BACK ON THE bus, he turns the pages of the album and shows Rachel the streets and the cellars where they lived. Francis liked to photograph the strange, fragile, left-behind domestic details that they found in the wrecked houses. There are china shepherdesses on a mantelpiece, stuffed finches under a glass dome, and plumed hats on stands in the blown-out window of a milliner’s shop. The details are crisp and eloquent. He admires his brother’s sense of composition and the stories that these photographs tell. On the next page they are striking poses wearing the same millinery confections. Francis is grinning under tulle and paper flowers.

“Is that your brother?”

He nods. “Francis.”

“You look alike.”

“Is it the taste in hats?”

“You’re wearing an ostrich feather.” She grins and points. “Your face is the same shape. It’s the chin and the cheekbones.”

“He looks like my father there—by which I’m not alluding to the hat.”

“So he photographed your war and you drew it. I wonder if your eyes saw it all the same. Do you ever look back at your drawings?”

“I don’t have them any longer. I lost everything in 1917.” He looks at Rachel. “I lost my sketchbook, I mean.”

“That must have felt like a big loss at the time, I imagine.”

He watches the landscape rushing past the window. “There was a time when it felt important to me to put it all down on paper. It was just the way that I coped with what was going on around me, and I suppose that was easier than carrying things around in my head. When I lost all my papers, I realized that because I’d been drawing and writing it all down, I hadn’t quite committed it all properly to memory, like I hadn’t really been living in that moment. I realize now that I sometimes remember things wrongly, you see. Like my brain has chosen the wrong bits to keep and some of the important parts are just missing.”

“I think that’s called self-preservation,” says Rachel and pats his hand. She smiles slowly and he sees understanding in her smile.

“Does Francis have your coloring?” she asks then, and her smile curls at the corner. “Your hair is terribly red. Like a fox in winter.”

“I apologize for it.”

“Like a stoat—or a weasel.”

“Couldn’t we have stopped at the wintry fox?”

It is starting to go dark as they walk back to the village. The evening light sharpens the lines of plowed furrows. The air smells of turned-over soil.

“You do believe he was killed?” she asks.

“I’m sorry?”

“Francis, your brother. You said that he was reported ‘Missing, believed killed.’ Do you believe it?”