In the afternoon the landscape changes. The railway line follows a river, which churns muscular beneath its glassy width. Willows dip and shiver and a figure fishes off a sandbank, the line glistening crystal as it arcs. Time runs awry. It races and dawdles, its rhythm lost to the train’s crazy beat. A father and daughter, sitting opposite, whisper and sleep, sleep and whisper. Harry envies their cocoon, the completeness of their circle. South, south, into the evening, with the weight of the world dragging in their slipstream. The sky is the softest watercolors.

He spends the night in a station hotel where the pillowcase smells of soap and the walls are solid. He pushes back the shutters and lets in the evening light. There is no one with whom to share the color of the hot roof tiles, the silhouette of the belfry, or the way that swallows swoop across, and so, once again, he finds himself putting it onto paper. The view that his window frames is all the colors of a Matisse painting, but still he wishes for brown paper walls and the rhythm of her breathing in the next room. He puts the terra-cotta tiles and the belfry and the swallows into a letter. He knows that she will possibly never read it, that his descriptions and drawings are probably mute and blank, but he still has to try to share them with her. Without that, they too might as well not exist.

He sits on the edge of the bed and stares beyond his feet. The floorboards have parted with age. They have warped in places, with water or heat. There are scratches—arcs and curves—their repetition looking like frenzy, like struggle, like panic. But, he tells himself, it is only where furnishings have been rearranged. These boards tell a story, but it is a quiet story with no crescendos or exclamation marks. They have never been shaken by explosives. They have never lurched and shuddered the plaster from the walls. The shock waves do not stretch that far. The bell tower sounds. Shadows creep from the corners of the room. Harry cries into the soap-smelling pillow.

Chapter Fifty-Seven: Edie

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Edie

Lancashire, October 1921

THE CHURCH BELLS STRIKE TWELVE NOTES AND EDIE LOOKS UP FROM the grave. She leans on the spade and contemplates her efforts. She has had to dig much deeper than she expected, as they wouldn’t lie right and she couldn’t bear to break the wings. A childhood rhyme comes back to her with the bells. “‘All the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,’” she recites to the crows’ grave. Should she say some solemn words? Some formula to wish them a fortunate onward flight? As she looks down at the small wooden cross that she has fashioned, she isn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.