'Bartram,' he said, 'Laurence Bartram. I'm very sorry to intrude, Mrs Lovel, but your daughter suggested I came in and the rain...'
Although Mrs Lovel had every right to be put out by his uninvited presence, she shook his hand and smiled. 'Quite right too, Mr Bartram,' she said. 'Catherine,'
she nodded in the direction of the door. 'Can you go and ask Martha to make tea? Stay and help her, I think.'
The girl made a face. She was younger than he had guessed. She left the room and the door banged slightly behind her.
'Look, I'm awfuly sorry to barge in like this,' Laurence said. 'It's obviously not convenient.'
'Not at al, Mr Bartram.' She sat down. 'It's perfectly convenient but I'm not sure how I can help you.'
'This is going to sound frightfuly rude, I'm afraid,' he began, 'but I represent the family of John Emmett. We, that is, they—his sister—gathered that John had left you a smal amount of money...'
A flush swept up her neck and face, and he regretted leaping in.
'But I never wanted the money. So much money. I never expected it. I never even knew about it until a letter came from a solicitor at the beginning of the summer.'
'No one has any problem at al with the bequest. Not at al.' Laurence spoke in what he hoped was a soothing voice. 'They were glad it had come to you,' he improvised.
Heaven knew what they actualy felt. He was embarrassed to see that she thought he was in some way attacking the propriety of it.
'It's just that John Emmett kiled himself. His family has very little idea why he did so. His mother's a widow. He has a sister. Forgive me; they just thought that you might have been a friend or the wife of a friend of his.' He didn't want to say outright that he'd just been told she too had lost a son. 'They never wanted to bother you.'
'Stil, I understand it no more than you, Mr Bartram,' she said. 'Until a year or so ago I had never heard of Captain Emmett. And then I received a letter from him. Just a few months later I hear that he has died in that dreadful way, leaving me al this money. Discovering that we had received this from a complete stranger, and a stranger who had then kiled himself, was very disturbing.'
'A letter?' Laurence hoped he hadn't sounded too excited.
'Yes. It was an odd letter in its way, but then it turned out to have been written only weeks before he took his life. It came in November last year. Captain Emmett said he wanted to meet me, that he had something to tel me about Harry, my son. I can't remember his phrasing but he was quite pressing. However, sadly, he never made an appointment.'
'Do you stil have the letter?' Laurence asked.
'Not any more. I'm sorry. But I knew men sometimes wrote to parents of friends who'd been kiled and I was grateful to hear from him.'
When she went to fetch the tea-tray he paced around the room. To one side of the door were two silhouettes: a boy and a younger girl. He presumed they were Catherine and her brother. There was a lithograph of a Gothic-looking castle and an old theatre poster in a frame. A young woman in an elaborate feather headdress stood singing, hands clasped. He looked closely. It looked like Catherine, but could be a much younger Mrs Lovel.
She returned, set a teapot, china and a plate of cake on a smal table, then sat in a chair with her back to the window.
'Did you reply?' he said. 'To the letter?'
'Of course. But he never wrote again.'
There was an awkward silence, which she filed abruptly.
'You knew Captain Emmett wel? It must be very terrible for his family.'
Laurence hastily swalowed his mouthful of Dundee cake. Crumbs fel on his tie. 'I was at school with him, but he wasn't a close friend. Not realy. Not as adults.'
'But Miss Emmett, his sister, she is a friend?'
'Wel, I suppose so. I don't realy know her either. I mean, not wel.'
She looked at him quizzicaly. 'My husband died when Captain Emmett must have been scarcely more than a child,' she said, effectively pre-empting his next question. 'He was older than me and had been an invalid for many years. He died in Nice when Catherine was three. Then my son was kiled in the war.' Her eyes dropped to her linked hands. She wore no jewelery. 'He was twenty-one. Now we are just the two of us.'
This time the silence seemed infinite. To say he was sorry seemed an absurd irrelevance.
'Harry volunteered as soon as he was eighteen. He was buried near Le Crotoy. But I am told his grave is lost.' She looked at Laurence. 'Captain Emmett must have been a friend of Harry's. Don't you think so? I met only one or two of his friends, and one died out in Flanders, but I don't remember an Emmett. Wouldn't he have told me?'
'I simply have no idea. But certainly one of the other bequests, apart from his family, was to an officer who served with him, so it's possible. Was Harry in the West Kents?'
This time it was she who had a mouthful of cake, so she shook her head. He put down his plate and when he looked up she had turned to gaze out of the side pane of the bay window.
'You know al these stories people tel about how they were lying in bed one night and their loved one walked in, or they were out walking and heard a voice caling them from far away, and soon after the news came of their death? How they just knew? Wel, nothing like that happened to me,' she said quietly. 'If it were possible, then it would have. We were very close, you see. He was quite a solitary boy and he would share things with me: stories, pictures, shels, birds' eggs.
'One afternoon Catherine and I went walking on Parliament Hil Fields. It was March and we were trying to fly a kite. We weren't very good: it was Harry's kite realy and he was so clever with it. Finaly it went soaring off and caught round a chimney. It looked like a flag: white, red and black, and I said to Catherine that we had better escape or we might be arrested as foreign agents.' She smiled, more to herself than him. 'We came back laughing to the house, just clutching the string, and when I turned a corner I saw him. The telegraph boy. Standing at the bottom of our steps, just out there.'
She turned her head a little towards the window.
'I held Catherine's hand so tightly that she cried out, and I turned round and I walked with her across the road and back to the green, and then I ran and ran, puling her along, and she kept stumbling and she started to cry, and I looked up and saw the kite, bright on the rooftops, and I knew it was no good. I couldn't turn the clock back an hour earlier, or a day, or a year, or three years. We sat on the grass for hours until it got dark and rather cold, and finaly a woman came out from the houses, and she spoke to us and was kind, and she and her husband walked us home and there it was—the telegram. My neighbour had it. She had told the boy "no reply". She knew, of course.'
The rush of words stopped. She swalowed hard.
'We hadn't been here that long. It had gone to our old address first. It was weeks since he'd actualy died. So, you see, I wasn't even thinking about him when I thought I stil had him, before I knew he was gone. Who knows what I was doing at the moment he died. Peeling an apple? Riding on a tram? Shopping at Swan and Edgar? Who knows what he was doing? I didn't. Was he kiled immediately? Did he linger in pain? I dreamed of it, of course. Not every night but often. As one does.'
Laurence thought how natural she seemed to think dreams of the dead were. He never admitted to anyone that he dreamed of Louise.
'I dreamed of him dying in every imaginable way, but it was worse when I dreamed he was alive. I could smel him, touch him, and then I'd wake up and it was new agony al over again. But you've lost someone yourself?' she ventured, obviously noticing his unease. 'Someone close to you? Not just Captain Emmett?'
Laurence said nothing for a few seconds. Finaly he said, 'A long time ago,' and knew she didn't believe him.
The room was starting to darken but she made no attempt to turn on the light, not even when she went out to the kitchen to send the maid home. When she returned, she seemed to have come to a decision.
'You know, I would very much have liked to know what Captain Emmett had to tel me. He probably knew Harry, pos
sibly had some details about his death.
But I don't think I ever shal know now what he wanted and I don't want to try to find out. For a long time I did but I owe it to Catherine to make a proper life for her, not one overshadowed with grief.' She paused. 'It's different for me, of course. For me life is over.'
Laurence sat forward.
'I'm so very sorry,' he said, and he meant it. 'I wish I could help, I wish I could tel you more about John Emmett; there must be a connection but I've found nothing, yet.'
'No,' she said, 'I'm not asking for that.'
She looked down at her hands. It was obviously time for him to leave and in saying goodbye he was not surprised that she didn't ask him to keep in touch with her.
On the way home, Laurence was cross with himself for not asking her a bit more. However, he had been unnerved by the depths of sorrow behind her dignified exterior and it had seemed to him that she didn't want her daughter to overhear their conversation.
As he left he'd said, 'I don't have a card, but...' He plunged his hand into his coat pocket to find only the Wigmore concert programme. 'I'l give you my name and address in case you want to talk to me.'
He tore off a bit of the back cover and started to write. She didn't offer him anything better to write on and he felt a bit of a fool, but it seemed a courtesy after he'd invaded her afternoon without warning.
'Thank you,' she had said and then added, 'So you like music, Mr Bartram?' She picked up the programme as it lay on the console table.
'Yes, I do,' he replied.
'I was a singer once,' she said almost off-handedly. 'Classical repertoire mostly. I trained for over four years. I sang on the continent but gave it al up when my son was born.'
'The Elgar was wonderful at this concert,' he said after a few seconds. 'It made me feel that things were getting back to normal.'
He cursed himself for not thinking. He was talking to a woman whose life could never be normal again, yet she actualy brightened and nodded in agreement as she skimmed the programme before handing it back. He hovered on the doorstep for a second, made his farewel and walked towards the main road deep in thought.
People didn't just inherit money from strangers. There had to be a link and he would find it. He felt that he had at least established that John had a reason, even one known only to John, for the bequest. One he'd meant to explain, perhaps. But what had made him change his mind?
Chapter Nine
When Laurence got home there were, unusualy, three letters waiting. A plump one was from India and he set it aside for later. The second was from his publishers. The third was in unfamiliar handwriting.
Dear Mr Bartram,
There was something I wanted to ask you but I didn't want to speak in front of Wiliam because he needs to look forward, not back to the war. We al must.
However, you may not have realised, and it didn't seem the time to raise it, but I knew John Emmett for a while. I doubt Wiliam wil have thought to tel you.
I nursed him out in France and of course that's how I met Wiliam, too. I just wondered, for my own peace of mind, whether you were quite certain that John's death was deliberate. You see, although John may have been troubled, he was strong in his way. He had inner resources—talents. He wrote, he could draw marvelously. He had things to live for, however difficult his circumstances.
You do hear of people being careless while cleaning a gun, say (though I'd like to know how he had hidden a gun if he was being treated for melancholia). But I just hope somebody who didn't know him properly hadn't jumped to any conclusion just because he was il after the war. Someone told me that tens of thousands of men are trying to claim pensions for nervous conditions and they are probably the saner ones. Anyway, they are not al kiling themselves. I'm sorry to bother you and to ask you to keep my letter to yourself but hope, in time, you might be able to reassure me that things were properly investigated. John Emmett was an exceptional man.
Yours sincerely,
Eleanor Bolitho
Laurence read it twice and sat back in his chair. Her words on the need to face forward carried echoes of Mrs Lovel's determination but, knowing Eleanor Bolitho had been a nurse in France, he should have thought to ask her whether she knew John. Nevertheless, he had never considered for a minute that John's death could have been an accident. Was that naive of him, being so ready to believe the man he once known and admired had loaded his gun and shot himself in the—what? temple?
mouth? He'd had a corporal once who'd shot himself, though no one was sure whether it was because he was careless or had had enough. The shot had gone through his chin and taken off the back of his head.
Eleanor was right. He had accepted the story at face value because John was already unstable. It dawned on him that he knew very little about how John had died. Where had he got the gun? Plenty of officers had held on to their pistols, although it was officialy frowned upon, yet he imagined any nursing home would have searched their patients' belongings. John could have got one from someone else but that would mean that there was someone out there who knew more about the suicide and yet hadn't come forward. Given John was dead, it had never seemed to matter where the gun had come from.
Once Laurence started to consider what he did not know, or even what Mary might know but had not volunteered, he realised how little substance there was to the account of John Emmett's death. Where was the wood where the body was found, for instance? Mary had said it was on the edge of the county.
He puled out an elderly atlas of England from his shelves. Fairford was in south-east Gloucestershire, almost on the border where three counties met: Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Wiltshire. But Somerset, Monmouthshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire also shared boundaries, though much further away. How far had John traveled before dying? Where was the inquest held?
He wasn't sure whether acting as Mary's private detective was quixotic or ridiculous, but there were surprisingly positive aspects to it and not just the emotions he was trying to suppress regarding Mary herself. He'd enjoyed meeting Wiliam and Eleanor Bolitho and he was intrigued by Mrs Lovel. He had wondered briefly whether either she or her daughter had been John's lover, but the girl was far too young and he just couldn't see Mrs Lovel's charms appealing to a man in his twenties.
He was stil puzzled by John having that much money to leave. It didn't fit in with the gossip relayed by Charles. He could ask Mary, if he phrased it subtly. But at least John's wil had established a scale of things. Bolitho had received a goodish sum for helping John survive an accident, although Bolitho had represented himself as little more than an observer. Whatever Mrs Lovel had done, it was evidently of slightly less importance than that, judging by the size of the bequest. The lost or dead Frenchman, M. Meurice, had been left half the sum Bolitho had received. Doulens was near the battlefields of the Somme. Had Meurice helped John out there in some way?
Realisticaly, Lovel and Meurice had to be connected through John's military service. Bolitho certainly was and, anyway, war had been John's occupation for most of the years leading up to his incarceration and death, leaving little time for anything else. Was it possible that Mrs Lovel, like Eleanor Bolitho, had been a nurse in France? It seemed highly unlikely as she had a young daughter. Yet whatever the connection was, it had not existed, or had not been pressing enough, for John to recognise it in his previous wil, made in 1914. Yet perhaps that first wil had been made with very little thought of death as a real possibility. It was just a routine for al departing officers and they were al such gung-ho optimists then.
He muled over a few other vague ideas. Could Mr Emmett Senior have been married before, and Mrs Lovel been a half-sister of John's? Unlikely, he thought; she and her daughter were unusualy fair-haired and fair-skinned, while John, like his father, was dark-haired and brown-eyed. Anyway, in that case Mrs Lovel would surely have recognised the name Emmett instantly when she received the letter and he doubted John's father was old enough to have squeezed in an earlier
marriage. It was equaly unlikely that Catherine Lovel was actualy an ilegitimate child of Mr Emmett and Mrs Lovel, making her a half-sister to John and Mary.
So, the uncomplicated and old-fashioned Cecil Emmett— a man whose main relationship seemed to be with his animals and the kitchen garden, and who refused to spend a night away from home—hardly seemed the type to maintain a handsome widow in a North London vila. His favourite phrase had been, Always set things right,' which he applied to everything from not leaving tennis bals in the rain to having cottages repaired for aged tenants while his own roof leaked. However, there were also Charles's alegations about his carelessness with money.
Could there realy be some connection with Germany? If so, Laurence couldn't begin to think how it could be unraveled now. By the time it began to get dark, he had decided to ask Charles to check the name Lovel with some of his army cronies. Charles would find the mystery irresistible. He should have asked Mrs Lovel for her son's regiment but Charles would enjoy finding it.
The one idea he'd been muling over since his first meeting with Mary was seeing Holmwood for himself. He had rejected his initial vague notion as reckless once he got home, but in the absence of other answers he was starting to think that it wouldn't be so difficult to carry off; he could simply present himself as looking for a place for a troubled relative. It would be a gesture to prove his commitment to finding out more about John Emmett.
The next morning he wrote to Mary to propose it again. She wrote back by return of post and with such enthusiasm that his heart sank slightly as he realised he was now committed to a deceit. However, his spirits rose at the rest of her letter, which described the easterly wind, leaves faling, Michaelmas undergraduates wandering about like lost schoolboys in their gowns, and how she had been to a recital in Trinity chapel which she thought he might have enjoyed. She added, almost as an afterthought, that she had found a few more of John's things although there was nothing remarkable among them. Next time they met, she'd bring them. She hoped this would be soon—she underlined the word soon. It was a very different Mary, more informal and light-hearted than in her earlier letter.
The Return of Captain John Emmett Page 7