Cover

Dedication

Dedication

To Mum and Dad,

with love

Image

Image

Part I

Part I

Prologue: Edie

Prologue

Edie

Lancashire, May 1921

EDIE DOESN’T HEAR THE POSTMAN. SHE ONLY NOTICES THE ENVELOPE, there on the linoleum, as she passes back through from the kitchen to the sitting room. She bends to pick it up, sure it is a thing of no great consequence, just another bill that will have to wait, until she sees the postage stamp. It is the same stamp that used to be on their letters from France.

She turns the manila envelope in her hands. The address is typed, so that it has a vague look of being official. She has written a lot of letters to France and Belgium over the past four years and, in return, receives envelopes full of apologies and repetitions. Her mind flicks through the names of agencies and bureaus, charities and associations, official offices and cemeteries.

At first it is just a white sheet of paper inside the envelope, with nothing written or printed upon it, but when she turns it over, she sees it is a photograph. For a moment she doesn’t know the face. Just for a moment it is the face of a stranger with no place or purpose being here, in her hallway, in her hand. It is an item of misdirected post, a mistake, a mystery—but that only just for a moment.

Edie leans her back against the wall and slides down the tiles. She hugs her arms around her knees. There’s a flutter in her chest like a caged bird beating its wings against the bars. The photograph has fallen from her hands and is there, at an angle to the checkerboard pattern of the floor, just an arm’s stretch away. She rocks her head back against the wall and shuts her eyes.

Edie tells herself that she needs to look at it again. She must look. She ought to look, to bring it up close to her eyes, and to be certain, because while those are surely his eyes in the photograph, everything else makes no sense. How can it be? Certainly it is just a resemblance? It can’t possibly be him, after so long. Can it? But she doesn’t really need to see the photograph a second time to know the truth. It is undoubtedly Francis.

She bites at her knee and makes herself look up. She can see her own footprints on the floor, the habitual patterns that she makes around this house. The linoleum needs mopping again. She should find time to paint the scuffed skirting boards and to beat the doormat. An oak leaf has blown under the hall table, and there next to it is that library card she’s been searching for. She notices all of these things, so that she doesn’t have to look at his face.

“How?” She asks the question out loud.

The envelope has crumpled in her hand, but she needs to check inside it. There must be more than just that picture. There must be an explanation. A meaning. But there is nothing else there. No letter. Not a sentence. Not one word. She turns the envelope over and sees her address has been typed by a machine with worn keys. The curve of the u is broken, the dot on the i is missing, but the inky perforation of the full stop is emphatic. She can’t read the smudged postmark. There are hyphens in the chain of letters, she makes out, and it is perhaps a Saint-Something-or-Other, but the blur is like a divine mystery. Her hands leave damp fingerprints on the brown paper. She has grown to accept that there must be a full stop after Francis’s name, but could she have got that wrong? Could there really be a chance? It is strange to see her own fingers tremble like that.

She rocks onto her side and feels the cold of the floor against her cheek. The photograph is there, just inches from her hand. She hears footsteps going up the pavement outside, the buddleia tapping against the sitting-room window in the breeze, the beat of a waltz on Mrs. Wilson’s gramophone next door, but mostly there is the noise of her own breathing. She shouldn’t be here, lying on the hall floor on a Tuesday morning, with her face pressed down against linoleum that needs mopping, but how hard it is to make herself move. Why is it so difficult to stretch her hand out toward the photograph? To believe that it really is him?

The sun is slanting through the fanlight now, and the harlequin colors of the glass are elongating across the tiles, jeweling his face in red and green and gold. The face of her husband, who has been missing for the past four years.

Chapter One: Harry

Chapter One

Harry

The Folkestone-Boulogne ferry, August 1921

EDIE?”

Harry sees her as he steps out onto the deck. She is wearing a gray silk dress, and though her hair is hidden under a broad-brimmed straw hat, he knows her from the shape of her wrist on the railings and the way that she holds a cigarette.

“It is you?”

But when she turns, it isn’t Edie at all.

“Pardon?” The woman takes her sun hat off as she looks up at Harry. Dark hair flickers around a pale face. “Forgive me, do I know you?”

“I’m terribly sorry. I was mistaken. Just for an instant I was certain that you were somebody else.” He nods an apology and steps back. How could he have thought it? He wants to walk away quickly now, to turn his face from the woman who is not her. He suddenly feels breathless and unsteady, but he hesitates when he sees the woman’s eyes. “Are you quite all right, miss?”

“It’s just the blasted sun.”

“Here. Please.”

“You’re very kind.”

It is only as she takes his handkerchief that he remembers it is embroidered with his brother’s initials. It was a shame not to use them, Edie had said, not sounding entirely convinced. He looks away as the woman wipes the tears from her eyes. The blue water is glitteringly bright.

“‘F.B.,’ is it? Frank? Fred? To whom do I address my thanks?”

“Harry, actually.” He offers her his hand. “Harry Blythe.”

“Rachel West.” Her face softens when she smiles. “Bother. It doesn’t seem quite nice to soil a stranger’s handkerchief and then to hand it back. Even if it perhaps wasn’t yours to begin with.”

“Do keep it. Think nothing of it.” He can feel his breath slowing, his center stilling. To focus on the details of a new face, to see her tears drying, and to exchange steady civilities takes that momentary misplaced rush away.

“I’m indebted to you, Mr. Blythe. I assure you, I don’t make a habit of commandeering the linen of men I’ve never met before.”

“No secret stockpile of pilfered napkins and inveigled cravats, then?”

“This is the first in my collection.”

How could he have mistaken her? Her face isn’t like Edie’s at all, he sees now: the angles are sharper, her colors all darker. But something in her smile, in the animation of her eyes, reminds Harry of her.

“Did I see you drawing pictures earlier?” she asks.

“Quite possibly. I’ve found myself press-ganged into being a floating portrait artist. A lady asked me to draw her likeness this morning and now they’re forming a queue. I’ve never had more custom or more gratitude. I’m starting to think that I could make a living on this crossing.”

“What a thing!”

“They mean to pin themselves up in enquiry offices and cafés and railway stations. They’re looking for missing men.”

Rachel West blows smoke at the sea and nods, as if she finds this behavior perfectly normal and natural. Her hand goes to the locket around her neck, her fingers stroking the engraved words Forget Me Not. He considers, as he watches her, whether it is sometimes best to try to forget.

“They stick up photographs of their husbands and their own faces. Like so many misplaced shoes that need pairing back together again. I didn’t know that there would be so many.”

When she looks back at him, she seems surprised. “So many? But of course.”

SHE PUTS A hand to the railings and shuts her eyes to the wind. Harry thinks about ships’ figureheads as he watches Rachel West’s profile against the water. He pictures her as a wooden woman on a ship’s prow, crashing through waves, cutting across wide oceans, all baroque curls and barnacled breast, the darling of the crew. Rachel, very much flesh again, blows her nose on his brother’s handkerchief and observes that the sea is so bracing. “It’s buffing my edges off,” she says as she turns back toward him.

Harry looks at the skyline. He can feel the vibration of the engine. The weight of the breaking waves. A glint of light reflects off a faraway fishing boat but there is, as yet, no sign of the French coast. He tastes salt on his lips and wonders if he will be sick again. Edie had once told him that the trick was to stay out on deck, to take deep breaths, and to stare squarely at the water, as if it were a dog that might bite him if he took his eyes away. He thinks again about the postcard he received from her last week. Has she stood where Rachel West is standing now within the past month? Could she have leaned on these same railings with her eyes fixed on the waves? Did she feel sick as she crossed to France? And just why was she—is she—in Arras?

“You look green,” says Rachel. “I take it that you’re not an accustomed mariner, Mr. Blythe?”

He shakes his head. “Not my calling.”

The boat pitches down and spumes of white water leap. He hears Rachel’s intake of breath. “Doesn’t it make you feel vigorous?” she asks. “Keenly alive? Effervescent with it?”

“Deeply so.” He feels vigorously buffeted by the sharp, salty wind, and nauseous with it. He tightens his grip on the railings. “Like I’ve got a stomach full of baking soda.”

“‘I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,’” she quotes with a grin. “‘To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife.’” All the sadness in her face goes as she enunciates at the waves. Her eyes widen, like she relishes the taste of the words. But then her gaze connects with Harry’s and the grin is gone. “I know you were there, weren’t you? I can see it on your face. I probably shouldn’t ask you—please forgive me for asking—but what was it like the first time? Would you tell me? The first time that you crossed over to France, I mean.”

She makes it sound like the River Styx, he thinks. Harry imagines himself and Francis on a small boat, the water all around writhing with the limbs of the wrathful. He imagines his fingers placing a penny in Francis’s mouth.

“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?”

She takes the paper from the envelope with some care and Harry feels a sense of responsibility as the wind tugs against the letter in his hands. He tries to read it through twice, wanting for her sake to understand, but only the date and Rachel’s own name are decipherable. There are the shapes of words, strokes and scrolls, which must have had meaning and importance to their maker, but Harry cannot untangle them. It might as well be in Greek.

“Can you read it?”

“I’m sorry. The writing is very difficult to make out, isn’t it?”

“He used to write poems. Would you believe it? Verses full of the landscapes of his childhood, and such clever rhymes.”

Harry looks back down at the page, which seems to have neither rhyme nor reason.

“It was his last,” she says. “The next thing was a typed note saying that David was missing. When I look at this letter I think that part of him was already missing.”

“Yes. I can see that.” Harry thinks about flinging this sad letter into the wind, pictures it floating away, a white speck retreating into the water, but he hands it to her instead and watches as she folds the paper.

“It’s the third time that I’ve been back,” she says. “It’s not enough: ‘Missing.’”

“No,” Harry replies.

THE BOAT IS full of Rachels—women who touch their lockets when they speak, traveling to gravesides and searching. It is a ship full of hope and fear. Hers is the fifth portrait that he will draw on the boat and they are all much obliged. He is curious to see these walls full of the seeking and the missing, all of these faces that require pairing together again. He imagines their photograph faces, Edie and Francis, side by side on a wall, coupled and completed again. He recalls twin portraits, his and hers, painted by his own hand, intended for the walls of their house. He remembers the day that he painted Edie’s portrait, how he had watched as she curled her fringe around wetted fingers. He can see it still. The silvering was flaking from the reverse of the mirror, so that sections of her reflected face were cracks and absences.

“There. I’m ready for you now,” she had said, her mirror smile focusing in on his own face.

He throws his cigarette away as the port comes into sight and takes Edie’s postcard from his pocket. The engines check and he feels the vibration of the boat change. Dunes and ramparts and piers emerge. There are the shapes of chimneys then, the dome of the basilica, and the holiday colors of the quayside cafés. Light cuts through the gathering rain clouds and the flags on the casino pull in the wind. As Boulogne slides into focus now, he wonders whether Edie is still on this side of the Channel and whether she has found Francis dead or alive.

Chapter Two: Harry

Chapter Two

Harry

Boulogne-sur-Mer, August 1921

FRANCIS HAD BEEN HERE TAKING PHOTOGRAPHS SIX YEARS AGO. Harry had watched from behind as his brother had focused in on the patterns of the rigging and nets and ropes, and all of it reflected back on the wet dock. The disembarking passengers tread through those same reflections today, and Harry hears and knows the sound of the rain in this place, the cries of the seagulls and the stevedores, and the screech of the wheels of the railway cars. He remembers the mass of masts and chains and cables scribbled against the rain-filmed sky, the shapes of cranes, the funnels of sailing barges, and the names of the grand hotels beyond. This dockside is all so familiar, and yet the memory of it feels so far away.

It had been such a momentous thing to see the French coast approaching for the first time, to finally be on this side of the Channel, but then they had stepped onto a workaday quayside, with canning sheds and tea huts and old-fashioned fishing boats with red sails. Now, on that same dock, Harry watches a man piling suitcases into a dinghy. Barrels are being rolled along the cobbles. A horse and cart clatter past, the cart loaded with baskets of herrings. There is a strong smell of diesel and fish. So much is the same, five years on, and so much is different.

Harry shoulders his luggage and walks on into the town, past warehouses, hotels, and shopwindows. He catches glimpses of his own reflection against the displays of butchers and bakers and ironmongers, and half expects to see Will and Francis there at his side. He remembers Will’s voice haltingly reading all the shopfront names aloud and laughing; their surprise that here too there must be grocers selling cabbages and corsets and colanders. Their eyes had been all over it that first time, he remembers, expecting foreignness but finding familiarity, as they walked through the streets of an extraordinarily ordinary town. When they had stopped pointing at things, the three of them had linked arms, that wordless action needing no acknowledgment, and seeming like the most natural thing.

“Where’s this war, then?” Francis had asked.

“Bothering some bugger else,” Will had replied.

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.

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