From the window of the bedroom that currently serves as his studio, Bram has a good view of the finer houses in Skimmerton. His mother offered little resistance to the idea of his using the room. She was so pleased to have him home again she would, he thinks now, have agreed to his commandeering the drawing room if he had only asked for it. His father had not been so accommodating.

“Thought you’d done with all that,” he’d said, seeing Bram wincing as he attempted to raise a paintbrush to easel height. “Would have thought you could put that arm to better use, now that the hospital has seen fit to send you back to us.”

The rifle bullet that found Bram’s shoulder had seen him spend the final months of the war in a ward full of similarly wounded soldiers. He counted himself fortunate. His injury had healed, leaving only a scar and some residual weakness and occasional pain. After the months he had endured in Africa, fighting disease and hunger as much as the enemy, watching his brothers in arms fall victim to the deadly Blackwater fever or malaria day after day, trudging through the swamps along the Rufiji River or baking beneath the equatorial sun alongside the Ugandan railway, he knew he had been lucky to come home at all.

“I’ve said I’ll come in to the steelworks with you, Father. I can enjoy my painting in my spare time.”

His father’s answer had been a disapproving grunt, but Bram has stuck to his word. For months he has traveled across town to the steel yard and spent his days in the office, carrying out his father’s instructions, familiarizing himself with the running of the works. And as soon as he is free he hurries home to his paints and his canvases and picks up wherever he left off, with whichever painting currently holds him spellbound. He has never felt so inspired, so in the grip of some artistic fever of creativity. It is as if, after touching the edge of oblivion, after the smell of death filled his nostrils and almost claimed him, he is reinvigorated with the desire, the need, to put what he has seen, what he has felt, what he has known, onto paper. To strive to capture the presence of those who were lost. To depict what they went through, and to show the strange land where they fought, suffered, and, some of them, died. He has been entirely taken up with his mission this past year and a half. And now it is done.

He turns back from the window and considers what he has achieved. The paintings stand leaning against every wall, stacked against one another, carefully wrapped and bound and ready for their journey down to London. So many images. So many faces.