The Return of Captain John Emmett (2 page)

Sometimes now he could go a week or more without revisiting the smells and tremors of the war, and a whole month without dreaming of Louise: that unknown Louise, ever pliant, ever accommodating. It was an irony that he thought about the dead Louise a great deal more intensely than he ever had the living woman, and with real physical longing.

Just once he had weakened. He was walking alone late when a woman stepped from a doorway.

'On your own?' she said.

He thought she had a slight west country accent.

'I say, you're a quiet one. You on your own?'

Inadequately dressed even for a mild winter's evening, she smiled hopefully.

'Do you want to get warm?'

His first thought had been that he didn't feel cold. His second, that she looked nothing like Louise.

Her back curved away from him as she took off her clothes, folding them carefully on a chair. Then she turned to him. Standing there, in just her stockings, her body thin and white and her bush of hair shocking and black, he was simultaneously aroused and appalled. She watched him incuriously as he took off his shirt and trousers. Then she lay back and opened her legs. Yet when he tried to enter her she was quite dry and he had to spit on his hand to wet her before he pushed hard against her resistance. He couldn't bear to look at her. As he took her he wished he had removed his socks. When he had finished she got up, went over to a bowl on a stool in the corner, half hidden behind a papier-mache screen, and wiped herself with a bit of cloth. He paid, noticing she wore a wedding ring, and went briskly downstairs into the dark where he drew mouthfuls of night air, with its smell of cinders and drains, deep into his lungs. He was lost. Too much had gone.

Nearly three years after the war, John Emmett came back into his life. There had been six weeks without rain. Night and day had become jumbled and Laurence often sat in the dark with the sash windows wide open and let the breeze cool him as he worked, knowing that when he finally went to bed on these humid August nights he would find it hard to sleep. Only the bells of St George's chiming the quarter-hours linked him to the outside world.

Then, one Tuesday teatime, he was surprised to find a letter, addressed in unfamiliar handwriting, lying on the hall table. Later he came to think of it as
the
letter. It had been forwarded twice: first from his old Oxford college, then from his former marital home; it was a miracle it had got to him at all.

He sat down by the largest window, slipped a finger under the flap and tore it open. Late-afternoon sunlight fell across the page. Neat, cursive writing ran over two pages, covering both sides, the lines quite close together and sloping to the right. He turned it over and looked for a signature. Instantly, foolishly, he felt a jolt of possibility.

11 Warkworth Street
Cambridge
16 June 1921

Dear Laurence,

Writing to you after so long feels like a bit of an intrusion especially as you once wrote to me and I never answered. My life was difficult then. I hope you still remember me.

I heard that you lost your wife and I am dreadfully sorry. I met Louise only that one time at Henley but she was a lovely girl, you must miss her a lot.

I wanted to tell you that John died six months ago and, horribly, he shot himself. He seemed to have been luckier than many in the war, but when he came back from France he wouldn't talk and just sat in his room or went for long walks at night. He said he couldn't sleep. I don't think he was writing or reading or any of the things he used to enjoy. Sometimes he would get in furious rages, even with our mother. Finally he got in a fight with strangers and was arrested.

Our doctor said that he needed more help than he could provide. He found him a place in a nursing home. John went along with it but then the following winter he ran away. A month later a keeper found his body in a wood over thirty miles away. He didn't leave a letter. Nothing to explain it. We had thought he was getting better.

I know you saw much less of each other after school, but all John's other friends that I ever met are gone and you are the only one, ever, who John brought home.

I am sure you are a busy man, but I would be so very grateful, as would my mother, if you could talk to me a little about John. We loved him but we didn't always understand him. We can't begin to know what changed him so much in the war. You might. I've written three letters to you before and not posted them; instead I just go over and over his last months. I know it is a lot to ask and I'm presuming on a feeling that maybe you don't share—that we had a bond—but could we meet? I will understand if you feel you have nothing to say, of course; we knew each other such a long time ago and you have had your own troubles.

Yours sincerely,
Mary Emmett

Laurence leaned back in the chair, feeling the heat of the sun. Mary Emmett. She was right, he would have liked to have known her better. He remembered a lively, brown-haired girl with none of her brother's reserve. He had first come across her while he was at school, then been surprised by how she had changed when he bumped into her again in Oxford at a dance three or four years later. Yet he had recognised her almost immediately.

Although she was not a beauty, she had an attractive, open face with—and he smiled as he remembered it—a schoolgirl's grin at anything that was at all absurd. They were seated at the same large table and kept catching one another's glance, but by the time he could detach himself from his neighbours, to ask her to dance, her friends were wanting to leave. They talked for perhaps ten minutes, which he wished had been longer.

Then, not long before the war, he'd seen her again at the Henley regatta. It was soon after he'd met Louise, and Mary Emmett seemed to have an attentive male friend, but he recalled meeting eyes that were full of laughter when they sat opposite each other at some particularly pompous dinner party. Candlelight shone on her pearl necklace and he thought he remembered the shimmering eau-de-nil satin of her dress. He had thought, if water nymphs existed, they would look much like her. He had a sense of connection which was far stronger than any actual contact between them and afterwards, impulsively, he had written to her. He had never received a reply and soon his life was overtaken by marriage and war.

He read the letter again and slowly the impact of her news sank in. What on earth had led the self-contained but confident boy he had known at school to kill himself, having survived four years of war?

John and Laurence had arrived at Marlborough on the same day in 1903. Laurence's first impression of school was of warm reds and rusts: one handsome, square brick building after another and the early autumn colours of huge horse-chestnut trees. He was small for his age and after a sheltered childhood the changes came as a shock.

Amid the clamour and occasional brutality of a large public school, the two thirteen-year-olds had banded together with Charles, who had been there a term already, Rupert—who later died in Africa—and Lionel, who was destined for the Church. But it was John Emmett who was the unacknowledged leader. He appeared fearless and was dogged in the pursuit of justice. When he was younger, things simply went wrong for those who crossed him; as he got older, he would quietly confront anyone who made a weaker boy's life a misery.

John Emmett had very little interest in the sort of success that schoolboys usually hungered for. Although good at most games, especially rowing, he was unimpressed by being selected for teams; he drilled with the cadets but made no effort to be promoted; he sang in the chapel choir but by sixteen was privately expressing doubts about God. He argued with masters with such skill that contradiction seemed like enthusiasm. He was a natural linguist. He even wrote poetry, yet avoided being seen as effete by the school's dominating clique of hearty sportsmen. Yet although many respected him, nobody would have called John their best friend. For the young Laurence he represented everything that was mysterious and brave.

John was notorious for his night-time adventures. One summer Laurence went out onto the leads of the roof, swallowing hard to try to conquer his nausea at being four storeys above the stone-flagged courtyard. There was nobody else he would have gone with. It was a perfect, absolutely clear night and the sky was filled with stars. Laurence looked up, feeling giddy as John named the galaxies and planets above them.

'Don't like heights, do you?' John said, matter-of-factly. 'Me, I can go as high as you like, it's being shut in that gives me the heebie-jeebies. But look,' he pointed, 'tonight you can just see the rings of Saturn with the naked eye.' He stepped dangerously near the edge, silhouetted against the bright night sky.

It was from his father that John had learned all about the stars. He would use his father's opinion to settle arguments decisively; Laurence could still hear his solemn tone of voice: 'My father says...' When Laurence finally went to stay with John, the year before they were to take university entrance, he found that Mr Emmett was in fact a bluff gentleman farmer, whose main topic of conversation was shooting, whose hobby was stargazing through his old telescope and whose closest confidant was a small terrier called Sirius.

'Dog star, d'ye see?'

John and his father seemed to understand each other without speaking and on several mornings Laurence woke to find the two of them already up and walking the fields.

He had liked the warm informality of the Emmett household. There was a freedom there he had never known. When Laurence's parents died, the Marlborough code meant that no one actually mentioned his new status as an orphan. When John came into Laurence's study a day or so after his mother's funeral to find him red-eyed, he had asked him to stay during the holidays. The Emmetts lived in a large, rather isolated house in Suffolk. Rooms were dusty, furniture faded. The grass on the tennis court was two inches high and choked with dandelions and the worn balls were as likely to go through the holes in the net as over it. There was a croquet lawn of sorts on a slope so steep that all but the most skilful players eventually relinquished their balls to the small stream that ran below it. Mary, very much the little sister then, went in barefoot to retrieve them and tried to sell them back. She was always paddling in the stream, her legs were invariably muddy, he recalled, and she had a ferret she took for walks on a lead. Was it called Kitchener? The following Christmas the Emmetts had sent him a present of an ivory-handled penknife with his initials on it. He had it with him in France.

He looked again at her letter. Why had they lost touch? He supposed they had rapidly become different men on leaving school but the truth was that John had probably grown up more quickly than he had. Laurence remembered being surprised to hear that Emmett had joined as a volunteer at the beginning of the war. John was the last person to be swayed by popular excitement and at Oxford he liked to speak of himself as a European. The only jingoist in the Emmett family had been John's father, who toasted the King every evening and mistrusted the French, Germans and Londoners. Laurence thought, uncomfortably, of his own, discreditable motives for volunteering and hoped his friends would be equally surprised if they knew that truth.

For a moment he felt a surprisingly intense sadness, the sort of emotion he could remember once feeling quite often. Now that odd, passionate schoolboy was gone, and, judging by the address on Mary's letter, so was the lovingly neglected house. John had been different when so many of them were so ordinary. Laurence counted himself among the ordinary sort. If the war hadn't come, they would all have become stout solicitors and brewers, doctors and cattle-breeders, with tolerant wives and children, most of them living in the same villages, towns and counties they came from.

For much of the war Laurence had hung on to the idea that he would go back to the small world he had been so eager to leave. Only when the end of the war seemed a possibility did life suddenly become precious and death a terrifying reality. Both he and John
had
returned, but now he knew that death had caught up with John and, moreover, by his own choice.

Laurence's second reaction as he read Mary Emmett's letter was a sinking feeling. He couldn't bring John back, nor could he tell her anything she wanted to hear, and he hadn't—as far as he knew—served near him in France. The truth was that he had heard nothing directly from his old school friend since they'd left Oxford. At university they had effectively parted ways. John had gone into a different college; his circle were clever men: writers, debaters, thinkers. Laurence had fallen in with an easier set, who held parties and played games, thinking of little outside their own lives. Laurence had migrated to London, surrendered to the coffee trade and married Louise. John had apparently gone abroad to Switzerland, then Germany. Laurence had read his occasional reports in the London newspapers. They were usually cameo pieces: Bavarian farmers struggling to make ends meet, the chocolate-smelling girls in a Berne factory or a veteran who had been Bismarck's footman. As tensions rose in Europe, he supposed John's small contributions had slipped out of favour. During the war one of his poems had been published in a newspaper but apart from that his work had disappeared from view.

Laurence had nothing new to give Mary. He told himself that a visit to Cambridge would simply raise her hopes, and probably her mother's too. If she came to London he couldn't think where he could take her. But he couldn't forget the kindnesses shown by all the Emmetts when he was a lonely boy without any real family of his own.

Dressing for dinner with Charles, he took out his cufflinks and there nestling beside them was the little ivory-handled penknife. That decided him. He was deluding himself that any kind of book was taking shape and a few days away from stifling London could do no harm. But as he walked through the London streets to dinner, it was Mary's conspiratorial and almost forgotten smile which occupied his mind.