On a whim, taken with a fancy, she cuts a bunch of sweet williams and places it in the crows’ grave with an apology to her brother-in-law. A blackbird is fluting its liquid notes from the lilac. It is a more elegant elegy than Edie can summon. She takes up the spade again and lets the first clods of earth cover them over gently. She works with reverence, carefully at first, but then it becomes an effort to just hide the last of the feathers. The tip of a wing protrudes through the soil. She cannot bear to put a boot to it.
Her hands sting when it is done and there is dirt in the creases of her palms. She thinks of a graveside gesture of Francis’ caught in Harry’s diary. She thinks of them covering Will over. She thinks of the scar on Harry’s palm. She remembers a black feather on Will’s grave that Harry had not put there. Her fingers find the ribbon in her pocket.
Edie surveys the garden and listens to the low sultry hum of the bees. It is overgrown now; poppies have seeded and bindweed twines through the buddleias. In 1917 Mrs Blythe had helped her dig up the lawn and they had put in lines of potatoes and cabbages and carrots. How has it run rank around her? How has she not noticed the weeds reclaiming it? She tells herself that she should make the effort again and reverse this neglect. She silently recites notions of efficiency and self-sufficiency; she will make a bonfire and dig the earth over. She will cut back the buddleias and take secateurs to the overgrown roses. She must plan ahead for next spring. Order seeds. Draw up a scheme. Plant lupins and broad beans and Canterbury bells. It is healthy to make practical plans, she tells herself. And yet, as she schemes potato trenches and lines of spring greens, she is struck by a sudden sense of alienation. This garden now belongs to Harry. This is his house. Can it still be her home? How can she plan a future here?
There is a pair of men’s boots in the border, she notices. The leather is lichened green and moss has claimed the soles. She vaguely recalls them being there, but is no longer sure which brother they belong to. The larkspur has seeded itself around the boots, there in the same border where it always grew. Mrs Blythe had told her that larkspur signified fickleness in the language of flowers. The smell of it takes Edie back to a hospital ward and a café in Arras where Francis’ face is waiting on a wall of missing men. Had these all been acts of fickleness?
She washes her hands at the kitchen sink. The earth swills and circles away and she remembers washing Harry’s hands in the Ypres hotel room. The glass might well have been in her own hand for all the pain it gave her. She had felt such tenderness towards his cut skin in that instant. She leans against the draining board and looks at his letters on the kitchen table.
They had been waiting for her behind the door when she got back. She had put the suitcase down in the hall, turned the card in her hands, and taken his envelopes through to the kitchen. The postcard was a picture of Amiens Cathedral surrounded by sandbags. She had passed it on the train hours earlier. He wrote from the station as he waited for a train to take him south. Had they passed so close again, then?
She had opened the letter with the Amiens postmark first and heard Harry’s voice making apologies and appeals. It had made her cry to see the photograph of Will and Francis laughing, and once again to have the Saint Christopher in her hand. Harry’s second letter was from further south and was full of azure skies, red rooftops and regret. He seems to be a long way away now and getting further. She wasn’t certain whether she felt relief or regret that there wasn’t a letter from Francis behind the door.
Edie makes tea and sits at the table. The kitchen is different without the crows. It has lightened. She no longer feels watched. And, yet, there is less of them – of Will and Francis and Harry – in here now and she is sorry for that. She props the photograph of Will and Francis against the milk bottle. ‘He was dying in my arms,’ Harry had written, but she couldn’t believe his words any longer. The version of Francis in Harry’s diary was so far away from the golden-haired young man who she had loved, and she now wasn’t sure that she knew the story’s narrator any longer either. ‘We were ordered forward,’ Harry writes now. ‘I couldn’t stay with him. It wasn’t a choice. Leaving Francis there was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. But, believe me, Edie, he wasn’t going to get up again. It was over. I know you hope that it might not be so, that you want to believe there’s a chance that he might still be out there, but it just can’t be right. For your own sake, Edie, you need to believe me.’
She looks again at the letter to Harry that she had begun. ‘So who was my husband really?’ she writes. ‘And where is he now?’ Edie does not mean to send the letter, it will never be posted, but she somehow can’t not reply to Harry’s pen. She needs to have her right to reply, and so she tells him about burying the crows, how much more difficult it was than she had expected, how different the room is now, about her plans for the garden and about what it feels like to hold the Saint Christopher in her hand again. Though he is the one taking trains, Edie has the sensation that she is still travelling, and to grip the medal in her hand gives her some sense of steadiness. But, then, didn’t the Saint Christopher trigger all of this? Her pen confesses that she wishes Harry were here, not getting further away, but that she can’t be the woman Francis assumed she was, that she feels shame, that she feels guilty – and that she can’t believe Harry when he says that Francis is so definitely dead.
58
Harry
Quercy, October 1921
The village has a Romanesque church, its gargoyles made more grotesque by time, marigolds in terracotta pots and rabbits in cages. In noon’s heat he circles through streets that are shuttered to the sun. He looks at the map the man in the station ticket office had drawn for him; each village is illuminated with details of its architecture and the shape of its trees, but this plan gives no clues as to the gradients between the gargoyles and the poplars. Harry’s route map is like a cluster of holy men, each village going by the name of a saint, and he wonders if Edie has opened his envelope yet and seen her returned Saint Christopher. He can imagine the medal in her hands, but can’t picture what expression her face might make. He thinks about a village called Saint-Christophe where someone had kept his brother’s photograph face. What links Francis to this alien place?
From the south side of Saint-Jean he surveys his progress. The valley is a bowl before him. The hills recede in declining blue, like the background of a Sienese crucifixion. The land falls away sharply immediately below and Harry realizes that he is standing at the top of a cliff. He wonders how it would feel to step off, to dive into that landscape. He feels himself swoon towards it, sees himself in a gasp of bright terminal light, the ground thrusting up and beckoning blackness. He senses that he’s being pulled forward, but then a woman is singing on the terraces below and there is laughter in the fields beyond. He takes a breath and leans against a wall for a moment, realizing he is shaking.
From the village he descends through a forest of chestnut and pine. Harry’s feet find a rhythm and for a moment it is a route march again and Will and Francis are at his side. He startles a deer in the shadows and it stops him in his tracks. The present presses in again and there is no voice on the road to call him back. To question. To challenge the stretching distance. He listens, but it isn’t there. There is nothing but birdsong and shifting light on the road ahead. Beyond, the forest gives way to walnut orchards and bald glades. The light, after the forest, is startlingly sharp.
The road from Saint-Laurent follows the valley, which, in turn, follows the stream. Poplars, tall as church spires, punctuate, indicating the stream’s forward meander. He looks up at a height of shimmering leaves and is dizzied by it. Blinking the glare from his eyes, he recalls the tree stumps along the roads in the north where he had walked by Gabriel’s side. Is this how it once was? Is this what the war took away? In the fields around they are haymaking, the sickles glinting a rhythm. The people in the fields pause and straighten, turning to him as he passes. Do they look out for other men returning along this road? He wonders
how many times his gait and his colouring have disappointed.
The valley leads him to Saint-Pierre, where, true to the station master’s map, there is a tower framed in yew trees. Washing is suspended in lines across the street and canaries sleep in cages. An old woman, sitting on a doorstep, plucks at sewing and acknowledges him in a language that he doesn’t understand. Otherwise the streets are empty. He sees only old women in these villages.
He follows the road straight through Saint-Pierre to the end of the village, before taking the right fork, where he refinds the river. Calvaire, Gabriel’s village, is red rooftops and the honey colours of old stone. Its church is a patchwork of ages and architectural theft. Mary, smiling benignly in plasterwork, is preserved behind chicken wire. There are offerings of flowers and pebbles and military buttons around her feet.
He had written a hasty letter to Gabriel from Amiens and told him that he would be here by this afternoon. As Harry looks at the square where the memorial will stand, he wonders if Gabriel has yet received his words. The preparations have already started and a workman is skimming out a rectangle of concrete for what must be the monument’s base. Gabriel has told him that there is to be a platform, lifted on a wall of faced stone and dressed with wrought-iron fencing, to discourage unseemly shows and livestock. On the square base the names will be carved: nos morts. They are pushing to have it unveiled on the eleventh of November, Gabriel has told him, when there will be trumpets and silence and those returned, and those not to return, will be honoured. Three years on from the end of it, it will be solemnized. In six weeks’ time, the memorial will give the square a new perspective. Harry is suddenly aware of the enormity and urgency of Gabriel’s task.
He watches the workman mixing the concrete. It seems expertly done. Harry in turn commits it to paper: the wet slap of the worked mixture, the warmth of the afternoon sun on the backs of his hands, the flits of sparrows in the violet sky. He draws it all into a letter to Edie that she might never open. Don’t really stop writing to me, will you? she had said once. How could she ever imagine that he might stop? He stares at the page of writing in front of him, the paper too brightly white. His skin feels tight with the sun.
The waiter from the bar takes a beer across for the workman. He stands, straightens, arches his back and raises the glass across the road. Harry watches as men come and go; all seem to feel duty-bound to ask questions, to approve the design and distract the workman from his labour and keep the concrete drying out. The workman wipes foam from his moustache and gestures thanks in the café’s general direction. Men pat his back as he carries his empty glass across. He shakes the hand of a young man in a black waistcoat. The young man walks on to Harry’s table. He recognizes Gabriel’s eyes under the brim of his hat.
‘It’s all happening. Already.’
Gabriel nods. ‘I am glad to see you,’ he says.
The road climbs out of the village and then descends, through scrub oaks, to the farm. Gabriel takes off his hat and wipes sweat from his face. Harry sees that his green eyes are ringed with red.
‘How was it?’ he asks.
‘Coming back?’
‘Yes.’
‘My mother cried, my father does not know me, my brother is – and is not – everywhere and Madeleine is making hay. How was Ypres?’
‘Too full of memories. My brother is – and is not – everywhere. We didn’t find anything.’
‘And Edie?’
‘She’s gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘She left. She’s gone back to England, I think. I don’t know if I’ll see her again.’
‘But why? What happened? You can’t let that happen.’
‘I don’t know that I have a choice.’
‘But you always have a choice.’
‘I think she genuinely believes that my brother might still be alive.’ They stand at a fork in the road and Gabriel shakes his head. ‘Do you know of a village called Saint-Christophe du Quercy?’ Harry asks.
‘Yes. Of course. It is south of here. An hour’s journey away.’
‘Will you take me there?’
‘If you wish it. But why do you want to go there?’
‘Because I need to know if my brother is alive.’
*
Gabriel’s finger points out the house that he once called home. It is a square farmhouse and below it, in the valley, there are tobacco fields. Harry watches Gabriel’s feet at his side and wonders if he has refound a connection with the fields. Does the house that they are walking towards again feel like home? The expression that he reads on Gabriel’s face indicates that it is not so.
‘Et voilà,’ says Gabriel at the gate. ‘I must present you to my mother.’
White light splinters through the shutters, but the room is dark. It takes Harry’s eyes a moment to adjust. Embers indicate the shape of a fireplace. A woman spins around from it as if startled, as if she expects someone else. She says few words in acknowledgement and the little she does say Harry cannot comprehend. Slowly the details show themselves; he discerns a large table, an assortment of chairs and little other comfort. It is stiflingly hot in this room. He looks at his feet on the doorstep and wonders what he is doing here. What is he doing amongst these strangers, these people whose language he does not even understand? Why has he travelled south and not north? But then how can he travel north before he knows if Edie is right?
‘She says that you look lost,’ Gabriel laughs.
‘Is it that obvious?’
He hands Harry a roll of blankets and leads him across the yard to the barn, advising that the mice will trouble him less in the loft.
Harry acquaints himself with his accommodation and makes a mattress of the straw. The scent of it brings back billeted discomforts. He aligns his possessions, such as they are, on the lintel – makes an altar of it with his offering of cigarettes, pencils and Edie’s portrait. He remembers nights in other barns, the rhythm of his brothers’ breathing and the shape of their joined initials scratched into a plaster wall.
At dusk Gabriel returns with a candle, bread and broth. ‘My mother tells me off like a child,’ he complains. Harry suspects that Gabriel envies him his apartness and the shadows of the hayloft. ‘We used to play in this barn,’ he remembers aloud, watching Harry eat. ‘Have you written to her?’
‘Every day.’
Harry watches the light retreat. It is warm in the barn and the old straw is sweet. He finds sleep easily, with the day’s journey weighing on his bones, but wakes with the stars. In the roof-space is a white shape that is either an owl or the ghost of an owl. It stretches, screams at the night and is gone. For a moment he is back in the nightmare wood.
*
Gabriel shakes him at dawn. He flops beside him on the straw and sighs at the roof beams. ‘Madeleine has made a start. They are already in the fields. She says that they do not need us. Women do not need men any longer. It is the same everywhere, she says. We are obsolete, my friend. Extinct. We are as good as dinosaurs.’ He lights a cigarette and laughs as if he doesn’t mean it.
Harry considers how Edie must feel the same. Is she waking in his mother’s house today and making plans in which he is not a consideration?
He puts his head under the pump, washing away sleep’s warmth and thoughts of Edie waking. Behind the barn they descend along the white road, through the scrub oaks to the valley. The plum trees are heavy with overripe fruit. The branches are crusted with lichen, lending them the appearance of something long dead. They are organizing collections for the fruit trees destroyed in the war zone, Gabriel informs him conversationally. Harry thinks about George Bartley cradling the branches of apple trees and a circle of apple pips around his grave.
As they walk, Gabriel shares the night’s sketches. He has drawn an image of a soldier slumped against a wall. There is a great weightiness in the dangle of the man’s arms, in the slouch of his shoulders and the droop of his head.
‘It is too deathly,’ says Harry. ‘You will ha
ve the village in tears every time they walk past. They will start avoiding the square. You will do nothing for the takings of the bar.’
Gabriel’s sketchbook is full of his brother, Marcellin: limp-armed and phantom-like, gesticulating, writhing, Christ-like and dying.
‘When must you submit your design?’
‘I’m already late. It has to be agreed by the end of the week.’
In the field, Madeleine, her sister Thérèse and Madame Bousquet advance as a line, swinging scythes and sweeping down the glinting grass. It is a timeless picture – only the workers are all women. Madeleine is dark-skinned and paleeyed. She leans on the scythe as they approach, looking as though she might use it against Gabriel.
Harry watches as Gabriel plays the gallant sergeant in the hayfield, but it is obvious that Madeleine does not want it. He sharpens a scythe for Harry, working it with a whetstone and showing him the action. So much of this is for Madeleine’s benefit, Harry realizes. Gabriel laughs at his inexpert efforts, says he hopes that he will make up in sweat what he lacks in skill, but still Madeleine does not smile. Gabriel tries to coax her, gives her the comedy and Harry’s incompetence to share, but her pale eyes are not here. Harry is struck by how much Gabriel needs Madeleine’s gaze to be on him. She shuts her eyes against the brightness and his grin.
They find a rhythm and work until the clock in Calvaire strikes noon. They drop the tools then, where they stand, and retire to the dark cave that is the farmhouse. Harry sits hesitantly; they have brought out an odd three-legged stool for him, even though there is an empty chair at the table. Is that then Marcellin’s seat? Is no one else permitted to sit there? They eat soup thickened with bread and wedges of sheep’s cheese, all of which is consumed in businesslike silence. Gabriel is the only one who tries to make conversation, but there is seemingly little enthusiasm for the words that he wants to share. Gabriel lets the dogs lick his fingers and smiles at their attentions. Only the dogs seem to be glad to have him home.
The Photographer of the Lost Page 29