“At about the same time,” he tells her. So many memories of that autumn in Arras are dark and difficult—the gas scares, Francis’s drinking, and the grief hanging over all of it—but he doesn’t mean to tell Rachel any of that. “Our sector was just a few streets farther east. It was all shaken apart, but not so much that this wasn’t still obviously a place where people had recently lived. It made it feel like the rules were shaken up too, though, and so we had no qualms about picking over it all and scavenging what comforts we could. In some billets we had pianos and armchairs. The luxury of that! Can you imagine?” He looks at Rachel and wonders if she can. “Houses were blown apart and yet, when you looked, there were still slippers on rugs and books waiting for their readers under bedside lamps.”

“What a sad image.”

“It was lonely, more than anything. If that makes sense? Arras was full of troops, but strangely deserted. I remember hearing a gramophone playing one day on an empty street and thinking that it was the loneliest sound that I’d ever heard.”

He also remembers helping to develop photographs in the dark of a cellar on the Douai Road, trays of chemicals and curling reels of film. The recalled smell of the fixer is sharp and immediate. He sees Francis’s face in the red light.

Harry’s lens clicks on Mrs. Gibson’s photograph. The loneliness of Arras strikes him again.

HE BUYS A postcard for Edie before they go. On the newsdealer’s rack Arras is photographed in every angle of ruination. He recognizes the blasted basilica, the citadel, and the cemetery gates. Les fantômes d’Arras, reads the annotation on an image of the ruined Grand Place. The rickety frontages look like something out of a gothic horror story, Harry thinks. He selects an image of the Rue de Douai, a fire-blackened façade, leaning girders, and a spill of tiles. This was once our happy home, he writes on the reverse of the card. We lived like troglodytes in caves, pillaged and looted and danced drunken waltzes to gramophone records. We picked blackberries in a forgotten walled garden, I read Wuthering Heights, and Francis set up a darkroom in a cellar on this street. But perhaps you have already been here and recognized it from his photographs? Perhaps you have already stood here?