The colonel looked at Martin, taking in every detail in a glance. He did not see me bite back a retort to Martin’s condescending remark. “You served, Mr. Forsyth.” It was not a question.
“Yes, sir.” Martin wore a suit today, a jacket of checked wool over a stylish waistcoat, but his painful thinness altered the effect of the clothes. He had slicked down his hair and combed it back from his forehead, which made him look disconcertingly adult, like a man instead of a boy just out of his sickroom. Yet his chair nearly swallowed him, and his knobby hands gripped the arms.
“Air, ground, or sea?” the colonel asked.
“Ground, sir,” Martin replied. “Artillery. I spent most of my time on the Marne.”
“Difficult fighting there,” the colonel commented. He picked up a leather briefcase and opened it, taking his time, my female presence completely forgotten in this male exchange. “I traveled through there in May 1916, and again just before the end of the war. It’s still abandoned, or so I hear.” He glanced up briefly. “Did you take an injury?”
“Shrapnel, sir.”
“I see. To the stomach?”
Martin looked surprised. “Yes, sir.”
The colonel shook his head. With what seemed excruciating slowness, he found a particular envelope in his briefcase and began to extract it. “I don’t have second sight, Mr. Forsyth. I’ve just seen the effects of shrapnel wounds to the stomach a number of times. You’re lucky you survived. Most of the men I saw with such an injury lived barely a week, and it was a mercy by the end.”
“Yes, sir.”
I resisted the urge to fidget in my seat. Martin was only doing his part; I had known that military small talk would make the meeting go more smoothly. But still I wished they would get on with it. I looked at the envelope in the colonel’s hand—Alex’s file—as if I could read through the thick, creamy paper.
“How much do you know of Mr. Manders’s death?” the colonel asked Martin.
“Not much, sir,” Martin replied quietly. “Though I believe he is officially missing in action, as Mrs. Manders has no official death notice.”
Colonel Mabry appeared to think this over, then nodded. He turned to me. “I suppose it’s quite frustrating for you, as his wife,” he said. “But disappearances like your husband’s were unfortunately common. We have some several thousand men still missing in England alone, Mrs. Manders. The recent burial of the Unknown Warrior illustrates this exact point.”
I nodded. The Unknown Warrior—the exhumed body of an unidentified soldier from a French battlefield—had been buried with great ceremony at Westminster Abbey the previous year, attended by royalty and thousands of mourners. I had sat in my flat alone that day, trying, like countless others, I was certain, not to imagine that it was my missing husband in that box, its solemn photograph in all the papers.
“You will not understand everything you see in the file,” Colonel Mabry said to me, as if I were a child or a recent student of English. “But wherever I can give clarification, I will do so.”
I took it from him and set it in my lap. Then I opened the slender file.
The first thing I saw was Alex’s face. The photograph was clipped to the inside cover of the file—a small, square shot of him. He was dressed in uniform, his collar just visible in the close-cropped shot, though he was hatless. There were the familiar planes and angles of his features, the eyes that I knew were extraordinary dark blue ringed with black, the familiar, well-bred set of his chin. His lips were closed and set in a serious line and his gaze was carefully blank as he stared into the camera.
“This is the photo from my husband’s passport,” I said.
“Yes,” Colonel Mabry agreed. “It is standard procedure.”
My eyes traveled the particulars of my husband on the page: height, six feet three inches; weight, fifteen stone; hair, dark blond; eyes, blue; age, twenty-three years. The file dated from 1915, when Alex enlisted, leaving him frozen in time, permanently twenty-three years old.