Harry used to look at her when he painted her portrait. She can remember the sensation of his gaze on her face and the weight of that look. Sometimes it felt like he was looking right through her bones, and she wondered if he could read her thoughts, but he had to look properly, he said, in order to capture her likeness. He also looked at her when he wasn’t painting her, though, and she knew how Francis teased him about that. Just occasionally she felt like she was the prize that Francis had won, and it didn’t seem nice that Francis taunted Harry for his blushes and those glimpses under his eyelashes.

Harry didn’t help himself, though, she supposed. Sometimes she hardly recognized herself in Harry’s paintings and she wondered how he could consider that to be her likeness. He made her noble when he put her down on paper, so that she was no longer a girl who worked in a shop, but a woman who might look out proudly from the walls of an art gallery, surrounded by a heavy gilt frame. There was such generosity in the way that Harry painted her, but he also gave so much of himself away.

The railway line is following the meander of a river—it is there on the left-hand side of the tracks now, and then on the right in the next moment—and the land all around is marshy. The ground is pitted and churned and the waterlogged places bounce back the white sky. A lot of branches have come down, as if there has been an almighty wind, but she can see from the crudely broken shapes of the tree trunks that this has been caused by more than a mere summer storm.

She remembers how, in the August of 1914, the newspapers had been full of the Ardennes and Lorraine, photographs of smashed forests, lines of refugees on the roads, and a burned-down library in a Belgian town. Francis had sat across the dinner table from her and told her that three hundred thousand books had turned to ashes in one night, and she had seen how that angered him. It had frightened her to see that look on Francis’s face, because she knew what that look might mean. And she knew that if he went, he would take his brothers with him, that it would be their next shared passion, and how could she stop that? But of course, in the end, they did go. In the middle of July 1916, they’d traveled south, when the newspapers were already full of assaults and attacks and such long casualties lists.

The young men leave the train at Aveluy, and the boy’s brown eyes connect with hers once more as he closes the door of the railway carriage.