A breeze has got up and he pulls his jacket around him. When the wind blows, everything seems to rattle; the scaffolds shake, the tin roofs hum, and the tarpaulins lash. His guidebook tells him that, in the Middle Ages, this was a proud fortified city, with important ramparts and moats. In Francis’s photographs it is all fallen down. It had all been dynamited. Nissen huts have now been constructed around what was the central square, and everything is patched and impermanent, but he sees signs that that long-ago pride has not been entirely crushed. Today the town seems to be almost entirely inhabited by workmen. The rubble is being cleared away and new bricks are rising. There is a lot of energy and determination and noise. Péronne clearly means to come back.

He orders a beer in a bar and remembers the piece of wire in his pocket. A three-inch-or-so fragment, twisted and rusted and looking like a relic from the Middle Ages, it was all that he could find. The field had been plowed and green lines of wheat were showing. He had walked between those green rows looking for an indication that he was in the right place, but this scrap was all that remained of the old barbed wire. There were just the clean new shoots and the canal peacefully glimmering below. Perhaps it was walking back down that slope, completing that journey, or seeing Bartley’s grave, or the fact that the wire had gone, but he feels a strangely powerful sense of being alive tonight. It seems to fizz in his veins. He feels more than the sum of his broken parts, and for the first time he feels that he might truly be lucky. Like Péronne, he feels determined. He leaves coins—and the wire—on the table.

“ARE YOU IN Spain yet?” Edie’s voice on the telephone sounds very distant.

“Spain?”

“Only your postcards seem to be getting farther away. I looked on a map. You’re going south.”

“Just following orders. I’m heading back north again this week.”

“And talking of postcards, your mail is building up here. People keep sending you cards at this address. I’m not your secretary, you know.”

He laughs. “I apologize. I’ll give you a tip at Christmas. Anyway, you’re at home! I was fully expecting that the telephone would ring out again. I’ve kept calling and just thought I’d take another chance.”

“I only got back here yesterday.”

“Did you find anything? How far did you make it?”

The line goes silent for a moment, then crackles, and he thinks he’s lost her, but then her voice is back again.

“Not far enough. Not as far as I intended. Listen, Harry, can I ask you something?”

“Yes?”

“It’s a big something.”

He hears her hesitation. “Go on.”

“Is there any possibility that you could be in Ypres on Friday?”