‘This is the dressing station at Houthulst Forest, I’m assuming?’
‘Yes.’
Louisa shakes her head. ‘Lots of men disappeared from that dressing station. I know that much. It was only a group of pillboxes, you see, just concrete bunkers, and the enemy kept on shelling it. Men got brought there, brought to what they hoped might be safety, only to be lost all over again. Michael had nightmares about that place, but he kept going back over that area. He had to keep going back there. A lot of the names on his list were connected with that dressing station.’
‘But why did he not tell me that he’d made the effort to bring Francis back? Had I known that, had I known that he’d tried, I would have thanked him.’
‘Because in the end he couldn’t save your husband? Because he felt that he’d tried and failed?’
Edie looks at the young man smiling over the fireplace, imagines the weight of Francis’ body on that young man’s back, and all the effort that must have taken, only for it all to have been for nothing. She is not sure who she feels sorrier for.
‘You said that my brother wrote to you twice?’
‘Yes, he sent me a package full of Francis’ photographs a few weeks after his first letter. Mostly the photographs that they’d taken together. It was kind of him. I was glad to have them.’ She thinks about the other photograph, the final one that had come through her door in May. If Francis himself hadn’t sent it, could it be that Michael Rose had contacted her a third time?
*
‘I was sent a photograph a few months ago – a photograph of my husband. It came in the post, but there was nothing else in the envelope. No letter. No details as to the sender. I somehow seem to have spent the past few months convincing myself that Francis sent it himself.’
‘Where was it posted from?’ Louisa asks.
‘From France.’
‘What did the envelope look like?’
‘It was a Manila envelope, a typed address, worn keys. Is it possible your brother could have sent it?’
Louisa presses her lips together. ‘It sounds like Michael’s typewriter.’
‘Really? Do you think?’
‘Yes.’
‘But why send me that? Why send me that without a note to explain it?’
Louisa turns her glass before she looks up. ‘Michael seems to have gone through a process of clearing his desk at the end. He tidied and labelled and sorted through all of his papers. He left it all as if he meant to hand it over. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that my brother’s mind was tidy at that point, but in his own way he was dotting the i and crossing the t. I guess that he meant to return it to you.’
‘But why not put in a note? Not even a signature? Why not let me know that it was him sending it?’
‘Perhaps he couldn’t bring himself to write again? Perhaps he just didn’t know what to say?’
Edie thinks about Francis’ black-and-white photograph face, but it is different now, knowing the truth, knowing that he isn’t out there any longer. Something has shifted; something that she now realizes was fear and shame and overwhelming worry as to how she might cope if he did come back. She now just feels desperately sad and sorry for the broken man in the photograph.
‘May I ask what the photograph looks like?’
Edie takes a mouthful of her drink. It’s been six weeks now since she last saw that picture, and she doesn’t like to bring it to mind. ‘He’s standing in a square, but it’s all broken down. He doesn’t look well – tired, exhausted, as if he’s given up. He seems so much older in the photograph – ten years older than actually he is.’
‘He looks like he’s taking the photograph of himself, doesn’t he?’ Louisa asks. ‘Isn’t that right? You can see that from the angle of his arms. I think it was taken in Ypres, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. But how on earth can you know that?’
‘I might have seen that photograph before. I think I might have seen it on Michael’s desk. Only it’s quite memorable. Once you’ve looked at that poor man’s face, it’s difficult to forget it, isn’t it?’
‘It is.’
‘I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t say that, should I?’
Edie shakes her head. ‘But how did your brother come to have it?’
‘I suppose because they took photographs together? Because they developed them together? Didn’t you say that Michael sent you a package of Francis’ photographs after he died? That he’d developed Francis’ last film?’
‘He did. But why keep that one?’
‘A memento?’
‘It’s a strange choice of memento, though, isn’t it? Why would he want to remember Francis looking like that?’ Edie wonders where that photograph of Francis is now. She hopes that Harry doesn’t mean to remember Francis that way.
‘You have to understand my brother’s state of mind.’ Louisa refills the glasses. ‘He felt guilty. He felt wretched about some of the things that had gone on. He believed that he should have done better – been a better man, a better leader. I’m afraid that he rather punished himself for that.’
‘He punished himself by looking at a photograph of Francis?’
‘Possibly. I can’t say with all honesty. I can only tell you that Michael wasn’t a well man.’
‘But why not tell me that he’d found Francis?’
‘Perhaps he simply couldn’t bear to. I don’t suppose you recall the date on the postmark?’
‘Of course. It was sent on the thirtieth of April.’
Louisa nods. ‘I wondered if that might be the case. It was the same day that he took his life.’
‘I am sorry, Louisa. So terribly sorry. The poor man.’
‘Yes. Aren’t they both?’
*
In the box of photographs that Edie handed to Harry there had been an image of Francis and Michael Rose together. There’s something candid about this shot, something natural and simply sincere that had made Edie pause when she first saw it. Francis and Michael are looking at one another and laughing, and neither of them seems to be particularly aware of the camera. They look like friends in this photograph. They look happy. Edie had quite forgotten the shape of Francis’ smile in recent months, but she now means to remember it. As she watches Michael’s sister tidying the glasses away, she decides that she will frame that picture when Harry returns the album, and she will also have a copy made for Louisa.
‘Your brother lived with you here?’
‘For a few months, I wanted to look after him, but then he moved to France just over a year ago. I didn’t want to let him go, I didn’t trust him to look after himself, and what with his state of mind, I worried. You understand?’
‘Yes. Absolutely.’
‘But he was determined. He rented a property down in the south-west. He said that it was for his health, for the weather, but I think it was because he couldn’t stand any more of me fussing around him. I wanted to stop all the business with the graves, you see, I wanted him to think about other things, find new occupations, forget about the war, but he’d made his mind up to finish it.’
‘In the south-west?’
‘I went over and stayed with him a couple of times, but it wasn’t any sort of a home, and I’m not sure that he wanted me to be there. It was a village called Saint-Christophe du Quercy.’
‘Saint-Christophe du Quercy?’ Edie repeats it, and suddenly the letters of a blurred postmark slide into focus, and match a place name in Harry’s letters.
‘You almost look like you know it.’
‘I think I might.’
68
Harry
Calvaire du Quercy, 11 November 1921
November 1921 is exceptionally cold. Ships are lost in the Channel in snowstorms, telegraph communication between London and Paris goes down and fountains freeze solid in Trafalgar Square. Grass beneath Harry’s boots is glitteringly brittle. The shapes of oak leaves crunch white. The trees are like negative images of themselves today and all the contours of the land
declare themselves differently. He looks back and sees his own breath hanging in the air. His survival, on this day of remembering death, seems to be making empathetic marks. He is conscious on the frosty lane of his own momentum and bulk and pulse and heat.
Gabriel is waiting for him at the bend, as arranged. The service is scheduled to start at twelve. He stamps his feet and blows on his fingers. Gabriel’s breath mists around him, like a soul in a trick photograph. ‘It’s ten degrees below,’ he says through chapped lips. ‘This air is like needles in my mouth.’
There are strings of red, white and blue flags across the square. They tug in the icy wind and seem to accentuate the cold. The people of the village, below the bunting, are in black. Harry moves through the crowd, at Gabriel’s side, towards the memorial. Gabriel shakes hands. A lot of hands stretch out towards him today. He is nervous, though, he has told Harry on the way up the hill. He fears that they each secretly hope that the statue will wear the face of their son, their husband, their father, their brother.
The figure is still covered over. An apparatus had been constructed that suspends a black cloth over it, worked with ruffles and pleats. Via a system of weights and pulleys it will be unveiled on the stroke of twelve, as the trumpets’ blare closes. This apparatus reminds Harry of a gallows.
He steps inside the church, and even in here it is as cold as the grave. It takes a few seconds for his eyes to adjust. Stubs of candles are flickering out, like the sputtering ends of prayers. The walls of the church are Old Testament and last judgement, but it is all pulsing stars and shooting comets above. The blistering plaster on the ceiling suggests the mystery of clouded heavens, and Harry remembers a star-punctured sky over Salisbury Plain, long ago, and the faces of his brothers looking up. He also remembers the first night after Francis died, how the sky had seemed to be entirely empty and he had suddenly been certain that no god was looking down. But Gabriel is at his side then, his hand on Harry’s arm. ‘Come away,’ he says. ‘We need a coup de courage, not a confession.’
It is not much warmer inside the bar. Overcoats are kept buttoned. The barman polishes a glass and holds it to the light. There is not much light today. Gabriel clinks his glass against Harry’s and says, ‘Absent friends.’
Jacques Delpy, down the bar, is holding forth on the significance of this day, on why it is a start rather than an end. It feels like an end. He says that it will be better now, that they have been shown the way, that henceforth it will be socialist brotherhood and full bellies. The old world is breaking up, he says. It is cracking apart.
Marie Leval cries quietly and takes a brandy for her nerves. She lost her sons, all gone at Verdun but all apart, one by one, and three to mourn. It would have been easier, she says, if they had gone together. Harry considers: did his mother feel the same?
It is almost four years to the day since Harry’s mother died. He had had to write to her a fortnight previously to tell her about Francis. There had never been a reply. There never would be one. He looks at Marie Leval and thinks about his own mother shedding sons one by one. Only he had come back. He had come through. Did that make him the lucky one? Ought he to appreciate that luck? Was it careless – callous, even – not to?
At a quarter-to-twelve, the crowd moves from bar to barricade. The village mayor, Marius Ferniot, looks coy in his chains. It is a big thing to have to preside over and Harry pities him the struggle for the appropriate words. Gabriel translates here and there, where the sentiments find weight with him. We are orphaned, he says. There is hommage, gloire, patriotisme and sacrifice. These words sound all the more abstract, all the more alien, in Gabriel’s accent. Harry thinks about the service around Will’s grave, how Francis had not seemed to be quite there even then. He also thinks about a grave surrounded by crumbled concrete. As Harry had peered closely at that photograph on Michael Rose’s wall, he’d seen how the wood was crudely hewn and hammered together, but the lettering was unambiguous enough. As he had finally looked at Francis’ grave, he realized how he had clung on to some hope. But both of his brothers are dead today and Harry too feels orphaned.
Marius Ferniot intones the names. Calvaire sent sixty-eight men to the front, to the north to fight for France, out of a population of just over one hundred and seventy. Of these, fifty-seven returned. The statistics and calculations are Gabriel’s. Calvaire did well: it beat the odds, fought and won against probability. By the law of averages this village should have lost twelve men. Marcel Mandelli looks up and nods as his son’s name is spoken. Guillaume was his eldest, Gabriel has told Harry, gone at Maurepas, where they sang the Marseillaise and carried the colours. He is five years dead and never buried. There are eleven names (Harry counts them) recited and now in new chiselled stone, dead in sharp lines, and below them the Disparus – those who have simply disappeared, the men in limbo between life and death that discretion cannot bear to distinguish.
Harry thinks of a face on a photographic film that ought to be there, but isn’t – a distinctive pair of eyes that have simply, inexplicably disappeared. He has written to Rachel again. Would she now rather have David missing or dead? When he looks at the panel of Disparus he sees the wreath-maker’s pale eyes and cannot comprehend that he could just have imagined them. When he reads the list of Disparus he sees a wall full of once familiar faces. He cannot comprehend that either.
The notes on Rose’s desk told him how he had gone back out again after the failed attack and struggled to get Francis to the dressing station. Rose had carried Francis on his back, across all that awful ground, even though he knew that Francis was dying, even though he knew that he couldn’t possibly make it. Harry hadn’t known that Rose had brought Francis’ body back, and he can hardly imagine how he managed it. Rose’s notes recorded that he left Francis in the dressing station without much hope, but then when the shelling started, he knew that all hope was gone. Harry had realized, as he looked at the photograph of Francis’ grave, that the eruption of concrete around it is what is left of the dressing station. He remembers the concrete bunkers, the shelling and the screaming and then the meaningful silence. There was so much confusion. There were so many bodies. He is struck by the unfathomable loneliness of the single cross. Where have the rest of them gone? How many unfound men are out there still? Will they all be brought home one day?
As Harry had turned the photograph of Francis’ grave in his hands, he had thought of all the images that he has taken and posted to waiting, needing, doubting families. Is this how those parents and siblings and wives felt when they received Harry’s photographs? There is a finality to it now, a final silencing of the nagging questions, but Harry also feels a profound new sense of loss. He has slept, though, for the past week; nights of deep, silent, dreamless sleep – sleep such as he hasn’t known for months, maybe years. He thinks of all the names on his list and hopes those men really are resting in peace, truly sleeping silently, and that their families have also stopped dreaming.
Harry sees Rose himself as he looks at the Disparus. The blur of face that might for a moment have been Francis’. Was that imagined too? Captain Michael Alfred Rose committed suicide in April. Francis was the last missing man that Rose had placed before he took his own life, Marie-Thérèse had told him. Harry wonders what emotions Rose had felt as he stood behind the camera squaring Francis’ cross in a viewfinder. What did he feel then as he posted that photograph of Francis to Edie? Harry has spoken to the priest in Saint-Christophe. He has walked Harry to the grave, where Rose is buried without rank, another anonymous Englishman. He had hung himself from the ash tree. Harry can’t help but work (and rework) through an imagined day in which Rose puts Francis’ face in an envelope, addresses it to Edie, and then carries a stool and rope down the field.
The close-pressed crowd bristles. Harry can almost see the static between them. He looks at the circle of faces and then feels obliged to look away. He wishes that his eye had found Edie’s face in the circle, that she could be here to share in the definition of this
. It is a landmark, if not an end. For all of them it is an end of sorts. The trumpets blare and have their silence. Fabric falls, silently seismic. It is done.
They walk to the edge of the square afterwards and lean on the balustrade by the church. Harry measures his steps. The wind is the only sound, as if the village cannot bear to speak, cannot bear to break it, to acknowledge it and to pass on. It is a collectively held breath. They stand in black units, in pairs and mute groups in wordless surmise. There are no words.
Harry looks over the valley. The mist clings to the river, but for a minute the sun breaks through, hedges and barns show their shapes, fields are green and it is over. They watch the mist roll over the contours of the valley.
Harry feels a strange mixture of sorrow and satisfaction as he sees Gabriel’s statue for the first time. The bare feet of the stone woman are planted in a hay field and her left hand, palm downwards, caresses the tops of the grass. Her head is bowed forward and her right hand covers her eyes. She is unmistakable, though.
‘It’s her. It is Madeleine, isn’t it?’ Harry compares the statue with the young woman who is standing a few feet away from him.
‘It is, but she’s also France,’ Gabriel adds. ‘She is all the mothers, daughters, widows and sisters, their loss and the weight of war.’
‘It’s just what it should be.’
Madeleine is standing at Gabriel’s side then. ‘T’as froid?’ he asks.
Gabriel rubs the cold from her hands, peels his gloves off and pushes them onto her fingers. There is a strange sudden intimacy to the action and Harry is both compelled to watch and feels as if he ought to avert his eyes. Her face is very pale today and unmistakably the twin of Gabriel’s statue.
‘Il est malade?’ Her eyes turn to Harry. She wiggles her comically oversized fingers and nods a smile towards him.
‘C’est ce temps.’
‘What does she say?’ Harry asks.
The Photographer of the Lost Page 34