“We had a false start,” he says. It would be wrong to romanticize it for her. “They put us on an Isle of Man ferry—a proper old paddle steamer. It had been requisitioned by the Admiralty, but still had wood paneling and velvet upholstery and the Douglas-to-Fleetwood timetable up on the wall. We sang ‘Jerusalem’ as we pulled out of Folkestone. I mean, can you imagine? ‘Bring me my spear! O, clouds unfold!’” He looks at her. She nods in recognition. “Apologies for the singing voice. Bravado, you know? Only our sword did have to sleep in our hands that day. The destroyer that was accompanying us hit a submerged mine—and boom! It ripped a great gash in its side and all flame and smoke poured out. We’d strayed into an unmarked minefield, you see, and at any moment our poor old paddle steamer might have gone boom too. Anyway, we limped cautiously back to Folkestone and slept that night on the dock.”

“With some relief?”

“A concrete floor had never seemed so comfortable. But we had to do it all again the next day.” The memory of torn steel and treacherous water looms at him like something spectral and leaves a metallic taste in his mouth. It had been there in the box of old photographs: that image of him and Will and Francis all curled together, three brothers asleep on the dockside. It was one of the pictures that made him pause when Edie had given him the box back in May. He had never seen that one before and it had taken him a moment to recognize his own slumped shoulders. She had laughed at him briefly for that. He can’t remember who might have taken the photograph, or the feeling of sleeping entwined with his brothers’ limbs.

“And so you did.”

“Cross again? Yes.” He blinks at Rachel. “That was February 1916. The experience rather put me off messing about in boats.”

“‘All I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,’” she quotes, “‘and quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.’”

“Quite,” says Harry.

“We learned that one at school.”

Seagulls arc and cry in the background of the canvas that he’s mentally composing of Rachel West. The wind in her hair makes her look like a mermaid. With his eyes on the water he can’t help but scan for mines. Regardless of what Edie might have advised, it calms him more to focus on this woman who offers poetry, rather than on the waves, and focus also on how he might convey her in paint.

“David went over in January,” she says.

“David?”

“My husband. Here. Perhaps you might understand this?”