The Photographer of the Lost

by Caroline Scott

  There is a handful of pencils, variously sharpened. Some of them are barely more than an inch long. He remembers how he had scrounged for pencils, how important the act of committing to paper once was, and how she has just told him that he was a fool to have done that. How can you have been so stupid, Harry? How can you have been so careless? But how was he meant to have got from day to day otherwise? He tests the leads of the pencils, sorts those that are worth salvaging and carves a point with his penknife, thinking of an identical knife that his brother once held to his throat.

  He sits at the dressing table, his writing hand reflected in the cheval glass. When he glances up between sentences he is obliged to look himself in the eye. He remembers Francis’ face reflected in the mirror of the looted house, how their eyes had met in that moment before the trinkets and violets had exploded around him. He has revisited that scene in his own diary today, concerned that she has now seen it too, but how glad he is that there are other parts that his diary couldn’t show her. He knows that there are sections of time that he needs to account for, though, and questions that she will have, and so he puts pencil to paper now and gives her a version of what happened in the days either side of Francis’ death. He folds the ribbon into the letter. As an afterthought he adds a photograph of Will and Francis, laughing in Boulogne, right at the start.

  He seals one envelope and opens another. He reads again the note that Ralph has sent. In parentheses of apologies there is the address of a cemetery. It is unequivocally that. There is, Ralph says, no doubt. The face in his camera then is a mistake. Harry looks up at his own face as he thinks how to begin a letter to Rachel. She had told him that she would be relieved to know, but he can’t imagine that could be true. In communicating these facts, he will end her awful searching and her hope. Is this an act of cruelty or kindness? He wishes that he could say it to her rather than write it, but then it would be so very difficult to say it to her. He hesitates over words, thinks hard how best to frame phrases, imagines himself saying those same phrases to Rachel’s face. Though he knows that her eyes will rush through his politenesses, he tries to put it in kind terms. He thinks of Daniel East’s eyes and crumples the letter in his hand. When he looks up he sees the reflection of his camera in the mirror. He recalls the insistent eye of Francis’ camera in the mirror of the broken house. He has had to call Mr Lee this afternoon, which has resulted in another five names being added to the list of graves that he must photograph. He wonders if he will ever be able to escape the graves.

  He stands up from the dressing table and takes the camera in his hands. It hits the wall with a convincing thud, leaving another gouge in the already scarred plasterwork. There is broken glass on the floorboards again. He thinks about Edie pulling a fragment of glass from his hand and turns away.

  55

  Edie

  Calais Plage, September 1921

  Edie startles at the noise of breaking glass. The wind has taken over a café table, dashing glasses to the ground. A waiter fusses in with a dustpan and brush as the drinkers gesticulate over their lost aperitifs.

  ‘Quelle catastrophe!’ says the woman in black silk crêpe and laughs.

  ‘Quite,’ Edie replies.

  ‘Of course, you’re English.’ The woman in black is leaning on the railings. ‘I did have suspicions about the colour of your hair.’

  The café table is righted, glasses are replenished, and the waiter is applauded. Beyond, the promenade is busy with day trippers, admiring the sea and the seafront properties. The houses at the top of the beach have a maritime cottage style, half-timbered and balconied, with turreted rooflines. There are white painted railings and palm trees and potted lemons. The promenaders point at the dahlias and bougainvilleas and the smartly varnished shutters, as if this decorative appraising is the thing to do. Edie looks down the sand and wonders how she has come to be watching the strollers and having her colouring critiqued in Calais.

  ‘I’m sorry. Where are my manners? I’m Clara Lawrence.’ The woman in black offers Edie her hand.

  ‘I’m pleased to meet you. Edie Blythe.’

  The woman is eating a cornet of cockles and Edie can smell the vinegar. ‘Will you?’

  Edie shakes her head. ‘No, thank you.’ She can smell waffles and hot toffee too. It takes her back to Ypres and makes her feel slightly nauseous. She realizes that she hasn’t eaten since the previous day.

  ‘Are you here on holiday?’ asks Clara, who seems determined to have a conversation.

  ‘No. I wish it were the case. I have been to Ypres. I thought my husband might be buried there.’ It seems almost impolite to say it, as if she’s thrusting too much unsavoury unsolicited information at a stranger.

  ‘Oh dear. How sad. Do I presume correctly that you didn’t find him, then?’

  ‘Yes.’ Edie shields her eyes to the bright light. She wonders if Clara Lawrence, in her well-cut mourning, is a veteran of these matters. ‘I mean, I didn’t. And you?’

  ‘A holiday. A break. I’ve been taking the waters in Le Touquet. I feel more liquid than solid at present. If the sun gets too strong I might start to steam.’

  Edie walks down the beach with the woman in black silk crêpe. There are tents to hire for the day, striped in bright barley-sugar pinks and greens and yellows, and wooden chalets with fretted eaves and spiked parapets that remind Edie of the bourgeois mausoleums that she has seen in French cemeteries. The families who have rented the chalets sit on the steps, drape their towels proprietorially and take tea from china cups. Siblings are burying one another in the sand. They laugh and fight and conspire. Fathers loosen their collars while the children run feral. Awnings strain in the wind, ropes rattle and always the sound of the sea.

  ‘It must be difficult for you not to have a grave.’ Clara squints into the sun before she turns her eyes back to Edie.

  ‘It seems to get more so,’ she replies. ‘With time you’d think it might recede, but the questions seem to be getting louder. The telegram said “Missing, believed killed” and that word, believed, seems to be looking all the more flimsy.’ Is it right to say it out loud? Is it bad form to share these sentiments with a stranger? She can’t seem to stop the words falling out of her mouth. ‘I have never felt more unsettled. In the past four years I have never felt more certain that he isn’t in his grave.’

  ‘Have you any good reason to think that? Have you any evidence that it might not be the case?’

  ‘No. Not really. It’s just an instinct.’

  Women walk with parasols along the shore, dressed in black or white. There seems such a definiteness to that. No in-between. As if the women, like the men, have all been sorted now and allotted their status. Edie feels, watching the women, that she’s not certain to which camp she belongs.

  ‘It’s the uncertainty that’s so difficult to live with, isn’t it?’ says Clara. ‘It’s all the questions that you ask yourself. The constant needling of the doubt. The being unable to focus on anything else. It’s so exhausting, isn’t it? I understand that. My father was reported missing in the spring of 1918 and we heard nothing for ten months. There was no news whatsoever, a complete absence of information, but then he turned up in a prisoner of war camp. And now I have to say that I’m not sure which was worse: the not knowing, or having him back so changed. That sounds awful, doesn’t it? It must sound terrible to you. But he’s in a neurasthenic hospital now. He came back to us, but the father that I knew is still missing.’

  Edie shakes her head. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She looks at the woman in black at her side and realizes that this is a sort of mourning.

  ‘He doesn’t know me any longer. He doesn’t remember his own name. The doctors say that he’ll probably never come out of the hospital.’

  Clara stares at the sea, then turns to Edie and shrugs.

  ‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’

  ‘Daddy’s war probably won’t ever end, and there’s so little I can do about that.’ There is a conclusiveness in Clara’s
voice, as if she’s spent a long time coming to this decision. ‘We shouldn’t linger in these places unless we have to. Don’t let doubt eat you up. I know it’s not easy, but try to think about other things. Occupy yourself. Look for the positives and move forward. This war has taken enough already, hasn’t it?’

  Children dip in the shallows with fishing nets. A group having a swimming lesson splash and laugh. A yacht with orange sails comes to the shore and men heave it up onto the beach. Donkeys repeat the same path up and down the length of the sand. It is only the children on their backs that change. They tread endlessly through their own hoof marks. Edie considers whether Clara is perhaps right.

  ‘Are you leaving today?’

  They watch a steamer pulling out from the jetty. Smoke billows behind. Edie looks down at her damp feet and considers whether to make the crossing. The wind whips her hair at her face and she tastes salt on her lips. Gulls hang and cry above. Does moving on mean heading north or south? In which direction is she meant to look forward? Can she leave Harry on this side of the Channel, condemned to never move on, always lingering in these memories? But, after everything that has happened, after all the mess and hurt that they’ve caused, she knows that their paths have to part here.

  ‘Yes. My boat is at five.’

  Clara squeezes Edie’s arm. ‘Don’t look back,’ she says.

  56

  Harry

  Amiens, September 1921

  The dawn is full of birdsong. It feels like something newly made, something that hope might be invested in. Only Harry is feeling short on hope. He tosses a coin at the station and, with his decision thus determined, he trades it for a postcard. He tells Edie that he is going south and copies out the address that Gabriel gave him. Beyond that he is unsure of what more to say. Harry doesn’t know what exists in Saint-Christophe du Quercy, but he has an instinct that it might not be a happy discovery. Ralph’s note had concluded by giving him the same advice again: that if Francis was killed, he’s likely to be one of the nameless burials at Tyne Cot. And if he is not? If Francis is in Saint-Christophe du Quercy, if that really is a possibility, why has he chosen to let Edie believe that he is dead all this time? And why is he reminding her of his existence now? Will she return home to further envelopes?

  The train is packed. He manages to find a seat at length, but is crushed between an overweight widow and an amputee. Packed in such close proximity, Harry’s eyes cannot help but be drawn to the hemmed edge of the steel-blue trousers to his right. He stares down at his own hand, the scar white across his palm. Edie had once, years earlier, shown him which crease was supposedly his lifeline. He had been reminded of that on the day that he was discharged from hospital, the ward sister jokingly advising him to henceforth steer clear of gypsy fortune tellers. He can still hear the woman’s sing-song Dublin accent and see the wink of a dark eye. His lifeline is cut straight across. Is this then the start of the second part? He thinks of Edie’s fingers tracing the line. Those same fingers touching Francis’ photograph. He is not sure that he has much enthusiasm for the second act if she is not a player in it.

  The carriage is airless and all alien chatter. A fly lurches at the glass. Beyond there is a gang of men with spades. They pause from their work and stare at the train. Behind them a field of crosses is being replaced with lines of white graves. He wonders, as the train pulls away, how far the cemeteries stretch. He thinks of the tape lines and train lines and of how little of this country he actually knows. Is Edie now on a train in England? As he pulls south, is she pulling north? He smells the earthy riverbanks, the glasswork fumes, and, at nine, as they linger on the station of a provincial town, the day’s new bread. The morning light makes a lantern of the chestnut trees.

  He looks for the station names that he passes in his atlas of the Western Front, but he has already moved far beyond its pages. He is off the map and into the unknown. He remembers being on a troop train, Francis at his side, and the sense of momentum as they moved south. He feels that momentum again; only it is not his destination that he fears now, it is a sense of alarm that he feels at the thought of the accelerating distance between him and Edie. He feels a sense that there is no going back now. It is done. He puts the atlas on the vacated seat at his side and knows that he will never need it again.

  The amputee disembarks into an anonymous station leaving Harry with his newspaper. Only the pictures are intelligible, but they say enough. There are photographs of groups of men around new war memorials, women by panels of stone-cut names and design blueprints presented for the reading public’s approval. He is suddenly aware that it is not only in the north. It is happening all the way down this country, in hamlets and villages, in towns and in cities – the marking of it, the celebration in stone and metal, as if it is a landmark, a thing to have a line drawn under. All down the country men like Gabriel must now chisel out a history, must find an appropriate expression. He imagines it like a shockwave stretching out from the cemetery with the gun emplacement at its centre. It ripples out from that place, beyond the pages of his atlas, expressing itself in monoliths and mausoleums and menhirs, in arches and obelisks, in catafalques and cruciforms – and, in their multiplication, these things mean nothing and everything. He folds the paper away.

  In the afternoon the landscape changes. The railway line follows a river, which churns muscular beneath its glassy width. Willows dip and shiver and a figure fishes off a sandbank, the line glistening crystal as it arcs. Time runs awry. It races and dawdles, its rhythm lost to the train’s crazy beat. A father and daughter, sitting opposite, whisper and sleep, sleep and whisper. Harry envies their cocoon, the completeness of their circle. South, south, into the evening, with the weight of the world dragging in their slipstream. The sky is the softest watercolours.

  He spends the night in a station hotel where the pillowcase smells of soap and the walls are solid. He pushes apart the shutters and lets in the evening light. There is no one with whom to share the colour of the hot roof tiles, the silhouette of the belfry or the way that swallows swoop across, and so, once again, he finds himself putting it onto paper. The view that his window frames is all the colours of a Matisse painting, yet he wishes for brown paper walls and the rhythm of her breathing in the next room. He puts the terracotta tiles and the belfry and the swallows into a letter. He knows that she will possibly never read it, that his descriptions and drawings are probably mute and blank, but he still has to try to share them with her. Without that they too might as well not exist.

  He sits on the edge of the bed and stares beyond his feet. The floorboards have parted with age. They have warped in places, with water or heat. There are scratches – arcs and curves – their repetition looking like frenzy, like struggle, like panic. But, he tells himself, it is only where furnishings have been rearranged. These boards tell a story, but it was a quiet story with no crescendos or exclamation marks. They have never been shaken by explosives. They have never lurched and shuddered the plaster from the walls. The shockwaves do not stretch that far. The bell tower sounds. Shadows creep from the corners of the room. Harry cries into the soap-smelling pillow.

  57

  Edie

  Lancashire, October 1921

  The church bells strike twelve notes and Edie looks up from the grave. She leans on the spade and contemplates her efforts. She has had to dig much deeper than she expected, as they wouldn’t lie right and she couldn’t bear to break the wings. A childhood rhyme comes back to her with the bells. ‘ “All the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,” ’ she recites to the crows’ grave. Should she say some solemn words? Some formula to wish them a fortunate onwards flight? As she looks down at the small wooden cross that she has fashioned, she isn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

  They had been much lighter than she expected, much less solid than their presence suggested, and terribly, horribly brittle. That brittleness set her teeth on edge somehow; it had both an awful fragility and a sense of pent-up potential. Despi
te their very obvious desiccating deadness, she almost expected the wings to flinch under her hand.

  Edie had felt a great sense of Will’s presence as she took the crows down from the dresser. They were so obviously the work of his hand. In removing them, in erasing their presence, did she push him out too? She had found herself talking aloud to Will’s memory, carrying on a conversation with a recalled image of a cross in France. She also found herself asking him about Francis. Was there something more that Will knew? Is Francis with him on the other side?

  Condemned to a cardboard box, the crows had less menace. There, at unnatural angles, they looked less likely to beat into life. And yet there remained something threatening about them. Some lingering suspicion that they weren’t yet finished and entirely devoid of the potential to flap their protest. Edie told herself that it was only her imagination. Is imagination getting the better of her with regard to Francis too?

  It wouldn’t have been right to put them out for the rag-and-bone man, and to burn them would have been too close to sorcery, so she had taken a spade down the garden and dug a grave. Standing here now, she is struck with her own folly, her own ridiculousness. ‘If you could see me!’ she says to a memory of Harry’s face, and then tells herself that it is for the best that he can’t.