He didn’t see Francis’s hands move. He didn’t see him throw the box, but suddenly it was all in the air. Buttons and beads and trinkets leapt. Harry put his hands over his face and crouched as cuff links and buckles and bobbins of cotton struck him. Thimbles, bracelets, and embroidery scissors hit his arms. The vase exploded as it connected with the wall behind him. When it all finally stilled, there were violets around his feet and he could hear Francis laughing.

Chapter Thirty: Harry

Chapter Thirty

Harry

Epéhy, Somme, August 1921

Image order: Miss Winifred Uttley requests a photograph of the grave of her fiancé, Pte. William Horace Stubbs (27891, East Yorkshire Regiment), KIA 22nd March 1918.

GEORGE BARTLEY IS JUST FEET AWAY FROM PRIVATE STUBBS. HARRY stares at the name on the cross. When he shuts his eyes, and recalls Bartley’s face, he’s still sitting in an orchard in 1917. Harry had drawn him that day, quickly, surreptitiously, struck by Bartley’s depth of feeling for the fallen trees and the way that it had shown on his face. He recalls the symmetry—and the not-quite symmetry—of the orchard, and looks at the lines of graves that now multiply behind George Bartley. He leans in to see the date on the cross; it is five months on from that day when Bartley had cried for the felled trees and Francis had stolen the brooch from the room that smelled of violets.

Remembering the apple in his pocket, Harry takes out his penknife. Bartley had told him about the five-pointed star at the center of an apple, how it represents atonement and immortality. “A symbol of both sin and of eternal life,” he had explained to Harry that day in the orchard, the former notion at that moment seeming more convincing than the latter. Harry carefully cuts the apple and pulls out the pips. He pushes them into the earth around Bartley’s grave. He likes to imagine that one day Bartley might be under an apple tree, its own fruit falling and forever beginning again. He wishes that he could offer something more to William Stubbs other than to tell him that Miss Winifred Uttley is thinking about him.

There is nobody else in the cemetery. It is not the same here as it is in the headline villages of the Somme; the pilgrimages and parties of excursionists don’t come this far east. He stands and looks along the row. They are mostly men from September 1918 here, their graves closely packed together. When Harry had known this area it was green with copses and hedges. The summer of 1917 had been all fights for posts, over hills and farms and woodlands. Was it still green in September 1918? With the numbers of dead in this cemetery, he can’t imagine how it could have been.