The Return of Captain John Emmett

by Elizabeth Speller

  'But this is what I wanted to show you.'

  Mary puled out a lined schoolbook. Again she opened it and handed it to Laurence. There were fewer words than in the earlier books, large, single ones or short phrases scrawled across the page. One read Göttes Mühle mahle langsam, mahle aber trefflich klein, but he had no idea what it meant.

  The pictures were no longer portraits and smal landscapes. Ghoul-like faces—eyeless, formless—rose, dripping, out of some viscous glue. He turned a few more pages: bodies, German soldiers by the look of the uniform, thrown outwards by a central explosion. A rat was crouched on the corner of the next page, a subaltern's pips hanging from its claws and a human grin on its mouth. He turned over the page. A man slumped away from a post, almost on his knees but restrained by a rope with his hands behind him, a blindfold over his eyes. Dark, shiny penciling over his shirt indicated mortal injury. The lead had pierced the page at one point. Six soldiers were standing with their guns half raised. Along the bottom on both sides of the next double-page spread men walked, single file, with bandaged eyes, one hand on the shoulder of the man in front. They'd been gassed, Laurence assumed, or were prisoners. It was hard to tel from the uniforms. The quality of drawing was stil very fine, which made their impact acute.

  Laurence turned the page again; he hated seeing al these nightmarish images here in front of Mary. Until now he had been unable to reconcile the boy he had known at school, as wel as the man revealed by his possessions and whose sister loved him, with the kind of person who would blow his brains out in a winter wood.

  Now he had become privy to the preoccupations of a different sort of man.

  There were a few blank pages, then one last drawing, in pencil. In it a girl lay apparently dead across some sacks, one arm thrown behind her, the other across her chest. Her head was turned to one side, her hair was tangled. What was most shocking was that her skirts were raised, showing her nakedness underneath. One stocking was torn, the other leg was bare, her foot turned outwards.

  He suddenly realised that he had been silent for some time. When he glanced up, Mary had moved to the window and was half turned away from him, looking out. She stil clutched the striped scarf. There were tears on her cheeks but her crying was silent. She pressed one end of the scarf to her eyes. He left the book on the bed and went over to her, putting his arm clumsily round her shoulders. She stayed immobile for a second before turning towards him. He held her for a minute, conscious of the scent of her, and of the scarf, and of her hair against his face, the slightness of her body against his chest. It was the first time he had touched another human being, apart from trying to comfort injured men, he thought, since he had last held Louise in the darkness of their bed. But then he remembered the whore in Soho just as Mary broke away, covering her embarrassment by puling a handkerchief out of her sleeve.

  'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I can't bear thinking what must have happened to him out there. After I found it I was going to burn it so that Mother never saw it, but it turned out she didn't want to look at John's things. She has his photo by the bed and that's enough for her. A tidy relationship.' She raised her eyes to his. 'She always did like everything to be nice and everybody to be happy. She can't cope with complicated things. I'm quite sure she wishes John had simply died in action like half the other officers in his regiment.'

  It occurred to Laurence that Mary must feel suffocated in this claustrophobic house with two prematurely old women.

  'Look,' he said, 'I'm happy to do anything I can to help but you're wrong in thinking I knew your brother wel. I knew him. I liked him. I liked him a lot. But that was a long time ago.'

  Mary looked at him. 'You probably knew him as wel as any of us, then.'

  She rummaged through the trunk, under the heavy layers of clothing, then sat back on her heels.

  'No, wait a minute,' she said, hurriedly, 'I've got something in my room I want you to see. You stay here.'

  Laurence sat on the chair, hearing her clatter down the second flight of stairs. It was stuffy under the roof, and moving John's things about had raised dust, which shimmered in the light. He walked to the window, lifted the latch and pushed. The window seemed stuck fast. Dead flies lay on the sil. He banged on the frame with the side of his clenched fist and then harder with his hand protected in the sleeve of his jacket. It burst free, explosively, and swung wide to alow in a rush of fresh air. Old moss and flakes of paint fel on to the floor; God knows when it had last been opened. The light beyond the slate roofs showed that evening was not far away. He looked at his watch. It was getting late. He was standing at the window when Mary returned with a manila envelope.

  'Look, I'm going to have to be off soon if I'm to catch my train,' he said. Her face fel instantly. 'We can meet again,' he went on hurriedly, 'but I'm supposed to be at dinner in London tonight.' It was only with Charles but he had left it too late to change the arrangements. 'I've got half an hour.'

  'John was engaged once, you know.'

  Laurence found himself surprised, not because he couldn't imagine John liking women, but simply because he couldn't imagine him being that intimate with anyone.

  'She was German, her name was Minna. She lived near Munich. A lawyer's daughter, I think. He met her before the war, presumably when he was traveling.

  Wel, obviously before the war.' She shrugged. 'We'd never got to meet her. Her family had been going to come over in 1913 but then everything caught up with us and they never came. My father died late that year. John came home for the funeral and he never went back to Germany. Then, when war seemed inevitable, Minna's father forced her to cal off the engagement. A good thing probably. She was very young. It was made worse because she died not long afterwards. Appendicitis, John said.'

  'There's no picture of her?'

  'No. He did have one once although I never saw it after they separated. He took her death quite hard. But there may have been other people in his life that we knew nothing of. He left a wil before he went to France; they al did. When he came back from the war he made another wil. We didn't know anything about it and it wasn't with the family solicitors. He used a smal London firm. They sent us a copy. It wasn't very different—he provided for my mother and me—but there were three individual bequests as wel. One was to a Captain Wiliam Bolitho whose address was a convalescent home. One was to a Frenchman, a Monsieur Meurice of ...

  somewhere that sounded like Rouen. Doulon—no, Doulens, I think—and the other was to a married woman. I've got her name downstairs. Sadly the Frenchman and al his family were untraceable. Even the vilage was gone. The solicitors are holding money in case he is found. There were no reasons given for any of the bequests.

  'Captain Bolitho was in John's regiment. He survived although apparently he lost his legs. But nobody knew anything about the Frenchman or the woman. I wondered whether they had been...' She paused. 'Wel, whether they had been close, I suppose, and whether he would have written to her if they were. In the end I never tried to speak to her and she never contacted us, though the solicitors could have passed on any letter to us.'

  She looked at him with an expression he found hard to read. Her eyes were steady and almost on a level with his.

  'Look,' he said, quickly, aware of the clumsiness of his timing, 'I'm realy sorry but I do have to go very soon.' He glanced at his watch again. He was going to be lucky to catch the half past six train. 'But if you want me to try to contact Bolitho or this woman, I'l gladly make enquiries. Nothing that would embarrass you, enough to put your mind at rest.'

  Although Mary was silent, she looked much happier.

  'Might I take the note he had with him?' he asked. 'It might be useful.' Though he couldn't think how. She nodded and reached for it.

  'Why don't you come up and see me in London?' he said. 'Next week, say? We could go to a concert, if you'd like that. Have you been to the Wigmore Hal? I could try to get tickets. We could talk more then. In the meantime I'l think whether there's anything else I can do.'

&nbs
p; Mary visibly brightened. 'I'd love that. I went there with John just before he joined up and before it was closed down. It must have been before 1914, because it was stil a German business. The Bechstein Hal, it was then. They were stil playing Schubert and Brahms: dangerous German music.' She smiled again. 'John's favourites. It was the only time we'd ever gone anywhere like that together. It was only because somebody else had let him down at the last minute.'

  He went downstairs ahead of her, said a rather perfunctory goodbye to Mrs Emmett and her sister and shook hands on the doorstep with Mary who was clearly trying not to cry. He wanted to say something to help her, but then she thrust a sheet of paper at him. He was puzzled for a second until he realised it was a copy of John's wil.

  Speaking fast, she said, 'You probably think I'm just not accepting it, John's death. But I do accept it. We'd lived with that possibility for four years. It's realy his life I'm trying to understand. There's this hole where I should know things. And then there are things I do know—such as the people in his wil whom we'd never even heard of, and my impression that he was definitely getting better—that I simply can't make sense of'

  He took her hands in his. She bit her lip, looking at him without speaking. 'I'l do everything I can,' he promised.

  He caught a bus to the station and only made the train by running down the platform. Once in a seat, he rested his head against the window and his breathing calmed. The train gathered speed. He had to close his eyes against the setting sun and, drifting on the edge of sleep, he reflected on the afternoon.

  He was disoriented by his encounter. It wouldn't be hard to be attracted to Mary Emmett—he had been in a way, al those years ago—yet he knew he was now responding to emotions and a vulnerability that had nothing to do with him.

  He took out the wil. Mrs Gwen Lovel was the first beneficiary—or was it Lowel? The legal hand was clear but the letter 'v' less so. Her address was 11

  Lynmouth Road, Kentish Town, London. Bolitho's address was a convalescent home at Brighton. Those bits would be easy, he thought.

  Chapter Six

  Laurence managed to get home, change and stil be only a quarter of an hour late, but he was so tired he feared being poor company. He and Charles sat down to eat in an almost empty dining room.

  'Everybody's on the moors,' Charles grunted. 'Lucky devils. But you look as if you've come hot saddle from Aix to Ghent.'

  'Actualy I went and saw John Emmett's people today.'

  'Did you, by God?' For once Charles looked surprised. 'What are they like? I heard they were cooped up in some ghastly place in Cambridge.'

  'Mary's a realy nice girl. I hardly recognised her, though.' It wasn't true but he wanted to resist acknowledging the impact she'd made on him.

  'Bad business,' said Charles, picking up his glass and half closing his eyes in appreciation of the wine. 'Have they taken it hard?'

  'Wel, it doesn't help that he didn't leave a letter.'

  'They've realy been through it,' Charles reflected. 'Pa died suddenly before the war, I heard from Jack—that's the Ayrshire cousin—and the Emmetts can hardly have come out with anything, once they'd paid off his debts. The mother was always pretty batty, he'd heard tel—must be where Emmett got it from—and more so when they had to sel the house. And before then, John gets engaged to some Fräulein and it takes a war to get him out of it. And the sister, Mary, my aunt said had been involved in some scandal with a married man. Takes a war to get her out of that too. Blown to smithereens at Vimy Ridge.' He added as an afterthought, 'Jack said he had been at school at Ampleforth with the felow. RC. Can't remember the name. Nice chap, though notoriously flighty wife.'

  Laurence was shocked by the lurch of his heart. He was unable to distinguish whether his annoyance was with Charles, Mary or himself. To his astonishment and discomfiture he felt jealous. Mary wasn't what he'd taken her for. Immediately he knew he was being ridiculous. Not only did he hardly know her but she had not volunteered anything about herself to him and why should he have expected her to? He was being a fool. She must be in her mid- to late-twenties by now. Why shouldn't she have had another life, a life away from her family? Why shouldn't she have been happy for a while?

  'John's father can't have been too profligate as John was able to make generous bequests in his own wil. One to a chap caled Bolitho.' Laurence knew he sounded gruff. 'Served with him, apparently. Do you know him?'

  Charles's social antennae meant that, even unasked, he could provide chapter and verse on just about any officer or outfit he had come across.

  'Bolitho? Bil Bolitho, I expect that'l be; he was with John's lot,' he answered, almost like a music-hal memory man. 'Good man. Legs shot off in 1917. Wel, not shot off but gangrene or something. One, anyway. Not sure about the other.' He paused, thinking. 'So Emmett left him some money? Not entirely surprising that he felt grateful, I suppose.' His expression belied his words. 'More surprising to find Emmett had any to leave. Jack's usualy spot on about stuff. Emmett and Bolitho served together in France. Emmett was inspecting a redoubt when it colapsed. Nothing to do with Jerry, just one of those things. Two other chaps with him died but Emmett wasn't far in and I heard that old Bolitho dug like fury and got him out. Banged him about, got him breathing. Heroic measures. Emmett must have remembered when Bolitho was invalided out.'

  'And a Frenchman who's disappeared and a woman caled Lovel, or Lowel? Does she mean anything to you? She lives in London now, Kentish Town way.'

  Charles thought for a moment. 'No,' he said. 'No. Can't say it does. No, don't personaly know any Lowels, Lovels or whoever. Or anybody at al in Kentish Town.' He looked amazed at his own falibility. 'The Cat, the Rat, and Lovel the Dog, rule al England under the Hog.'

  Laurence stared at his friend, speechless.

  'Richard III's nasty chums,' said Charles, happily. 'Only bit of history I remember from school. So, this Miss Lovel, an heiress too now, is she? Some floozy of Emmett's? Wel, at least she sounds English this time. Always a dark horse, that man.'

  ' Mrs Lovel, I think.'

  Charles raised his eyebrows. 'Just so,' he said.

  After the strangely disquieting day in Cambridge and the dinner with Charles, Laurence half expected Louise to come; she so often did when he had drunk a bit. Trying to avoid her, he delayed getting undressed. Eventualy he fel into bed around two, thinking briefly about the sun and the river. He must have falen asleep as the next thing he knew it was morning; he had been woken by a bee buzzing angrily between curtain and windowpane. He flicked it out into the day and lay back. Despite his aching shoulders and back, he felt content, relaxing in the early light, recaling his meeting with Mary, and he pushed away thoughts of her now-dead lover.

  He considered the feasibility of actualy contacting people who had known John. What questions could he reasonably ask on her behalf? Nothing too wild; there was a limit to how far anybody wanted to look back these days. He simply hoped to give Mary some sense of her brother's war and of what others made of him.

  He thought of his own sister, as he almost never did, and reflected how very little she would know about him if he should die suddenly. He puled out his bedside drawer and found the picture he had of them, side by side, just before she left to go on honeymoon and out of his life. He was already taler than her. Al these photographs looked so real, yet were as much ilusions and ghosts as oil paintings in a galery. He had left al those he had of Louise in their London house. He thought back to the family portrait of the Emmett children. Who was the baby, he wondered? Had they once had a younger sibling? He felt sorry for Mary, now the lone survivor.

  He felt happy in a way he hadn't for years at the thought of simply walking over to the concert hal to check the programme. To satisfy his conscience, he wrote solidly al day. The pages at the end of it suddenly looked remarkably like a proper chapter.

  He decided to start folowing up John Emmett's trail the next morning, although when he woke heavy skies threatened rain, putting him in two minds whether to postp
one his day's plans or not. There was, after al, no hurry: John Emmett had been dead for nine months or so.

  The postman delivered a letter from Charles. He took out the single, crisp page with a smile. Having inherited and swiftly sold the substantial business built up by four generations of Carfaxes, Charles had time to involve himself in other men's lives. Sometimes Laurence wondered whether, in the absence of war, Charles was bored.

  Albany

  10 September 1921

  Dear Bartram,

  Before you turn detective, because any fool can see that's what you've got in mind, and probably a lady behind your transformation into Mr. Holmes, I thought I might help you by tracking down Bolitho. Turns out he's not in a convalescent home and not far away. Lives in a mansion flat in Kensington with his wife. Not doing too badly, I'm told, and quite happy to have visitors. Anyway, he's at 2 Moscow Mansions, South Kensington. I had an aunt who lived in the same block before the war, ful of faded gentlefolk. I think the Bolithos must be on the ground floor. You're on your own with the mysterious Mrs Lovel, though.

  Charles

  The folowing week, Laurence met Mary off the train at Liverpool Street. He stood right under the clock, excitement turning to nervousness and then to embarrassment as he realised two other men and a single anxious-faced woman were sharing his chosen rendezvous. It was a cliché. He was a cliché. He moved further away. There were a surprising number of people on the platform: a gaggle of girls in plaits with identical navy coats and felt hats puled down hard on their heads, while they, their trunks and their lacrosse sticks were overseen by two stern-looking ladies; it was obviously the beginning of term.

  Al these journeys momentarily intersecting here, he thought. Al the farewels. A stout older man huffed by, preceded by a porter with a large case. From childhood, Laurence had always been drawn to inventing lives for unknown people. This man was a Harley Street physician, he decided, whom the war had saved from retirement. Now he was off to a difficult but profitable case in the shires. Laurence looked up at the clock; the Cambridge train was already ten minutes late.