Lancashire, October 1921
SHE IS STANDING IN EXACTLY THE SAME SPOT. SHE IS SURE OF IT. FIVE months ago she had stood here and had finally found the courage to ask Harry.
“I want you to take a photograph of Francis’s grave.”
Standing here again, Edie wants both to take her words back and to ask them again with more urgency. More imperative. More uncertainty. As she had asked it, she hadn’t been sure that she wasn’t setting Harry an impossible quest. Five months on, Francis being in a grave feels all the more implausible. But what is the alternative?
“I want you to take a photograph of Francis.”
When she says it out loud she is not sure that it sounds any more convincing. She imagines Francis’s face, four years older, tracked down and finally caught by Harry’s camera.
“And then what happens next?” she asks herself.
Edie looks out across the reservoir. They had often walked up here together, watching the water side by side, Francis’s voice telling her about giants and witches and Roman roads. He had pulled flints and fragments of pottery out of his pockets and had talked about the village under the water, she remembers, the cottages and the public house and the Methodist chapel, all submerged when the valley was flooded to make the reservoir. Edie had thought about how the families must have felt as they had watched the waters rising, seeing those well-known walls and floorboards and fireplaces lost to the liquid underworld. She had imagined their sense of dislocation. She feels something similar now when she contemplates the walls of Harry’s house. Today those walls had felt like they were closing in on her and she had to get out.
There had been another letter from him that morning. He writes to her about war memorials, haymaking, and the Frenchman who is in love with his brother’s widow. She is not sure what he expects her to feel about the latter. What emotions does he wish this information to incite? His letters radiate heat and sunshine but also sadness. Her replies are full of shortages in the shops, the price of coal, and questions. She keeps her letters with his, filing her replies in between, as if this were a conversation. But she will never send him her letters. She will never actually put them in the post. This will never be more that a one-sided conversation.
There are couples doing the circuit of the water today, smiling at the sun on its surface and the silent landscape beyond. A group of children in Sunday best are leading a horse. Two girls twirl parasols, and shadows roll across the moor. She shuts her eyes to it all and listens to the lapwings.
“Edie, isn’t it?”
It startles her. For a moment it is Francis’s voice. For a moment it is always Francis’s voice, but when she opens her eyes a ferryman is standing at her side. He flicks his cigarette away and offers her his hand.
“Mrs. Blythe? I’m rotten with faces, but you are Francis Blythe’s wife, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” She turns toward him. She is still Francis’s wife. She will always be Francis’s wife. She just wishes that she could be certain what that now means.
“I thought so. It’s the hair.” He nods. “I often think about him. Often used to see him up here with his camera.”
“You’re right.” Edie recalls photographs of the pump house machinery, of cotton grass, and the grooved stones of the old packhorse track. Francis was a man who liked history and technology and to understand the landscape around him. He needed to know the names of plants, the geology of the hills, and the reason why stones were worn thus. He wasn’t a careless or a clumsy man. Not a man to idly or accidentally let go. There was so much more that he wanted to learn and to try.
“I was in the same battalion. I was sorry when I heard about him.”
“Heard about him?” She looks at the man. He is so much older than Francis. Much older even than that photograph. “What did you hear exactly? Would you tell me? Were you there in October 1917?”
“And a bloody awful balls-up it was.” He wrinkles his nose when he looks back at her. “Forgive me, love. Excuse my language.”
“Did you see his body?” She watches the man turn his eyes away and take a step back. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t ask, should I? But there are so many questions in my head. You didn’t see Francis, did you? Did you see him dead? Did you hear that he was definitely dead?”
The ferryman shakes his head and looks like he doesn’t know what to reply. He looks like he doesn’t want to reply. “I saw a lot of things that day that I’d rather forget. I only heard that he was on the casualty list.”
“The casualty list?”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Blythe. That’s all I can tell you. But you know that already, don’t you?”
There are shadows around the man’s eyes. His eyes now don’t want to meet hers. There is a tremble in his hands as he puts a match to his cigarette. She remembers that Harry’s hands do that. He blows smoke away and apologizes.
A lapwing cries as she watches the ferryman walk away, and she considers: How does Francis being on a casualty list equate with him being missing, believed killed? How does that add up? Surely, being a casualty requires a body, be it one injured or dead? A missing man can’t be a casualty, or can he? Could the ferryman be mistaken? Could he have misremembered the events? Confused Francis for someone else?
The reservoir is a mirror full of blue sky, but the railings are cold to her hands. She looks down on the water and just for a second, in the movement of the surface, Francis is there by her side. Fleetingly. Certainly. Possibly. Her pulse races. She is dizzy and nauseous. But she grips onto the railings, makes herself look again, and there is nothing in the water but her own reflected face. Is it elation or fear that she feels? Grief or relief? Wishfulness or madness? She concentrates on her breathing, counts her breaths, shakes away the notion, and tells herself that it is just the tricks of memory, of conscience, of light on the water. Isn’t it?
The wind blows across the water and she pulls her coat around her shoulders. Harry had been in this water too, she remembers. She is not sure why she recalls it just now, but she can hear both their voices telling the story, their voices weaving, Francis’s lips whispering it into her ear again, and Harry’s there too. In the winter of 1907 they had walked out onto the ice together. Three brothers, still boys then. They had dared each other. Pushed each other on. Harry had told her how he had heard the creak of the ice beneath his boots, seen the shift of the bubbles just below the surface and then the sudden cracks. Francis had told her how suddenly Harry had no longer been there, how Harry had screamed Francis’s name and then Francis’s arm had kept searching in the water until he had finally found Harry’s hand. She imagines the panic and racing fear and the moment when their hands connected. Harry gripping on to life and his brother. The gasping as he surfaced. The emotions exchanged between their eyes in that instant. And what if Francis hadn’t run to him? What if Francis hadn’t got him out? She pictures Harry kicking slowly against the curling weed, the light pulling away from his clamoring hands. She sees him fixed in the glacier cold, like a fly in amber, or a photograph smile. Surely Harry remembers that too? Surely Harry wouldn’t have just let Francis go?
“Mrs. Blythe?” The ferryman is there again.
“There is something else, isn’t there? You said the casualty list. Not the list of the missing.”
“I don’t know what I can tell you,” he says and looks down at his hands. “There isn’t much that I can give you, but perhaps you have a right to know the bit that I have.”
“Yes?” She watches him shift his feet and feels both an urgent need and a sense of shame for putting him in this situation.
“All I know is that your husband was taken away to the dressing station. Rose took him there himself. He carried him, they said. That’s the only thing that I can tell you. I don’t know anything more. That’s the only thing that I heard.”
“Rose?”
“Captain Rose. Michael Rose. They’d been friends, you see, him and Francis, back before it all began.”
“But Captain Rose wrote to me. He sent me a letter at the end and he told me that Francis was missing. How could he be missing if Rose had taken him to get help? He didn’t mention a dressing station at all. Why wouldn’t he put that in his letter?”
“I don’t know.” The ferryman looks away. He now looks like he wished he hadn’t followed her. “I’ve no idea. Only don’t misunderstand me—the dressing station was just a group of pillboxes, and it was conspicuous, so they shelled it. They kept on shelling it. The fact that Rose got him back there doesn’t mean that he wasn’t missing in the end. It’s not easy to explain to you what it was like.”
“Captain Rose died, didn’t he?”
He shakes his head. “I’d heard that he was living in Cheshire after the war. If you get in touch with the regiment, they’ll be able to tell you.”
“Yes, of course. Thank you for helping me.”
“I’m not sure that I’ve helped at all.”
She completes the circuit and is back at the spillway. A rainbow glistens in the spray of the water, but the rushing sound of it down the steps makes her shiver. Five months earlier Harry had taken her photograph, standing on exactly this spot. He had nodded when she had talked about Francis’s grave, but then there would be three months with not a word from him. What did that silence mean? Is there really something that he couldn’t bring himself to tell her? So many words pour out of Harry’s letters now, but she knows that he hasn’t told her everything. It was there in Ypres, that hesitation. When she had asked him to find Francis she believed that it would silence the doubts and the questions, but how loud they are now.