'If you mean the son, it's George Chilvers.'
'Yes, wel, young Chilvers didn't fight. He had been a keen cricketer, so was apparently healthy, and he's not a medic himself, so no reserved status. Bad feeling al round especialy as most of the lads in these parts fought together and took a drubbing in '17.'
'But that doesn't mean that Holmwood itself is suspect,' Laurence said.
'No,' Charles conceded. 'Apparently one of the older attendants who made it back lost an arm. Worked at Holmwood before the war, when it was a place for mad gentlefolk—men and women. Came home, hero's welcome, medal, expected to get his place back as Dr C had promised, but young Chilvers laid him off three months later while Pa was away. Said he couldn't pul his weight. He—the ex-employee—believes he was got rid of because he didn't approve of young Chilvers'
marriage.'
'But why on earth should a warder have an opinion, or anyone care if he did, about his employer's marriage plans?'
'Because, old chap, it seems that Chilvers married a wealthy heiress.'
And so?' There was obviously more to come.
And she had been a patient at Holmwood. That's how Chilvers Junior met her. She'd tried to kil herself.' Charles couldn't keep a triumphant note out of his voice. Laurence was astonished that he'd managed to keep this juicy morsel of gossip to himself for so long.
'Wel, you were obviously a lot more alert after our drive than I was.'
'I'm hoping to find out more tomorrow. Our man, the disgruntled warder, usualy comes in for a drink on Wednesday lunchtime. He's bringing a friend who stil works there. So I plan to be in the bar with a generous walet while you are interrogating the Chilverses.'
Despite sleeping so deeply before dinner, Laurence was pleasantly tired when he got back to his room. A smal fire was burning and the thin curtains had been drawn, the water bowl emptied and his bed straightened. He opened the window a little, slipped between the cold sheets and slept until morning when he woke with an aching bladder and, loath to use the chamber pot, went briskly downstairs, the linoleum cold under his feet. On the way back up he crossed with Charles going downstairs with equal urgency.
Half an hour later after a agreeably silent meal of thick bacon, dark-yolked eggs and blood-pudding, they planned Laurence's day.
'Got the wind up yet?' asked Charles hopefuly.
'Not realy. Either I get some information or at least a general feel for the place or I make a complete fool of myself, get away quickly and never have to see them again.'
'Or they could take you for a maniac and strap you into a straitjacket,' Charles said benignly. 'But although the locals may grumble, the place is quite wel thought of by the nobs. Landlord, the wonderfuly named Cyril Trusty, by the way, tels me that they've had various scions of the great and good tucked up in there.
Lord Verey's heir for a start, and the son of a bishop, though Trusty can't remember which one. Not much of a man for matters theological, our landlord.'
'And where do al these pilars of the establishment stand on shel-shock, then?'
'Wel, I don't think Verey's been giving speeches in the Lords,' Charles said. 'Probably not too keen for the world to know the heir's of unsound mind.'
Laurence decided to walk up to Holmwood. It lay on the edge of the smal town, the landlord had told them, sketching out a pencil map.
'You'l know it when you see it,' said Cyril Trusty. 'High wals and spikes on top. To stop them scarpering. Impale 'em instead. Doesn't look as old as it is. Bits added on. Solid. Paid a fortune to instal proper asylum locks just before the war. Had to get a man from London. Ordinary locks won't do for lunatics. Ingenious type, your madman, they say.'
Chapter Fourteen
Laurence's appointment was at eleven and he set off along the riverbank with a quarter of an hour to spare. Where the path reached some water meadows he looked back to see the fine church standing on higher ground. It reminded him that the churchyard at Fairford was the last place anyone had admitted to seeing John Emmett.
Which way had he gone then, Laurence wondered? Not across the meadows, obviously, as that would have led him straight back towards Holmwood, the direction he was taking now. Not due east, as he could see a wide river and no sign of a bridge. And if he'd turned down into the market place, along the main road and towards the station, surely he would have been identified, if not as himself, certainly as an outsider: a patient. Beyond the church lay farmland as far as Laurence could see, with a few stands of beech and a Dutch barn right on the horizon. John must have headed that way.
Presumably the main service on Christmas Day was Matins. John's disappearance could have been discovered no later than midday, once the church party got back to Holmwood at the latest, though the youth he'd stunned in order to escape must surely have raised the alert before then. That left three to four hours or so of decent daylight to look for him. But it also meant that John would soon have needed shelter.
Could he have known anyone in the area? Could someone have come to fetch him? It would have needed a car. Branch-line trains ran a reduced service on Christmas Day and, anyway, he was sure the police and Holmwood people would have checked at the station. But in concentrating on how, he was no nearer knowing why. Where was John going so determinedly and who could he have persuaded to help him if that was what he'd done? And why hadn't that person come forward?
He had a sense that he was almost on to something when the sight of what he guessed were the closed gates of Holmwood distracted him. A large iron bel pul was set in the wal beside a smal nameplate. He couldn't see Cyril Trusty's promised spikes but he noticed that the smal upper windows, at least, were barred like a prison. The rooms up there must be dark, he thought. The building he was approaching was tal and square, its roof shalow and, unusualy for the area, he noted, of slate rather than Cotswold stone. That added to its slightly sombre appearance but the man who opened one gate a minute or so later had a perfectly pleasant expression on his face.
'Mr Bartram?'
He stood back to let Laurence through. Inside, an oval of grass was studded with a few falen crab apples. A cream Bentley was puled up by steps to the front door. It was one of the few cars Laurence could recognise. He thought of Charles, who was able to identify anything on wheels at any distance and by any visible part.
Charles would love this car. Perhaps one of the eminent parents was visiting a son?
'Could you come this way, sir?'
A graveled drive wound away behind a shrubbery but they were heading to a pilared porch on the left.
'Sorry.' Laurence caught up. 'Just admiring the motor car.'
'Mr George's car,' said his guide. 'He's a great man for cars. Dr Chilvers now, he stil takes the trap if it's fine, but Mr George loves a beautiful bit of machinery.'
They came into a half-paneled hal. Stained glass in the door filtered a wash of colour on to the stone floor but the space was mostly lit by a skylight three storeys above. The building was absolutely quiet, smeling of beeswax and, faintly, of cooking. It took Laurence back instantly to his prep school. Wide stairs curved up to a landing while several doors led off the hal. The man knocked at the nearest one and opened it without waiting for a response. The room he entered was a large, book-lined study, a room to receive guests rather than treat patients.
Dr Chilvers looked more the rural doctor than hospital physician. Dressed in a shapeless country suit, he was a spare man in his sixties, his hair sandy grey and wavy above a pale, almost waxy face. As he stepped forward his eyes held Laurence's. His handshake was firm. The doctor's demeanour was presumably intended to put Laurence at ease but, perhaps because he was here under false pretences, Laurence felt decidedly on edge.
'Come in, come in.'
Chilvers indicated an upright leather chair, then sat down himself behind a wide and tidy desk.
'You came up last night? Stayed at the Regent? It's comfortable enough and the owner is a good man. Used to work for us, in fact, but took on the hotel when his
late father became il.'
'Actualy, I'm at the Bul.'
Chilvers looked surprised. 'The Bul?' he said, as if, although he recaled it, it was an effort to remember where it was. 'Wel, there's not much alternative, when the Regent is ful, I suppose. We do have a couple of guest rooms here but we tend to keep them for family. Of patients, that is. Especialy ladies traveling alone or where a visit seems likely to be distressing.'
Laurence nodded.
'Did you come by train?' Chilvers asked.
'No. I motored down with a friend.'
'Quite so. Quite so.'
Again Laurence had the feeling that it would have been better to have conformed to expectations.
'You're here about your brother,' Dr Chilvers said in a slightly brisker tone of voice. He put on his spectacles and puled over a sheaf of paper from the right-hand side of his desk. The first page was blank.
'I should tel you at the outset that at present we have no room at al. We take a maximum of eight patients. This permits us to give highly specialised care, adapted—I think I may say with confidence, very finely adapted—to individual patients' needs. However, I would anticipate a vacancy, possibly two, in the very near future. One patient returning home. Very much improved. The other into longer-term convalescent care. We could be looking at—' He reached for a large morocco leather diary, opened it, leafed through a few pages. 'Certainly before New Year. Late December, I would imagine. Would that be suitable?'
Chilvers evidently mistook for something else Laurence's look of alarm at the conversation's swift and specific direction, because he continued, 'Of course we haven't discussed your brother or what we could do to assist his condition, but I feel it is important not to hold out any false hopes for an immediate solution.' His eyes met Laurence's. 'Families come to me, some accustomed through rank or wealth to resolving a problem with some immediacy. But in these cases a swift and satisfactory outcome is not always possible. Despair is not susceptible to the usual processes of society. It is not just those who enter here but their families who may find their circumstances have very much changed. We help them al adapt.'
Chilvers had made this speech before, Laurence was sure. He nodded again, then he found himself saying aloud what he was thinking. 'It sometimes feels as if the fixed points have moved. It's as if we can't be sure how things might fit together any more.'
He spoke quite urgently and stopped, suddenly embarrassed, but Chilvers did not seem to find it odd.
'I think the essential aspects of human nature remain unchanged,' the doctor responded. 'Love, fear, jealousy, indolence, opportunism, hope—even nobility of spirit—but the relationship of one to another may have altered; some aspects may have moved to the fore, others have receded. Of course for every man whose response is to tread carefuly, recalculating those fixed points,' he paused and looked at Laurence, 'others abandon it al and live lives of remarkable recklessness.
'It seems to me,' he continued, 'that one might argue that man has evolved to be a warrior; indeed, few generations have escaped that role. Of course, I was not there,' he gave a respectful nod to Laurence, 'but I judge, from speaking at length to many of the recent war's more invisibly injured, that what was hard for them was a lack of clarity—in orders, aims, even as to whether engagements had been won or lost, and the constant anticipation of random catastrophe. The realisation that the traditional skils of the top-class fighting man—strength, courage, dexterity with his weapon and so on—might not be rewarded, not even by a heroic death, but rather, that a man's fate depended almost entirely on the inequities of fortune. It exploded profound understandings of what it meant to be a soldier.'
Laurence stared out of the window where crimson Virginia creeper blocked a ful view of what was obviously a lawn beyond. After a matter of probably a few seconds but which felt like several minutes, Chilvers seemed to throw him a lifeline:
'Have you read your Homer?'
'At school.' However, he'd known men who had their Homer with them on the battlefield. He'd heard less talk of Homer's inspirational qualities as the war ground on.
' The Iliad gives us an impeccable account of battlefield injuries. No machine-guns, no tanks, no aeroplanes, but the injuries themselves—those ancient and terrible descriptions—and their prognoses, are absolutely accurate. Injuries to the brain, piercing wounds to the liver, known even then to doom the afflicted. But what does Homer not show us?' Laurence knew no answer was expected and Chilvers moved on without pausing for one: 'The casualties die swiftly, if dramaticaly, and at the end of each day the living usualy retrieve their dead, then get back to a campfire and their comrades. No mention of mutilation or lifelong physical disability there.
No shel-shock.'
Laurence finaly found his voice. 'There wasn't much mention of al that in The Times, either.'
Chilvers gave a dry laugh, dispersing the intensity. 'True, but then The Times was for fathers and commanders of earlier wars: the mouthpiece and the vindication of the establishment. The Times was information, The Iliad a celebration. The Iliad was a romance stiffened by historical fact. The Times was fact with fiction as emolient.
'You'd be surprised at how many men I see, men who thought war would be something like Troy. Not the regulars, of course; they were emotionaly better suited to the stresses of conflict, and not so much the conscripted, who were either resigned or resentful. But in the volunteer there is shock, bewilderment, even a sense of betrayal. They couldn't compare their war to the Zulu wars, not that half-naked men with spears didn't have a trick or two to teach them. The Boer War was fought against God-fearing farmers, not a proper army, and, anyway, we won. Their grandfathers could have told them a thing or two about conditions in the Crimea, but many of those old combatants were never able to speak of it at al. So these young men go off with a few weeks of basic training, and three thousand years of Homer in their pockets and, more dangerously, in their heads and, in every sense of the phrase, they come to grief. When they get home, reeling with Homer's deceptions, the Times readers at the breakfast table tel them they've got it al wrong.'
Al those barely contained arguments he'd had with Louise and her parents, Laurence thought, with him trying to control a degree of anger and exhaustion which they didn't deserve. They had no idea. Any of them.
'In this war,' Chilvers said, 'men weren't fighting for the King or for Britain and certainly not for "little Belgium", but for apple blossom in a Kentish orchard or the smel of caulking ships on the Tyne, or the comradeship of a Rhondda pithead. Men find it easier to risk their lives for provincial loyalties.'
'Or because they have no option,' Laurence said. It was odd, though not unpleasant, to find himself on the receiving end of a wel-honed lecture, but he could hear a note of bitterness in his own voice. 'And they returned to find that the things they thought they were fighting for suddenly seemed hopelessly sentimental and irrelevant.'
Chilvers made no reply and Laurence continued, brusquely, 'I didn't join myself until late 1915, when I could see conscription was imminent.' He felt ashamed for lying unnecessarily.
He failed to say that the circumstances which led him to do so began when when, after a single, clumsy sexual encounter—his first—which he thought Louise had found distasteful and which she certainly tried her hardest to avoid ever afterwards, she had become pregnant. Perhaps it had damaged their relationship more than it had their prospects. They were engaged at the time and he was working for her father. He could not tel Louise, much less her furious mother, how much he had wanted her: the curve of her lip, the fine bones of her ankles in white stockings, the womanly smel of the back of her neck, under the weight of her pinned-up hair, so different from the flowery perfume she wore or the hot linen scent of her dress. Feeling her under him, as he pressed deep inside her, he had felt complete. Neither Louise's obvious discomfort, nor even his own dawning shame could diminish the deep joy of it. As a result, they simply brought forward their marriage, but she miscarried soon afterwards. Hav
ing married her, he swiftly felt an appaling need to escape.
For the first months he was amused, watching her set up the smal but handsome house bought with her family funds. As the countries of Europe issued ultimatums and mobilised their armies, he looked on as she chose curtains and furniture with her mother, selected a housemaid or a lapdog, played the piano and invited her friends round. Al the while he had a sense of his life becoming immeasurably smaler. He knew his own horizons were not vast when he met Louise and he disliked himself for being unable to enjoy her complete happiness in making them both a home. She was not even particularly demanding; there was simply an implicit invitation for him to admire her domestic skils. He had acquiesced in everything.
His first positive, independent action in marriage had been to lie to her and tel her he had received his papers. They had been married just eighteen months. She never knew that he had volunteered.
So he had gone and, despite the news coming in from the front, he sat on the train to Dover almost exhilarated at the opportunity of war. Al that folowed had seemed entirely merited by this first act of treachery.
'You were working until then?' Chilvers asked, breaking into his daydream.
'In my father-in-law's business. My wife is dead,' Laurence added quickly to cut off any possible question.
'I am sorry,' Chilvers said, and paused.
After some seconds he spoke again.
'But we must speak of your brother.' He took out his pen and wrote down the details of the fictional Robert's name, date of birth. 'You said in your recent letter that he had been in a sanatorium in Switzerland and that his own doctor has died, so I assume you have no access to his records? Never mind, sometimes it is easier to come to these cases without preconceptions. I am sure we can track them down if we need them, but military medical records are, I have found, lamentably inadequate.'
Laurence felt a lessening of tension. One major hurdle had been cleared easily.
The Return of Captain John Emmett Page 11