Amagansett

‘That’s the point.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t you see?’

‘No.’

‘I wanted…’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t know…to amount to something first. Then think about it. Maybe. Or not. I don’t know.’

‘Abel, you’re a great photographer.’

‘Bullshit. And I’m not fishing for compliments.’

‘Let me lay some on you anyway.’

Abel wagged a hand, cutting him dead. Hollis didn’t persist. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t had the conversation before. Abel judged himself far too harshly. How many other photographers would have been mortified at getting their work on the front cover of Life magazine? How many would actually have given thanks for the fact that the photo wasn’t credited directly to them but to the US Army Signal Corps? Most would have had that front cover framed and hanging on the wall of their shop for all to see, not moldering amongst a pile of other magazines on a shelf back at their house.

It was Lucy who first drew Hollis’ attention to the magazine cover. Lydia was also present at the time. Abel wasn’t. He was in the kitchen, preparing dinner—their first dinner together, two couples tentatively getting to know each other. Taken in a small town in Germany, the photo showed a GI leaning against a halftrack, muffled up against the cold, and smiling. Abel’s reaction when he wandered through and found the three of them bent over the copy of Life almost soured the evening. He dismissed their compliments, cutting Lydia quite dead, something for which she never really forgave him.

Abel explained that the officer in the photo had bugged him to fire off a couple of shots, and he’d only done so to shut the guy up. The reel of film was then tossed into the photographic pool, and that was the last he’d expected to hear of it. Next thing he knew, there was the smiling GI on the front of Life, some idiot at the War Department having decided that his grin struck just the right note of cheeky triumphalism for the folks back home. Abel rated the photo as one of the blandest he had taken during the long push eastwards from the beaches of Normandy—devoid of any technical or artistic merit—but what annoyed him most was its dishonesty.

The man whom he’d immortalized for the home-front readership had played no part in the fighting they’d just come through, the hell that was the Battle of Hurtgen Forest. He was from a relief unit sent in at the end, 33,000 men having already died or been incapacitated in a few brief months, swallowed up in five hundred acres of densely wooded real estate of little or no tactical value.

Some weeks after that first dinner, Abel dug out and showed Hollis a folder of shots he had taken in Hurtgen Forest, photos he’d held back for himself rather than consign them to the nearcertain oblivion of the photographic pool.

The forest itself was the stuff of fairy tales, those of the more nightmarish kind—a dark, dense underworld, the dwelling place of witches and wolves. Towering pine trees, tight-packed so that their branches interlaced, formed a gloomy canopy through which stray shafts of sunlight barely penetrated to the forest floor. What the photos didn’t show were the German anti-personnel mines lurking beneath the spongy carpet of pine needles, or the trip wires rigged to the assault course of fallen wood that anyone passing through the forest was obliged to negotiate. The greatest danger, Abel explained, came from above, from the deadly hail of wood unleashed by artillery tree-bursts. In one of the shots a soldier was literally hugging a tree, while all around him death whirled like a blizzard. It was an image that brought to mind a terrified child clutching at his mother’s thigh.

Most of the photos, though, were of GIs at rest, stuffed into slit-trenches and foxholes, tending to their feet or their weapons, seeking comfort in the little routines of life. One GI was even plucking at his nose hairs, using the inside of a tobacco tin as a mirror.

By the time Hollis had worked his way through to the end of the batch, the forest was all but gone, the noble pines reduced to matchwood, their shattered trunks poking through the surrounding debris. Light flooded the photos, the roll of the land was revealed. The final shot was of three tall pines outlined on a bald crest, beheaded and stripped of all but their lower branches. There was no mistaking the parallel with the three crosses of Calvary.

Abel had been right. The photo selected for the front cover of Life magazine was inert and empty when set alongside those other images. But he was wrong if he thought he had yet to prove himself as a photographer.

‘It’s a poor excuse,’ said Hollis.

‘What’s that?’

‘Your work. For not getting married.’

‘Right now it’s the best I can come up with.’

‘What if she leaves you?’

‘That’s her choice.’

‘I hope she does.’

‘You fancy a shot at her yourself?’

‘Then you’ll know what a damn fool you’ve been.’

‘You’re not her type, Tom.’

‘Will you just listen to me for a moment.’

Abel spread his hands: fire away.

‘Too late,’ said Hollis. ‘She’s coming.’

Abel stubbed out his cigarette.