Elizabeth Speller: The Return of Captain John Emmett

He thought of his own sister, as he almost never did, and reflected how very little she would know about him if he should die suddenly. He puled out his bedside drawer and found the picture he had of them, side by side, just before she left to go on honeymoon and out of his life. He was already taler than her. Al these photographs looked so real, yet were as much ilusions and ghosts as oil paintings in a galery. He had left al those he had of Louise in their London house. He thought back to the family portrait of the Emmett children. Who was the baby, he wondered? Had they once had a younger sibling? He felt sorry for Mary, now the lone survivor.

He felt happy in a way he hadn't for years at the thought of simply walking over to the concert hal to check the programme. To satisfy his conscience, he wrote solidly al day. The pages at the end of it suddenly looked remarkably like a proper chapter.

He decided to start folowing up John Emmett's trail the next morning, although when he woke heavy skies threatened rain, putting him in two minds whether to postpone his day's plans or not. There was, after al, no hurry: John Emmett had been dead for nine months or so.

The postman delivered a letter from Charles. He took out the single, crisp page with a smile. Having inherited and swiftly sold the substantial business built up by four generations of Carfaxes, Charles had time to involve himself in other men's lives. Sometimes Laurence wondered whether, in the absence of war, Charles was bored.

Albany

10 September 1921

Dear Bartram,

Before you turn detective, because any fool can see that's what you've got in mind, and probably a lady behind your transformation into Mr. Holmes, I thought I might help you by tracking down Bolitho. Turns out he's not in a convalescent home and not far away. Lives in a mansion flat in Kensington with his wife. Not doing too badly, I'm told, and quite happy to have visitors. Anyway, he's at 2 Moscow Mansions, South Kensington. I had an aunt who lived in the same block before the war, ful of faded gentlefolk. I think the Bolithos must be on the ground floor. You're on your own with the mysterious Mrs Lovel, though.

Charles

The folowing week, Laurence met Mary off the train at Liverpool Street. He stood right under the clock, excitement turning to nervousness and then to embarrassment as he realised two other men and a single anxious-faced woman were sharing his chosen rendezvous. It was a cliché. He was a cliché. He moved further away. There were a surprising number of people on the platform: a gaggle of girls in plaits with identical navy coats and felt hats puled down hard on their heads, while they, their trunks and their lacrosse sticks were overseen by two stern-looking ladies; it was obviously the beginning of term.

Al these journeys momentarily intersecting here, he thought. Al the farewels. A stout older man huffed by, preceded by a porter with a large case. From childhood, Laurence had always been drawn to inventing lives for unknown people. This man was a Harley Street physician, he decided, whom the war had saved from retirement. Now he was off to a difficult but profitable case in the shires. Laurence looked up at the clock; the Cambridge train was already ten minutes late.

Perhaps he and Mary would forever be meeting like this. He stil felt uneasy in stations. Memories of three journeys to or from France stil haunted him. The first time, nervous but confident, he was ridiculously over-equipped: a Swaine Adeney Brigg catalogue model, his uniform stiff, his badges bright and untested, chatting eagerly to new faces, wanting to make a good impression on the two subalterns traveling out with him. They were al so junior that they had no choice but to sit on wooden benches in the crowded compartments, back-to-back with ordinary soldiers. It was winter and the fug of cheap cigarettes, the range of accents and the stink of stale uniform was overwhelming. He observed the contrast between excitement in some men and grim disengagement in others.

The second time—when a period of leave in May, spent with Louise and some friends in Oxfordshire, had cruely reminded him of al he had to leave behind and that the gap between normality and hel was only a day's travel—had been hideous. He had sat on the train taking him back to the front almost unable to speak.

That time he had recognised the silences he had met on his first embarkation.

Much later, he had returned to England on a hospital train. Although he had traveled in reasonable comfort on this journey, when he got off it was to a sea of stretchers bearing casualties, some in blood-stained bandages, others apparently blind or minus limbs. The sight of them was more shocking, lying on a familiar London platform, than amid the chaos of injury and mutilation he'd encountered in the trenches. He remembered an orderly and a nurse leaning over one man. She puled his grey blanket over his head as she signaled to two soldiers to carry him away. Contemplating the horror of the man's long journey, the pain and disruption of coming home, just to die next to the buffers, Laurence had turned his head away.

He jerked back to the present. The landscape of khaki and grey faded away. The Cambridge train was puling in with a last exhalation of steam. He watched various individuals pass but he could not see Mary.

She had almost reached his end of the platform before he recognised her. With her hair covered by a deep-crimson hat and wearing a coat, she looked different: more sophisticated and more in control. Everything about her declared her a modern woman, he thought as she drew closer, yet her eyes were less confident as she searched the crowd and she clutched her bag tightly to her. He was grinning like an idiot; he could feel his cheek muscles aching. He waved, although it was quite redundant; she was near enough to have seen him already and then she was in front of him. Quite on the spur of the moment he kissed her on the cheek. She smeled of Lily of the Valey.

'Laurence,' she said, with her amused, crooked smile, 'it's so good to be here.' She looked round almost excitedly and took a deep breath of anticipation.

'We need to get a cab,' he said, gently ushering her through the crowds, his hand in the smal of her back. 'We've got plenty of time so we could have tea before the concert. If you'd like that, that is? Talk a bit and so on?'

'Talk a bit,' she said teasingly but then laughed. 'Oh Laurence, I love just being here. Getting away.' Her voice became more serious. 'We'l have a bit of time afterwards though, I hope?' He was very conscious of her body even through the smal area under his palm and through a wool coat. She broke away only as a cab drew up.

Within a quarter of an hour they were sitting over tea in Durrants Hotel.

'I struck lucky with Captain Bolitho,' he told her happily. 'Nice wife too. It al seems quite straightforward.'

His confidence that evening, the uncomplicated nature of the story he had to tel, was something Laurence would remember long afterwards.

Chapter Seven

Laurence had been surprised to get a letter by return of post from Wiliam Bolitho, suggesting he come to lunch the folowing day. He had taken a bus and then, folowing Charles's very precise directions, walked through the streets to Moscow Mansions.

Mrs Bolitho had opened the door. She was slim and of middling height with curly auburn hair and an inteligent face. Bolitho sat by a window in the sitting room with a blanket over his lap. The shutters were folded back and light poured into a slightly shabby but pleasing room. Some draughtsman's drawings, mostly of big but unfamiliar houses, hung on the largest wal, and on the wooden floor lay a rose and indigo Persian rug faded by the sun. One wal was lined with books; the other was dominated by an abstract picture of strong ochre and black squares and curves, with odd glued and painted newspaper scraps. Laurence had no idea what it meant, but he liked it.