The Return of Captain John Emmett (15 page)

'
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 dramatically, and at the end of each day the living usually retrieve their dead, then get back to a campfire and their comrades. No mention of mutilation or lifelong physical disability there. No shell-shock.'

Laurence finally found his voice. 'There wasn't much mention of all 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 emollient.

'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 emotionally 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 all. 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 tell them they've got it all wrong.'

All 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 smell 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 well-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 tell 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 smell 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. Having married her, he swiftly felt an appalling need to escape.

For the first months he was amused, watching her set up the small 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. All the while he had a sense of his life becoming immeasurably smaller. 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 skills. He had acquiesced in everything.

His first positive, independent action in marriage had been to lie to her and tell 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. All that followed 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.

'Regiment?'

It had taken Charles and Laurence some time over the previous week to place Robert in a suitable regiment. 'Instant pitfall, this,' Charles had said. 'You can count on someone's cousin having been in the same outfit, however obscure it might be, and that same cousin being clapped up in Holmwood. You know how it is with cousins?'

Laurence had no cousins but through Charles had observed their mysterious degree of social penetration.

And for God's sake keep him out of the Artists' Rifles; being mad is practically a prerequisite for joining.'

In the end Charles had suggested an empire regiment. 'That's where a lot of oddballs ended up.' They had debated the merits of the Canadian and South African Expeditionary Forces.

'Anyway, Chilvers was far too old for service, even as a medic,' Laurence had said, 'and his son was never a soldier, and Holmwood's a tiny place, and it's not as if the existing patients have a committee of acceptance. It's not White's, Charles.'

He was finding that dissembling was moving from a necessity to something approaching a game with someone to share it with. Charles had given him a long, appraising look.

'Queen Victoria's Own Madras Sappers and Miners,' Laurence now said confidently to Chilvers.

'Do you have a connection with India?'

'Yes,' said Laurence. At least my sister—
our
sister—lives out there with her family.' It was strange to be telling the truth, briefly.

'And you have other siblings?'

'No.'

'Parents?'

'Both dead.'

Chilvers wrote carefully, his expression attentive. Laurence tried to ignore a pang of guilt.

'Your brother is unmarried?'

'Yes.'

'This must be quite a burden for you,' Chilvers observed matter-of-factly. 'The sole responsibility for an invalid is never easy.'

'I have an aunt,' Laurence said. He needed the aunt to provide a place where Robert was currently domiciled.

'Any illnesses before the war?' he asked.

'We both survived diphtheria as children,' Laurence said, letting the imaginary brother share his infections. 'Otherwise just childhood diseases.' He was becoming more relaxed, soothed by the anodyne questions.

'Any sign of previous mental instability? In your brother's case or with any other family member?'

Laurence was briefly surprised; it was not as if shell-shock was hereditary.

'No.'

They went on to discuss Robert's general background and then his present condition and treatment, all mapped out for Laurence by Eleanor Bolitho. Laurence had learned it by heart and hoped it didn't sound too pat.

'I should warn you,' said the doctor, 'not to expect miracles and not to be disappointed if there are setbacks. What we sometimes see is that when a patient is taken out of his usual environment to this place where there are few expectations of him, least of all to be the man he once was, and with our regime, good food, plenty of rest and encouragement to move beyond his war experiences, he visibly improves, sometimes quite fast. Splendid for his loved ones, of course. But sometimes the cost of dismantling the habits he may have assembled to help him bear the unbearable—abandoning him unarmed, as it were, to confront his memories—may leave him vulnerable. We've had men who arrive here refusing to sleep, or who never speak. We have men who compulsively follow exact and occasionally quite outlandish routines: who won't remove soiled clothes or bathe. One, I recall, kept his ears plugged with wool and Vaseline jelly. All of these protections are barriers; all serve to keep them as solitaries. We try to equip a man with better ways to confront the terrors he suffers but there is nevertheless a dangerous period of raw, unprotected insight.

'There was a mother once whom I particularly recall; her son came in as a living body inhabited by a dead man. He lay in the dark, mute, apparently unhearing, curled up, facing the wall. He responded to neither heat nor cold, pinprick, bright light nor sudden noise. To be honest, I thought it was a hopeless case. He was very frail: his temperature was always abnormally low, his pulse slow; we wrapped him in blankets and hot-water bottles, and we chafed his hands. We fed him by tube.

'We did everything for this patient. My son urged me to have him removed to a larger, probably more permanent institution, but his mother begged me to keep him. She didn't want him moved again. She sat there, stroking him, talking to him. About his dog, about fishing. She brought the seasons into the room: leaves fell, snow drifted, corn ripened in the fields, the pond at home dried up, the barley was gathered in, the wind brought down an old barn. She continually changed the photographs by his bed. She put books there for him, which she selected carefully and replaced every so often. Sometimes they were children's picture books, some were boys' adventure stories. One was about Captain Scott's expedition, I recollect.

'And slowly, over months and months, he improved. Astonishingly, he improved. His senses came back. His wits came back. He began to eat, to talk, to read and to smile when he saw his mother. To remember. Eventually she suggested he should be allowed home for a weekend and we agreed. He cut his throat in his mother's bed on his first evening back. He wrote one line to say he simply couldn't live with his memories. His mother told me she sometimes wished he'd been killed outright in Flanders or that she'd accepted him as he was before we treated him.'

Chilvers was obviously still moved by the case. He looked drawn and tired. Laurence felt uncomfortable, hearing this tragic account in response to his own lies.

Chilvers took off his spectacles and started to polish them. 'In a little while, I shall get my son to escort you round the premises and explain a little of how we treat such cases as you go along. I find that is usually the most effective way of covering all the possibilities.' He rang a small bell. 'But in the meantime, no doubt you have questions of your own?'

Laurence struggled to articulate the apparently innocent but potentially fruitful enquiries he'd planned with first Eleanor and then Charles's help, and the questions that he felt Chilvers would expect him to ask if he really had a brother in need of care. For reasons he could not put his finger on, their discussion had unsettled him. He also knew that he had come prepared for a charlatan, even a sadist, and Chilvers, although perhaps a little certain in his ideas, was neither. Confronted with Chilvers' insights, and given that the man had naturally enough heard plenty of stories of war from his patients, Laurence was acutely aware that it was he who was in fact the impostor.

'By the way,' the doctor said, 'I wondered how you heard of us. I assume it was a personal recommendation?'

Laurence flailed. 'Yes.' Could he name the Emmetts? Would the family of a runaway suicide have suggested he put his brother in the same institution? Suddenly a conversation he'd had yesterday came to him.

'It might have been Lord Verey, I think. I met him at a dinner. For charity,' he improvised. 'And I mentioned Robert only towards the end.'

The room was silent. Laurence thought that he probably cut an implausible figure as a dining companion for the great and good.

Then the doctor said slowly, 'As I believe I mentioned earlier, we are always discreet, but I think Lieutenant Verey's case—a very sad situation—could be considered one of our successes. His physical injuries were so severe that I thought at first his state of mind was entirely contingent on those limitations. It was also obvious that he would need virtually full-time nursing care and I had some doubts as to whether he would be suitable for Holmwood at all. We pursue quite...
vigorous
treatment here and to have cases that are not susceptible to any kind of improvement is bad for the morale of the others, quite apart from taking up a bed that might be better used by another. But his lordship was very insistent—perhaps at that stage he felt a confidence only a father could—and he was happy to support the hiring of extra nursing staff. Young Verey improved more than I could ever have hoped.'