“This Friday? Yes, I suppose so. Why?”

“Because, as I said, I didn’t get as far as I intended.”

“I’m sorry?”

“If you’ll be in Ypres, then I will be.”

HE SITS ON the curb and lights a cigarette. Men are playing billiards in one of the bars and their ease and laughter spill out of the windows. A waiter weaves between the café tables, a tray stacked with glasses carried high and confident in his hand. A girl in a white dress turns and smiles as he places her drink down. With the thought of seeing Edie again, it’s all pushing through Harry’s veins too fast, like all his chemicals have gone slightly off-kilter; he doesn’t feel to be quite in control of his own body. He breathes in the smoke and the laughter and the warm breeze. He counts his breaths. But when he opens his eyes again he sees that the cigarette in his hand is shaking.

“I found an old photograph of Denham Hall recently. A postcard. You sent it to me. I want to see you,” she had said on the telephone.

He throws the cigarette away and walks back through the early evening streets. The shape of a tank looms in a corner of the square. A plaque has been attached to it informing the onlooker (in three languages) that it is a gift from an English town and a war memorial. A gang of children are chasing around it. He stops to take a photograph and the children grin and wave at the camera. The tank might as well be a lump of stone.

“I want to see you. And there is a place that I need to visit,” she had said.

He wants to see her too, he craves seeing her, but the thought of why she needs to meet him in Ypres, and what that implies, leaves him with so many difficult questions. Did she really see something significant in that photograph of Francis? Could there really be some clue that he has missed?

“Where?” he had asked.

“I’ll tell you when I get there.”

Her voice had gone. The line was dead. But he had stood there still with the telephone receiver pressed against his ear. Just for a moment he had allowed himself to remember her dancing in a garden four years ago. The smell of a summer evening. Reflections in a lake. The grip of her hand on his arm. But then her voice was asking him to meet her in Ypres. Needing to visit Ypres.

His own mirror face startles him as he steps back into the hotel room. For a second the reflection in the glass is his brother’s. Francis’s eyes. The shape of his mouth.

“I’ll come back and haunt you,” says Francis’s faraway and all-too-close voice.

Chapter Thirty-Five: Harry

Chapter Thirty-Five

Harry

Denham Hall Military Hospital, Cheshire, August 1917