The Return of Captain John Emmett

by Elizabeth Speller

  Perhaps he and Mary would forever be meeting like this. He stil felt uneasy in stations. Memories of three journeys to or from France stil haunted him. The first time, nervous but confident, he was ridiculously over-equipped: a Swaine Adeney Brigg catalogue model, his uniform stiff, his badges bright and untested, chatting eagerly to new faces, wanting to make a good impression on the two subalterns traveling out with him. They were al so junior that they had no choice but to sit on wooden benches in the crowded compartments, back-to-back with ordinary soldiers. It was winter and the fug of cheap cigarettes, the range of accents and the stink of stale uniform was overwhelming. He observed the contrast between excitement in some men and grim disengagement in others.

  The second time—when a period of leave in May, spent with Louise and some friends in Oxfordshire, had cruely reminded him of al he had to leave behind and that the gap between normality and hel was only a day's travel—had been hideous. He had sat on the train taking him back to the front almost unable to speak.

  That time he had recognised the silences he had met on his first embarkation.

  Much later, he had returned to England on a hospital train. Although he had traveled in reasonable comfort on this journey, when he got off it was to a sea of stretchers bearing casualties, some in blood-stained bandages, others apparently blind or minus limbs. The sight of them was more shocking, lying on a familiar London platform, than amid the chaos of injury and mutilation he'd encountered in the trenches. He remembered an orderly and a nurse leaning over one man. She puled his grey blanket over his head as she signaled to two soldiers to carry him away. Contemplating the horror of the man's long journey, the pain and disruption of coming home, just to die next to the buffers, Laurence had turned his head away.

  He jerked back to the present. The landscape of khaki and grey faded away. The Cambridge train was puling in with a last exhalation of steam. He watched various individuals pass but he could not see Mary.

  She had almost reached his end of the platform before he recognised her. With her hair covered by a deep-crimson hat and wearing a coat, she looked different: more sophisticated and more in control. Everything about her declared her a modern woman, he thought as she drew closer, yet her eyes were less confident as she searched the crowd and she clutched her bag tightly to her. He was grinning like an idiot; he could feel his cheek muscles aching. He waved, although it was quite redundant; she was near enough to have seen him already and then she was in front of him. Quite on the spur of the moment he kissed her on the cheek. She smeled of Lily of the Valey.

  'Laurence,' she said, with her amused, crooked smile, 'it's so good to be here.' She looked round almost excitedly and took a deep breath of anticipation.

  'We need to get a cab,' he said, gently ushering her through the crowds, his hand in the smal of her back. 'We've got plenty of time so we could have tea before the concert. If you'd like that, that is? Talk a bit and so on?'

  'Talk a bit,' she said teasingly but then laughed. 'Oh Laurence, I love just being here. Getting away.' Her voice became more serious. 'We'l have a bit of time afterwards though, I hope?' He was very conscious of her body even through the smal area under his palm and through a wool coat. She broke away only as a cab drew up.

  Within a quarter of an hour they were sitting over tea in Durrants Hotel.

  'I struck lucky with Captain Bolitho,' he told her happily. 'Nice wife too. It al seems quite straightforward.'

  His confidence that evening, the uncomplicated nature of the story he had to tel, was something Laurence would remember long afterwards.

  Chapter Seven

  Laurence had been surprised to get a letter by return of post from Wiliam Bolitho, suggesting he come to lunch the folowing day. He had taken a bus and then, folowing Charles's very precise directions, walked through the streets to Moscow Mansions.

  Mrs Bolitho had opened the door. She was slim and of middling height with curly auburn hair and an inteligent face. Bolitho sat by a window in the sitting room with a blanket over his lap. The shutters were folded back and light poured into a slightly shabby but pleasing room. Some draughtsman's drawings, mostly of big but unfamiliar houses, hung on the largest wal, and on the wooden floor lay a rose and indigo Persian rug faded by the sun. One wal was lined with books; the other was dominated by an abstract picture of strong ochre and black squares and curves, with odd glued and painted newspaper scraps. Laurence had no idea what it meant, but he liked it.

  Laurence turned as Bolitho reached out to shake him by the hand. It was a strong grip that matched the strength of character in the man's face. Bolitho had caught the direction of Laurence's gaze.

  'It's Braque,' he said. 'Wel, not a Braque, obviously, but a copy.' Then he went on, 'It's very good to meet you.'

  Laurence sat down in a deep chair opposite Wiliam. They talked for a while about nothing particularly significant, although Laurence was trying to gauge the man and suspected Wiliam was doing much the same with him, until Eleanor suggested they move through for luncheon. He tried not to look shocked when she removed a blanket, revealing one of Wiliam's legs apparently ending at the knee, the trouser neatly pinned up, and no sign of the other limb at al. She helped Wiliam into a wheelchair, bracing it with her foot, while he swung himself over.

  'Can I help?' Laurence asked, although it was obviously a practised routine.

  'No, no it's fine,' said Wiliam. 'Most chaps in my situation sit in the wheelchair most of the day but I get damn bored. I prefer to move about.'

  Eleanor pushed the chair through double doors to the smal dining room where a table was laid near the window.

  Any fear he'd had that the meeting would be gloomy and difficult was dispersed over a simple meal of cold meats, boiled potatoes, sweet pickled beetroot and a blackcurrant fool. The Bolithos were excelent hosts and the affection between them was tangible. Wiliam had been an architect before the war, he told Laurence, and stil hoped that he might find a job that would alow him to work again. Laurence glanced at his wife whose face was one of determined good cheer as her husband spoke.

  'I was trained in Glasgow and studied in Vienna. There's so much I'd like to be part of—so much happening in architecture that's exciting, innovative...' His face lit up with enthusiasm. 'It's difficult, of course, but with al the new building in London I'm keeping my ears open. I write letters, I keep up with my reading and so on.'

  He indicated a pile of journals on a table. 'Eleanor says it can be only a matter of time.'

  'Sadly,' she said, 'they're as short of young architects now as they are of so many other professional men.'

  Apparently ignoring her earnestness, Wiliam looked over his shoulder, his waving fork indicating the room and the painting behind them.

  Alternatively, I do feel I might have a good future in forging Braques,' he said. 'Cubism seems to invite it, realy.'

  An hour or more went by without Laurence realy noticing time pass but it was long enough for him to realise, as he had with Mary, that he was quite useless in controling the direction of a conversation. He let it find its own level. Eleanor held forth on the prospect of the Independent Labour Party ever winning an election. Her enthusiasm and inteligence were infectious and Wiliam, who must have heard it al before, looked on with evident pleasure. Laurence found himself teling them about his teaching and his reservations about the book he was writing.

  'But obviously you want to talk about John Emmett's wil?' Wiliam said eventualy, with no embarrassment. 'Wel, one of the things we were able to do with his bequest was to buy a gramophone.' He looked towards the corner. 'Tidy, isn't it?' As Laurence folowed his glance, Wiliam added, 'I expect you're wondering where the horn is. You see, it's got a pleated diaphragm instead, it's the latest thing. I first saw it out in France, as we had one in the mess at HQ. A friend has just sent me Beethoven's complete works. They've just been recorded.' He picked up a couple of crimson-centred records and carefuly slipped them out of their brown-paper covers. 'Beautiful. And Bach as wel. The
re's much more interest in him these days. About time too.' He looked completely happy, Laurence thought. 'Frankly, Emmett's bequest changed our lives. The sum he left us surprised us both.'

  'It was being able to move here, you see,' said Eleanor. Just fleetingly she sounded defensive. 'It wasn't al about luxuries, however welcome.' She smiled at her husband and then turned to Laurence. 'We realy wanted more room; with the wheelchair you need more space to manoeuvre—you can imagine. We were in Bayswater, but it was smal and Wiliam was a prisoner if he was on his own, and then there was Nicholas.' Laurence must have looked puzzled because she went on,

  'Our son. He's nearly three now.'

  Laurence tried not to let his surprise show on his face. Eleanor laughed.

  'The flat seems a lot smaler with him around; he's never stil for a minute. Today he's at my sister-in-law's near by with his little cousins.'

  She got up to carry the plates through to the kitchen and caled back, 'Moving here, living near her, has made a huge difference to us al. She's a widow—my brother Max was kiled at Cambrai. Now we can al start again.'

  Laurence looked at Wiliam and saw a handsome man with thick, light-brown hair, which was just beginning to turn grey around his ears; the first lines of middle age only gave his face more expression. Any pity Laurence had felt for him on arrival had long subsided.

  After they'd finished lunch, and Eleanor had left to fetch their son, the two men settled back in the drawing room. Wiliam took out his pipe and held it in his hand without lighting it.

  'You were a close friend of John Emmett's, then?'

  'Wel, the thing is, I wasn't a particular friend of his,' Laurence began. 'I was while we were at school, I suppose, but I'd hardly heard from him since; in fact I didn't even know he'd died until his sister—Mary—contacted me. It's just that his family were very kind to me when I was young and so I thought I might help them a bit by trying to find out more about his state of mind.'

  'No letter, I gather? Or so the solicitor told us.'

  Laurence shook his head.

  'Hard. I'm unlikely to add to what you probably know already but I can tel you it was damned odd hearing about the bequest and, of course, hearing it with the news of his suicide.'

  'But you saved his life, didn't you?' said Laurence. He wondered how Wiliam felt now that the life he saved had been thrown away.

  'Not realy. In fact, not at al. I just happened to be there. Anyone would have done the same. They did, in fact.'

  Laurence recognised English diffidence. No doubt he would have explained it like that too.

  'It was in the run-up to the Somme. He was in a covered trench just outside Albert. It was an old one that had been blown in a while back and was being redug. They knew their stuff, those sappers. Though the chap in charge of the sector had come across from HQ at the time because there was some question of whether the earthworks were viable at al. Rightly, as it turned out.

  'Emmett had gone down there with a corporal and two other men who were stringing up some cables. It was probably rotten wood that did it. We'd run out of decent material for revetment by then and we were reusing timbers that had been waterlogged. It had been hot and dry for weeks and I suspect the wood had simply dried out too quickly, even underground. You know what it was like.'

  Laurence nodded.

  'Anyway,' Wiliam went on, 'I was just standing there in the sunshine, glad it was al quiet. I can remember it exactly because one of the men had just brought me a flint arrowhead. The whole river valey was ful of Iron Age remains. Every time we dug, these things were turning up—stone axes sometimes. Everyone knew I colected them so if they found any odd-looking bits they brought them over. I've stil got some.' He waved at a cabinet against the far wal. 'This one was tiny but a beauty; you could see where it had been chipped around the edge as if it had been done yesterday. Perfect. When, bang, there's this God-awful crack and a few seconds of dul rumbling under the feet, and the tunnel's gone. A great puff of dirt comes back out of it, smeling of damp and worse things, to be honest. That damn awful smel.

  'My immediate response was that we were under fire and we al ducked down instinctively, but within seconds we realised the tunnel had gone. I started trying to tear at the debris and the earth with my hands, but it was hopeless, the entrance was almost completely blocked. The sergeant caled for proper tools and someone went for an orderly. I went in with the sergeant—Tucker, as I recal—and we took turns clearing it. Another lad helped. I think he was the servant of the visiting sapper officer.'

  The name Tucker registered almost immediately with Laurence. Although a common enough name, it was also on the list John Emmett had with him when he died.

  'It was Tucker who ran the risks, no question; we stil weren't entirely sure whether they'd found a shel. Tucker had had his run-ins with Emmett but on that day he was digging like a man possessed to get him out. He reached one of the soldiers in a few minutes or at least got hold of his feet. We puled him clear but he was in a bad way. Tucker cleared his nose and mouth but apparently he was gone within seconds—the man was his friend, someone said—and then the orderly arrived and had him taken off.

  'One of the soldiers dug with anything he could find and while Tucker was stil dealing with his friend, I changed places, without much hope realy, and I found John there about twenty feet in. Cleared the filth away to help him breathe. The tunnel hadn't falen in al along its length. The nearest section had come right down and did for the man we'd got to first. Further in the timbers had held on one side and colapsed on the other, so they were at an angle across the trench. John lay under this; the top half of his body was towards us. He was conscious and had air, but his right arm was caught under him, his back and legs were buried by the earth and he couldn't turn his head. Even the timber above him was bowing and there was a steady trickle of soil. I don't mind teling you I was on a hair-trigger to run out of there. I always hated those tunnels, especialy re-digs. But slowly I calmed down and realised I couldn't smel explosive or burning.'

  Wiliam turned in his chair, opened a carved box on the side table, took out a silver lighter and a tobacco pouch and proceeded to fil and light his pipe. He drew the smoke in, slowly and deeply.

  'I started excavating round him, hoping to hel the whole thing wouldn't fal in.'

  'And you got him out?'

  'Wel, he was a lucky man in the event; scarcely a scratch on him, but he wasn't doing too wel down there. Covered in sweat, ashen in the light of my torch and gasping. Eventualy Tucker had to finish the job. I was too big, you see. Tal man, back then ... couldn't squeeze through properly. Every time I moved, I scraped against the sides and brought more stuff down, but Tucker was wiry, almost skinny, he could wriggle about down there. Until we had John out, I thought he must be bleeding somewhere, even wondered if he'd die before we'd got him clear. Ghastly look on his face. But nothing; wel, a broken finger and ankle, but nothing major that you could see. It turned out he'd also injured a kidney, which eventualy saw him sent back to Blighty, but what he was suffering from right then was fear, I suppose.

  Simple, unaloyed fear. We weren't supposed to be frightened, not so that it showed. Now when you look back, you can see that fear was the rational response to much of it, but there was another set of rules then, wasn't there?'

  Laurence nodded silently. He had never been able to say outright, 'I was frightened.' The band of iron round his chest might have been so tight that pain shot down his arms and his fingers tingled as he laboured to draw in a breath, but he'd always hidden it, or at least he hoped he had.

  Bolitho went on matter-of-factly, 'The men could scream for hours out in no-man's land, especialy the young ones. Disturb your rest for a bit, rather like a neighbour's barking dog, but eventualy you'd learn to sleep through. Officers, though, were supposed to be above al that. You might have been a Sunday school teacher or a corn merchant back home, but get a commission and al your emotions had to be left at the door.' He inhaled on his pipe.

 
'And there was Tucker,' Bolitho continued after a while, 'who was close to losing his stripes for this and that, working like a dervish to get John out. Absolutely fearless; on his stomach practicaly keeping the ceiling up with his own body and the whole thing creaking in a way that made you remember how many hundredweight of earth was above it, lying with his body pressed against John, so close that he could have kissed him just by dropping his head a few inches. Yet when we finaly puled John clear, only minutes before the whole damn thing fel in with one last, long rumble, and Smith left in what was now his tomb—pray God he was dead already, not a squeak from him—I saw Tucker was looking at John with a sort of amused contempt and something nastier: triumph, I'd say. And he didn't seem that bothered by the corporal—Perkins was his name, I think—getting it, either, given the man was what passed for a friend.'

  'And no bequest from John for him?'

  Bolitho tapped at his pipe. 'Unlikely. There was definitely business between John and Tucker. Something going on.'

  'Business?'

  'Haven't a clue what it was,' Wiliam said breezily. 'Just an impression. Antagonism of some sort. Tucker had his finger in various pies. Buying and seling, doing favours, even dead men's effects, some said. He nearly went down over some rabbit-skin fiddle.'

  'Rabbit skin?' Laurence wondered whether there was a whole lexicon of army jargon that had passed him by.

  'You remember rabbit stew? Sometimes more stew than rabbit, sometimes the men claimed it was rat? Procurement people made a fortune on seling rabbit skins. Hundreds of thousand of pounds from clothes manufacturers to warm the slender necks of shop girls and kindergarten teachers, with fur colars straight from the mess kitchens. Only Tucker had seen the opportunity first and he'd been seling them localy. Argued he thought it was al just rubbish. Got away with it, but only just.