The Photographer of the Lost

by Caroline Scott

  After an evening in the red light he had dreamed about the red gallery. He was walking through it at night, the pictures on the walls just mute darkness within the gilt glimmer of their frames. Broken glass stuck in his feet, but on and on he walked, and it was a spiral, a circle. Then she was there, briefly, in the door frame at the end of the corridor. She was dancing with someone, though the male figure was no more than an anonymous shape. She looked over her shoulder towards Harry and smiled. He walked on towards her, but no matter how far he walked, she never seemed to get any closer. The noise of the incoming shell echoed in his head.

  ‘You must finish it, then.’ Gabriel nods. ‘Do you have the photograph of Marcellin’s grave?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Harry reaches for the stack of photographs from the dresser. Gabriel stands at his shoulder as he turns through them and then he is there standing at the side of his brother’s grave. Harry hands him the portrait. Gabriel, in the photograph, is making the sort of expression that one ought to make at a graveside, his sepia face solemn but noble. The face at Harry’s side, as he looks at his own image, isn’t quite so solid. Is he thinking of standing in this same spot with Madeleine? Gabriel rubs his eyes and Harry turns away.

  He looks at the next image on the pile, which is just a wall. He had stared at it as it floated into existence in the bath of chemicals. He had tried to remember why he might have taken a photograph of a wall. It was only a couple of hours later that he had managed to place and recall the significance of that particular expanse of stone. A figure had been sat in front of it. He had talked to that man, told him his name, shaken his hand. Afterwards, in the red light, Harry had stood in front of the mirror. He half expected his own reflection to have disappeared then. But, unlike that of Daniel East, Harry’s face was there in the glass.

  ‘My mother will never make this journey,’ says Gabriel. ‘I am glad that I can show her this image. You must remember that when you send your photographs. It is a good and a kind thing that you have done.’

  Would he have posted the image of Daniel East to Rachel? He thinks of the man’s face, as real as his own in the mirror. The only clue in the photograph that he might ever have been there is a wreath leaned against the wall. That is it. He thinks of Rachel and her talk of clairvoyants, of psychics conjuring spirits for those in wishful mourning. Had he wished Daniel East from his imagination? He had almost told Rachel as they stood looking down over Vimy Ridge. It would have sent her search in a different, and false, direction. He had been on the very edge of telling her.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says to Gabriel.

  ‘Are you going to return to Saint-Christophe? I spoke to Lucien Delbos who owns the bar. He said that there was an Englishman living there.’

  Harry tries to recall the photographer’s face, but all that will come back to him is a blur. He knows that there was something familiar there, but in recall it has no detail. His recalled image is not quite sharp enough. As with Daniel East, could he just have been mistaken?

  ‘I don’t know,’ Harry says.

  He sits at the table after Gabriel leaves, and stares at the photograph of Daniel East’s absence. Was it the camera, or is his mind playing tricks? He almost suspects that if he looks away from the print for a moment, the figure will return. But will it be Daniel East there against the wall this time, or the face of the man with the camera in Saint-Christophe? Harry tries to bring to mind the face of the photographer, to pull it into focus. He had surely seen it, and known it, but he can’t now recall a face at all. Harry watches the lying photograph; he doesn’t mean to let it catch him out; he means to reason all of this out, he tells himself; he will return to Saint-Christophe.

  But when he picks up the phantom photograph, he can’t make it stay still. Why can he not hold it still? He tries to pin it to the tabletop, but his fingers won’t do as he wills them. The photograph falls to the floor and he crosses his arms over his chest. He tries to brace it, to keep it in, to push the shaking back inside his body.

  65

  Edie

  Denham Hall, Cheshire, October 1921

  ‘There are only ghosts here now,’ says the man by the gate. ‘Did you know it before?’

  ‘Not really. Not well. I came here once. In 1917. My brother-in-law was a patient here.’

  Edie hasn’t expected to come back to this place, but it is one bus stop before the street where Captain Rose lives, and somehow as the familiar walls of the house came into view, she had wanted to rewind and be here, not there. It wasn’t that she had expected to step inside the walls, just that she would have liked to lean on the gate and remember it all better, just to see the house from across the water again and to try to put it all into place, but now the agent is turning the key and it can’t hurt to look again. Can it?

  ‘I saw the sign. It’s to be sold?’

  ‘It’s going to auction at the end of the month. Every stick and stone of it. Every item of it has been catalogued. Every napkin, candlestick and soup spoon. I’m sorry, I should introduce myself. Alastair Bowen, property agent.’

  She shakes the man’s hand. ‘How sad for the family.’

  ‘They’ve taken a house in town. These old places are too much of an expense to maintain – all those windows to clean, all those steps to climb – and the roof needs work. The damp is finding its way in. It’ll probably become an institution of some kind, or split up into flats, or bulldozed to make way for new houses. That’s the way it’s all going now.’

  Weeds have grown through the gravel path and the gardens have gone back. Bindweed has choked the rose beds and the clipped lawn is now a yellow meadow picked out with bright poppies.

  ‘It was all so tidily mowed and maintained.’

  ‘It hasn’t been for a long time.’

  The rhododendrons have grown taller, the elm and ash crowd in more, but beyond them the house remains, mirrored in the lake. The upper windows have been boarded over and the blinds are drawn on the lower floors, so that it resembles a blinkered version of its former self. There are no men singing on the steps. No gramophone music distorts across the garden. It is as still as an Impressionist painting. It is only the light that vibrates.

  ‘The winds last winter weren’t kind,’ says the agent.

  A tree has fallen, bringing the far end of the conservatory down into so much buckled metal and fallen glass. Edie remembers the men in wicker chairs looking out in their convalescent blues, all their faces in the glass, looking as if they were waiting. Where are all those men now?

  ‘How quickly nature takes it back.’

  The climbing roses haven’t been pruned and they sway away from the walls in the wind. Ivy has crept over the balustrade and is claiming stonework and window panes.

  ‘I’ve already cleared it from around the door twice,’ says Bowen. ‘It blunted my secateurs. It’s as if it wants to seal it in, to close the lid on the mausoleum.’

  Edie watches as he turns the key and pushes the door. Blown leaves shift and skitter across the tiles.

  ‘Don’t spook easily, do you?’ he says.

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Good. The last patients left two years ago and the family never really made it a home again. There’s nothing here but echoes and mice now. I shan’t admit to the number of times that a creaking shutter or a rustling in the walls has made me jump.’

  Edie steps through the leaves and recalls crossing the same floor tiles four years earlier, struck then by the grandeur of this place. The skylight casts its yellows and blues down around her feet, but when she looks up she sees how the glass is grimed and the silhouettes of fallen branches break the symmetry of the leading.

  Bowen nods at a line of packing cases. ‘Waiting to make their exit. A few last personal things. I’ve got to go up to the library. Do you want to come up with me?’

  Edie remembers the sweep of the staircase. She remembers holding on to the stair rail and a flutter in her stomach as she had followed the nurse up. Her k
nees hadn’t felt quite steady. She had felt fear at that moment.

  The paint has blistered from the ceiling and flaked down onto the staircase. It is like a sweep of confetti strewn all up the stairs and there is a smell of damp decay. Can it really be only four years ago? The house has the air of having been abandoned for decades.

  Bowen’s torch leads the way along the corridor, picking out mouldering lampshades and stacks of curling magazines. It lights a birdcage, a box of crockery and a cobwebbed bath chair.

  ‘This was the saloon, but it became a ward during the war,’ he says as he pushes the door. ‘Though you perhaps already know that?’

  ‘Yes.’ Edie replies and realizes that she is holding her breath.

  How odd to cross this threshold again. How shockingly alike and different it all is. She is conscious, as she stands here, of how many times she has replayed this memory, how she has stored away all its detail. The bedsteads are still there, though stripped to their metal frames. Without the antiseptic smell and the blue uniforms, they are just boys’ beds in a dormitory. The wallpaper is coming away, sheets peeling down from the tops of the walls.

  ‘It’s shrugging off its skin,’ she says. ‘How sorry it looks.’

  ‘I’m not sure that it would be terribly hygienic any longer.’

  She had looked at all the men in their beds, one by one, hoping for Harry’s face, and they all looked back at her, so obviously not him. She had feared how bad the injury would be. Francis had told her that he’d been caught in an explosion on the barbed wire and that he was pretty nastily cut up. She had looked at the men with bandaged faces and wondered if she would know him. Edie walks the length of the room again. For a second it flashes into cold white daylight, with the scent of larkspur and Harry’s eyes lifting to hers.

  ‘Your relative did make it out of here, I take it?’ Mr Bowen’s voice brings her back to the dim present.

  ‘Yes. He’s a photographer now.’

  ‘Grand. We are the lucky ones and must make the most of every day.’

  His face is lost in the dazzle of the torch beam but she hears a melancholy edge in his voice. What secrets they all must now keep stored away. She looks down the corridor from the ward. ‘May I?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll open a shutter for you.’

  The room is just darkness at the end of the corridor. She pictures Harry in the doorway. Walking through feels oddly like some sort of rite.

  ‘You look as though someone has stepped on your grave,’ says Bowen’s voice, suddenly there at her side again. ‘It was a picture gallery, I think. Someone in the family was a collector.’

  There is no light in the room, but she knows the colour of its walls. A pale shape looms. She looks twice before she knows that it is a statue covered over in a dust sheet.

  ‘Open more shutters if you want. I’ll be in the library next door. Don’t worry, if you see a ghost, I’ll hear you scream.’

  The shutter is stiff, but she manages to pull it back far enough to see it all. The chairs are stacked now, the tables pushed aside, and the chaise longue covered with sheets, but it is the walls that most strike her as different. Where the paintings once hung, where there were all those purple mountains and blue cliffs, there are now just darker rectangles of red paint.

  ‘They’ve all gone,’ says Edie.

  Bowen turns in the doorway. ‘The paintings? Yes, all sold off last year. So much of it went out of the door, bit by bit, but not enough to settle the bills.’

  Edie puts her hand to the cool marble of the mantelpiece. For a moment he is by her side, steering her around the walls again.

  It’s all downhill from now, isn’t it? This might well be the best day of my life, says Harry’s recalled voice.

  The plasterwork ceiling has come through in places. Older wooden panels show beneath. Could it have been that bad then? Surely this decay must have already set in. Had she just not seen it?

  If I cling on to you, will you help me not to bounce back down? she hears Harry say.

  Music suddenly swells and she gasps. Is Bowen right about the ghosts? Jazz music is playing somewhere in the house. She steps into the library as he looks up from the gramophone.

  ‘I didn’t scare you, did I?’

  ‘Briefly. Momentarily. Bravo, if that was your intention.’

  The gramophone crackles through ‘Crazy Blues’. It is the same instrument, she recognizes, that they had out on the steps. She shivers and pulls her coat around her shoulders.

  ‘Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds.’ Bowen shuffles his papers and smiles. ‘I find it cheers the place up a bit. Drags it into the twentieth century. I’m sorry. I won’t be much longer.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to be in here on my own.’

  ‘Do you wonder why I jumped at the chance of your company?’

  There are books all over the floor in the library. Bowen apologizes for the mess. She steps between stacks of Shakespeare and estate accounts and thinks of Francis and Harry in a looted house, his feet picking between sonnets and maps of Abyssinia.

  ‘If you wish to take a souvenir, I’ll turn a blind eye.’ Bowen nods to the stack of gramophone records. ‘No one will know and I won’t tell on you. There’s actually some decent stuff here.’

  ‘It’s quite all right. But thank you.’

  She sits down in a chair and closes her eyes. For a moment it all spins around her and they are dancing again on the lawn. She sees Harry’s up-close, long-ago face. She also sees the photograph that he sent the previous day. It had shocked her when an image of Tyne Cot fell out of an envelope, but he reminded her that he had promised to do it for her. His writing supposes that she hasn’t yet stood in that place. He says this is the best that he can give her.

  ‘Being there, seeing this, brought it all back to me,’ he wrote. ‘I relived those last moments. I saw his flickering eyelids again, heard his stilling breath, felt the weight of him in my arms.’ Seeing the scene now through his words, being brought up close to Francis’ dying face, she wants to believe that Harry isn’t lying. But she has stood in that cemetery, amongst the eight thousand nameless men, and she knows that Francis isn’t one of them. She also knows that this wasn’t Francis’ last moment. Where is the journey in Rose’s arms to the dressing station? Why is that scene not in any of Harry’s letters? She wishes that he wasn’t lying, but she knows now that he is.

  ‘I shall be sad when it’s gone,’ says Bowen, turning towards her as he locks the door of Denham Hall. ‘I should be sorry if so much history went under the wrecking ball.’

  They stand side by side and watch the reflection of the house shiver in the lake. She turns the Saint Christopher in her pocket. If she hadn’t given it to Harry that day, if she had given it to Francis instead, would it all now be different? Did it really cause so much trouble?

  It can’t do any harm, can it? She hears her own recalled voice and feels like she has caused so much harm.

  There is no drama in its arc, not even a bubble breaks the surface. She has no obvious sense of exorcising a ghost or righting a wrong.

  ‘There’s probably a tidy sum in coins at the bottom of that lake. Did you make a wish?’ Bowen’s grin is no more real than Francis’ celluloid smile, but how very far away and long ago that suddenly seems. How fleeting and fragile it all is.

  ‘I’m not sure what to wish for,’ Edie replies.

  66

  Harry

  Saint-Christophe du Quercy, October 1921

  Gabriel drives him as far as the village walls this time.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?’

  ‘No. As I said, if you’d meet me here again in a couple of hours . . .’

  Harry walks back over the bridge and across the field and stands with his hands on the railings. The grass beyond is knee-high and the apple trees untended. Wasps hum amongst the fallen fruit and he thinks of a long-ago felled orchard, the sweet smell of the newly cut wood, and his brother sleeping in the grass at his si
de. Should he not still be sleeping? Who do these railings contain?

  The gate closes behind him. Weeds have pushed through the gravel path and a trellis of wisteria has taken over one side of the house. There are empty bottles stacked in a crate by the side of the door, he sees as he gets closer, and a cane chair that has blackened with being out in the weather. The drone of a wasp is amplified in the bottles. A shutter hangs aslant.

  It is dark inside and he can see very little through the window. There are some items of furniture covered over with dust sheets, so that they look like ghosts in a Victorian melodrama. There is a vase of desiccated hydrangea heads on the other side of the glass and an open book. He stands on his tiptoes to see and reads the first line of a poem. ‘I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky . . .’ He hears Rachel’s voice speak the line and is momentarily back on the boat with the taste of salt on his lips. It’s not enough: ‘Missing’, says Rachel’s recalled voice.

  With a sudden movement he steps back. A bottle falls and smashes. A rat scurries away.

  ‘Monsieur?’

  He turns, expecting to see the man in the Homburg hat with a face that is a blur.

  ‘Monsieur? Je peux vous aider?’

  It is a woman. White hair. A black dress. A gold cross at her throat. She holds her outstretched hands together as if she is making an offering in a church, as if she is about to dip in front of an altar. There is something humble and tender about the gesture and Harry instinctively wants to stretch his hand out to hers.

  ‘I can help you?’ she says.

  *

  She unlocks the door and Harry steps in behind her. She introduces herself as Marie-Thérèse and apologizes for the state of the floor tiles.

  ‘I have been looking after the house and le monsieur. Il était anglais, ce monsieur,’ she adds. ‘Comme vous? The house is available for rent again, but I did not expect anyone to view it today. J’ai honte de ce bordel! I am sorry for the mess. Tout sera bien propre.’