The first card is emblazoned with the caption “Souvenir de Notre Village.” Swallows swoop, each of them bearing a pastel-tinted image in their beaks—a chateau, a schoolhouse, the columned frontage of a church—all now gone. It is like an offering of memories. The second postcard is a photograph of three men standing in a field, paused with a plow. In the background a valley slopes down toward the canal. Harry knows the slope.

At the sound of laughter he looks up. A woman with a jazz voice is arm in arm with a man in a white apron, and they’re dancing their way out of the bar and circling between the café furniture. “‘Now I got the crazy blues,’” sing Mamie Smith and the dancing woman. She has dark plaits twisted around her head and silver bangles that clatter up her arms. Harry thinks of Rachel’s ringed fingers, of the wreath maker’s weaving fingers, and it is only at that moment that it strikes him.

Chapter Thirty-One: Edie

Chapter Thirty-One

Edie

Poperinghe, August 1921

EDIE REMEMBERS FRANCIS’S PHOTOGRAPH OF THIS PLACE: ALL THE men crowded onto the platform of Poperinghe station brandishing their leave papers for his camera. The men in the photograph squint into the sun and grin. They fill every inch of that image with the flourish of their papers and the flash of their smiles. But today she is the only person on the station platform and at this moment she can no longer recall what her husband’s smile looks like.

Harry had told her that he had seen his brother on that day back in September 1917. Their paths had crossed on this railway platform; as Harry was going back to the battalion, so Francis had been on his way home on leave. It was the last time he would come home, the last time she would see him, but she wasn’t sure she knew the man who had sat and stared at the fire for hours and curled in the sheets of her bed.

Swallows streak down the railway lines and she remembers how Francis had given her a brooch on the day he came back. As he had stooped to kiss her in the doorway, he had placed it in her palm, folding his hand around hers. She can feel the brief sharpness of that grip as she thinks about it now, and that was what had caused her to withdraw from that awkward embrace. Their lips hadn’t met. And so it was.

“For you,” he had said. “Do you like it?”