It is always the same. It has been the same for the past fortnight. They all shake their heads.

“You don’t think it’s Arras? I thought it might be the Grand Place?”

“Non. No. Je suis désolée. Ce n’est pas ici.”

“Thank you, anyway.”

“Peut-être en Belgique?” says the girl as she hands back the photograph.

“In Belgium? Yes, perhaps.”

Edie pushes her soup plate away and tilts the photograph to the light. She turns the image between her fingers. Still the reverse tells her nothing. She tries to read Francis’s face in the photograph, but it gives nothing away. For four years she has been certain that he is dead. When they had used those words, “Missing, believed killed,” she had believed it. She had felt it. But then, three months ago, this photograph arrived. At first she had asked herself who could have sent it. Now she asks herself why he has sent it.

She can tell from his stance that he is taking the photograph of himself. His arms stretch out toward the sides of the print and his eyes are focused just slightly above the top of the paper, so that he is caught perpetually both embracing and evading the gaze of the viewer. She can imagine him looking into the lens of his own camera, seeing the reflection of his own face curving in the glass. She has seen him do it before, when he was young, but always with a smart sideways grin, a raised eyebrow, an expression knowingly composed for film. There is no grin in this image, no larking or posing. There is no hint of humor in his eyes. There is something terribly blank about Francis’s face. This black-and-white misplaced man is so far away from that jewel-colored boy in the lending library.

Under her magnifying glass he is pinpricks of silver ink and she cannot piece them together. She can’t join the dots and understand the image. She leans back in her chair and rubs her eyes, but it doesn’t help. In the picture he is wearing a collarless shirt that doesn’t look exactly clean, and a jacket that is fraying at the collar. Edie doesn’t know these clothes. These are not clothes that she has laundered or mended or folded. They are poor clothes, she thinks, not the smart cuts and colors that used to be Francis’s choices, but still they matter to her. It is important that these are civilian clothes. It matters that he is not in uniform. Surely that confirms that this photograph was taken after 1917? Could she be sitting in the same town as Francis now?