Cover

Dedication

Dedication

To Mum and Dad,

with love

Image

Image

Part I

Part I

Prologue: Edie

Prologue

Edie

Lancashire, May 1921

EDIE DOESN’T HEAR THE POSTMAN. SHE ONLY NOTICES THE ENVELOPE, there on the linoleum, as she passes back through from the kitchen to the sitting room. She bends to pick it up, sure it is a thing of no great consequence, just another bill that will have to wait, until she sees the postage stamp. It is the same stamp that used to be on their letters from France.

She turns the manila envelope in her hands. The address is typed, so that it has a vague look of being official. She has written a lot of letters to France and Belgium over the past four years and, in return, receives envelopes full of apologies and repetitions. Her mind flicks through the names of agencies and bureaus, charities and associations, official offices and cemeteries.

At first it is just a white sheet of paper inside the envelope, with nothing written or printed upon it, but when she turns it over, she sees it is a photograph. For a moment she doesn’t know the face. Just for a moment it is the face of a stranger with no place or purpose being here, in her hallway, in her hand. It is an item of misdirected post, a mistake, a mystery—but that only just for a moment.

Edie leans her back against the wall and slides down the tiles. She hugs her arms around her knees. There’s a flutter in her chest like a caged bird beating its wings against the bars. The photograph has fallen from her hands and is there, at an angle to the checkerboard pattern of the floor, just an arm’s stretch away. She rocks her head back against the wall and shuts her eyes.

Edie tells herself that she needs to look at it again. She must look. She ought to look, to bring it up close to her eyes, and to be certain, because while those are surely his eyes in the photograph, everything else makes no sense. How can it be? Certainly it is just a resemblance? It can’t possibly be him, after so long. Can it? But she doesn’t really need to see the photograph a second time to know the truth. It is undoubtedly Francis.

She bites at her knee and makes herself look up. She can see her own footprints on the floor, the habitual patterns that she makes around this house. The linoleum needs mopping again. She should find time to paint the scuffed skirting boards and to beat the doormat. An oak leaf has blown under the hall table, and there next to it is that library card she’s been searching for. She notices all of these things, so that she doesn’t have to look at his face.

“How?” She asks the question out loud.