She goes ahead and opens shutters. As light comes into the room Harry sees china dogs that he might recognize and porcelain shepherdesses that he might not. There are several clocks in this room, all stopped at different times, so that their lies vary in scale. He also sees a lot of photographic equipment; there are rolls of film and parts of cameras, stacked glass plates and boxes of chemicals. Photographs are everywhere. Lines of wire have been stretched between the beams and pegs remain where drying prints have been suspended. There is only one image now on the wires: the view of the valley, the tapering lines of trees and the ash tree at the centre. With the smell of developing fluid, Harry is back in the cellar in Arras.
‘Voyez! Looking after this monsieur has not been easy,’ says Marie-Thérèse. She laughs, throws her hands up and then frowns. ‘Pas facile,’ she repeats with emphasis.
‘No,’ says Harry, looking around. ‘I see.’
The walls are a patchwork of photographic prints, rippling now in the breeze from the window. Many of the images Harry recognizes as being from the immediate vicinity – the arcades of the village square, the wooden timbers of the market hall, the alleys and the crumbling bastide walls. The valley below the house is a repeated subject. The ash tree is there in mist, in rain and in snow.
Marie-Thérèse points and pulls back her lips to show a crooked-toothed smile. Her own image is amongst a collection of portraits. She sits straight-backed, proper and proud, those hands, linked again, now in her lap. There are faces of farmers and shepherds and circus performers, ancient faces, children’s faces and young women in mourning clothes. There is something quietly dignified about these portraits. Each of the sitters looks as though they have some source of pride. He has given a nobility to them all.
‘Ma fille,’ says Marie-Thérèse and indicates a girl with braided hair. ‘My daughter.’
Harry nods. They are accomplished portraits. Sharp. Direct. Their eyes arresting. They speak loudly, these quiet sitters. He would be proud had he taken these photographs himself. He thinks of all the faces that he drew. All those glinting eyes and grins that he had tried to catch on paper left something of themselves behind and come back to him in dreams. He sometimes imagines all of those paper faces flickering behind him like an echo. He sometimes wonders what happened to the sent-home soldiers’ smiles. Are they still there on bedroom walls and kitchen dressers, substituted for their owners or looking like something long ago and unlikely? He thinks of all the times that he has drawn Francis’ face and how far away but oddly close that memory feels at this moment.
Harry looks at the far wall and Marie-Thérèse shakes a hand in front of her face and turns her back. ‘I don’t look,’ she says.
There are faces again here. All male now: some of them smiling, joshing in a farm courtyard, others unshaven and shadow-eyed. There are faces that Harry does not know, but so many that are familiar. Will is standing on his hands in a Yorkshire field. Pembridge is exchanging cigarettes with a French soldier. Wilkinson scowls at a jar of insecticide powder. Bartley is in the orchard. Harry is by Francis’ side on the docks in Boulogne. Francis is everywhere.
He hears footsteps behind and turns. Marie-Thérèse opens the far door, steps into a kitchen and beckons Harry after.
‘C’est trop, tout ça,’ she says. ‘Too much. It is necessary to try to forget. Il faut essayer. It is necessary to think of tomorrow, not yesterday.’
She takes a bottle from a shelf, pours two measures and squeezes Harry’s arm. He watches her as she moves around the kitchen. Her broom shoos cobwebs from corners. There is a stale smell, a rust mark in the bottom of the sink and husks of dead centipedes on the tiles. She gathers them together with a dustpan and brush and straightening says, ‘C’est trop triste. Too sad.’
Harry takes it all in – the row of wooden spoons and the rosy-sprigged coffee pot, the pans that hang from the ceiling and the bar of soap by the side of the sink that has shrunk and cracked. Who last turned it in their hands? Whose domesticity is this? There are bird bones and snail shells on the window ledge, a piece of quartz, a clay pipe and a collection of flints. Harry considers the imagination that has salvaged and arranged these small treasures. He sees his brother, long ago, pull a triangle of flint from the wall of a trench and turn towards him with an outstretched hand. ‘Look,’ says Francis’ once-upon-a-time voice.
He glances up at a scurry of noise above. ‘Que les souris qui dansent.’ Marie-Thérèse laughs at Harry’s alarm. ‘Only the mice. While the cat is away, the mice dance.’
Harry drains his glass. The spirit is strong and hot at the back of his throat. He coughs and Marie-Thérèse widens her eyes in amusement. She clinks her own emptied glass against Harry’s and crosses her arms over her chest. ‘Alors, you wish to view the house, monsieur?’
Harry suddenly feels that he is trespassing.
‘No. I mean, thank you, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. The gentleman is out? He is away today? Le monsieur, il n’est pas ici?’
Marie-Thérèse looks at him for a moment before she answers. She counts it out on her fingers and holds up five digits. ‘Capitaine Rose, il est décédé. He is dead, monsieur. He is dead for five months.’
*
Perspective shifts as he walks back into Rose’s room full of photographs. Harry remembers the grip of Rose’s hand on his arm as they had stood at Will’s graveside. He remembers Rose’s face next to Francis’, laughing in the red glow of their cellar darkroom. He remembers – he is sure of it – reading that Rose had been killed in Cambrai. So many facts are false. So many people aren’t where they’re meant to be. So much is shaken up.
He looks around this room and Francis’ face is everywhere. How could he really have believed that Francis might be in Saint-Christophe du Quercy? And, yet, he so obviously is.
‘Il était un vrai gentleman, Capitaine Rose. Sympathique. Très gentil,’ says Marie-Thérèse.
‘Yes, he was,’ Harry agrees.
Rose had joined them while they were training in Morecambe. He and Francis had met looking into the window of a photographer’s studio. A conversation had started as their reflections joined over flashguns and spools of film. Is this where it ended?
‘But these journeys! Cette lourde tristesse! It was all very difficult. Cette affreuse guerre.’
‘Journeys?’
Marie-Thérèse’s finger makes backwards and forwards gestures. ‘Each month. From north to south. Du sud au nord. And all of this terrible news,’ she adds, searching for English adjectives. ‘Horrible news.’
‘I’m sorry? I’m not sure I follow.’
‘Ses gars. His boys. Ses soldats. Are you one of his soldiers?’
Her meaning becomes apparent when she shows him the wall. Marie-Thérèse leads Harry through the kitchen, past the flints and the quartz and the rosy coffee pot, which only ten minutes earlier all might have belonged to Francis. Past the spoons and the soap and the snail shells, which Harry had pictured so very clearly turning in his brother’s hands. The room beyond looks like it once served as a dining room, a sideboard displays decanters and soup tureens, only now it is something between a library and a command centre. The dining table is covered over with large-scale military maps, busily annotated. As Harry looks he sees familiar villages and around them clusters of names and numbers. It is some moments before he realizes what the numbers represent.
‘His casualties? Our losses?’ He turns to Marie-Thérèse. She nods her head.
Something seems to shift under Harry’s feet as he looks at the maps. Marie-Thérèse pulls out a chair and encourages him to sit. She goes back through to the kitchen for the bottle of eau de vie.
Harry knows the villages, the woods, the terrains and the names, and it doesn’t take him long to figure out Rose’s purpose or his code. The names of the missing men are in red ink; the confirmed casualties are in black. Rose had seemingly given himself the task of turning all the reds into blacks.
‘He says it is his responsibility.’ Mari
e-Thérèse refills Harry’s glass. ‘Il a dit que c’était son duty.’
He thinks of Ralph Fielding’s need to do the right thing by the men he lost. The need to make it up to them in some way. His penance, as Cassie had called it. Is this what Rose felt too? Was this something that he had to make right?
‘He was trying to find them all?’
‘He had some success. Il a trouvé beaucoup de ces disparus.’
‘Disparus?’ Harry repeats. ‘He found the disappeared?’ There is only one name then that he needs to locate on the map. ‘Il y une carte de la région d’Ypres?’ He searches the table.
‘Je ne sais pas, monsieur. I do not know. Mais il y a son mur. His wall.’ She points.
It is only then that Harry sees there is a wall of faces in this room too. It is like the crosses that suddenly loom out of Gabriel’s canvas. Like those unintelligible shadows that suddenly, with a shift of focus, make sense. The wall behind Harry is covered in photographed faces.
‘Ses gars,’ repeats Marie-Thérèse. ‘His boys.’
Harry’s eyes do not know where to look. There is Bartley and Pembridge and Fearnley. Here is Summerfield and Wilkinson and Lieutenant O’Kane. So many of them are familiar. So many more of them he had forgotten. ‘William,’ he says as his focus catches the expression of his younger brother. It is a shock to see him here. ‘Mon frère,’ he says to Marie-Thérèse.
‘Le pauvre.’
‘And the cemetery,’ he says as he steps nearer to the wall. There, beside Will’s grin, is the cross in Guillemont that Harry had knelt beside two months ago. It is the same for all of them, he sees: next to the photograph of each of these men is an image of his grave.
‘Et ceux qu’il n’a pas trouvés. Et les soldats he does not find,’ Marie-Thérèse adds, hesitating through the words.
Her finger indicates the second group. Just faces these. No accompanying graves. But too many faces. And Harry’s eyes cannot search them fast enough.
‘He’s not there.’
‘Monsieur?’
‘Francis.’ He searches Marie-Thérèse’s face too, but no recognition glimmers. ‘Francis Blythe? His photograph is everywhere in the other room. Did Monsieur Rose find Francis Blythe?’
It seems a long time before Marie-Thérèse’s expression changes. An awful long time until she picks out the place on the wall.
67
Edie
Cheshire, October 1921
‘You’re looking for Captain Rose?’ the woman asks.
‘Yes. Please forgive me for disturbing you. I’m looking for Michael Rose. I was given this address.’
Edie feels embarrassed and confused now, feels a strange urge to run. Does she have any right to cross-question this man? Is it fair to oblige this stranger to pick over memories that evidently trouble him? Looking at the woman’s frowning face, sensing her obvious suspicions and doubt, Edie feels that coming here has been a mistake.
‘I’m sorry. He’s not here any longer.’
‘He’s not?’ It’s almost a relief. Can she now turn her back and walk away? ‘Please excuse me. Do forgive me. I must have been given the wrong address.’
‘You’re not wrong,’ the woman says. She looks at Edie, but then looks away. ‘You were given the right address. My name is Louisa Davies. I’m Michael Rose’s sister. But I’m afraid that my brother is dead.’
*
‘It was five months ago,’ Louisa Davies explains. ‘I had a phone call from the gendarmerie. It’s very difficult to be told in a foreign language that your brother has killed himself. As you stumble through the translation, there’s no softening it with euphemism. He hanged himself.’
‘How awful for you.’
Louisa Davies shakes her head. ‘Awful for poor Michael, but I can’t honestly say it was a shock. My brother wasn’t a well man, you see. When I look back, I can see that it was coming for a long time. Sometimes you wonder how you can have missed the signs, don’t you?’
Edie insists on helping Louisa with the tea things, and as she looks around this stranger’s kitchen, at the coffee spoons enamelled with the coat of arms of Arras and the sugar bowl painted with an image of Ypres, she is aware of how much connects them. But how many other links will never now be clear enough? There have been so many missed signs and missed opportunities. She had wanted to look Captain Rose in the eye, and to hear the story from his mouth, and then to know if Harry had lied and whether there is really a chance that Francis might yet be alive. She is now not sure that she will ever know.
‘We thought we’d lost him once before, long ago. My brother was badly wounded at Cambrai,’ Louisa says as they walk through with the tea tray.
‘At Cambrai? Yes, I think I’d heard that.’
‘He was in hospital for months and I wasn’t certain that he’d make it. We sorted all the paperwork out, and my mother and I even talked about what hymns he would have liked at his funeral. It quite spooks me now to remember that! Because one morning we walked into the ward and his eyes were open again. Just like that. He pulled through then, he got stronger every day, but the version of Michael that I got back wasn’t the brother that I’d known before the war. He joked once that he’d looked his maker in the eye. I suppose it was coming so close to the edge that did it. Or that’s how I reasoned it to myself, anyway. The version of my brother that I got back was a driven man. The war had spat him out again, but it had taken his mind. He was obsessed, you see.’
‘Obsessed?’
‘By what had gone on. By making it right.’ Louisa blows at her tea and makes small waves. There is such difficulty in her eyes, Edie sees, as she looks up over the rim of her cup. ‘I’m afraid that Michael felt guilty, that he had a sense of unfulfilled responsibility. You see, while he was in his hospital bed, he made a list of the men in his unit that he’d lost and he gave himself a mission to account for them all.’
‘Like a shepherd looking after his sheep?’ There is a framed photograph of a young man over the fireplace. He is wearing a tweed jacket and holding a cloth cap in his hand as he leans on a farm gate. His fringe flops over his forehead and there is a sparkle of amusement in his lifted eyes. He looks rather like Louisa Davies, Edie thinks, she can see a family resemblance, but she also recognizes the young man’s features, just a little older, from some of Francis’ photographs. This is the young man with whom she has needed to talk, only it is now too late.
‘Something like that,’ Louisa replies. ‘A shepherd who has lost his sheep and needs to bring them all back into the fold. He made a list of the men who had died and a list of the missing. He had to be sure that the first group all had a grave marker, and the latter all had to be found. Only, that was such an undertaking. He had set himself an impossible task.’
‘Absolutely impossible.’ Edie thinks about Tyne Cot and the words on all those crosses; all the men, so many men, Known unto God and God alone.
‘And, really, I think Michael knew that it was impossible. He probably even knew that right at the start, but he wouldn’t give it up. He started going out there, you see. He’d go out there for weeks on end, going over the ground, picking over it all. Like a scab that he refused to let heal. He went out there with a spade. Can you imagine? Digging over all those terrible places. It was dangerous and it was bad for his health. His health never fully recovered after he came out of hospital, and all of this made it so much worse. I tried to reason with him. Of course I did. I begged him to stop, to give it up, but I don’t think that he actually could. It was a torture to him, and it was a torture to see him that way, but at some very fundamental level he needed to do it. Or, at least, he needed to try.’
‘Did he find any of the men he was looking for?’ Edie pictures the young man in the tweed jacket out there in that terrible landscape. She pictures his spade digging and all of the amusement falling out of his eyes. She needs to know what he was looking for and what he found.
‘Yes, which gave him all the more reason to carry on, I suppose.’
She looks at Edie. ‘Why did you want to speak to Michael?’
‘Because my husband is missing. I thought that he might be able to confirm some details for me. Please say no if this is too intrusive, but could I perhaps look through your brother’s papers?’
Louisa hesitates. ‘Could I perhaps ask your husband’s name?’
‘Francis Blythe.’
Louisa nods. ‘For some odd reason I did think it might be. I know his name. It used to be there so often in Michael’s letters.’
‘You do?’
‘Well, they were friends, weren’t they? He was the young chap who took photographs with Michael. Isn’t that right? And his was the last name that Michael crossed off his list. I think that finding Francis Blythe rather drew a line under things, as though Michael felt he had come to a point where he had done enough.’
‘He found Francis?’
‘Oh, how do I say it? I am so sorry, Edie. You shouldn’t hear it this way, should you? Michael found Francis Blythe’s grave.’
*
Edie cries then like she hasn’t cried before, not even when the telegram came, or when she got the first letter from Michael Rose. Because now it is final. Because now finally it is real. Louisa puts her arms around Edie as she cries, and Edie feels how Louisa cries too. When it is done, when Edie can cry no more, Louisa pushes the damp hair away from her face, looks her square in the eye and smiles.
‘Forgive me,’ Edie says.
‘Don’t apologize. Don’t ever apologize. You have every reason to cry, and better out than in, eh? Shall I fetch the bottle of brandy?’
‘Your brother wrote to me twice, you know.’ She tells Louisa as she fills the glasses. ‘He sent me a letter in November 1917 and told me that Francis was missing and believed killed, and I was grateful to him for that, the fact that he’d taken the time, and that he said such kind things. But then afterwards, I heard that your brother had brought Francis to the dressing station, that he’d carried him there himself. I haven’t been able to make that fit, that Francis could have both been missing and a casualty.’
The Photographer of the Lost Page 33