The Return of Captain John Emmett

by Elizabeth Speller

  'Wel, nearer the mink. Bright-yelow kid, fine and soft. Must have cost a fortune. I know because when we met, he had just got out of that car of his and rather creepily he shook hands—wel, he squeezed hands—without taking them off. It was like warm loose skin against my own flesh. Disgusting. Had his poor wife with him.

  Like a mannequin. Al the latest fashions—French probably. Perfect hair. Perfect marcasite earrings. Enviable hat. Wel, I was envious. Fox stole. Just the thing for a madhouse in some rural back of beyond.'

  She stopped and seemed to consider what she'd said.

  'Poor woman. She didn't say a word and he didn't introduce us. A life sentence, however many hats.'

  'Rumour has it, she was the one with hats in the first place. It's he who wasn't in gloves until she came along.'

  Mary summoned a half-hearted expression of scorn, but she was focused on puling a pamphlet out of the manila envelope. It was poor-quality paper that had obviously been roled up at some time. She tried to smooth it out on the table, weighing down one end with the sugar bowl. The front cover had an ink drawing of a cluster of stars and across it, in what might almost have been potato print, the word Constellations. Inside the front cover was a short typed paragraph, signed only: Charon. He read it.

  'Read, stranger, passing by. Here disobedient to their laws, we cry. 1916.'

  The epigraph echoed something he knew from school. Ancient Greek, he thought, but the words were not quite right. He read on. The folowing pages were al typed poems. After a few pages he came to the one he'd seen scrawled in one of John's notebooks back in Cambridge. He turned it to show Mary. She nodded. 'That one again,' she said. '"Sisyphus".'

  He read it for a second time. Its briliance struck him, just as it had in the stuffy attic at the end of the summer. Once he had been an enthusiastic reader of poetry but since the war he had read very little. He found the best modern poets so disturbing that he was invariably left melancholic; the worst were excruciating lists of rhyming clichés. This poem, however, was beyond categorisation; there was a strangely mystical feel about it. He remembered reading Gerard Manley Hopkins at Oxford. This Sisyphus had the same mad beauty in his writing. Reality had al but disappeared and what was left was like the unease of a dream.

  'I can't understand it,' said Mary. 'In fact the more I try, the less I succeed—but when I relax, I seem to absorb it. Or something...' She trailed off embarrassed and then said as if to defuse her emotional response, 'But it's bit affected, this pseudonym stuff. I mean, they're not boys in the classical sixth. Why can't they just use their initials if they're feeling coy? Anyway, if they'd put their names to them, they might be famous by now'

  'They wouldn't risk it,' said Laurence. 'It had to be private unless it was frightfuly gung-ho, our glorious dead, noble sacrifice sort of stuff. The one John had published earlier was just on the right side of the divide. But most were never intended for publication. Although this is obviously a bit more than the work of a few friends.'

  He remembered what Eleanor Bolitho had told him about John publishing poetry, his own and others', and was certain this was the project she'd spoken of.

  Again, he felt forced to keep information back until he'd tried to speak to Eleanor but he felt fraudulent presenting knowledge as a conclusion.

  'Someone's typed it, for a start; it's in semi-circulation, I think, and wel before the war ended, judging by the date on the introduction.' He turned back a page.

  'I mean, look at this one, it's not satire, it's simply contempt: "The pink brigadier lifts his snout from the swil." I don't think it would have advanced anybody's career.'

  Opposite the farmyard ditty was a neat traditional poem. Unlike much of the poetry, this was oddly cheerful and complete. So many of the poems were raw and rough-edged. Yet here was a tidy pastoral sonnet. The work of an optimist or a blind man. Blue speedwel, bluer sky, skylarks, hawthorn after rain. Distant guns like summer thunder. Laurence rather liked it. The pen name was 'Hermes'.

  'Hermes,' said Mary, 'the messenger.'

  'The winged messenger,' said Laurence. 'And Sisyphus had a vast rock to rol uphil for ever, and Charon rowed the dead, of course.' He looked again at the page. 'Would you mind if I borrowed this?' he asked. 'I can see it's fragile but I'l be realy careful.'

  He gave her no reason. There was none beyond a wish to read it, at his leisure and unobserved.

  'Have it al—everything—if it helps.'

  He refiled Mary's cup with lukewarm tea. The waitress was outside, peering up the street. He could no longer put off recounting his interview with Byers. What he told Mary was pretty faithful to what he'd heard, though omitting the severed penis and the brains that had splattered on John's boot.

  Nonetheless, when he had finished, her head was bowed. She was absolutely silent and then two tears dropped from the end of her nose on to the wilow pattern of her plate. She rubbed her nose with her hand, rustling around in her bag and her pockets, apologising and sniffing, until Laurence found his own handkerchief, clean, even ironed. She dabbed rather ineffectualy, then held it across her eyes, almost hiding behind it. Then she sat for a minute with the handkerchief screwed up in her hand and her hand bunched against her forehead. Eventualy she took a deep, slightly uneven breath.

  'I'm sure we could have helped if he'd spoken to us.' Her eyes filed with tears again.

  'I think,' said Laurence very cautiously, 'that many men—just couldn't talk about things. It was as if once they put words to it, it would overwhelm them completely. And they didn't want to place that burden on people they loved. Couldn't.'

  Mary sniffed but he thought it was an encouraging sniff.

  'Even now, if I meet another man my sort of age, we know we probably share the same sort of memories; we don't discuss it but it's there between us. But with families there's a sort of innocence. It can be exasperating'—he thought back to Louise's patriotic certainties—'but sometimes it's easier to be with people who haven't been,' he searched for a word, 'corrupted,' he said finaly. He knew that he had moved from the general to the particular, revealing himself more than he'd intended.

  'But the price is that you'l always be alone,' Mary said heatedly. 'And a whole generation of women are excluded. Redundant. Irrelevant.'

  Laurence nodded. He thought of Eleanor Bolitho and wondered how different it must be to be with a woman who had shared some of the horror.

  'It's not fair. You don't give us a chance.' Mary's voice rose slightly.

  'The man I was teling you about—Byers. He's not been married long. Yet he's never ever told his wife al this.'

  'And perhaps Mrs Byers has lots of things she'd like to tel him. Of fear and loneliness and never knowing who was coming back or in what shape. Sitting.

  Waiting. Perhaps you should ask us whether we'd like to know? We're women, not children.'

  'He means wel ... he's trying to protect her.'

  Mary snorted, or something like it. 'So from now on we conduct our relationships in a dense fog with areas marked do not enter. Briliant, Laurence.'

  He didn't know how to respond. He didn't want to tel her she had no idea. That he, at least, couldn't put the past into words, not that he wouldn't. His heart was beating erraticaly.

  'So do you have secrets tucked away? Do all you men have secrets?' she asked almost angrily.

  He wanted to say, 'Do you?' but instead he said, 'Yes, of course I do.' Then he found himself blurring his truth. 'Everybody has secret bits of their life, I suppose.' He tried to stop it sounding too much like an accusation.

  She nodded almost imperceptibly, suddenly calmer. 'Was it al realy, realy awful? Out there?'

  'No. Some of it was boring. Some of it was funny. Living in a cottage with two other subalterns and a French family: the mother giving birth noisily upstairs while we ate sausages and lentils. Some of it was plain ludicrous. There were two men in my platoon, and every time we seemed settled for more than a week, they'd start growing vegetables. And rhubarb. A year or so later w
e passed through the vilage again and the rhubarb was thriving—the only thing that was, amid the ruins. Nearly al of it was uncomfortable. Some people enjoyed bits of it, especialy at first. My friend Charles; he was a natural. He was good at it. His men respected him. He liked his men. I liked mine. Most of them. But we both had an easy war compared with some.'

  He had a sudden image of a soldier beaming at him. It was Polock, the fat man, khaki uniform straining. There never was such a man for belching. He could do it to 'God Save the King'. The men counted on his last lucky belch each time they went over the top.

  She sat quietly for a while, gazing at the closed pamphlet. Eventualy she said, 'I'm glad in a way we have that list of bird-watching. That's a long time after the worst of it. So at least I know that he didn't always feel as wretched and raging as he was when he came back. This,' she picked up the list, 'is a John I recognise. Look, he can even joke about not throwing himself in the river. He's simply glad to be alive. I think he is, at last, I realy do.'

  'Yes.' Strangely, his own reaction to glimpsing this hour of pleasure was sadness.

  'But come the winter, it al goes wrong.'

  He couldn't decide whether to tel her of his faint disquiet about John's death. What he and Charles might have found plausible after a good dinner was too far-fetched to be presented as real speculation, although it didn't realy seem to make much difference. Mary had stil lost her only brother. Unless you were a policeman, the need to reveal and avenge murder was reduced almost to a philosophical enquiry after the losses of the last years.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  While Laurence was muling over Tucker's intentions and paying the bil, Mary's mood seemed to shift. She took his arm as they walked into the street.

  'Have you ever gone to the films? I suppose you have, living in London?'

  Laurence shook his head. 'Not recently,' he said. The only films he'd seen were flickering newsreels at HQ. 'Would you like to, next time, perhaps?'

  'I'd love that,' said Mary. 'I saw Lilian Gish a while back, in The Greatest Thing in Life, and she was beautiful and funny. Or we could go to a play?

  Heartbreak House might be more your thing. More serious.'

  Laurence relaxed into Mary's easy assumption that she knew what he'd like. He clamped his arm down a little so that her hand was caught between his upper arm and his ribs. He looked sideways at her, half hidden under the rim of her dark-red hat. She returned his gaze, apparently amused.

  When they arrived at the station, there was an unexpectedly large crowd by the platform. Laurence pushed himself to the front to speak to the stationmaster.

  'No train,' he said when he'd fought his way back to her. 'There's been a landslip. Nothing until tomorrow. Do you want me to arrange for you to be put up at a hotel? Or can you go to your cousin?'

  'My cousin's about to produce her fourth baby,' said Mary. 'I realy don't think I could pitch up unannounced.'

  To Laurence's relief she didn't look particularly bothered.

  'Isn't your mother going to be worried?'

  'No. She and Aunt Virginia are in Buxton. They're taking the waters in the hope it might help my mother's rheumatism.'

  They had turned away from the platform. After a long silence, Mary said hurriedly, 'Look, would it be possible, say if it wouldn't, if I came back with you?' She looked slightly embarrassed.

  'Yes. Of course. I just thought you wouldn't realy want to. It's not terribly comfortable.' He was worrying that it might not be terribly clean, either.

  'No, that's fine. More than fine. Anyway I'd love to see where you live. There's a limit to the appeal of teashops.'

  He was about to tel her that she would have to sleep in his bed, and that he was quite happy to sleep in an armchair, but didn't want her to think his mind had raced ahead to the sleeping arrangements.

  They stopped and bought roasted chestnuts on a street corner; the man who huddled over the glowing coals was wearing his campaign medals on his coat.

  Cradling the smal, warm bags in their hands, they caught a bus that took them right up to Bloomsbury. Mary insisted she didn't want anything else to eat.

  The house was in darkness but, as they climbed the first flight of stairs, the door to his neighbour's flat opened. Laurence stopped dead, placing his hand on Mary's forearm.

  'Good evening,' said his neighbour, his unkempt bulk filing the doorway. He looked Mary up and down.

  'Ah ... this is a friend of mine: Miss Emmett.'

  'Yes. I see.'

  'Was there anything?' Laurence began.

  'No. I was just going out.' His neighbour stayed watching them as they climbed up to the next floor.

  'Sorry,' Laurence said as soon as they were in his flat and he had lit the fire. 'Perfectly harmless. But something a bit odd about him.'

  Mary looked amused. 'It's al right. He was just awkward in the way men are who live by themselves for years.'

  She slapped her hand across her mouth.

  'There I go again, piling on one insult after another. I hope you know I don't mean you.'

  'One of your droopy widowers who, having the misfortune to be living a single life, has falen into unsavoury habits?'

  'You know I don't think that and I certainly don't mean you.' She lightly batted her fists on his chest.

  He looked at her. Her eyes were only a little lower in level than his, grey-green and clear. Her smile faded a little and her lips parted almost imperceptibly. He held her gently by the upper arms, locking her gaze for what seemed like a minute but was probably no time at al, and then let her go. She looked away, apparently confused.

  Laurence went through to his bedroom, leaving Mary to warm herself by the fire.

  'May I play the piano?' she asked.

  'You can try,' he caled through, 'but it's probably unplayable. It hasn't been tuned since ... for ages.'

  He knelt down by his bedroom wardrobe to see whether he had any spare linen at the bottom. He heard her open the piano lid and pul the stool closer. Then the stool lid opened and there was silence. He rocked back on his heels to peer through the doorway. She was standing, leafing through some sheet music, staring at it intently with her head bobbing. Then he realised she was hearing the music in her mind. She looked up, saw him gazing at her and laughed.

  'Sorry, just trying to work out what I won't disgrace myself with.' She paused and indicated the front sheet. '"Louise Scudamore". Scudamore? Was that your wife? Was she good? At the piano?'

  'She practised a lot,' said Laurence, remembering her playing rather heavily, leaning forward with a look of fraught concentration on her face and her nose screwed up. 'Her biggest trouble was that she needed spectacles.'

  He remembered how hard Louise had tried. Her mother had thought her exceptional.

  'Actualy,' he went on, with a sudden burst of honesty, 'she was probably a bit hopeless, but she enjoyed it and she loved the piano. That's why I've kept it, even though I can't play a note.'

  'You should learn to play. It would relax you.'

  'I don't know any teachers,' he countered. 'Anyway, I'm far too relaxed half the time. I need to be less relaxed.'

  She looked at him knowingly. 'I don't think so, Laurie. I don't think you're ever truly relaxed. In fact, I seem to recal thinking you were a very coiled-up, contained man when I first met you.'

  He was about to protest but she had already returned to the music.

  'Right, Liszt. That's a good start,' she said, sitting down. 'I used to be quite good at this. Or perhaps not?' she said, as she began to play, faltering a little on the first notes.

  He finaly found a pair of sheets. They were old and had been neatly turned, sides to middle, but they were clean and without holes. While she was engrossed in the music he held them to his face to check they didn't smel damp. When he shook them out, they were plainly for a double bed. Swags of embroidered flowers and bows decorated the upper edges. He found one recently laundered pilowcase and for the lower pilow kept the case already on it, smoo
thing it with his hand.

  She went on playing. Her touch was assured but the tone was pretty awful. When he'd finished making the bed— her bed, he realised with pleasure—adding an extra blanket under the eiderdown because she might not be used to a bedroom as cold as his could be, he stood in the doorway and watched her. She thudded on a dead key, and not for the first time.

  'It's stuck,' she said. 'You realy ought to get this tuned, Laurie. It's a good piano, a wiling one. It deserves to be tuned.'

  'Pianos have personalities?'

  'Of course they do. There are good pianos and bad pianos, wiling ones and disobliging ones, modest ones and blustering ones. And this one shouldn't be abandoned.'

  She leaned over and touched a slightly warped panel on the front where a shel in faded mother-of-pearl inlay was contained in a cartouche.

  'Nor should her finery be neglected. When we stil lived in the country, I had a lovely piano: a smal Bluthner. Wel, it was my mother's, realy. My paternal grandfather had given it to her as a wedding present. My mother could play beautifuly, much better than I can. When I was very little we used to laugh when she played duets with my grandfather.'

  'You haven't got it now?'

  'No. No room and anyway it was too valuable. We had to sel it.'

  'I didn't realise...' Laurence began.

  'Actualy father was dreadful with money,' she said. 'Hopeless. The house in Suffolk was in trust for John. My grandfather—my other one, my mother's father—

  must have seen the way things were going long before he died. My father was realy kind—wel, you know he was,' her eyes shone, 'but he believed everybody. Every chancer with a half-baked scheme to make money. Every tip on a horse that might reverse our fortunes. And he never learned. He always wanted to see the good in people. Like John, in a way.'

  'I'm sorry. Your parents were awfuly good to me.'

  'They were good people. But my mother was always a bit disappointed. She would have liked more of London life, I think, and she got worn down by staving off one crisis after another. Although my father was a steadfast family man, he never seemed to notice the odd writ, or the grass three feet tal, or living on mutton and onion tart for a week, or the smel of boiling soap ends.'