Harry thinks of his black-framed brothers and imagines an alternate reality in which they have all returned and are now placed around his mother’s kitchen table. He cannot picture what their expressions might be and what conversations would pass between them. There is only their photograph faces and an absence of words and Edie alone at that family table now surrounded by empty chairs. Is that where she is sitting at this moment, with blue irises and black crows as her background?
They return grudgingly to the fields. The sweat stings in Harry’s eyes. His throat burns and his hands are a weeping mess of blisters.
Gabriel picks a leaf from a walnut tree. ‘Here, to mark your book, so you will remember me when you go.’ Gabriel’s hands, which are already all scars, do not blister.
‘When I go?’
‘You have to go on. You’re not there yet.’
‘Could I ask you to take me to Saint-Christophe du Quercy next week?’
‘Of course. If you wish it. I would have taken you yesterday if you wanted.’
‘I wasn’t ready but now I am.’
59
Edie
Lancashire, October 1921
She is standing in exactly the same spot. She is sure of it. Five months ago she had stood here and had finally found the courage to ask Harry.
‘I want you to take a photograph of Francis’ grave.’
Standing here again, Edie both wants to take her words back and to ask them again with more urgency. More imperative. More uncertainty. As she had asked it, she hadn’t been sure that she wasn’t setting Harry an impossible quest. Five months on, Francis being in a grave feels all the more implausible. But what is the alternative?
‘I want you to take a photograph of Francis.’
When she says it out loud she is not sure that it sounds any more convincing. She imagines Francis’ face, four years older, tracked down and finally caught by Harry’s camera.
‘And then what happens next?’ she asks herself.
Edie looks out across the reservoir. They had often walked up here together, watching the water side by side, Francis’ voice telling her about giants and witches and Roman roads. He had pulled flints and fragments of pottery out of his pockets and had talked about the village under the water, she remembers, the cottages and the public house and the Methodist chapel, all submerged when the valley was flooded to make the reservoir. Edie had thought about how the families must have felt as they had watched the waters rising, seeing those well-known walls and floorboards and fireplaces lost to the liquid underworld. She had imagined their sense of dislocation. She feels something similar now when she contemplates the walls of Harry’s house. Today those walls had felt like they were closing in on her and she had to get out.
There had been another letter from him that morning. He writes to her about war memorials, haymaking and the Frenchman who is in love with his brother’s widow. She is not sure what he expects her to feel about the latter. What emotions does he wish this information to incite? His letters radiate heat and sunshine but also sadness. Her replies are full of shortages in the shops, the price of coal, and questions. She keeps her letters with his, filing her replies in between, as if this were a conversation. But she will never send him her letters. She will never actually put them in the post. This will never be more than a one-sided conversation.
There are couples doing the circuit of the water today, smiling at the sun on its surface and the silent landscape beyond. A group of children in Sunday best are leading a horse. Two girls twirl parasols and shadows roll across the moor. She shuts her eyes to it all and listens to the lapwings.
‘Edie, isn’t it?’
It startles her. For a moment it is Francis’ voice. For a moment it is always Francis’ voice, but when she opens her eyes the waterman is standing at her side. He flicks his cigarette away and offers her his hand.
‘Mrs Blythe? I’m rotten with faces, but you are Francis Blythe’s wife, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she turns towards him. She is still Francis’ wife. She will always be Francis’ wife. She only wishes that she could be certain what that now means.
‘I thought so. It’s the hair,’ he nods. ‘I often think about him. Often used to see him up here with his camera.’
‘You’re right.’ Edie recalls photographs of the pumphouse machinery, of cotton grass and the grooved stones of the old packhorse track. Francis was a man who liked history and technology and to understand the landscape around him. He needed to know the name of plants, the geology of the hills and the reason why stones were worn thus. He wasn’t a careless or a clumsy man. Not a man to idly or accidentally let go. There was so much more that he wanted to learn and to try.
‘I was in the same battalion. I was sorry when I heard about him.’
‘Heard about him?’ She looks at the man. He is so much older than Francis. Much older even than that photograph. ‘What did you hear exactly? Would you tell me? Were you there in October 1917?’
‘And a bloody awful balls-up it was.’ He wrinkles his nose when he looks at her. ‘Forgive me, love. Excuse my language.’
‘Did you see his body?’ She watches the man turn his eyes away and take a step back. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t ask, should I? But there are so many questions in my head. You didn’t see Francis, did you? Did you see him dead? Did you hear that he was definitely dead?’
The waterman shakes his head and looks as though he doesn’t know what to reply. He looks like he doesn’t want to reply. ‘I saw a lot of things that day that I’d rather forget. I only heard that he was on the casualty list.’
‘The casualty list?’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Blythe. That’s all I can tell you. But you know that already, don’t you?’
There are shadows around the man’s eyes. His eyes now don’t want to meet hers. There is a tremble in his hands as he puts a match to his cigarette. She remembers that Harry’s hands do that. He blows smoke away and apologizes.
A lapwing cries as she watches the waterman walk away, and she considers: how does Francis being on a casualty list equate with him being missing, believed killed? How does that add up? Surely, being a casualty requires a body, be it one injured or dead? A missing man can’t be a casualty, or can he? Could the waterman be mistaken? Could he have misremembered the events? Confused Francis for someone else?
The reservoir is a mirror full of blue sky, but the railings are cold to her hands. She looks down on the water and for a second, in the movement of the surface, Francis is there by her side. Fleetingly. Certainly. Possibly. Her pulse races. She is dizzy and nauseous. But she grips on to the railings, makes herself look again, and there is nothing in the water but her own reflected face. Is it elation or fear that she feels? Grief or relief? Wishfulness or madness? She concentrates on her breathing, counts her breaths, shakes away the notion and tells herself that it is only the tricks of memory, of conscience, of light on the water. Isn’t it?
The wind blows across the water and she pulls her coat around her shoulders. Harry had been in this water too, she remembers. She is not sure why she recalls it now, but she can hear both their voices telling the story, their voices weaving, Francis’ lips whispering it into her ear again, and Harry’s there too. In the winter of 1907 they had walked out onto the ice together. Three brothers, still boys then. They had dared each other. Pushed each other on. Harry had told her how he had heard the creak of the ice beneath his boots, seen the shift of the bubbles below the surface and then the cracks. Francis had told her how suddenly Harry had no longer been there, how he had screamed his name and then his arm had kept searching in the water until he had finally found Harry’s hand. She imagines the panic and racing fear and the moment when their hands connected. Harry gripping on to life and his brother. The gasping as he surfaced. The emotions exchanged between their eyes in that instant. And what if Francis hadn’t run to him? What if Francis hadn’t got him out? She pictures Harry kicking slowly against the curling weed, the light pull
ing away from his clamouring hands. She sees him fixed in the glacier cold, like a fly in amber, or a photograph smile. Surely Harry remembers that too? Surely Harry wouldn’t have just let Francis go?
‘Mrs Blythe?’
The waterman is there again. ‘There is something else, isn’t there? You said the casualty list. Not the list of the missing.’
‘I don’t know what I can tell you,’ he says and looks down at his hands. ‘There isn’t much that I can give you, but perhaps you have a right to know the bit that I have.’
‘Yes?’ She watches him shift his feet and feels both an urgent need and a sense of shame for putting him in this situation.
‘All I know is that your husband was taken away to the dressing station. Rose took him there himself. He carried him, they said. That’s the only thing that I can tell you. I don’t know anything more. That’s the only thing that I heard.’
‘Rose?’
‘Captain Rose. Michael Rose. They’d been friends, you see, him and Francis, before it all began.’
‘But Captain Rose wrote to me. He sent me a letter at the end and he told me that Francis was missing. How could he be missing if Rose had taken him to get help? He didn’t mention a dressing station at all. Why wouldn’t he put that in his letter?’
‘I don’t know.’ The waterman looks away as if he wishes he hadn’t followed her. ‘I’ve no idea. Only, don’t misunderstand me – the dressing station was nothing but a group of pillboxes, and it was conspicuous, so they shelled it. They kept on shelling it. The fact that Rose got him there doesn’t mean that he wasn’t missing in the end. It’s not easy to explain to you how it was.’
‘Captain Rose died, didn’t he?’
He shakes his head. ‘I’d heard that he was living in Cheshire after the war. If you get in touch with the regiment, they’ll be able to tell you.’
‘Yes, of course. Thank you for helping me.’
‘I’m not sure that I’ve helped at all.’
She completes the circuit and returns to the spillway. A rainbow glistens in the spray of the water, but the rushing sound of it down the steps makes her shiver. Five months earlier Harry had taken her photograph, standing on exactly this spot. He had nodded when she had talked about Francis’ grave, but then there would be three months with not a word from him. What did that silence mean? Is there really something that he couldn’t bring himself to tell her? So many words pour out of Harry’s letters now, but she knows that he hasn’t told her everything. It was there in Ypres, that hesitation. When she had asked him to find Francis she believed that it would silence the doubts and the questions, but they’re louder than ever now.
60
Harry
Quercy, October 1921
Harry takes a smoke in the cool evening air. The red cliff beyond the goose field glows, and Gabriel, in the foreground, is a silhouette in the twilight. He stares across the green. Harry takes a place at his side, leaning on the gate, and offers him a smoke.
‘It is the house of Madeleine. And of Marcellin, of my brother.’ Gabriel gestures to the house opposite. A lamp defines a yellow square of window. ‘It is the lanterne des morts.’
‘Lantern of the dead? To guide Marcellin home or to show her loss?’
Gabriel shrugs. The match betrays the shaking of his hands as he lights a cigarette, Harry notices. ‘Both? Madeleine resents my heart and blood and breath. That I have returned and he has not. I would once have given her my blood and breath. But now she tells me that I am too late.’
‘Is that true? Does she not just need time?’ Harry blows smoke at the pink sky.
‘No. There is not time enough in my lifetime.’
‘Perhaps returning isn’t the right thing,’ Harry says. ‘Perhaps we expect too much of it? Perhaps it is better to keep moving on? Perhaps you’re not there yet either?’
‘Perhaps, perhaps,’ says Gabriel, crushing his cigarette. ‘I don’t know that I should have returned. I don’t know that I have a place here any longer. I don’t know what I am meant to be.’
‘You need to talk to her. You need to tell her that.’
Gabriel nods his head.
He writes to Edie again that night. He sends it all to her in words and images: the significance of a lantern in a window, Gabriel’s struggle to settle on the right design for the memorial and the way that he looks at Madeleine. He sends her sketches of the gold of the hayfield, the shadows of his loft and the shine of Madeleine’s plaits; he draws the folds of the fields, the shape of the walnut trees and the way that the sun glows in the red cliff behind the house; he gives her the streak of the bats against the blue-black sky now and the glimmer of the ghost-winged moths. He means to let Edie travel with him. He wants her to see it all, to share it all, even though it all means nothing to him if she’s not here with him. He wants her to know that he would still give her his blood and his last breath.
*
On the third day the hayrick comes, swaggering and creaking, precariously top-heavy. They fork the hay up into the loft from the wagon and the children trample it flat. The gold and green is pressed to the rafters and Harry’s eyrie is gone. There is something bright and beautiful here, he thinks. Something timeless. Something that will go on. He thinks that, if he were Gabriel, he might stay, that he might make that effort, that he would try to make a future of it.
Gabriel helps him to clear away old straw and implements in a tumbledown cottage behind the barns. He talks of the tools and terminology of his new commission. ‘I do not expect to get a taste for statuary,’ he says.
‘And Madeleine?’
‘I am planning a pilgrimage of my own.’ He smiles at Harry. ‘I plan to take Mado to Marcellin, to visit the cemetery together, and through his death to find a future. I will talk to her. I will make her see. Marcellin is lost to both of us. He divides and bonds us. It is not wrong. We have to find a future.’
As Harry sweeps the flagged floor of his new lodgings he thinks about how he would compose a portrait of Gabriel and Madeleine. He has already started putting their gestures, their movements, the way that their eyes connect down on paper. He is drawing Gabriel and Madeleine because he has stopped drawing Edie’s face. He has made a pact with himself because it has to be this way. Because he has to stop. He has to make himself forget. Sometimes now when he has the dream about Edie, he can’t quite make out the detail of her features. Edie is starting to blur. She is slipping out of focus. It is an agony to him her imprecise face, but how can he have it otherwise?
61
Edie
Lancashire, October 1921
Those details just aren’t there in Rose’s letter. Edie reads through it again, although she hardly needs to; she already knows those brief lines by heart, could pick out Rose’s handwriting, could recognize his on-paper voice. Amongst all his pleasantries and kindnesses, there is no mention of any dressing station or a journey back. Surely if Rose had done that, if he had carried Francis as the waterman had described it, he would have mentioned it? But there is no hint of that journey in this letter. There is only that scant phrase ‘Missing, believed killed’, embroidered around with apologies and well-meaning obituary. It doesn’t add up. Why would he not have told her the rest? What motive could he have had for that omission? Could the waterman’s memory be wrong? Might he have mistaken Francis for someone else?
She turns the photograph between her fingers again. She has spent so long focusing in on that terrible image for that past five months, and had altogether forgotten that this one existed. Francis is carrying a camera in this photograph. A tree is casting shadows across his face, but Edie recognizes the expression. She looks close, at the hands that were once as familiar as her own, at the glint that the image captures in his eye. This is so much more like the man that she knows. It is almost as if there are two versions of Francis, she thinks. Could this version not have survived?
It was Rose who had sent her this photograph, folded into that momentous letter. He had taken it him
self eighteen months earlier, near Béthune, he had told her. He had recently given Francis his old camera and they had been planning an outing to Ypres together. ‘To photograph the sights,’ he had said in his letter. Edie thinks about the sights of Ypres. She thinks about Francis making plans for photographic excursions. Is it so improbable? Could he really have let go when he yet had plans? Should he not – could he not – still be taking photographs somewhere?
Francis’ letters are laid out across the table. Edie had realized, as she retrieved the box, that she had not read his words for a long time. It is nearly two years since she has last pulled the box of letters out from under the bed. How had she accepted it for all that time? How has she never before thought to look through them for more clues? Francis’ last letter is dated September 1917 and is brief and purposeful, full of arrangements for his journey home and complaints about camp food. When she reads it aloud, she can’t discern what mood he is in. She can’t hear his voice there. She thinks about the man who then made that journey home, who sat silently in her house through the last week of September, and wishes that she had tried harder to get him to talk. Did he already, at that point, suspect that something had gone on between her and his brother? She thinks now that it must have been the case, but where had that suspicion started? Where had it come from? Was he watching her that week and looking for signs? Was he seeing guilt, seeing betrayal, in all her words and gestures? Was he already planning to take Harry’s diary when he got back? Did he know what he would do next?
When the telegram had arrived at the end of October, she had somehow known what it would say. There was just something about him when he came home on leave; a recklessness, she supposed she might call it; something precarious; a sense that he had already started letting go. And yet, could she have got that wrong? She can remember so few of his words that week, but as he had readied to leave, he had said, ‘It will all be over in another year and then I’ll start again.’ She wasn’t sure that she believed him then, as he had stood in the doorway before heading to the station. She had doubted his conviction. But was it possible that she had misunderstood? Had she misread him? She had seen weariness on his face and read it as a reluctance to return to the war, but was it rather that his trust in her was dying? Was he giving up on her in that moment? Could he, even then, have been planning a different course? Did he really say ‘I’ and not ‘we’, and if he had, was that significant?
The Photographer of the Lost Page 30