第12章 The Photograph

The half-photograph had lived in the lining of Milly's tunic for two months, and she had looked at it so often in the dark that she could have drawn it from memory: a thin man in civilian clothes, one hand in his pocket, a dog sitting against his knee, the other half of the picture torn away clean. On the back, in pencil worn nearly through the card: *R. and me, Ashbourne, 1913.* She had assumed, at first, that the "me" was Ryecroft, and that the thin man was the friend Roly Denbigh. Then, in the store at Marlefield, and later in the little effects room at Argentonne, she began to look at the other unclaimed photographs, the ones taken off men who had died and never had a family to send them to, and among them, on the eleventh of October, she found a full plate glass of a battalion group, taken outside a church hall somewhere in England, with the names pencilled along the bottom, and there, in the third row, in a clerk's dark coat and a clerk's white collar, she found the face of the man who had walked out of the ground on the twenty-first of September. The name under the face was *B. Kedge*. He had been a clerk, then. An orderly-room clerk, from the look of the coat and the pallor, one of the men who kept the battalion's own records and knew, better than any officer, how a name lived and how it died and how easily a dead man's line could be struck out of a book and left to lie. It explained everything: the calm, the rehearsed patience, the soft hands, the way he had said that he was whatever the papers said he was. A clerk knows exactly how much a paper is worth. A clerk knows that a private notebook is worth nothing, and that a register, properly kept, is worth a life. Milly copied the name into her notebook, in the second list, beside the place where Ryecroft's name should have gone. Then she wrote, for the first time in weeks, a letter that was not about Ted. She wrote to the battalion of the man in the photograph and asked, in the stiff, careful, semi-official way that civilians use when they are pretending not to be civilians, after Private Rowland Denbigh, and whether he was living, and whether he might be found. The answer came back within the week, and it came back from a base hospital on the coast, and it was written in a shaky hand by a man who had been shot through the shoulder at Thiepval and was coming back up as soon as the surgeons would sign for it. It said exactly four sentences. *I am R. Denbigh. I am alive. My friend Ryecroft is dead and nobody will tell me where. If you know anything, write to me at the address below and do not put his name on the envelope.* She did a little more, before she went to Hilda. She asked Danforth, as idly as she could, whether the establishment had ever had a clerk of that name, and Danforth, who had begun to understand that his own safety lay in Milly's success, went through the older registers until he found what she wanted. Kedge had come to the establishment in the spring as a battalion clerk attached for a fortnight to help with the March returns, and he had gone away again, and then he had come back, and then he had gone away a second time, and after that the register had lost him. Danforth remembered him. He remembered him with a fear that he did not have to explain: a quiet man, neat, who had borrowed money from three orderlies and paid back none of it, who had been seen at the railhead with a staff captain, and who had then simply stopped being in the place where a man who is owing money ought to be. "A man who owes money has a reason to want a new name," Milly said. "A man who owes money to the wrong man has a reason to want a new life," Danforth said, and then looked at the door, the way everybody in that building had learned to look at doors. She went out to the yard and found the impostor standing at the gate, as though he had been waiting for her, and for a moment neither of them said anything. He had a great deal of time, that man; you could see it in the way he stood. Whatever the market paid for a name, it had paid him enough to stand at a gate in the afternoon and watch an ambulance driver with no particular hurry at all. "You have been looking at photographs," he said. "I have been looking at a great many things." "So have I," he said. "I have been looking at a woman who keeps a book, in a place where books are read by men who sell them. I would not care to be that woman much longer, if I were she." And he touched his cap, which he was not wearing, and walked away up the road toward the railhead, and Milly watched him go and felt the cold of the afternoon arrive all at once, and understood that the market was no longer hiding from her. It had decided to meet her in the open, which meant it had decided something else as well. She told Hilda all of it that evening, standing by Number Four in the rain, and Hilda listened the way she always listened, with the water dripping off her elbow and her eyes on the middle distance, and when Milly had finished she said the thing Milly had been refusing to say to herself. "They are going to move on the fourteenth. The men who buy the names are not going to wait for you to find a colonel, and Cradock is not going to wait for you at all. If you are going to break this, you have to break it in a fortnight, and you have to break it where the paper is, or the paper will break you first." "A fortnight," Milly said. "A room, a witness, and a man with the power to sign. And a way to be at Vallencourt on the fourteenth without being run down on the road on the thirteenth." "Then that last part is mine," Hilda said. "I can drive Number Four. I have been wanting a reason to be somewhere else for weeks." Milly put the letter in her tunic with the photograph and the notebook, and went out to the yard, and found Hilda, and told her what she had found. "A clerk," Hilda said. "That is worse than a sergeant. A sergeant can be bribed. A clerk can be bribed and then he knows how to hide it." "He is wearing a dead man's name," Milly said. "And the dead man was going to report the market, and the man who was going to receive the report is coming back up the line, and there is a delivery of six names at Vallencourt on the fourteenth." Hilda leaned on the wing of Number Four and looked at the grey sky. "You have three days," she said. "What are you going to do with them?" "Get the truth into a book that a court must take," Milly said. "And keep the man with the key from getting to the witnesses first. In that order." "And if he gets to you first?" "Then you will take the notebook," Milly said, "and you will take it to Commandant Ashwell, and you will make her read it, because she keeps an account of her own, and accounts have a way of wanting to be balanced." ---