She thinks about Mrs. Blythe and the animal howl that she had made in the night when she knew that her youngest son was dead. Edie had heard that noise through the walls again and again in the weeks that followed. Even with that cry coming out in the nights, Margaret Blythe spent the days curled into herself and shaking, as if she must keep it all in during daylight hours. Edie had never told Francis about how his mother had suffered; after all, what could he do? But, she considers now, had she told him more, might he have felt permitted to share his own pain? Was Francis too curling in on himself and trembling at that time? If he had let a cry out, if he had been able to spill it out in his letters, might it have made things different?

She cannot associate the places that she has seen from the train with the blue-eyed boy that Francis had been, and she feels the light on that memory going out. His smiling whisper fading away. What with seeing that landscape, and the background it gives to those difficult months after Will’s death, she now understands more of how Francis had become the man that she met again in 1917, and why he had turned his head away from hers on the pillow. But she doesn’t yet understand how the man in the photograph fits, and why he has arrived in an anonymous envelope. Is it that Francis means for her to come and see all of this? Does he need to make her understand?

In the weeks after Will’s death, Margaret Blythe had cleared out his room, boxing up her son’s books, birds’ eggs, and football boots. Apart from the crows on the kitchen dresser, everything of Will’s had moved up into the attic, where Edie supposes it is still. Then Margaret had done it all again in November 1917; there had been so little of the child Francis left when Edie had moved back into his boyhood bedroom a month later. In those difficult days Edie had been glad to let his mother take that responsibility, not to have to fold away Francis’s shirts herself and parcel up his handkerchiefs and hairbrush, but sometimes as she looks around Francis’s room now, she misses his atlases and poetry books and cameras. The marks are still there on the wallpaper where his maps and his photographs once were. There are spaces on the shelves where his books ought to be, and empty drawers in the dresser, and sometimes that room feels to be so full of Francis’s absence. And, yet, could she still have got it wrong? Could she have misunderstood? Is the absence that she senses not quite what she has assumed it to be?

Chapter Twenty-Two: Harry

Chapter Twenty-Two

Harry

Guillemont, Somme, August 1921