HARRY ISN’T ACCUSTOMED TO LINGERING ON HIS OWN REFLECTION, but today something has changed. Today he walked back down the field toward the canal. Four years ago the doctor had told him that he would always have fragments of shrapnel inside him; was it just a fancy this afternoon that, returning to the place where it had entered his body, he had felt all those metal fragments tingle? Was it some strange magnetism, or just the memory that had made him tremble? His knees had buckled on the slope, it had all rushed back, and he had crouched down in the place where the belts of barbed wire once were, and rocked with his arms around his knees; but then he had got up and walked on. He looks at his arms in the mirror. The scars are white now where the wire lashed around him. The skin is still puckered on his stomach where they stitched him back together. The hotel mirror has a long crack across it; it is in as sorry a state as he is, Harry considers. But, like him, it is still here.

He can hear the couple talking in the room above. All of the plaster has fallen from the ceiling, leaving only floorboards overhead. The male voice says that the sanitary arrangements are like “Japan in the old days”; she says that she is going to write a letter to the paper when they get back to Basingstoke. They agree: the standard of accommodation isn’t at all like Bournemouth. Harry smiles. Small showers of plaster follow their footsteps. He watches, over his mirrored shoulder, as they progress across the room. Billows sigh from the ceiling and dust skitters across the pages of the photograph album.

It is still open on the bed. He turned through its pages when he got back here, but he cannot annotate the images after August 1917 for Edie, and he will never know if he has put them in exactly the correct chronological order. Francis had photographed trophies from the trench raid while Harry was in the casualty clearing station. He wonders whether his brother had known, as he was taking those photographs, that he’d been injured. On the next pages of the album there are pictures of the vegetable gardens that they had cultivated through September in the deserted village behind, a bunch of flowers in a dugout, and a length of dusty road. At the end of September the battalion had come to this town. Harry, though, has never been here before, has never seen these things. He can’t write dates and locations underneath these photographs because he wasn’t there. He buttons his shirt and steps out into the evening.