He can almost hear their voices, their laughter, their footsteps at his side, but Harry’s reflection is alone in the shopwindows today. He has to stop and check that it is so. In the display of a milliner’s shop, plaster mannequins tilt their chins under a selection of variously embellished cloche hats and a mirrored sign says QU’EST-CE VOUS CHERCHEZ? WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR? Harry finds, as he stands here, that he can’t quite put it into words.

He takes a table in a corner café and watches, through the steamed windows, as streetcars slide past. He carves his initials in the condensation. Beyond his dripping letters posters are advertising day excursions and the benefits of taking the water. Painted ladies loll in the shallows around bathing machines, smiling like sirens at the procession of umbrellas. He takes a shot of eau-de-vie with his coffee and turns Edie’s postcard in his hands.

Something for your photograph album, her handwriting says on the reverse. Isn’t this a bit back-to-front?

Harry sees her photograph face ask the question; sees her mouth speak the words; hears the inflection in her voice. His focus pulls out and it is the day before he went back to London, a full three months ago now; Edie is standing by the spillway of the reservoir in his image, framed by his lens, the water rushing down the steps to her right, and her head angled as if she can’t decide whether she wants to look at him or not. She had told him about the photograph of Francis just minutes earlier. So much had seemed back-to-front at that moment too.

“I’ve been looking through Francis’s old photographs recently,” she had said. “The photographs that he took during the war, I mean. I’ve been trying to sort them out, put them all in order, only none of them make sense to me. It should be a rule, I think, that no one should be permitted to take photographs unless they mark them with the date and the location. What use are they otherwise? How am I meant to understand what I’m looking at?” She had looked toward Harry. “Of course, you’ll know one ruined village from another. Perhaps you’ll catalogue them for me?”

“I will, if you wish it.” He had rewound in recalled clicks of the camera lens. He had reeled back through in snapshot instants. It left him in Epéhy in August 1917. His older brother was sitting across the table from him cutting photographic paper down into rectangles. Around them a bar full of soldiers roared into song, but Francis was concentrating on the angle of his corners. Two months later he was gone.

“I didn’t know that you had his photographs,” he had said to Edie.