Wreaths have been placed against the ruins of the cathedral, as if it were a grave or a tomb. It is circled in barbed wire. They stand to look at the notice that has been placed there. “‘This is holy ground,’” he reads aloud. “‘No stone of this fabric may be taken away. It is a heritage for all civilized peoples.’”

Edie raises an eyebrow. “Would anyone really want to? Would someone seriously want to pocket a chunk of it as a souvenir? It looks entirely unholy to me. Civilized is a bit of a stretch too.”

“Perhaps.”

“You’d already been posted here when Francis came back on leave, hadn’t you?”

“Not far away. We were in a camp up to the northwest.”

“I wish that I could have understood it then, that I could have had some notion of what this place was like.”

“When Francis came back?”

“I didn’t seem to be able to connect with him. It was like part of him had already gone. Maybe that part of him was here? If I’d seen this, perhaps I could have understood him better. Perhaps I might have known how to start a conversation.”

“But you couldn’t have made it better. How could you?”

“I don’t know.”

The lights are just starting to come on in the cafés, which seem to be making a great effort to be cheerful. The bars and hotels brag their resilience in confident names—they are the Grand, the Victoire, the Splendid, and the Excelsior. It seems to Harry like they’re overstating their claims. They take a table outside and order glasses of beer. She smiles at him between sips. Harry gets the impression that Edie too is making a great effort to be cheerful, though her hand shakes, he sees, when she lifts her glass.

“Don’t you draw any longer?”

“Occasionally. I live my life surrounded by cameras now. They make me feel rather inadequate as a copyist.”

“You were ambitious once. You were more than a copyist.”

“Would you write that down for me?” He raps his knuckles on the table and can’t help but grin. Edie shakes her head, and her smile is gone when she looks back. “That photograph,” he says. “Can I see it again?”

“I understand.” She retrieves a brown envelope from her bag and passes it across the table to Harry. “I still keep looking in the envelope expecting to find a letter that I’ve missed, but there’s nothing.”

“It is a French postmark. Saint-Christophe de Something? It’s blurred. I can’t read the remainder of it.”

“Do you know how many villages in France are called Saint-Christophe? I took it into the post office in Arras. It could take you ten years to travel round them all.”