North of Albert, August 1921
THERE ARE TWO YOUNG MEN SITTING OPPOSITE HER IN THE RAILWAY carriage, obviously two brothers, and Edie is glad of the laughter in their voices as she looks out at the sad country beyond the window. The whistle screams, the steam clears, and she sees villages that are all wooden huts and leveled churches. Those strange undulations of the earth. The straggling belts of brown barbed wire. The endless thistles. She wants to shut her eyes to it, not to see just how desolate and broken it is, but she tells herself that she must look.
The boys grapple arms, laughing, and smile when their eyes meet hers. She can make no sense of their foreign words, but the sounds are the same, and it pulls her back to Francis’s teenage bedroom and all those noises that were always coming through the walls.
When she was nineteen years old she had left the calm of her childhood home for a house full of male voices. It wasn’t that she’d grown up in a quiet house; there had always been the homemade wine and the gramophone and the nonsense poems that they’d recited in comic voices. But it was just her and her mother: two twinned female voices, ever harmonious, never raised. They had been contented in one another’s company, stirring the jamming pan together, and sharing their sewing patterns and their books. And then her mother’s voice had been so suddenly silenced. She was no longer there when Edie looked up from her book; there was no one with whom to share the twist in the plot or a new blouse pattern. All of a sudden their busy kitchen was entirely still.
Francis had been so kind to her through those months of her mother’s illness; he had been so understanding, no longer the golden youth with the flashing grin and the ready rhymes, but instead a caring, gentle, steady man. He had let her talk when she needed to, and she had found comfort in the words that he returned. She could see how well he understood her, how he wanted to take away her sadness, and how she now hated the silence of her own newly empty home. And so she had left it for a house full of boys, with their jokes and their boisterous roughhousing, and the secrets that they always seemed to be sharing. She barely remembered her father’s presence, and so how odd it had been to suddenly live among the noise and the movement and the scent of these men.
The train lingers in a station that is all corrugated iron and pine planks, and she watches a young couple swinging their legs on a bench. The boy is turning through a book of maps, seemingly following the line of a route with his finger, but the girl pulls his hand away and smiles as she links his fingers through her own.
She hadn’t wanted a great fuss of a wedding because she had no family to invite. Even so, the little church had looked so unbalanced, with all the friends and relations on Francis’s side, and so few seats taken on the left. But then, having seen her glance back at the empty pews, his brothers had moved over; they had crossed the aisle, and so when she next looked back, there they were smiling on her side. “We’re your family now,” Harry had said to her afterward, “whether you want us or not, and we always will be.” She can still picture Francis in his bridegroom smartness, the shine of his slicked-back hair and the glow of his face, his sudden nervousness and the twitching smile that he seemed to be having difficulty controlling.
As newly married wife and husband, she and Francis had moved into his teenage bedroom, with his cricket bats and fossil collections and his maps of ancient military campaigns on the walls. They had lived like that for two months—his brothers’ voices always there through the walls, and laughing into the pillows to dampen the noise—before the house next door had come up for rent and they had moved one door down. It had seemed the most natural thing that they stay on the same street. She would never have taken him from his brothers, and why would they want to go any farther?
She had always liked to watch the three of them together—Francis, Harry, and Will—their secret sibling jokes and looks, and how their faces mirrored one another. When she sat across the table from them, it was like looking at a progression, or a picture of the passage of time. While Francis’s features were the most strongly defined—he was the most conventionally handsome of the three of them—Will’s face, beneath a mop of blond fringe, was still forming. When she looked from Will to Francis, she could see the man that he would be in ten years’ time. And she had assumed that they would always be there across the table from her, turning from boys into men, becoming the men they were meant to be.
The younger boy on the opposite seat catches her eye and she smiles as he looks away. That shy glance reminds her of Harry. She can see his eighteen-year-old features still, facing her across his mother’s dinner service, and how his eyes had sometimes caught hers, just like that. All of the elements that she had loved in Francis’s face—the curl of his eyelashes, the angularity of his profile, the bow of his top lip—were there in Harry’s face too. When she had seen Harry again this May, that resemblance had been all the more obvious.
Steam billows as the train passes under a bridge; they are into a cutting, and in the darkness of the earth bank she catches a glimmer of her own reflected face. Just as Francis had started with cameras in the summer before the war, forever insisting on taking her photograph, so it had been for Harry with his paints, and she always had to sit for her portrait. She can still put herself back in the sitting room, listening to the whisper of his pencil on paper, the chink of his brush against the glass, and her brother-in-law’s steady breathing.
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.
“Bonne journée,” they say to her, and touch their hats, as they step out into a landscape that’s all at the wrong angles. The taller brother puts his arm around the younger and they walk down the platform. As the train slides past, it could well be Will and Francis for a moment. Perhaps she, as an only child, had not fully appreciated how much Francis needed his brothers to be there with him? She thinks about the photograph of Francis alone in the square, and is struck by the terrible loneliness of that image.