They walk on through the tumbledown streets. A troop of schoolgirls moves along the pavement ahead of them in white blouses and green hats. Edie watches the brims of the hats circling as the girls look about. She looks at the schoolgirls walking ahead, watching their reactions to this broken-down town, because she doesn’t want to look at it herself. On the corner a man is turning the handle of a barrel organ. He raises his hat to the schoolgirls, but might as well be invisible.

“This is us,” says Harry.

There are flags flying outside the hotel. They look absurdly victorious. “Ever catch your mirror image and wonder how you got here?”

When she looks ahead they are reflected side by side in a shopwindow, he and she, framed in Gothic architrave. It looks like a portrait of two alarmed people. They stare at their mirrored selves.

“Frequently,” he replies.

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Harry

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Harry

Ypres, September 1921

HARRY LIES ON THE BED IN HIS HOTEL ROOM. THE WOMAN AT THE desk downstairs had bragged of hot water and electric light, but the walls of his room are patched over with brown paper. It reminds him of a nursery rhyme—Jack and Jill tumbling down the hill and vinegar to draw the bruises out. He can hear Edie unpacking in the next room, her footsteps moving back and forth from suitcase to wardrobe. Light comes through a join in the paper walls, which her movement now and then blocks.

“We can talk through the walls,” he says.

“Yes,” says Edie’s voice.

“I used to hear the sound of snoring through Francis’s bedroom walls at home. It wasn’t you, was it?”

“You’ll find out tonight.”

He works to slow his breathing, still a bit in disbelief she is there, in the next room. He hadn’t expected her to put her arms around him at the station. He wasn’t prepared for that, or for just how difficult it would be to pull away. He has to keep it light and bright now, to joke and tease, and make them brother and sister once again, because it could all too easily, too quickly, become something else. He can’t let himself look through the gap in the paper walls.