Chapter Thirty-Two: Harry

Chapter Thirty-Two

Harry

Vimy Ridge, August 1921

Location image order: Miss Esme Stewart requests general photographs of Vimy Ridge. Her brother, Captain Albert Stewart (13th Brigade), was reported missing, believed killed, on 10th April 1917. Remains yet to be identified.

I WASN’T CERTAIN WHETHER YOU’D STILL BE HERE. WHEN I PHONED your hotel, I fully expected them to tell me that you’d gone.”

“I honestly start to think that I’ll still be here in a hundred years’ time,” says Rachel.

Harry hadn’t known whether, or how, to say it down the telephone. Now that he’s here, standing at her side, he’s even more unsure of where, or indeed if, to start.

“I leave David’s details with everyone I meet.”

“That’s good of you,” she says.

They’re walking together up the ridge. The grass is thin and the white chalk below shows through. He remembers reading how it had snowed on the ninth of April 1917, as the Allied attack had been launched. Though the gradient does not seem aggressive, he has to take a break and catch his breath. Rachel puffs her cheeks out and puts a hand on his arm.

“I’m so glad you stopped. I didn’t want to be the one to wave the white flag first.”

“It’s deceptive, isn’t it? That or I’m very out of practice.”

He looks at Rachel West’s ringed fingers on his arm and thinks about Daniel East’s hands twisting the wire. His image is inside Harry’s camera. Is it enough, though, this coincidence of pliers and eyes and compass points, to raise her hopes? She smiles at him. If he were to say it, would he take the smile from her face? Would it just be giving her false hope, sending her in the wrong direction?

“Have you been here before?”

She nods. “Just last week.”

She pulls her windblown hair from her eyes and he recalls the pull of those same fingers through his hair. He wasn’t sure that she would turn up, but she shows no apparent embarrassment. She doesn’t avoid his eyes or his questions. Her straight gaze makes him start to question the scene that he recalls. Did it really happen? Might it just have been a dream?

“You should have said. I wouldn’t have dragged you back had I known.”

She shrugs. “I’m glad to revisit with someone to talk to. It makes a change from talking to myself.”

It was not inconvenient to come here. Meeting her fit in with the other tasks he had to do. When he had spoken to her on the telephone he had felt sure that it was meant and right that he tell her, but now he is no longer quite so certain of what he saw, or what he ought to say.