Lancashire, October 1921
THE CHURCH BELLS STRIKE TWELVE NOTES AND EDIE LOOKS UP FROM the grave. She leans on the spade and contemplates her efforts. She has had to dig much deeper than she expected, as they wouldn’t lie right and she couldn’t bear to break the wings. A childhood rhyme comes back to her with the bells. “‘All the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,’” she recites to the crows’ grave. Should she say some solemn words? Some formula to wish them a fortunate onward flight? As she looks down at the small wooden cross that she has fashioned, she isn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.
They had been much lighter than she expected, much less solid than their presence suggested, and terribly, horribly brittle. That brittleness set her teeth on edge somehow; it had both an awful fragility and a sense of pent-up potential. Despite their very obvious desiccating deadness, she almost expected the wings to flinch under her hand.
Edie had felt a great sense of Will’s presence as she took the crows down from the dresser. They were so obviously the work of his hand. In removing them, in erasing their presence, did she push him out too? She had found herself talking aloud to Will’s memory, carrying on a conversation with a recalled image of a cross in France. She also found herself asking him about Francis. Was there something more that Will knew? Is Francis with him on the other side?
Condemned to a cardboard box, the crows had less menace. There, at unnatural angles, they looked less like they might beat into life. And yet there was still something threatening about them. Still some suspicion that they weren’t yet finished and entirely devoid of the potential to flap their protest. Edie told herself that it was just her imagination. Is imagination getting the better of her with regard to Francis too?
It wouldn’t have been right just to put them out for the rag-and-bone, and to burn them would have been too close to sorcery, so she had taken a spade down the garden and dug a grave. Standing here now, she is struck with her own folly, her own ridiculousness. “If you could see me!” she says to a memory of Harry’s face, and then tells herself that it is for the best that he can’t.
On a whim, taken with a fancy, she cuts a bunch of sweet Williams and places them in the crows’ grave with an apology to her brother-in-law. A blackbird is fluting its liquid notes from the lilac. It is a more elegant elegy than Edie can summon. She takes up the spade again and lets the first clods of earth cover them over gently. She works with reverence, carefully at first, but then it becomes an effort to just hide the last of the feathers. The tip of a wing protrudes through the soil. She cannot bear to put a boot to it.
Her hands sting when it is done, and there is dirt in the creases of her palms. She thinks of a graveside gesture of Francis’s caught in Harry’s diary. She thinks of them covering Will over. She thinks of the cut on Harry’s palm. She remembers a black feather on Will’s grave that Harry had not put there. Her fingers find the ribbon in her pocket.
Edie surveys the garden and listens to the low sultry hum of the bees. It is overgrown now; poppies have seeded and bindweed twines through the buddleias. In 1917 Mrs. Blythe had helped her dig up the lawn and they had put in lines of potatoes and cabbages and carrots. How has it run rank around her? How has she not noticed the weeds taking it back? She tells herself that she should make the effort again and reverse this neglect. She silently recites notions of efficiency and self-sufficiency; she will make a bonfire and dig the earth over. She will cut back the buddleia and take pruning shears to the overgrown roses. She must plan ahead for next spring. Order seeds. Draw up a scheme. Bring back the lupines and the broad beans and the Canterbury bells. It is healthy to make practical plans, she tells herself. And yet, as she schemes potato trenches and lines of spring greens, she is struck by a sudden sense of alienation. This garden now belongs to Harry. This is his house. Can it still be her home? How can she still plan a future here?
There is a pair of men’s boots in the border, she notices. The leather is lichened green and moss has claimed the soles. She vaguely recalls them being there, but is no longer sure which brother they belong to. The larkspur has seeded itself around the boots, is still there in the same border where it always grew. Mrs. Blythe had told her that larkspur signified fickleness in the language of flowers. The smell of it takes Edie back to a hospital ward and a café in Arras where Francis’s face is waiting on a wall of missing men. Had these all been acts of fickleness?
She washes her hands at the kitchen sink. The earth swills and circles away and she remembers washing Harry’s hands in the Ypres hotel room. The glass might well have been in her own hand, for all the pain it gave her. She had felt such tenderness toward his cut skin in that instant. She leans against the draining board and looks at his letters on the kitchen table.
They had been waiting for her behind the door when she got back. She had put the suitcase down in the hall, turned the card in her hands, and taken his envelopes through to the kitchen. The postcard was a picture of Amiens Cathedral surrounded by sandbags. She had passed it on the train just hours earlier. He wrote from the station as he waited for a train to take him south. Had they passed so close again, then?
She had opened the letter with the Amiens postmark first and heard Harry’s voice making apologies and appeals. It had made her cry to see the photograph of Will and Francis laughing, and once again to have the Saint Christopher in her hand. Harry’s second letter was from farther south and was full of azure skies, red rooftops, and regret. He seems to be a long way away now and getting farther. She wasn’t certain whether she felt relief or regret that there wasn’t a letter from Francis behind the door.
Edie makes tea and sits back at the table. The kitchen is different without the crows. It has lightened. She no longer feels watched. And, yet, there is less of them—of Will and Francis and Harry—in here now, and she is sorry for that. She props the photograph of Will and Francis against the milk bottle. He was dying in my arms, Harry had written, but she couldn’t quite believe his words any longer. The version of Francis in Harry’s diary was so far away from the golden-haired young man she had loved, and she now isn’t sure that she really knew the story’s narrator any longer either. We were ordered forward, Harry wrote next. I couldn’t stay with him. It wasn’t a choice. Leaving Francis there was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. But, believe me, Edie, he wasn’t going to get up again. It was over. I know you hope that it might not be so, that you want to believe there’s a chance that he might still be out there, but it just can’t be right. For your own sake, Edie, you need to believe me.
She looks again at the letter to Harry that she had begun. So who was my husband really? she wrote. And where is he now? Edie does not mean to send the letter, it will never be posted, but she somehow can’t not reply to Harry’s pen. She needs to have her right to reply, and so she tells him about burying the crows, how much more difficult it was than she had expected, how different the room is now, about her plans for the garden, and about what it feels like to hold the Saint Christopher in her hand again. Though he is the one taking trains, Edie has the sensation that she is still traveling, and to grip the medal in her hand gives her some sense of steadiness. But then, didn’t the Saint Christopher trigger all of this? Her pen confesses that she wishes Harry was here, not getting farther away, but that she can’t be the woman Francis assumed she was, that she feels shame, that she feels guilty—and that she can’t believe Harry when he says that Francis is so definitely dead.