Vimy Ridge, August 1921
Location image order: Miss Esme Stewart requests general photographs of Vimy Ridge. Her brother, Captain Albert Stewart (13th Brigade), was reported missing, believed killed, on 10th April 1917. Remains yet to be identified.
I WASN’T CERTAIN WHETHER YOU’D STILL BE HERE. WHEN I PHONED your hotel, I fully expected them to tell me that you’d gone.”
“I honestly start to think that I’ll still be here in a hundred years’ time,” says Rachel.
Harry hadn’t known whether, or how, to say it down the telephone. Now that he’s here, standing at her side, he’s even more unsure of where, or indeed if, to start.
“I leave David’s details with everyone I meet.”
“That’s good of you,” she says.
They’re walking together up the ridge. The grass is thin and the white chalk below shows through. He remembers reading how it had snowed on the ninth of April 1917, as the Allied attack had been launched. Though the gradient does not seem aggressive, he has to take a break and catch his breath. Rachel puffs her cheeks out and puts a hand on his arm.
“I’m so glad you stopped. I didn’t want to be the one to wave the white flag first.”
“It’s deceptive, isn’t it? That or I’m very out of practice.”
He looks at Rachel West’s ringed fingers on his arm and thinks about Daniel East’s hands twisting the wire. His image is inside Harry’s camera. Is it enough, though, this coincidence of pliers and eyes and compass points, to raise her hopes? She smiles at him. If he were to say it, would he take the smile from her face? Would it just be giving her false hope, sending her in the wrong direction?
“Have you been here before?”
She nods. “Just last week.”
She pulls her windblown hair from her eyes and he recalls the pull of those same fingers through his hair. He wasn’t sure that she would turn up, but she shows no apparent embarrassment. She doesn’t avoid his eyes or his questions. Her straight gaze makes him start to question the scene that he recalls. Did it really happen? Might it just have been a dream?
“You should have said. I wouldn’t have dragged you back had I known.”
She shrugs. “I’m glad to revisit with someone to talk to. It makes a change from talking to myself.”
It was not inconvenient to come here. Meeting her fit in with the other tasks he had to do. When he had spoken to her on the telephone he had felt sure that it was meant and right that he tell her, but now he is no longer quite so certain of what he saw, or what he ought to say.
“The family asked me to take general photographs of the ridge,” he explains. “That was the brief. Only it seems excessively brief. General just seems a bit too general, don’t you think? I don’t know where to start.”
When they turn and look back, the road is long and straight, tapering out in the haze on the skyline. There are other groups advancing up the hill, tourists in sneakers and pilgrims in black. The slope is pitted with shell holes and crumbling earthworks. The village below looks like a feature that someone has tried to scratch off a canvas.
“I can see for miles,” says Rachel. “You can see why they had to take it.”
The plain below is flat. There is the smudge of an industrial town in the distance and a stretching scar (not a neat cut—but like something troublesomely healed) that might perhaps once have been the front line. He takes the view looking back down toward the village.
“It’s the man’s sister who has asked for the photographs?”
“Yes. I haven’t met or corresponded with her. My employer just passed this request on. All I know is that her brother was reported missing here in April 1917.”
He wishes that Mr. Lee’s instructions weren’t so scant and unspecific. The landscape framed in his viewfinder might have no relation to the whereabouts of Captain Albert Stewart. He has no idea where precisely the line was on the tenth of April 1917. He doesn’t want to palm Miss Esme Stewart off with a meaningless image. It is too important for that.
“Perhaps she just wants a sense of the place?” Rachel suggests.
“I suppose. But what direction am I meant to point the camera in? I might be completely off the mark. Would you want a photograph of it if you couldn’t get here?”
“Yes. I might,” she replies. “Just to know the lay of the land, so that I could imagine it correctly.”
He wonders what Miss Esme Stewart imagines. He looks down at the scabbed slope and considers whether he ought to show it to her at its worst, or whether to try to select kinder angles. Would it be kindness to show Rachel the image on his camera? Could he not be completely off the mark there too?
“You’ve been working farther east?” she asks.
“Northeast of here. I was in Epéhy yesterday. Four years ago I thought that I might never leave there. I was injured there,” he clarifies as he looks up at Rachel. “It was quite sobering to go back.”
“And who would be visiting your grave?”
“I don’t know.” He considers: Would Edie make that journey? Would she have come to look for him? Would it have mattered to her to know the lay of that land? “But instead I ended up on an ambulance train back to England.”
“Come on,” says Rachel, leading him toward the top of the ridge.
A family is having a picnic at the top. They have laid out a blanket and are passing sandwiches and a thermos flask. A man in pin-striped trousers is pointing. The children look bored. There are circles of sweat under the father’s pointing arms.
“There’s going to be a Canadian memorial up here,” she says. “I’ve read about it. They’ve launched a competition to design a monument.”
Harry thinks about Gabriel, once again struck by the enormity of the task of designing a memorial, of capturing and commemorating an experience in stone, to be seen for miles and forevermore. It seems so much more epic than framing it in a camera lens.
“That’s quite a responsibility,” he says.
They walk along the top of the ridge. The children behind them are now tumbling and giggling over a game of leapfrog. The father is still pointing. Harry circles, taking photographs until the film comes to an end.
“This heat,” she says.
They sit down and take in the view. Harry leans back, into the sharp grass, and shuts his eyes to the glare. The camera is heavy on his chest and the white light throbs through his closed eyes. He is very aware of the image of the wreath maker inside his camera. How can a chemical reaction between light and silver salts be such a weighty thing?
“You’ll get sunburnt,” says Rachel’s voice. “I can see you sizzling. I can almost hear you sizzling. You’ll be like a lobster by this evening.”
A headache is beginning to throb. He feels slightly too large for his own skin. “Is a lobster better than a weasel?”
He sits up and she hands him a bottle of lemonade, apologizing for the fact that it’s not cold. It hits the back of his parched throat, sweet and sharp. Rachel wipes the top of the bottle before she puts it to her own lips. Did his lips really once touch hers? Did he really dream the scene in his hotel room? He’s not quite sure that his memory hasn’t perhaps started to play tricks. A horse-drawn cart struggles to the top of the slope and sets up selling ice-cream wafers.
“The things you can buy on a battlefield these days.”
He shelters the camera under his jacket while he changes over the film. As he puts the used roll in his pocket he is very conscious of the face of the man imprinted on it.
“You look furtive,” observes Rachel.
“Just keeping it out of the sun. If the light gets in it will all just disappear.”
“It seems almost callous that the sun should shine, doesn’t it?” Rachel asks. “Almost cruel. It’s not weather for loss or regret. If only the light could make it all disappear.”
“Will you show me your photograph of David again?”
He’s unsure about the wisdom of his words as soon as they’re out of his mouth. Rachel looks at him, as if measuring the question.
“Yes.” She reaches into her bag. “Why?” She holds the card out toward him. He knows that her fingers won’t release until he has given her an answer.
“I’m traveling a lot. I’m seeing a lot of faces.”
Her fingers let go. She nods as if his answer makes sufficient sense. “Of course.”
It is a much younger man in the photograph. He would like to compare this image side by side with the one of Daniel East. There is some similarity around the eyes. He is not sure that it is enough, though. He looks up at Rachel. It’s not enough.
“Thank you.” He hands her the photograph back and watches as she smiles at the young man’s face. Her left hand abstractedly plucks at daisies.
“I’m the one who should be saying thank you.”
They walk on and he photographs the country below. Where within that stretching plain is Captain Albert Stewart? Will he ever surface and point out landmarks for his sister? Will his features ever turn up on a stranger’s photographic film? A couple are picnicking in the shade of one of the shell holes. At first he is careful to keep them out of his shot, but then he finds his lens focusing in on them. The girl is laughing as the man gently places a daisy chain around her neck.
“I would rather see him in a shell hole with another woman than not ever see him again at all.”
He turns to Rachel. She is shielding the sun from her eyes with her hand. Are there tears in the shadow of her hand?
“Sometimes when I wake up he’s breathing at my side. Just for a moment. I hear his footsteps on the floor above. I smell his cigarette when I walk into a room. I just can’t believe that I’ll never see him again.”
Harry shakes his head. “I’m sorry.”
“I used to smell his shirt collars, you know. That’s stupid, isn’t it? I’ve never admitted that to anyone before. I could breathe him in, though—bring him close. But now he’s fading. Now he’s barely there.”
Harry thinks about a pair of pale eyes caught on his camera film and imagines them fading. He wants to give that news to her, wants to bring David close, but he’s not certain that he can hand her that fragile hope.
“Oh, I nearly forgot—your handkerchief. I had it laundered.”
He looks down at Francis’s embroidered initials.
“Your journey hasn’t crossed with your sister-in-law’s?”
“No.”
“You should try to contact her.”
“It’s been four weeks since I received her postcard. I don’t know where she is. She might be at home again by now.”
“Write to her there, then. Telephone her.”
“To say . . . ?”
“You told me about going back to the place you were injured. How you thought for a moment that might be your end. Did you think of her on that day?”
“Yes,” he eventually replies.
“Tell her that.”