The Return of Captain John Emmett

by Elizabeth Speller

  Buoyed up by her tone, he wrote to Holmwood immediately. Mary had said they had instaled a telephone system although he was in no great hurry. Wanting it to seem like an ordinary enquiry, he created an older brother, Robert, who owed quite a lot to a character in a book by John Buchan, but was, additionaly and essentialy, given to melancholy and seizures, having being injured at Loos. He went out to the postbox straight away, before he could deliberate any further, but after he'd posted his letter he wondered whether the fits were too much. On the way back, he picked up a newspaper from the news boy in the square; since he had started involving himself with John Emmett, he had found his broader curiosity for the world returning intermittently.

  When he got in, not being in the mood to look at his work, he opened his sister's letter. It was ful of the usual cheerful inconsequentialities and devoid of any sense of what she was thinking, only of what she—or, more often, other people—were doing. He felt saddened by the distance that had come between them; even the vocabulary of her life seemed old-fashioned, as if time as wel as oceans separated them.

  He thought back to school and the days when his parents were both alive. His father had been a handsome man who, his mother feared, had an eye for other women. Laurence remembered how funny this had seemed at the time, when he was fourteen or so, with his father in his late forties, and his mother sensitive to any straying glance or conversation.

  'Oh Laurie,' she would say anxiously, 'your teacher, Miss Beames, do you think she might be generaly considered pretty? Did you see your father talking to her?' Or, whispered on a bus, 'Did you see the way your father looked at that young lady he gave his seat up to? Did you get the feeling he knew her already?' His sister would rol her eyes.

  Who would be interested in that old man? Laurence had thought to himself then.

  He wondered who young Wilfred, his eldest nephew, took after. At the end of the year he would find out. When he had eventualy read his sister's latest news, he was alarmed to find that his oldest nephew was being sent to school in England after Christmas. He could tel that his sister wanted him to be Wilfred's guardian. He rather hoped the boy had not inherited too many characteristics of his sister's stout, red-faced husband but he was nonetheless glad his dead parents had living grandchildren.

  Now he scanned an account of a vast industrial explosion in Germany and briefly felt compassion for the families of the dead, whatever their nationality. Pity was like blood returning, painfuly, to a leg with cramp. The other lead story concerned the hunt for the kiler of a senior police officer who had been shot dead as he left his office. The policeman had been involved in two high-profile cases with violent foreign gangs. A police spokesman said there were stil no clues but there was an increasing problem with the number of side arms in circulation after the war. Laurence thought, briefly, of John. Would he have kiled himself anyway, even if he hadn't had a gun?

  In an opinion piece he discovered that Brinsmead Pianos had opened under new ownership. He read this article in more detail. Louise's piano—his piano—had been a Brinsmead. He thought the firm had been broken by the piano workers' strike of the previous year. Guns. Strikers. Discontent. He found himself wondering how Eleanor Bolitho would see it al. An editorial in his paper viewed Brinsmead's reemergence as a triumph of capitalism over the Bolshevist threat. From what Eleanor had said of her political beliefs, he thought she might rejoice in the workers asserting themselves, even if it did lead to a dearth of music in middle-class parlours.

  Next to the pianos was a poor picture of a politician and an ilustrious army commander, speaking together at a public meeting in Birmingham. They were arguing that war, any war but especialy the Great War, was not a matter of heroism but endurance. They had been heckled at first, the article said, but the hecklers had themselves been shouted down. Laurence recognised the men; it was the pair Charles had been so excited to meet at his club: Morrel, the former MP, and the retired general, Somers. He had been wrong in his assumption that the retired officer would be a stickler for the harshest discipline. Perhaps speaking out now was another form of courage.

  It was interesting, Laurence mused, reading on, how some people were beginning to feel they could say these things now without their patriotism being caled into question. Charles had told him that another MP—Lambert Ward—whose own recent service with the Royal Naval Reserve had provided him with a shield of valour, had demanded executed deserters be buried in military graves with al the other falen soldiers. Charles himself was surprisingly indifferent.

  'Who cares?' he said. 'One way or another, they're al gone.'

  Until John Emmett rose from the dead into his life, Laurence had almost convinced himself the war was history but now he saw that its aftershocks rumbled on and on, and that peace had nothing to do with signatures and seals on a paper.

  He started to read about the paper poppies they were making for Armistice Day this year. It was a new idea—started in America. He couldn't imagine wearing one; he even disliked fresh poppies—but perhaps some families wanted a visible sign of al they had lost.

  The wind had got up and the windows rattled. He tore a strip off the page and wedged the frame fast. He returned to the mutilated newspaper and started on an obituary of a centenarian who had fought under Elphinstone in the First Afghan War and survived the massacre at the Gandamak Pass. His last thought as the paper slipped to the floor was how smal wars used to be.

  Over the next week his own eagerness to get going was matched by a lack of any action elsewhere and yet he couldn't settle to writing. Charles had bought a car and had been trying it out by motoring from one friend's house to another across the southern counties. He wouldn't be back for a day or so. There was no further word from Mary. What was she doing, he wondered. How did she pass the weeks in Cambridge?

  After a couple of days' reluctant progress on his book, a letter finaly brought good and bad news. Dr Bertram Chilvers, Holmwood Nursing Home, Fairford, Gloucestershire (proprietors Dr B.G.S. Chilvers MD, and G.H. Chilvers) would be delighted to show him round his establishment and discuss possible treatment for Captain Robert Bartram. Trains ran from Paddington to Fairford, changing at Oxford. The station was on the outskirts of town but it was only a ten-to fifteen-minute walk. If Mr Bartram let them know what train he would be catching, a car could be sent to fetch him. If he required accommodation overnight, it could be arranged at the local hotel. It would be helpful, it concluded, if he could obtain a letter from Captain Robert Bartram's doctor to assist in an assessment of his condition.

  'Damn,' said Laurence aloud. 'Damn, damn, damn.'

  He considered forging a letter of referral but realised almost as soon as he'd hit on the idea that it was hopeless. Doctors al knew each one another and anyway he was sure to get the vocabulary wrong and they'd smel a rat. At the very least he would have to account for the absence of such a letter.

  Suddenly he thought of Eleanor Bolitho. Could she help him construct a plausible document? While she had as good as asked him not to disturb Wiliam again, he could, under the guise of answering her letter to him, ask for help. He dashed off a note to her before dining at Charles's club.

  When he arrived in Pal Mal, he could tel Charles was eager to talk, but they got dragged into a smal group digging in on their positions on the gold standard.

  Finaly, as brandy was brought into the smoking room, Charles, who had been fidgeting with impatience throughout the latter part of their dinner, could describe his attempted pursuit of Mrs Lovel's son.

  'Truth is, old chap, he doesn't exist. Bought this new book, fresh off the press—bound to come in handy: Officers Died in the Great War. Five dead Lovels in there. Not a lucky name. But not our man. The first...' He counted off on his fingers: 'Colonel Frederick Lovel: career soldier and far too old from what you've told me.

  Number two: Captain M. St J. Lovel RFC—a possibility, but then we have number three: his brother Lieutenant H.B.E. Lovel. He died in 1917, but I think you said our boy's an only son. Four
, Captain Bruce Lovel, went down with Kitchener on the Hampshire en route to Archangel in 1916. Best hope,' his finger hovered, 'was five: another subaltern, Royal Fusiliers, enlisted in London, nineteen years old: Richard Ranelagh Lovel. Promising but he's too early: missing in action, Mons, 1914.'

  'Missing?' Laurence said.

  'Yes, missing, but it's pretty certain what happened to him. I checked. Was seen badly wounded but pressing on. Seen to be shot again and faling, and by his adjutant. Know that man myself, as it happens. Married to a cousin. Third cousin, realy. I'm off to see him for the weekend. Two soldiers in his platoon saw this Lovel's body but they had no chance to bury him. Body gone by the time anyone got back there. Whole place was unrecognisable by then. Him too, no doubt. So it's simple,' he concluded dramaticaly. 'Your Master Lovel didn't die in the Great War.'

  Laurence responded slowly, without pointing out that it wasn't his Lovel. 'Perhaps, though I can't think how, he isn't dead, then? Perhaps he survived?'

  Charles was beaming before he had finished the sentence. Laurence had gone exactly where he intended.

  'No suitable Lovel dead or alive, old chap. Al checked. Friends plus Army List. Of eight surviving Lovels, four left the army: one's a barrister; one lives on an annuity; two returned home north of the border; one went to South Africa; one, a Lovel-Brace, is a Hampshire landowner. One Lovel is stil serving and currently head of the Staff Colege. No dead commissioned Lowels in the right place either. I remembered you weren't sure of the speling the first time you mentioned him, or rather her, the heiress of Parliament Hil. Perhaps the lady's a fraud?'

  Laurence thought that Charles was much cleverer than he let on and that he also had a great deal too much time on his hands.

  'No,' he said, 'I'm quite certain that she had a son and that he was kiled. She thought John might be a friend of his.' To manufacture grief like hers, he thought, would have required the skils of a consummate actress.

  He left late, declining Charles's invitation to bring Mary Emmett to the Savoy next week. He knew Charles would try to pick up the bil, which Laurence would indeed have trouble meeting, but he also wanted to keep Mary to himself for the time being. As he walked home briskly in the cold he realised that his one certainty—

  that the deaths of Emmett and Lovel were connected—had been obliterated by Charles's energetic enquiries.

  That night he wrote to Mary and remembered to ask whether he could have the photograph of the soldiers in the farmyard. He wanted to see if Wiliam Bolitho could identify any of those in it. He told her that he had not realy advanced his search and he hoped she wouldn't be disappointed. Even so, there were some things he kept to himself.

  Chapter Ten

  In the morning a letter came from Eleanor Bolitho. She agreed to meet him the next day in a teashop he'd suggested near the British Museum. She would have to leave spot on four to fetch her son, she said.

  When he arrived she was already waiting, her elbows on the table, reading a book. He read the spine of it as he struggled for a moment to pul his arm from his coat before sitting down. It was John Galsworthy's The Man of Property.

  'Helo,' she said evenly, putting the book to one side.

  Eleanor didn't seem a person for light chatter or any degree of deception, so he simply expanded on the explanation in his letter and the need to fabricate a medical history for a mythical brother. But first he told her what he knew of John's deterioration once he got home. It seemed only fair. He explained Mary Emmett's fear that her brother had been mistreated at Holmwood and added some of the ideas he'd had about John's death.

  For a few seconds her face showed no discernible emotion. Then she said, simply, 'I don't doubt she's right. There are far too many greedy, amoral people taking advantage of sick men and of their families, who are bankrupting themselves to have their loved ones looked after. Or,' she added darkly, 'so they believe. I've heard about a couple of such places. Something should be done about them. This government should do right by ordinary people. We should have a different sort of politics now that everything's changed so much. We shouldn't be trying to do things the same way, which ended up kiling and mutilating half the men in Europe.'

  She paused just long enough for Laurence to signal a waitress. Her pale, creamy skin was flushed.

  'Did you ever read any of John Emmett's poetry?' she asked abruptly.

  Laurence's heart sank. He didn't want any diversion at this point. 'Not realy. Only the one that was published in the paper.'

  'Do you like poetry?'

  'Yes. Some of it, anyway,' Laurence said, hoping she wouldn't ask him to explain which bits.

  'Wel, John's poems, his early ones, were very much a young man's work: pretty pastoral scenes usualy with a pretty Dresden shepherdess: his little Minna, sitting in them.'

  'Minna?'

  'His fiancee. He was engaged to be married in about 1912, I think. She was a German girl. She died. When he talked about her I always felt it was Goethe and Schiler and Schubert he'd realy falen in love with.' She was silent for a second. 'Didn't you know about Minna?'

  'Mary Emmett told me but I'd forgotten her name.' He was trying to calibrate the extent of Eleanor Bolitho's knowledge of John Emmett. He'd previously assumed a very slight relationship.

  'And now you're also wondering how I knew so much about John?' she asked, in a slightly teasing tone and looking him straight in the eye.

  'Yes.'

  'And about poetry?'

  He smiled.

  'Wel, the answer to the second question is that before the war broke out I was reading English at Cambridge—at Girton Colege. We couldn't graduate but we could study. I wanted to be a teacher. But circumstances changed,' she paused, 'and I became a nurse. Which has been a more useful skil, as it turned out.'

  She breathed in deeply.

  'The answer to the first question is that when John came into my field hospital, it was al very quiet; lovely, very early summer weather, I remember. Beds made, bandages roled, shrouds waiting, quarts of iodine and carbolic acid and chloroform, but no patients. Not yet. We had half a dozen soldiers plus two young officers who were il rather than injured. One had jaundice, I think. And a Canadian major who'd been kicked by a horse. We were waiting for the big push. It was uncannily quiet, in fact. Quite eerie in its way. Not far from the hospital Irish soldiers were digging pits, great long graves, for al the dead they were expecting. The other nurses and I kept taking water out to the men; they were in surprisingly good spirits, standing there cracking jokes while up to their knees in earth amid a sweep of grass and wild oats. Anyway, John was brought in from his regimental aid post one afternoon; he'd been injured in an accident. He had various middling injuries. But he seemed quite shocked and had bad flank pain. By the next day he started bleeding quite heavily from a kidney, so we kept him in.'

  And your husband was brought in then too?' Laurence added.

  'Good heavens, no, this was much earlier than that. I met Wiliam when he was fighting for his life. No, there was just John and the three others. They were the only officers.'

  'Can you remember what the major's name was?' asked Laurence.

  'No,' she said. 'I haven't a clue. I'm sure they didn't know each other beforehand, if that's what you're thinking, and the major was moved out in a day or so.

  The boys were just boys. They ate together and played draughts. Only John was there for any length of time.'

  She stopped.

  'The MO wondered, though only to me, whether John might be adding blood to his own urine. But we never confronted him.'

  Laurence must have looked puzzled, because she added, 'He appeared to be bleeding from his kidneys, but the blood could have come from anywhere.'

  'You mean he was faking it?' Despite himself, he was shocked.

  'Faking the degree of visible damage? Possibly. But not faking the fact he was hurt or needed care.

  'After a couple of weeks things heated up and he was sent back home, lucky man. The injury had saved hi
m. The mass graves were filed and overfiled, but he wasn't there. But when he was there and when nobody else was,' her voice dropped a little, 'I was on night duty and he couldn't sleep. The trench colapse had realy rattled him.'

  'Being trapped,' said Laurence.

  She nodded. 'In those circumstances you get to know a man quite wel.' She looked sad.

  'You were saying about his poetry?' Laurence said, remembering the limits on her time and that he had once seen another poem of John's—when he was in Cambridge with Mary.

  'Al I was going to say was that after John was injured, he stopped,' she said briskly. 'Writing poems. He said it had gone. He said he had been a minor poet at best and now not even minor. It wasn't true but it's what he felt.' She hesitated. 'They were al in touch with each other,' she went on after a while, 'the would-be poets

  —and there was a sort of magazine he put together, even after he stopped writing himself. It had al kinds of stuff in it. Some was pretty awful, to be honest, but John said it didn't matter if it helped people to stay sane. One or two were marvelous. I remember him reading some to me. It was very late at night and warm. We had the windows wide open and you could smel the countryside. In al that misery, it was a single perfect hour.'

  Laurence watched her face. She had been in love with John Emmett, he thought.

  'Can you remember any of their names?' he asked.

  'Most of the ones I read had pen-names. Some of their subjects were pretty strong, not likely to go down wel with the general staff. And he wasn't supposed to circulate poetry, not poetry like that. You weren't realy even supposed to keep diaries were you? Though I imagine that was honoured more in the breach than the observance, as they say. John said he knew who most of the poets were but nobody else did.'

  Laurence suddenly remembered the other poem he'd read from John Emmett's trunk in Cambridge.

  'The name Sisyphus doesn't ring any bels, does it?'