart beating, the silent room throbs with the pulse of his heart. He is shaking.
He thinks about Francis in the Blue Angel. Did he sit in that cellar turning pages while the glasses rattled and plaster fell from the ceiling? Is this the act that caused him to be tied to a post? Was it Harry’s own words that were responsible for his brother’s humiliation? Or was it her action in putting the ribbon around his neck? His mind replays the action. Everything that comes after is an unbearable blur.
His crouched limbs ache. He watches her until she puts out the light.
50
Harry
The Photographer of the Lost Page 25