Gabriel shrugs and takes the chair opposite. There is paint on his hands. He had shown Harry the canvas the day before and asked for his opinion. It was just darkness at first, and a suggestion of night sky, and Harry had seen nothing more in it. He had looked at Gabriel and then back to the difficult shadows. It was a veiled vista, smoked with soft suggestion, but Harry stepped closer and it slid into focus; the landscape was cross-hatched with white crosses; these fields were dense with dead. Harry stepped back, but the dead, now distinguished, refused to blur. In the foreground was a figure, his shadow-carved face greens and grays, his mouth gasping, as if surfacing from the sea, and his pale eyes communicating torment. It was a lamentation. Gabriel told him that it was a portrait of Marcellin and all the dead of France.

“Madeleine has bought the train tickets for Chaulnes. You don’t mind that we go?”

“Of course not.”

“We will be back on Saturday.”

“Don’t feel obliged to hurry back. I can help your mother.”

“And then how guilty would she make me feel?” Gabriel rolls his eyes and laughs.

“I have been developing more photographs,” Harry tells him. “I should, shouldn’t I?”

“Will you feel better when you have completed it?”

“I’ll never complete it.”

“You’ve done enough.”

“Have I? I wish I could feel like that.” He had left his camera in pieces on the floor of a hotel room in Amiens. He can’t recall the name of the hotel, but he can remember the names of all those men who were still on his list. “I’ll post the photographs that I’ve taken back to Mr. Lee. The families have paid for them. I need to complete that much.”

He had started the previous week, setting up his trays of chemicals on the table at which they are now sitting, wet images of graves hanging in lines from the beams, thinking all the time of Francis and Lieutenant Rose making a darkroom of a cellar in Arras. Would Edie still want an image of Francis’s grave? Is she ready for the alternative?

After an evening in the red light he had dreamed about the red gallery in Denham Hall. He was walking through it at night, the pictures on the walls just mute darkness within the gilt glimmer of their frames. Broken glass stuck in his feet, but on and on he walked, and it was a spiral, a circle. Then she was there, briefly, in the doorframe at the end of the corridor. She was dancing with someone, though the male figure was just an anonymous shape. She looked back over her shoulder toward Harry and smiled. He walked on toward her, but no matter how far he walked, she never seemed to get any closer. The noise of the incoming shell echoed in his head.