He knocks the telephone receiver from its cradle as he steps away, fails to catch it, and leaves it swinging. A man turns and swears at him as he catches his elbow. Anger curls at the corner of the man’s mouth, but Harry doesn’t linger on it.

She weaves through the crowd ahead, her footsteps getting faster now. She swings a woven straw bag in her hand as she walks. There is something in the way she swings the bag, in the width of the swing, that is carefree and unselfconscious, that tells him that she is smiling.

“Edie!”

A porter is handing suitcases down from the train and stacking them on the platform. Harry stumbles to avoid a trunk that’s being lifted down, only just manages to stay on his feet, and when he looks up again she has gone.

“Attention!” shouts the porter after him. “Regardez où vous allez, hein?”

He runs now down the platform, looking through the train windows in case she has boarded. He scans the waiting room, along the empty benches, and, turning, catches the panic in the eyes of his own reflection in the windows. He pushes through a cluster of children and apologizes his way around a pair of arm-linked nuns.

And then she is there again. A strand of hair has escaped from her barrette. It catches in the breeze and strokes her white neck. Harry’s hand is about to reach toward it as she turns and smiles. His mouth is about to make the shape of her name but he stops himself.

“Frank!” she says with laughter in her voice. A man puts his hand on the back of her neck, curls his finger through the strand of loose hair, and pulls her in for a kiss.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Harry

Chapter Twenty-Four

Harry

Cimetière des Pommiers, Somme, August 1921

Image order: Mrs. Cora Evans would like a photograph of the grave of her son Pte. George Evans (32049), Lancashire Fusiliers (age 32, KIA 25/02/1917, grave number 186). Flowers requested.

IT IS AN EXTENSION TO THE VILLAGE CEMETERY. HARRY WALKS BETWEEN the civilian graves, some of which have odd wooden constructions above them, like sentry boxes, and others grander creations in glass and iron. These grave housings remind him of greenhouses and he half expects there to be tomatoes climbing inside. He sees fancy ironwork crosses, timber palisades, and ceramic roses. There is something rather showy and competitive about these graves. Something slightly histrionic. He imagines their inhabitants sticking out their chests. The graves are stuck with rosettes, woven metalwork wreaths, and votive arrangements of enamel flowers. In some places the ironwork is terribly twisted, the mangled forms communicating great violence. Much of the stonework is chipped. None of the crosses are at quite the same angle. Whatever the original pretensions of this cemetery’s inhabitants, the overall impression is now one of disorder, representative of this village’s suffering.