The Return of Captain John Emmett

by Elizabeth Speller

  Yours sincerely,

  Mary Emmett

  Laurence leaned back in the chair, feeling the heat of the sun. Mary Emmett. She was right, he would have liked to have known her better. He remembered a lively, brown-haired girl with none of her brother's reserve. He had first come across her while he was at school, then been surprised by how she had changed when he bumped into her again in Oxford at a dance three or four years later. Yet he had recognised her almost immediately.

  Although she was not a beauty, she had an attractive, open face with—and he smiled as he remembered it—a schoolgirl's grin at anything that was at al absurd.

  They were seated at the same large table and kept catching one another's glance, but by the time he could detach himself from his neighbours, to ask her to dance, her friends were wanting to leave. They talked for perhaps ten minutes, which he wished had been longer.

  Then, not long before the war, he'd seen her again at the Henley regatta. It was soon after he'd met Louise, and Mary Emmett seemed to have an attentive male friend, but he recaled meeting eyes that were ful of laughter when they sat opposite each other at some particularly pompous dinner party. Candlelight shone on her pearl necklace and he thought he remembered the shimmering eau-de-nil satin of her dress. He had thought, if water nymphs existed, they would look much like her. He had a sense of connection which was far stronger than any actual contact between them and afterwards, impulsively, he had written to her. He had never received a reply and soon his life was overtaken by marriage and war.

  He read the letter again and slowly the impact of her news sank in. What on earth had led the self-contained but confident boy he had known at school to kil himself, having survived four years of war?

  Chapter Three

  John and Laurence had arrived at Marlborough on the same day in 1903. Laurence's first impression of school was of warm reds and rusts: one handsome, square brick building after another and the early autumn colours of huge horse-chestnut trees. He was smal for his age and after a sheltered childhood the changes came as a shock.

  Amid the clamour and occasional brutality of a large public school, the two thirteen-year-olds had banded together with Charles, who had been there a term already, Rupert—who later died in Africa—and Lionel, who was destined for the Church. But it was John Emmett who was the unacknowledged leader. He appeared fearless and was dogged in the pursuit of justice. When he was younger, things simply went wrong for those who crossed him; as he got older, he would quietly confront anyone who made a weaker boy's life a misery.

  John Emmett had very little interest in the sort of success that schoolboys usualy hungered for. Although good at most games, especialy rowing, he was unimpressed by being selected for teams; he driled with the cadets but made no effort to be promoted; he sang in the chapel choir but by sixteen was privately expressing doubts about God. He argued with masters with such skil that contradiction seemed like enthusiasm. He was a natural linguist. He even wrote poetry, yet avoided being seen as effete by the school's dominating clique of hearty sportsmen. Yet although many respected him, nobody would have caled John their best friend.

  For the young Laurence he represented everything that was mysterious and brave.

  John was notorious for his night-time adventures. One summer Laurence went out onto the leads of the roof, swalowing hard to try to conquer his nausea at being four storeys above the stone-flagged courtyard. There was nobody else he would have gone with. It was a perfect, absolutely clear night and the sky was filed with stars. Laurence looked up, feeling giddy as John named the galaxies and planets above them.

  'Don't like heights, do you?' John said, matter-of-factly. 'Me, I can go as high as you like, it's being shut in that gives me the heebie-jeebies. But look,' he pointed, 'tonight you can just see the rings of Saturn with the naked eye.' He stepped dangerously near the edge, silhouetted against the bright night sky.

  It was from his father that John had learned al about the stars. He would use his father's opinion to settle arguments decisively; Laurence could stil hear his solemn tone of voice: 'My father says...' When Laurence finaly went to stay with John, the year before they were to take university entrance, he found that Mr Emmett was in fact a bluff gentleman farmer, whose main topic of conversation was shooting, whose hobby was stargazing through his old telescope and whose closest confidant was a smal terrier caled Sirius.

  'Dog star, d'ye see?'

  John and his father seemed to understand each other without speaking and on several mornings Laurence woke to find the two of them already up and walking the fields.

  He had liked the warm informality of the Emmett household. There was a freedom there he had never known. When Laurence's parents died, the Marlborough code meant that no one actualy mentioned his new status as an orphan. When John came into Laurence's study a day or so after his mother's funeral to find him red-eyed, he had asked him to stay during the holidays. The Emmetts lived in a large, rather isolated house in Suffolk. Rooms were dusty, furniture faded. The grass on the tennis court was two inches high and choked with dandelions and the worn bals were as likely to go through the holes in the net as over it. There was a croquet lawn of sorts on a slope so steep that al but the most skilful players eventualy relinquished their bals to the smal stream that ran below it. Mary, very much the little sister then, went in barefoot to retrieve them and tried to sel them back. She was always paddling in the stream, her legs were invariably muddy, he recaled, and she had a ferret she took for walks on a lead. Was it caled Kitchener? The folowing Christmas the Emmetts had sent him a present of an ivory-handled penknife with his initials on it.

  He had it with him in France.

  He looked again at her letter. Why had they lost touch? He supposed they had rapidly become different men on leaving school but the truth was that John had probably grown up more quickly than he had. Laurence remembered being surprised to hear that Emmett had joined as a volunteer at the beginning of the war. John was the last person to be swayed by popular excitement and at Oxford he liked to speak of himself as a European. The only jingoist in the Emmett family had been John's father, who toasted the King every evening and mistrusted the French, Germans and Londoners. Laurence thought, uncomfortably, of his own, discreditable motives for volunteering and hoped his friends would be equaly surprised if they knew that truth.

  For a moment he felt a surprisingly intense sadness, the sort of emotion he could remember once feeling quite often. Now that odd, passionate schoolboy was gone, and, judging by the address on Mary's letter, so was the lovingly neglected house. John had been different when so many of them were so ordinary. Laurence counted himself among the ordinary sort. If the war hadn't come, they would al have become stout solicitors and brewers, doctors and cattle-breeders, with tolerant wives and children, most of them living in the same vilages, towns and counties they came from.

  For much of the war Laurence had hung on to the idea that he would go back to the smal world he had been so eager to leave. Only when the end of the war seemed a possibility did life suddenly become precious and death a terrifying reality. Both he and John had returned, but now he knew that death had caught up with John and, moreover, by his own choice.

  Laurence's second reaction as he read Mary Emmett's letter was a sinking feeling. He couldn't bring John back, nor could he tel her anything she wanted to hear, and he hadn't—as far as he knew—served near him in France. The truth was that he had heard nothing directly from his old school friend since they'd left Oxford.

  At university they had effectively parted ways. John had gone into a different colege; his circle were clever men: writers, debaters, thinkers. Laurence had falen in with an easier set, who held parties and played games, thinking of little outside their own lives. Laurence had migrated to London, surrendered to the coffee trade and married Louise. John had apparently gone abroad to Switzerland, then Germany. Laurence had read his occasional reports in the London newspapers. They were usualy cameo pieces: Bavarian farmer
s struggling to make ends meet, the chocolate-smeling girls in a Berne factory or a veteran who had been Bismarck's footman. As tensions rose in Europe, he supposed John's smal contributions had slipped out of favour. During the war one of his poems had been published in a newspaper but apart from that his work had disappeared from view.

  Laurence had nothing new to give Mary. He told himself that a visit to Cambridge would simply raise her hopes, and probably her mother's too. If she came to London he couldn't think where he could take her. But he couldn't forget the kindnesses shown by al the Emmetts when he was a lonely boy without any real family of his own.

  Dressing for dinner with Charles, he took out his cufflinks and there nestling beside them was the little ivory-handled penknife. That decided him. He was deluding himself that any kind of book was taking shape and a few days away from stifling London could do no harm. But as he walked through the London streets to dinner, it was Mary's conspiratorial and almost forgotten smile which occupied his mind.

  'But why the hel didn't you tel me?' he asked Charles later, as they sat back in deep armchairs, nursing their port.

  Charles coughed, loud enough to make two men sitting across the room look up. His stil-boyish face flushed with embarrassment. 'Unforgivable. I was in Scotland when I heard. My cousin Jack's place. Damn cold. Then I forgot.'

  'Why did he do it?' Laurence asked himself as much as Charles.

  'Usual thing, I suppose. France? Seems to have taken some men like that. Mind you,' Charles reflected, 'he was home when the West Kents realy took a pounding. Back in England—smashed leg, something like that. Must have avoided the whole scrap. Perhaps he felt he didn't deserve the luck.'

  Charles seemed to have regarded his military service as a bit of a lark. He'd embraced war as an escape from destiny in the form of the successful family leather factories and he flourished in the infantry. He had escaped death, serious injury or ilness for three grueling years and had been mentioned in despatches twice by the time the war ended.

  They both fel quiet. Laurence gazed at the flare of copper chrysanthemums in the fireplace. Eventualy Charles broke the silence.

  'Look, I'm sorry I didn't fil you in about Emmett. I know he was a joly close friend at school but then the Harcourts didn't make it either, nor did Sorely and that odd chap Greaves you liked so much, and that Scot—what was he caled—with the terrible temper. The one who joined the RFC? It's not as if we'd al been in touch and I rather thought you'd had enough of talking about that kind of thing. You know, with Louise and everything. No-go area and al that.' He reddened again.

  'Lachlan. It was Lachlan Ramsay who had the temper,' said Laurence quickly. 'But yes, I did admire John. His odd courage; his independence. What may have happened after the war doesn't alter that. It's a shame.' He paused. 'Quite honestly, I wish I could say he was my friend, but he wasn't, not realy. Friendly, while we were at school, but not a friend. Hardly even that at Oxford. A few words if we'd met in the street, no more.'

  As he spoke, one of the two older men who had sat across the room from them got up to leave. His companion rose to folow him. Charles, who had been glancing in their direction for the last half-hour, jumped up from his chair and went over to shake the first man's hand, and was then introduced to the other. The slightly younger man had a distinguished and inteligent face, the older one a slightly stiff military bearing.

  As Charles sat down again he looked pleased. 'You know who they were, of course?'

  Laurence never knew who anybody was, however eagerly Charles assumed that figures who loomed large in his own life were as significant in anyone else's.

  'Gerald Somers,' Charles said triumphantly, and then when Laurence failed to respond quickly enough: 'Major general. Zulu wars. Boer scrap. Mafeking.

  Enough medals for a jubilee. A real hero, not just medals for other men's courage. Of course you know who he is, Laurence. Mind you, he's not so popular with the powers that be now. Got some very unfashionable views on military discipline.'

  Simply to be left in peace Laurence nodded. 'Of course.' These ageing generals loved their hanging and flogging, he thought wearily.

  'Wel, they can't say much. Not to his face. Career like that and gave both his sons to his country. The other man was Philip Morrel. Used to be an MP. I'm surprised you didn't recognise him, Laurence. Though he's a Liberal, of course. His wife is Lady Ottoline, sister of the Duke of Portland. You know. Bohemians.

  Absolutely terrifying.'

  Laurence had at least heard of the Morrels and their circle, so felt able to nod. 'Absolutely. But why would Mary write to me?' he added.

  Although even as he said it, he realised Charles was right—attrition had been high among their school friends. In the aftermath of the last few years, her choice was limited.

  ***

  When he got in, Laurence sat down to write to Mary Emmett. He kept it brief, just his condolences and a gentle warning that he doubted he could throw any light on anything, but would visit as soon as she wanted. Then, with a sense of urgency—her letter had taken eight weeks to find him—he went out into the dark to post it.

  When he returned he lay on his bed, unsettled by the heat, and by thoughts of John.

  Chapter Four

  It was a perfect early September day, the sky a cloudless deep blue, as Laurence's train crossed the flatlands of eastern England. It was not an area he knew wel or found particularly attractive but on such a fine morning it was hard not to feel a sense of wel-being. As the train gathered speed leaving London behind, he had felt a wonderful sense of liberation despite the probable awkwardness of the day ahead. The fields spread away to the horizon, al bleached stubble and hayricks, and occasionaly a line of elms marking a road going from one smal vilage to another. Nothing seemed to move, although as they rattled across a level crossing a horse and cart laden with hay and two bicyclists waited to cross.

  His mood stayed calm even as they drew into Cambridge and he left the train. The country summer had straggled into the city; Michaelmas daisies and roses grew in tired beds by the station, and a few ripe blackberries hung on sooty brambles in the no-man's land between the platform and the picket fence. On the platform a group of young women laughed in the pastel shade of Chinese parasols.

  Rather to his relief, he recognised Mary Emmett almost immediately, standing outside the ticket office in a pale-green dress and a soft straw hat, her wavy brown hair caught in a bun at the nape of her neck. Her once laughing greenish eyes were solemn. But when he approached she smiled and he saw the girl he remembered in the older, thinner face.

  She put out her hand. 'Laurence,' she said, 'welcome to Cambridge. Thank you so, so much for coming.'

  She had a wide, pretty mouth and when she talked a dimple appeared to one side. She looked genuinely delighted to see him, and only dark smudges under her eyes hinted at sadness.

  They took a bus, which drove slowly past the Botanic Gardens—a dark-green jungle behind tidy railings. The warm stone buildings of the ancient coleges lay on either side of them.

  'Now,' Mary said as they got off by Magdalene Bridge, 'here we are at the crossroads of duty and pleasure: we could go home but if we do we'l get caught up with Mother and Aunt Virginia. She lives with us now, as a companion for my mother.' She made a face.

  Laurence waited to see where the other road led.

  'Or,' she continued, 'seeing as it's such a perfect day, we could go out to Granchester for early tea. We could take the bus or even punt. Do you punt?'

  'Wel, I could punt more than a decade ago. I suppose I could test my surviving punting skils if you feel brave?'

  'I can actualy punt myself.' She smiled. 'It's just much more fun to be a puntee.'

  However he had thought the day might turn out, Laurence had never expected to be drinking lemon squash under trees so heavy with fruit that under their weight the branches had curved to the ground to form green-latticed caves. They made good time up the river. After tying up next to a couple of other boats, a
nd swatting away midges at the water's edge, they walked through meadows to the tearooms. Apart from their footsteps in the dry grass, the only sound was a distant corncrake.

  Mary asked whether he'd read Brooke's poem about the vilage and Laurence felt absurdly glad to be able to recite at least some of it.

  'I met him, you know,' Mary said. 'I don't think he was very impressed—I was far too young and not nearly clever or beautiful enough for his set, but John liked him. They'd come over here and talk and read. That's how I first knew of the tearoom. But I love the river. Cambridge can be so dusty and yelow but the river is always so cool and green. It reminds me of our old house out here. I'd live on an island or a houseboat if I could.'

  'You'l be horrified to know that when I was at Oxford I used to think you were like a water nymph,' he said. For a second he couldn't believe he had blurted out something so ridiculously inappropriate but she looked so delighted and happy at his absurd revelation that he laughed with her.

  Laurence began to wonder whether the whole day would pass without either of them mentioning the reason for his visit. It was only the almost untouched seed cake on her plate that suggested Mary Emmett was more anxious than she appeared. He was fighting off sleepiness from the punting and the sun as he sat in his shirtsleeves, eyes slightly screwed up against the light. He had become adept at sensing the turn of a conversation so that he could head off any direction that led to Louise and sympathy. Now he found himself on the other side, trying to reach a place where John could be there quite naturaly.

  'Is your mother al right?' It was a lame question.

  'No,' said Mary. 'No, she's not, actualy. She was never very strong and she's just retreated from the world. Al the anxiety about John during the war, and then a brief happiness when he came back. Then it was soon obvious things were badly wrong, and she was scared and embarrassed by his violent outbursts. He got involved in a fight, miles away, and was arrested. He wouldn't talk about it but he would have been charged if he hadn't been admitted into a nursing home. Al the same, she wasn't sure whether she should have let him be put away—because we were putting him away; we both felt it. He wouldn't speak and something was wrong with his arm; it made his life even harder that he couldn't use it. He needed us. Needed somebody who loved him.'