HE FINDS THE street in his tourist guide and reads the description aloud. “‘The fine double-gabled houses markedly illustrated the transition from fifteenth to sixteenth century architectural fashions—irregular arches to the lower floors, full semicircles framing the regular window bays above. Today little but rubble remains,’” he reads.

“How terribly twentieth century of it.”

Evidently the carpenters and masons have been busy in the two years since Harry’s guidebook was published, and wooden buildings now stand in many of the gaps that were seemingly formerly admirable stone. Where old walls remain, they are shored up, the protected plasterwork terribly nibbled and pitted.

There is no sign to indicate that it is a drinking establishment (of dubious repute or otherwise), but there are flecks of blue paint around the carved wings above the door.

“Is it a secret club, do you think?” she asks. “Will we be expected to whisper a password and to give a special handshake?”

“Nothing so fun.”

They are momentarily light-blind. From the brightness of the street they flounder into black.

“I can’t see a thing,” he says.

In the dark, just for a second, it is Francis’s voice at her side, his voice that had once whispered unseen through library shelves, but then he strikes a match, light bounces off a low curved ceiling and a stone staircase descending, and Harry’s face is there again.

“I’m glad you’re here with me,” she says.

Harry goes ahead. She feels the temperature drop as they go down.

The staircase bends around and opens onto what seems to essentially be a cellar. Light flickers off a vaulted roof and damp fluoresces on the red-brick walls. It might as well be midnight outside. The air is thick with cigarette smoke and there is a sour-sweet smell of old dirt. A dozen or so men sit at tables, candlelit and crouched over glasses. Nobody is talking. A gramophone plays a jazz track that seems entirely inappropriate with its forcible jollity. Edie knows which photographs Harry was thinking of, and she recognizes the curve of the ceiling and the bottle-cluttered tables. She imagines the flash of Francis’s camera and needs to reach for Harry’s arm to steady herself. Has Harry pored over those photographs too, then, not able to date and place them? Has he too sought meaning and explanation in those images?

A man looks up from beside the gramophone. He seems to be the only person who has registered their presence. It is as if everybody else in the room is in a trance. Have they realized that the war is over, that it is 1921 and summer outside? She feels that she has walked into Francis’s photographs. The faces might well be the same. But why had Francis been in this place? What was he doing? What was he feeling here? And why does this seem to matter so much to Harry?