The Return of Captain John Emmett

by Elizabeth Speller

  'No. Impossible. But it was a terrible burden for a young boy to bear. It ruined his relationship with his mother.'

  And his sister, Laurence thought. The living evidence of what had gone wrong with their family. He was certain Mary did not know. Did the maternal grandparents know or suspect? Was that why al their money had been left to John?

  'Look, I have to go in,' Eleanor said. 'I'l keep in touch but it's too cold for Nicholas to be out.' She leaned forward and kissed Laurence on the cheek. 'I'd like to meet your Miss Emmett,' she said. 'Perhaps it's time she was introduced to Nicholas. If you want to tel her I knew John, wel, you can, of course. If it would help.'

  Then she bent over the car and exchanged a couple of words with Charles as she retrieved her son to wails of protest.

  Charles was obviously delighted to have met Eleanor whilst simultaneously disappointed that she had not exploded into anarchy on her own doorstep. He had kept shaking her hand until she had had to withdraw it. As they drove away Laurence knew what Charles was going say next, but it was not until they had turned the corner that he finaly spoke.

  'You know what they say about redheads?' he muttered, his teeth clenched on his pipe.

  When they drew up at the Lovels' smal house, Charles let him out on the opposite side of the road, a little way down the street. Charles suggested waiting in the car but it was far too cold and Laurence had no idea how long he might be. If Mrs Lovel was in, he hoped the photograph might serve as an excuse to ask her some more questions. What regiment her son had been in, for a start.

  Laurence braced himself. He crossed the road and walked up to the front door. The house was almost in darkness although a very dim light shone from a smal window that he thought must light the stairs. He knocked, waited. Knocked again. Listened.

  The paint was peeling on the front door. The passage to the side was shut. He had a sudden vision of her standing on the doorstep with pistols stuck in her sash and a dagger between her teeth like a pirate queen. At the same time he knew that if he realy believed she was a murderer, he would hardly be here alone on a late winter's afternoon. He took two steps back to look up at the upper windows. He looked back over the road. Charles had gone. As he was about to knock again, he heard footsteps inside. Somebody was coming slowly down the stairs. The chain was removed and finaly the door opened.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Gwen Lovel stood framed in the doorway, her face in shadow. For a split second he took her for her daughter, but it was an impression caused by Mrs Lovel's hair faling loose over her shoulders. As soon as he saw her, reality hit him. She was just one of tens of thousands of mourning women.

  'I'm sorry. It seems as if I've come at a bad time.'

  'No,' she said vaguely, but made no attempt to ask him in. She rubbed her face. He wondered whether she had been asleep. When he had first met her, her melancholy had had a sort of vigour. That was al gone now. His visit began to seem thoughtlessly impulsive.

  'I'm realy sorry to bother you, but I have a photograph and it's possible it might be someone your son knew—you said you'd met a few of his friends—and I wanted to check with you. I could come back at some other time.'

  'No. Come in, Mr Bartram.'

  Her voice was quiet. She motioned to him to folow her into the front room and lit the lamps, leaving the curtains open. He put his coat down over a chair.

  Finaly, a smile flickered briefly, although it was as if she was having to make an effort.

  'Are you wel?' She said it with a tone of genuine concern.

  'Quite wel, yes, thank you. And you?'

  She shrugged. 'Wel, you know ... it is not easy. Not at al. Do you have any news of your friend?'

  'I think I know some of what happened to him,' he said. It was too complicated and too private to start to explain it to her. She seemed to understand this and inclined her head slightly, but her eyes were alert.

  'But you have something to show me?'

  He puled out the photograph. She sat down and picked up some half-moon spectacles from a smal table. He watched her face as he had Eleanor's but was absolutely unprepared for what folowed. She put her hand up to her mouth. Her eyes opened wide. Her silence was unnerving.

  Finaly she spoke. 'Oh my God. What is this? Where did you get it?'

  'I was given it.' He knew the answer was inadequate—she was so pale he was afraid she was about to faint.

  'Harry,' she said.

  Laurence's head spun. Was the condemned man not Edmund Hart but Harry Lovel after al? Had Brabourne lied and, if so, why? Why hadn't he checked first with Leonard Byers that this was indeed Edmund Hart?

  'Harry?'

  Gwen Lovel gazed at the picture.

  'Where have you got this?'

  'Is it realy your son?' It was a ridiculous question. She was so obviously shocked. 'Can I get you a drink of water? I'm terribly sorry, I hadn't realised for a minute...' He felt cold with horror and angry with himself. Did she even know the man in the picture had been executed? But then, had he?

  'Harry,' she said, then was silent. He became aware she had started to cry only when some of her tears fel on the picture. He heard a faint noise upstairs.

  Catherine was obviously at home; he hoped she wouldn't come down.

  'You can keep it,' he said hurriedly, regretting it immediately when she threw him a look of disbelief.

  She puled out a handkerchief and blew her nose. 'Who did you think it was?'

  'Actualy I thought it was a man caled Edmund Hart.'

  She looked at him, pityingly, he thought. Her shoulders lifted as she took a breath.

  'It is. This is my son—Hans Edmund Hart. He was never Lovel. Only Catherine is Mr Lovel's child.' She brought out the words slowly. 'My name was Hart before my marriage. I named him after my father. My father was German. I am German, although my mother was Welsh. We came to cal him Harry. A diminutive. But also because—Hans—wel, living in England, you can imagine; it would not have been easy.'

  'And when he took a commission, he used his second name for every formality?'

  She nodded. 'He had been brought up in England. He felt English. He was prepared to fight as an Englishman. But not as Hans.'

  'You have no other photographs of him.' It was a statement but she took it as a question.

  'I have pictures of Harry. I see him before I go to sleep and when I first wake up. When you have a child, they are your calendar, your measure of time passing.

  I see him in his christening robes, I see him as a little boy with his hoop. I see him building castles on the sand. I see him play the piano. I see him at school. And now,'

  she glanced at the photograph again, 'I see him at the end ... No, don't explain. I know what I am seeing. I am seeing what I already know.'

  Laurence stood just inches away but with a continent of distance between them. He noticed that her accent was stronger in her distress. He wondered how he could have thought it insignificant before. He could think of nothing to say.

  Yet as he stood there and watched her stroke the image of her son's face with her finger, it dawned upon him that if she had known al along how Edmund Hart had died, then she also had a much stronger motive for kiling John than he had thought. Had he made a sentimental misjudgment?

  After a long time he spoke. 'Did you know how he'd died?'

  She shrugged. 'Not at first. Not for a long time. Not when your friend Mr Emmett wrote to me or when he left me the money. Not when I first met you. But now, yes. I know it al.'

  'And Edmund's—Harry's—real father is dead?'

  She looked up, alarmed, not by his question, but by something she had seen beyond him.

  'Captain Emmett.'

  The words came from behind Laurence's back. A man stood in the doorway to the room. Laurence hadn't heard him. He stepped forward and stood beside Gwen Lovel. In the better light, Laurence guessed he was in his late fifties. He was of medium height, strongly built and had an authoritative presence. He was familiar yet Laurence cou
ldn't identify him. Where had he seen him before and why, given that he had obviously been in the house al the time, did Gwen look worried to see him?

  'May I have it?'

  Gwen Lovel handed her guest the picture. He looked at it, his expression impossible to read. Finaly he looked up. Al the while, Laurence watched Gwen Lovel who was shaking her head almost imperceptibly. The man handed the picture back to her. Although Laurence knew he was on the point of placing the stranger, he was sure he had come across him in a completely different context.

  'Harry,' the man said.

  Suddenly Laurence realised with astonishment that he had seen the man before him at Charles's club. He was the man pictured in the articles Brabourne had given him. It was General Gerald Somers.

  Laurence was briefly puzzled but then understood. Somers was already investigating executions during the Great War. If Gwen Lovel's son had been shot, then there was a logical reason why Somers was here. Laurence's anxiety receded. Mrs Lovel was no kiler.

  'If I'd known Mrs Lovel's son...' Laurence started. Somers began to speak almost as if he hadn't heard him.

  'Sit down, Mr Bartram. You see, I know who you are and why you are here and now you know why I am here. Or, if you do not, I shal tel you.' He indicated a chair at right angles to Gwen Lovel and then sat down himself.

  Somers started to speak a few times and then stopped, not as if he was nervous but as if he didn't know where to embark on his story. When he did so, it was neither with the official inquiry nor with Edmund Hart, but with his own eldest son.

  'When Hugh died—in the family tradition he was a career officer—it was quite early on, February 1915,' said Somers. 'Extraordinary to think of it, but we didn't then know a great many families who had lost sons.

  'I never saw my wife weep. She acted on instinct. It helped her, perhaps. She wrote her black-bordered letters. Ordered her mourning from Peter Robinson.

  She remained, head to toe, in deepest black, just as her mother or grandmother might have done. She was a figure in a landscape that had become history and she was left stranded, nowhere. Then, I think, she realised everything had changed. It seemed almost greedy to claim so much visible grief just for oneself. So with exquisite mistiming she found herself setting aside her Victorian veils and her crape just as every colier's wife was clutching at a worn black shawl. After 1916, mourning became a way of life.'

  Somers paused and looked towards the window. 'She never spoke of Hugh again. Al pictures of him disappeared. She refused to engage in any discussion about him. It was hopeless. Impossible. I never knew what became of his possessions. When Miles, my younger son, came home on leave, he was furious about this and would try to force Marjorie—my wife—to acknowledge Hugh's life and death, but she would simply leave the room. Miles and I would talk of him late at night—in low voices as if he'd done something unspeakable.

  'And yet she had been—we al had been—so proud of Hugh: a handsome young man, our brave boy. How naive we were. Now he was buried in another country and even more deeply in our memory. Neither place was to be revisited. The care with which we negotiated our daily conversation in order to expunge Hugh eventualy caused any real communication between us to cease altogether.

  'Then when Miles was lost, there wasn't even a body. Suddenly the circumstances of Hugh's death seemed almost luxurious. Somebody had seen him and handled him, laid him down and read prayers over him. He had a grave.'

  Somers got up, walked to the window and gazed out.

  '"Missing, presumed kiled in action". My wife didn't hold out hope, as some mothers did, that our son would be found. I think she felt a degree of contempt for me as I tried to extract from the War Office information they didn't have, trying to raise the dead. For her it was over. She had no sons left. No children. More picture frames vanished. With Miles gone, I lost my last link with Hugh. Yet, unlike her and unbeknown to her, I had one son left, whom I had betrayed many years earlier and whom I could hardly claim now. Harry Hart was my son, Mr Bartram. Harry Hart should have been Harry Somers.'

  Somers had returned to stand behind Gwen Lovel, his fingertips on her shoulders.

  'You didn't realise?' Somers was saying to Laurence. 'About Harry? I've known Gwen for twenty-five years. Gwen should have been my wife—if I had not been a coward and a scoundrel. I met her when she was nineteen. Innocent, sweet, with al her life before her. I was already a cavalry major. Family tradition. I was keen on tradition then. Went to Berlin with some chaps in the regiment and one took me to hear Gwen sing. She captured my heart.'

  His face softened.

  'I went to her dressing room with my friend. We had some champagne and lingered a bit that evening. She was amusing, gentle, kind—and her voice was lovely.' He looked happy, remembering it. 'I wanted to see her again. On my own.'

  Gwen tipped her head back to look at him.

  'I didn't want to seem like some stage-door Johnny so I just took her for tea and for walks in Babelsberg Park. The next year I went back. One hot May day I bought her a yelow parasol and we took a boat on the Havel. I could see she was fond of me. Although the relationship was stil just a friendship, I had to tel her that I was engaged to be married. The terrible thing was that she had never entertained any thought of us having a future together; not because of a betrothal she hadn't even known about but because she assumed a man like me would never have serious intentions about a girl like her. I was ashamed when she told me.'

  Gwen shook her head again.

  'But we carried on, by letter, through visits, for weeks, months, a year. Mine was a lonely sort of marriage even before we lost our boys. Gwen had a Welsh mother; I had had an Austrian nursemaid. We corresponded in both languages. Time passed. Eventualy things changed. Her father died. She came to London. We became much closer.'

  He looked down at his lover but she was gazing at her hands. Laurence stayed silent, not wanting to interrupt the flow of speech.

  'I set her up in a tiny flat. It was a compromise. I hoped she knew I loved her as she did me. But just when I thought we were most happy, Gwen decided to end our relationship. She wouldn't explain why. I was upset and angry—though I had no right to be. She went abroad. Within the next year or so trouble flared up in Africa. I finaly left England with my regiment in 1899. I was worried about how she would manage. I'd been helping her financialy. I wrote to her, care of her father.

  She never answered. When I returned in 1902, I heard that Gwen had managed fine: she'd returned to the concert hal and was engaged to be married to a widower.'

  He drew breath and looked down at Gwen for a few seconds.

  'I went back to the formalities of my marriage and the compensation of my sons. I thought of Gwen every day: what she'd think or say. Things that would amuse her. It wasn't until a year or so later that I was walking up Piccadily and bumped into a friend of hers, a felow musician. Of course, I asked how Gwen was. Her friend said she was back in London and the marriage was a success, but the husband was not in the best of health. Although he had not adopted her child, he took good care of both him and Gwen. I was reeling. The friend was talking as if I knew al about the situation. I don't know what I said then but I managed to extricate Gwen's address with a plausible story and wrote to her the folowing day.'

  He smiled again.

  'And so I discovered that the dear girl had ended the relationship because she was expecting Harry and didn't want me to feel obliged to her in any way. That was how much she loved me. When Mr Lovel offered to marry her, she accepted. Harry's name remained her maiden name—Hart. She told her husband that the man who had fathered her boy was from Germany and was dead.

  'Which I might as wel have been. I made contact with Gwen and from then on she kept me in touch with his progress as a child, and then as a schoolboy. I stayed away as she asked—she had a daughter by then—though over the years I saw the boy from time to time from a distance. He was musical, like Gwen, and I would attend his concerts, but I never made myself known. Gwen was
not prepared to tel him his real father had risen from the dead and was a married man.

  Understandably.'

  Laurence glanced at Mrs Lovel, whose intense gaze was now fixed, unmoving, on the general.

  'And then came the war,' said Somers. 'Harry failed to get a commission in his first attempt. Gwen was sensitive to questions about his background, so I wrote on his behalf, saying I was the boy's godfather. I succeeded: he was commissioned three months after his eighteenth birthday, despite his German roots. Despite his lack of a father on his birth certificate. Not in the best of regiments, not like Hugh and Miles, but, as it turned out, fighting on the same blasted river plain. The same gas, the same wire, the same guns. The same rudimentary justice. The same muddy graves.'

  'He joined the moment he could,' Mrs Lovel said, softly but firmly. 'He hated the idea of war but he wanted to do his bit.'

  The light was starting to go, yet it was impossible to leave. Somers took his hands off Gwen's shoulders; he had evidently not finished unburdening himself.

  'Might I speak to Captain Bartram alone, do you think?'

  'Of course,' she said, although her eyes stayed on his face while she rose from the chair. Laurence heard her footsteps as she went slowly down the hal, folowed by the muffled bang of a door shutting. Then silence. Somers hardly seemed to have noticed her going.

  'Suddenly, Gwen asked to meet me. She had never asked me to leave my wife's side, even for an hour. She had borne Harry alone and she was alone in bearing the knowledge of his death. She had been so patient, so undemanding, for years. She was as she had always been: a good woman.'

  Laurence had a sudden vision of Louise, curled up in bed with her back to him, more like a child than a wife despite being five months pregnant. She was soft and relaxed, trying to get him to discuss choices of names for their unborn child before he left for France. Her hair had been in a loose plait and stray strands had tickled his nose. He thought what single word he would use to sum her up. She was not what Somers might cal a good woman. Nor was she undemanding. She was, he realised with an unexpected lurch of loss, sweet. Just a sweet girl.