‘Hers?’
‘Yes.’
‘Saint Christopher who looks after travellers? What’s the line from the story? “The whole world couldn’t have been as heavy on my shoulders as you were”? He doesn’t seem to have done you many favours, does he?’
He winds the ribbon through his fingers and rewinds time. It can’t do any harm, can it? Edie had said as she handed it to him on the drive of the hospital. If she hadn’t given it to him, could things have been different? Would Francis ever have been in the Blue Angel? Would she have given it to Francis instead, and where then would they all be now? Would Francis have come home at the end of the war and been a husband again, even a father? Did all of that harm happen as a consequence of that action? Harry shakes his head. ‘I can’t load much blame onto a trinket and a ribbon.’
‘Aren’t you a bit furious at him, though?’
‘At Francis, you mean?’ He looks down at his glass. ‘How could I be? Why should I be? He wasn’t well. I see that now. He wasn’t thinking rationally. Everything had got out of proportion. I understand now just how unwell he was, and with his mind in that state, an ungrounded suspicion became an obsession, and then tore him apart. Perhaps I should have taken better care of him. Perhaps there’s more that I could have done. If anything, it’s me that’s the guilty party, only I’m not sure that I’m guilty of any sin beyond the occasional thought.’
‘Occasional?’ She raises an eyebrow.
‘But I didn’t do anything about it. I wouldn’t have done. I never said anything to her. Not really. I wouldn’t have betrayed him, or encouraged Edie to do anything that she shouldn’t. That would never have happened.’
‘You do seem to have been a bit hard done by.’
Beyond the window of the brasserie a woman is pushing a man in a bath chair through the square. She is pointing up at the architecture; he is staring at the blanket over his knees. ‘No,’ Harry replies. ‘Not in the grand scheme of things. I’m the one that made it through, aren’t I? I’m vaguely whole and healthy. I don’t think I have a right to feel wronged.’
‘Don’t be so ruddy reasonable,’ says Cassie.
He laughs. She rolls her eyes and reaches across for his packet of cigarettes.
‘What will you do now, then?’
‘I’ve got a list of twenty-odd graves that I’ve got to photograph.’ That list, in his pocket, presently seems a heavy thing to have to carry around. It is so much more than a piece of paper – so many people’s hopes and fears and needs. He feels the magnitude and rawness of that more than ever now.
‘Oh, Harry. Do you have to do it?’
‘It’s different for Ralph, isn’t it?’
‘Ralph does it because he’s driven to do it. It’s more of a calling than work. He has absolutely no doubts that he’s doing the right thing. I sometimes wonder if it’s some sort of penance too – him working himself back to a moral even keel – but I wouldn’t say that to him and, however he reasons it, he wouldn’t have it otherwise.’ She takes a sip of her drink and looks at Harry over the rim of her glass. ‘It hasn’t settled at all yet, has it? It’s as if all the debris is all still falling down. We’re all finding our feet and trying to pick our way through the ruins.’
‘And that’s just it: I don’t know the way. I don’t know which direction I’m meant to be going in now.’ He pushes the ribbon away. ‘I want to do the right thing, but I don’t know what that is any longer.’
‘You sound like a man in need of a compass.’ Cassie dabs her cigarette out and looks up at him through her fringe. ‘You should go after her.’
‘What can I say?’
‘Be straight. Tell her how you feel.’
‘She already knows that and she chose to go. I think that’s my answer.’
The woman with the invalided man is struggling to push his chair through the door of the brasserie. The man’s hand is caught between the chair and the door frame and Harry sees his face flinch with pain. When his head leans back there is such profound weariness in his face. A waiter rushes forward to help the wife. She smiles thanks to the young man but the exhaustion is marked all around her eyes too. Perhaps, Harry considers, it is best for Edie’s sake that she has gone.
‘You said that she left the photograph behind.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The photograph of Francis? The one that someone sent her?’
‘Yes. Here. I’ll show you.’
The envelope had been there beneath the diary. It had saddened him to see that Edie had left that too. Did she feel let down by them both? He recalls her fingers touching the edge of Francis’ photograph.
‘Hell,’ says Cassie. She turns over the photograph. ‘Poor man. His poor face. It’s a cry for help, isn’t it? No wonder it spooked her.’
‘I think she’s convinced herself that it was taken after 1917, that it might be more recent. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that was how he looked at the end.’
‘You mean she thinks it was taken after he was declared missing?’
‘And that Francis himself might have sent it to her.’
‘Jesus. She thinks he might yet be alive and sending her a calling card?’ Cassie’s eyes widen.
‘She looked scared when I met her at the station. I didn’t expect that. She kept looking around in Ypres, as if she thought he might be there, watching us.’
‘Are you absolutely certain that she’s wrong?’
‘Yes. I think so. Surely?’
‘You don’t sound one hundred per cent convinced.’ Cassie blows up her fringe. Her fingers push away the photograph. ‘Your poor Edie. What an awful thing. It’s sad that she didn’t want to keep it, but I can absolutely understand why.’ She turns the envelope over and squints at the postmark. ‘Saint-Christophe du Quercy?’
‘Is it? I couldn’t make it out. How can you tell?’
‘Three years as a doctor’s secretary. Does it ring any bells for you?’
He shakes his head. ‘But . . .’ It then strikes him. ‘I met someone from a place called Calvaire du Quercy.’ Gabriel’s address is still in his pocket. ‘A few weeks ago. Just a stranger I met in a cemetery.’
‘Could that stranger have known your brother?’
‘No, I can’t see how.’
‘Same region, though. I’d guess that it’s down in the southwest with a name like that. You should go and find out.’
He thinks about the photograph that he took of Gabriel. Could there be any link between that and the image of Francis that Cassie is turning in her hands? ‘Yes. I should, shouldn’t I?’
‘Listen, I don’t mean to pile another rock onto your shoulders, but I’ve something for you from Ralph.’ She fishes in her handbag and pushes a cream envelope across the table.
‘What is it?’
She wrinkles her nose and frowns. ‘You gave him the name of another missing soldier. He had more of a result there. That’s what he found out.’
‘You mean David West?’
‘Yes, that’s the name.’
Harry picks the envelope up and weighs it in his hands. He thinks about Rachel and how much depends on the contents of this envelope. He thinks about the wreath-maker whose undeveloped image is still on the film in his bag. ‘I really hope that this contains an address?’
Cassie looks down at the ostrich feather in her lap. ‘I’m sorry. I think it’s the address of a cemetery.’
53
Edie
Amiens, September 1921
Edie had watched Harry leave the cemetery. She had seen him turning amongst the crosses, where she had been standing herself only minutes earlier, and knew that he too was trying to feel whether Francis was there. She saw Harry’s eyes searching, his mouth moving. Were those words for Francis? Did he speak with anger or regret? Did he ask for pardon, or offer his apology? Edie had wished that she could hear what words Harry was saying, could more clearly see what expression his face wore.
Rain spatters against the glass sudd
enly and she looks out, beyond her own reflected face, and sees apple orchards and fields of cattle, sugar beet, potatoes and barley. It is all pastoral again here now: fertile, productive Picardie. The fields are green and full of wet life and Edie is struck by the contrast between this place and that. There, north of Ypres, it had all been churned earth and new earthworks, as if a whole county had been bulldozed, brought down and was being started again. There was no sense of rejuvenation, though; it wasn’t as optimistic as that; it was more reclaiming and sanitizing. Had it once been as bright and bountiful as the landscape that is now accelerating past?
As she had boarded the bus to Ypres the man ahead of her had shown her a piece of twisted metal. ‘Lead,’ he had said. ‘From the church roof.’
Edie watched the man’s hands turning the object, his fingers examining where the melting lead had run. It conveyed so much heat and violence and Edie was reminded of all the scrap metal, all that salvaged ugliness and sadness, in Dillon’s shop. ‘Are you taking it home?’
‘Yes, it’s quite all right, I did ask permission. It’s a souvenir,’ the man had said.
Sitting beside her on the bus, he had told her that this was his holiday, his fortnight away from the accountancy office. He had been at Passchendaele in 1917 and had now come back to see the sights. Edie wondered how anyone might want to come back. How might one choose this as a holiday? A fortnight amongst accountancy ledgers seemed infinitely preferable. As she looked out at the sour and scabbed land, the bus rattling along the newly laid road, she had felt as if she were watching a film reel: what flickered past the glass was unreal, surreal, black-and-white cinematography that might snap at any moment. Once again, she realizes it had perhaps been unfair of her to expect Harry to return.
‘S’il vous plaît?’
She shows her ticket to the guard as the train slows through suburbs. Sidings and terraces and a canal blur past. Workshops and warehouses and allotments pull away. She sees church spires, factory chimneys and intact streets that look medieval. How lucky this town is with its solid bridges and sound architecture. What fortune to be back behind that line.
There are twelve thousand men buried in Tyne Cot, eight thousand of them without a name. Edie had read that fact, had known that number for a long time. And, whatever the odds, she had told herself that if Francis was there, she would know it. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to walk directly to his cross, but she would feel that he was nearby. Standing amongst so very many crosses, though, she had only felt a sense of shock, of horror, of confusion. With the size of the cemetery, the scale of the thing, it was almost too much to comprehend. They could all be Francis, or he might be none of them. She didn’t feel a prickle of connection to any particular cross. Just a terrible sadness and anger for all of them.
The train pulls into a station and Edie sees the sign for Amiens. She watches the exchange of passengers, the sightseers, pilgrims and widows alighting, guidebooks and suitcases in hand, and the onwards travellers joining the train. Beyond the gantries the stonework of the station has been cleaved and shored up. Nothing is quite intact, is quite as it was. Nowhere has entirely escaped.
The movement of the crowd returns her thoughts to the stillness of a field of crosses and his photograph face. Harry had said that that last photograph of Francis must have been taken in October 1917. He had sworn it couldn’t be later. But how could he be telling the truth? Francis had slept in her bed in September. How could four weeks do that to a man’s face? But then what had Francis learned in those four weeks? And what had he done to himself as a consequence of that learning? She thinks about Francis when he had come home on leave, how he had curled himself away from her and sat for hours staring at the fire. She had watched him and wondered what terrible thoughts were passing behind his eyes. Now she realizes that, at least in part, it was jealousy and suspicion that was twisting Francis up. At what point had he first suspected? How long had he been storing all of that up? Was it seeing the Saint Christopher that had triggered it? Was it because she wrote letters to Harry too? But had he not read her letters and seen that they were innocent?
She had stood amongst the unidentified dead and told them that, whatever Francis might have supposed about Harry and her, it wasn’t true – that nothing had happened – that whatever conclusion he might have drawn, it was the wrong one. She wouldn’t have betrayed him, she tells herself. Not then. Whatever feelings she might have had for Harry, she wouldn’t have acted upon them, and however difficult a future might have been with Francis, she would have made it work. She would have done the right thing, however wrong it might have felt. She would have tried. Edie tells herself that. She had also told it to the field of crosses.
I have spread my dreams under your feet, his long-ago voice whispers. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Was it natural that she had felt some sense of anger towards the graves that might be Francis as well? Was that a proper reaction? Was it so wrong to feel that she had been treated unfairly? That she’d been judged and damned and had not had the right to defend herself? She had unbuttoned the swallow brooch from her coat, remembering his words. It’s only paste, he had said. Only a cheap thing, but it’ll look pretty on her, won’t it? She had seen the scene through Harry’s eyes a few hours earlier, visited that looted house through his diary. She knew about the trinket box, the violets and his sudden violence and she had remembered the moment when Francis had placed the brooch in her palm and tightened his fingers around her hand. She had thought, after that happened, that perhaps her response had spoilt things. But maybe the Saint Christopher was more to blame? Or perhaps it is her that is to blame? Edie had looked at the closest cross, at the words Known unto God, and pushed the brooch into the soil.
With the guard’s whistle, and the call for Calais-Maritime, she looks out on slate rooftops slipping by, red chimney pots and the distant towers of Amiens Cathedral. She is leaving it all behind, all the skeleton churches and levelled cathedrals, all the ruins and the boneyards. She imagines Harry waking in Ypres this morning and wishes, for his sake, that he too could leave it behind. All this cemetery searching can’t be healthy. It’s all too like endlessly digging over the same ground.
She recalls the night when he broke the mirror. His eyes had fluttered when she had first walked into his room and didn’t seem to be able to focus, as if he weren’t really there, as if he were seeing something else, but then his pupils had dilated and stilled as they connected with her own. He had looked like his own death mask then, as his head had rolled back on the pillow. His cheek, against her own, was as cold as a tomb and wet with her tears. She had put her unsteady fingers to his white lips and there had been no thoughts in that moment, no questions or doubts, only the need to care for him. She had watched his chest rise, and falter, and would have given him her own breath. As she switched off the light she had looked over her shoulder and, lying there with his hands crossed over his chest, he was a marble soldier on a cenotaph. She had returned to her own room, and staring into the darkness, had so very nearly returned to lie down on the bed next to Harry. How much more complicated it might all be now. Surely it is better not to have that complication?
Edie thinks of him, but tells herself that she mustn’t. She has made a decision not to be in contact with him again, knowing what those words in his diary did, knowing how close she has come to being the woman that Francis suspected she was. She can’t be with Harry and not feel that she is proving those suspicions right. And yet she is travelling home to his mother’s house. To Harry’s house. Can she carry on living there now, surrounded by another woman’s china patterns and handed-down cake forks and family photographs? How can she live with the three of them there on the mantelpiece, knowing now what they knew? It can’t be as it was. Looking out across the rooftops of Amiens, it is already all too complicated.
Market gardens and waterways pull past. It turns again to open landscape and a young man apologizes as he takes the seat opposite. Too young to have
been in poilu blue, he unrolls a magazine full of American film stars. While his thoughts might be with Rudolph Valentino and Mary Pickford, he has the hands of a farm boy, Edie decides. He places his finger to the line on the page as he glances out at the passing barns and haystacks and cattle in the shelter of the hawthorns.
She had touched the words on that cross. A Soldier of the Great War Known unto God. She recalls the action. Touched the soil that covered that soldier. Pushed her fingers down through the soil towards his bones. Could it have been Francis there, mere feet and inches below? Was he really beneath the earth? She had doubted it for the past month and didn’t feel any sense of him as she pushed her hands into that soil. Edie leans her head against the cool glass of the window and looks out at farmhouses and wheat fields and hedgerows. She thinks of eight thousand unanswered questions. She feels the distance pull. It is only now that she cries.
‘Tout va bien, madame?’ The boy with the magazine leans towards her.
‘Not remotely,’ she replies.
54
Harry
Amiens, September 1921
Harry unpacks his haversack and lays the items out on the bed. They are odd suddenly, these objects that were once so familiar and so vital. His fingers move over his old mess tin remembering the pattern of the tarnish. There is a set of cutlery, his cut-throat razor, a tin of boot polish, a penknife (still sharp), a fob watch (stopped) and a cigarette lighter (out of flint). He feels both very close to and very far removed from these items. Some of them were once other men’s belongings, things that he had found and salvaged, souvenirs of other lives, maybe more even than second-hand. It is not so very different from looking in Dillon’s glass cabinets or watching Rachel’s hands move over the lost property of the lost men.
In between his items of kit are his papers. There is an envelope full of letters from Edie and the sketchbook that he had bought in Morecambe into which he had recorded everything that came after. The pages have come out of this book, the stitching of its spine long since gone, and so the order of the images is now all awry. Amongst the wrongly ordered landscapes and seascapes and once-upon-a-time townscapes, there are a lot of images of Edie. It surprises him – shocks him – how many of these there are. And then there is his diary, kept secretly, meant for no eyes but his own, which Edie has just read. Once again, as before, her ribbon is wound around it. He ought to return the Saint Christopher to her, he thinks. Three days ago she had needed to possess it. If he posted it to her now, though, would it repulse her?
The Photographer of the Lost Page 27