Harry’s room was still as it had been when he went away six years ago. That was how his mother had left it, and it was waiting for him still, as if he might yet come home. Edie didn’t often go in there, because she didn’t feel that she had the right. Occasionally she asked herself if he hadn’t come home because she was here now, in his mother’s house.

“Can you still draw?”

“Yes. Though it’s taken some time to get the control back. And it’s different than it was.”

He dabbed his cigarette out. She remembered a boy who had paint down his fingernails. The version of Harry that she had known before the war always seemed to have hands creased in ink or charcoal or paint. She had often wanted to walk him to the sink and put the bar of soap and a nailbrush in his hands, but she was almost sorry to see his clean fingernails now.

“You haven’t thought about going back to college?”

“No. It’s too late now.”

In the summer before the war he had applied to Manchester School of Art. He had told Edie before he had the conversation with his mother or his brothers, had shared all those ambitions with her first, and it had delighted her to see the excitement in Harry’s face. How could he then have let all of that go? How much had that sacrifice cost him? She used to think that she could see Harry’s soul in the way that he painted, and she remembered how the light used to shine through his colors. Had that light gone out too?

“I’m sorry to hear you say that. Did you start taking photographs because it was difficult to draw?”

“It’s a job,” he said. “It’s money. I needed the money.”

“It surprised me when I heard you were working as a photographer—mostly because it was always Francis’s thing.”

“It’s because of Francis that I knew how to do it. I’m only a photographer in a backstreet studio. I take photographs of children on their birthdays, engaged couples, and hopeful spinsters.”

She smiled. “You don’t have to qualify it. You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

“Would he begrudge me the hopeful spinsters?”

“Perhaps he’d be glad for you.”

“Perhaps.”