Harry thinks of Francis’s face as he painted it once long ago. He sees the color of his eyes and the line of his nose and lips. His brother’s eyes are the blue of a butterfly’s wing. “I can imagine,” he says. Surely Francis couldn’t yet be somewhere, nameless and waiting? Surely there was no way back? “So what happens now?”

“They know where I am and, in the meantime, I have an appointment in town this afternoon.”

“Your lost property?”

“He talked to me about it in the hospital. Preparing me, I suppose, only there were so many polite euphemisms crammed into his sentence that for a moment I thought I was being invited to view some back room in a railway station. As if my husband might be idling among the forgotten umbrellas and lost gloves, just waiting for me to reclaim him.” She stares at her own gloves and flexes her fingers. “He advised me to go home.”

THEY EAT THIN soup and slices of ham. Rachel sometimes talks with her mouth full, he notices. Harry watches the room, surveying this strange collection of company. There are women who appear to be widows, French officers in uniform, and workmen in shirtsleeves. A couple in Parisian fashions are sharing a table with men who look like they’ve just come in from the fields. A bottle of wine passes between the hands of those who are plowing and those who are grieving and those who have come to see the sights. This war has been a curious leveler, Harry thinks. The woman at the next table is sitting alone and staring at her soup, her expression suggesting that she is not at all sure how she has found herself in front of this particular bowl. Harry looks down at his own bowl and thinks of Edie. Is she somewhere close by also wondering how she came to be here?

“You’re not listening, are you?” Rachel waves her fork.

“I am. You were talking about the amnesiacs.”

She places her cutlery down neatly. “You don’t have to stay here, you know, Harry. It’s very kind of you to have accompanied me this far, but I really don’t need chaperoning. You don’t have to help me.”

“I want to help you,” he replies.

A BUS TAKES them into the town, bumping along the patched roads, looking out at the healing-over land. Among the chaos and the corrugated iron, new buildings are rising. It is being reclaimed in red brick and wire-defined boundaries. Rachel points a finger and passes comment on the architecture. This utility is ugly, she says; there is no sympathy, no softness, no acknowledging nod to the past.

“I might feel inclined to snub the past if I lived here,” he replies. “That or make a rude gesture at it.”