The Photographer of the Lost

by Caroline Scott

  Harry’s letters are in the same box. She doesn’t mean to reread them, but even the appearance of his writing on the page is so different from Francis’ letters. Harry had so many more words. He had spoken to her in his letters, while after Will’s death Francis had always seemed to be repeating a script. At the top of the pile, Harry’s ‘PS’ thanks her for pencils. ‘I can see where you have sharpened them with a knife. I can picture you on the kitchen step with the paring knife. It will break my heart when I have to sharpen them again.’ And that was just how they were together, Harry and her. It had always been that way, and neither of them would have let it spill over into anything that they needed to feel guilty about. Neither of them would have hurt Francis. They never even needed to speak about bridges that mustn’t be crossed; it was understood that there was a limit. But, of course, she realizes now that Francis was watching. Of course, he was listening to them. Of course, he didn’t understand that there was a limit. How far did he think it had gone?

  She takes the card out of her pocket and looks at it again. She had gone to the regimental headquarters the previous day and the woman on the desk had simply smiled at her enquiry and obligingly copied the address from her records onto the reverse of a business card. Captain Michael Rose is living in Alderley Edge. He didn’t die at Cambrai, as Harry had told her. Since the woman smiled at her, and passed the address across the desk, Edie has been asking herself what reason Harry had to lie. What reason did Rose have not to tell her all of the truth? She can’t help but think that there is something that links the lie and the omission, but what does that add up to?

  She pockets the card again and pushes Harry’s letters away. It is the same voice that writes to her now, only the tone is so different. It is as if the orchestra has changed key. ‘It won’t stop,’ he says today. ‘I can’t move on. I don’t know how to make it stop.’

  ‘I don’t know how to make it stop,’ she speaks out loud.

  Does she not have the right to ask Rose? Should she not be allowed to know how Francis got from the dressing station to being missing and lost? She walks to the table, picks the pen up and once again considers where to begin a letter. But it is not enough to put those questions in an envelope. Her fingers turn the card in her pocket. Does she not have the right to hear it directly from him?

  62

  Harry

  Quercy, October 1921

  Gabriel takes him on the horse and trap.

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

  ‘No. Don’t waste your time. It might be a fool’s errand. I don’t even really know what I’m looking for.’

  Saint-Christophe du Quercy already has its war memorial – an obelisk dressed with stone palm leaves and the newly cut names of twenty-eight men. Harry walks around the monument. He reads the names of the twenty-eight men, imagines who these Edouards and Augustes and Jean-Baptistes might have been, what their faces might have looked like. None of these names is familiar. How did an image of his brother’s face end up in this remote, ancient village? How is Francis connected to this foreign place and this list of strangers?

  They passed through fortified walls on the way in, but it is a long time since war shook the stones of this place. There are arcades around the square and a wooden market hall that might well be medieval. There are no people, though. He shades his eyes from the sun. There is no other soul in the square – only Harry and the names of twenty-eight men who didn’t come back. Did anyone come back?

  He walks around the arcades and looks out at the bright square beyond and the war memorial at its centre. It is the pivot at the centre of this village now. Everything must revolve around it. He wonders if it repulses or draws. Today it does not seem to draw. Noise clatters from the top of the bell tower and vibrates around the square, summoning no one. He walks on until he hears the sound of voices.

  Harry stands at the bar to drink a beer. A woman is polishing glasses with a white cloth, holding them up to the light and nodding as she places them on the shelf. An old man is whistling as he sweeps the floor in the back room. Otherwise the bar is empty.

  ‘Do you know if there is an English man living in this village?’ he asks, faltering as he sees her incomprehension. ‘Il y a un anglais qui habite ici?’

  ‘Un anglais?’ The woman looks up. Her polishing pauses. ‘Il n’y a que l’homme qui prend des photographies.’

  ‘A man who takes photographs?’ The glass won’t seem to stay still in his hand.

  *

  He had felt his heart racing as he had watched the woman drawing the map. All the rhythms of his body seemed to be accelerating as her pencil made a chain of arrows that finally terminated with a cross. As he follows those arrows now, and looks down the long perspective of the narrowing road ahead, he feels something akin to vertigo and has to put a hand out to the wall to steady himself. What exists where those vanishing points meet?

  The woman has taken care to mark all the shops along the street, but her sense of scale is askew, Harry realizes. The drawing diverts him from the road and into washing-strung alleys that twist round and then widen again, past the back door of a baker’s, where a youth crosses white arms in the doorway, and a butcher’s, where a man in a red-stained apron touches his hat to Harry. He walks quickly, but as he looks at the cross on the map, he is not altogether sure whether he ought to be running to it, or running away; he is caught between urgency, the need to know now, and fear. He steps out beyond the walls that enclose the village, over a bridge and across a field and sees the building. It is a symmetrical-faced house, two windows either side of a canopied door, squarely planted in a garden. Here the order stops, though. The garden, he can see, is overgrown and paint is peeling from the metal railings that surround the property. The shutters are closed. It looks forgotten.

  Harry’s hand is on the gate when he sees the man. He is in the field beyond, moving away with what is unmistakably a camera and tripod in his arms. There is something about the man’s gait. He walks awkwardly, jerkily, as though he has sustained an injury to a leg at some time, but the way that he moves is familiar and Harry finds himself following.

  Though it is a warm autumn day, and Harry is sweating in shirtsleeves, the man is dressed as if it is December. He wears a black overcoat and a homburg hat which has seen better days. He stops every few paces and looks about. Harry, following, supposes that the man is searching for the right angle for his photograph.

  He leans in the shadow of a wall as he watches the figure’s halting progress across the field. The valley falls away below, tapering into a funnel of woodland. There is a lone ash tree ahead, an antique, noble tree. If Harry were taking the photograph he would centre the composition in on that tree. As he watches the man setting up the camera and tripod, he can’t help but approach. It is a glass-plate camera, old but quality apparatus, heavy kit.

  He is yards behind the photographer now. He can hear him breathing, smell his breath. Harry realizes that he is holding his own breath. Hands – familiar hands? – adjust the focus. The man steps back to swap over the plates. He half turns as he does so.

  ‘Who is there?’ says a voice that Harry recognizes.

  He doesn’t know quite what it is that makes him run, but suddenly Harry is pounding through the village streets, past the butcher’s and the baker’s and the twenty-eight names, his heart banging, pulling away as fast as he is able.

  63

  Edie

  Cheshire, October 1921

  ‘Captain Rose? I’m sorry, dear, he’s long gone.’ The woman leans in the doorway. Edie’s hand had shaken as she had rung the bell, she had felt light-headed as the door opened and, as the woman pushes her spectacles up her nose now, Edie knows that she can see her foolishness.

  ‘He died?’ she asks.

  ‘Heavens, no. Whatever gave you that notion?’ The woman laughs and then apologizes. ‘I just meant that he’s moved on. Moved to Altrincham. Not moved to the other side.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I really wasn’
t sure. Do forgive me for disturbing you.’ She turns to go. She has spent the journey framing questions, rehearsing one side of a conversation, working her way through iterations of possibility, but now it all falls away and she finds herself struggling for the next word. ‘Only, I don’t suppose that he left a forwarding address?’

  ‘Goodness, how pale you look, miss. Yes, they left me an address to pass on the post. He moved in with his sister, you see. I’ll find it for you, if you’ll give me five minutes, but won’t you come in and have a glass of water, dear? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  *

  There are paintings of gloomy Victorian children all over the walls of this sitting room. Red-faced infants shed great glassy tears and milkmaids sob over spilt milk. Edie had braced herself to walk into a house full of polished leather and brass, compasses, binoculars and military bearing. She is rather thrown by the inconsolable children, the packs of porcelain pug dogs, and all the cushions embroidered with Bible quotes. She moves Thou Shalt Be Saved aside, and takes the offered place on the sofa.

  As she watches the woman working her way through the writing bureau, Edie considers why Harry had chosen to tell her that lie. Why did he need her to think that Captain Rose was dead? Why had he blocked the possibility of her speaking with him before? She can only assume that Harry doesn’t want her to know the parts of the story that were missing from Rose’s letter. But what significance does that have? What more can Rose tell her?

  ‘Do forgive my mess. How embarrassing. I know that it’s in here somewhere.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry for barging into your house uninvited. It’s very kind of you to make the time.’

  While she sips the glass of water, she pictures a series of scenes in which Francis moves from dressing station, to hospital, to recuperation, to – where? She imagines the chain of decisions that have gone through Francis’ head, resulting in his making a choice not to come home. Is he so convinced that she has wronged him? Is he still angry at her? Did he simply decide that there was nothing to salvage? Has he made another life? Found another wife?

  ‘Only my husband rearranges my papers and never thinks to put anything back where he found it. It’s all sport to him, like it must always be hide-and-seek. Is that men in general, do you think?’

  ‘I couldn’t say.’

  Edie looks around the sitting room and she imagines a home in which she and Francis are husband and wife again, where possessions are once more shared, and conversations have two halves. Edie finds that it is easy to give their imaginary home a dinner service, and cutlery and upholstery, and to pick out the pattern of the wallpaper, but she doesn’t know what face her husband ought to wear. The two versions of Francis seem so far apart. Must she have the man with the sorrowful eyes when she would really much rather have the boy with the rhymes and the smile? The contemplation of it makes her feel foolish. It makes her feel a failure, and why would he choose to come back to such a shallow woman? She imagines an alternative reality in which Francis is sharing a home with a different woman. Is this what jealousy feels like? Is this how betrayal smarts?

  ‘I knew I had it.’ The woman turns and puts a looking glass to the piece of paper in her hand. Edie sees rounded copperplate letters and, in the magnification, a female name.

  ‘Captain Rose lives with his sister, you said?’

  ‘Yes, a very nice lady. Lovely manners. We met them both when the house turned over. The captain is a gentleman too, of course, and a decorated officer, only the poor man was suffering terribly with his nerves.’

  ‘He told you that?’

  The woman shakes her head and plumps a cushion which is cross-stitched with the words Do Unto Others. ‘The neighbours. Noises in the night.’

  ‘Oh.’ Edie thinks about the sound of Harry’s fear and tears, and then the cold of his cheek against hers. She is not sure that she wants to hear about noises in the night.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a pity? He was a charming man in the daytime, they tell me, meek as a lamb, but there were some shocking things went on, weren’t there? Alfred says that no amount of medals on your chest makes up for having that in your head. I suppose that’s why his sister wanted to look after him.’

  ‘Naturally so.’

  Is it his nerves that make Harry cry in the night? Is it the shocking things that went on? There was a moment when she had wanted nothing more than to look after Harry, but is he really the man that she thought he was?

  ‘Anyway, listen to me rattling on. You are still terribly pale, Mrs Blythe. Would you like a sherry?’

  ‘No, it’s quite all right, I must get on, but thank you. Could I possibly take a copy of the address?’

  ‘Do you mean to get in touch with Captain Rose?’ she asks, as she looks up from the writing bureau.

  ‘I’m not sure. I think so. There’s something that I perhaps need to ask him.’

  ‘Do be careful, dear. Won’t you?’

  ‘Of course. But why do you say that?’

  ‘Oh, these men and their memories. It’s really not over for so many of them yet, is it?’

  64

  Harry

  Calvaire du Quercy, October 1921

  ‘It is not from her?’

  ‘No. It’s Rachel’s writing. It’s from a friend.’ Harry is familiar with the handwriting of several women now, their loops and leans and the way they set down the lines onto an envelope. There are no envelopes from Edie, though.

  ‘Read it, if you wish,’ says Gabriel. ‘I will make the coffee.’

  He sits at the table and opens Rachel’s envelope. It is the second that he has received from her this month. She has gone to David’s grave. She had been to that same cemetery before, her letter tells Harry. She doesn’t know how she could have missed him, how she could have walked so close by and not known that he was there. She will return to England now, she says. She will pull up the shutters and restart her sewing machine, make a business and a purpose for herself. Harry is not sure what emotion he hears between Rachel’s lines. She tries to sound determined, but it is tinged with something else. He suspects that she is not experiencing the sense of relief that she had told herself she would. What has hit her is not quite the emotion that she was braced for. He thinks about her profile on the boat reciting poems and wonders what lines will come to mind as she reverses her journey. He thinks again about the mystery of the empty photograph.

  ‘Your friend is well?’ asks Gabriel, and puts the coffee pot down on the table.

  ‘I think so. I hope so.’

  ‘This is the tall woman? The Amazonian?’

  ‘No,’ Harry laughs. ‘That’s Cassie. Her letters are full of wagging fingers. She writes to tell me that I have to write to Edie.’

  He does not need Cassie’s encouragement; though his letters remain unanswered, he carries on writing. It is as if, in describing the details of his days, and committing these acts and images to her eyes, he tests that what he sees is true. He hasn’t told her about the photographer, though. He hasn’t told Gabriel all of it either. He’s not sure how to put it into words yet, and suddenly doesn’t feel he can trust his own eyes or his mind.

  ‘Does she realize how many letters you have written to Edie?’

  ‘Possibly not.’

  Gabriel shrugs and takes the chair opposite. There is paint on his hands. He had shown Harry the canvas the day before and asked for his opinion. It was just darkness at first, and suggestion of night sky, and Harry had seen nothing more in it. He had looked at Gabriel and then back to the difficult shadows. It was a veiled vista, smoked with soft suggestion, but Harry stepped closer and it slid into focus; the landscape was cross-hatched with lead white crosses; these fields were dense with dead. Harry stepped back, but the dead, now distinguished, refused to blur. In the foreground was a figure, his shadow-carved face greens and greys, his mouth gasping, as if surfacing from the sea, and his pale eyes communicating torment. It was a lamentation. Gabriel told him that it was a portrait of Marcellin
and all the dead of France.

  ‘Madeleine has bought the train tickets for Chaulnes. You don’t mind that we go?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘We will return on Saturday.’

  ‘Don’t feel obliged to hurry on my account. I can help your mother.’

  ‘And then how guilty would she make me feel?’ Gabriel rolls his eyes and laughs.

  ‘I have been developing more photographs,’ Harry tells him. ‘I should, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Will you feel better when you have completed it?’

  ‘I’ll never complete it.’

  ‘You’ve done enough.’

  ‘Have I? I wish I could feel like that.’ He had left his camera in pieces on the floor of a hotel room in Amiens. He can’t recall the name of the hotel, but he can remember the names of all those men who were still on his list. ‘I’ll post the photographs that I’ve taken to Mr Lee. The families have paid for them. I need to complete that much.’

  He had started the previous week, setting up his trays of chemicals on the table at which they are now sitting, wet images of graves hanging in lines from the beams, thinking all the time of Francis and Lieutenant Rose making a dark room of a cellar in Arras. Would Edie still want an image of Francis’ grave? Is she ready for the alternative?