She had touched the words on that cross in the graveyard. A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR KNOWN UNTO GOD. She recalls the action. Touched the soil that covered that soldier. Pushed her fingers down through the soil toward his bones. Could it have been Francis there just feet and inches below? Was he really beneath the earth? She had doubted it for the past month and didn’t feel any sense of him as she pushed her hands into that soil. Edie leans her head against the cool glass of the window and looks out at farmhouses and wheat fields and hedgerows. She thinks of eight thousand unanswered questions. She feels the distance pull. It is only now that she cries.

“Tout va bien, madame?” The boy with the magazine leans toward her.

“Not remotely,” she replies.

Chapter Fifty-Four: Harry

Chapter Fifty-Four

Harry

Amiens, September 1921

HARRY UNPACKS HIS HAVERSACK AND LAYS THE ITEMS OUT ON THE bed. They are odd, suddenly, these objects that were once so familiar and so vital. His fingers move over his old mess tin remembering the pattern of the tarnish. There is a set of cutlery, his cutthroat razor, a tin of boot polish, a penknife (still sharp), a fob watch (stopped), and a cigarette lighter (out of flint). He feels both very close to and very far removed from these items. Some of them were once other men’s belongings, things that he had found and salvaged, souvenirs of other lives, maybe more even than secondhand. It is not so very different from looking in Dillon’s glass cabinets or watching Rachel’s hands move over the lost property of the lost men.

In between his items of kit are his papers. There is an envelope full of letters from Edie and the sketchbook that he had bought in Morecambe into which he had recorded everything that came after. The pages have come out of this book, the stitching of its spine long since gone, and so the order of the images is now all awry. Among the wrongly ordered landscapes and seascapes and once-upon-a-time townscapes, there are a lot of images of Edie. It surprises him—shocks him—how many of these there are. And then there is his diary, kept secretly, meant for no eyes but his own, which Edie has just read. Once again, as before, her ribbon is wound around it. He ought to return the Saint Christopher to her, he thinks. Three days ago she had needed to possess it. If he posted it to her now, though, would it repulse her?