Elizabeth Speller - The Return of Captain John Emmett

For a few seconds her face showed no discernible emotion. Then she said, simply, 'I don't doubt she's right. There are far too many greedy, amoral people taking advantage of sick men and of their families, who are bankrupting themselves to have their loved ones looked after. Or,' she added darkly, 'so they believe. I've heard about a couple of such places. Something should be done about them. This government should do right by ordinary people. We should have a different sort of politics now that everything's changed so much. We shouldn't be trying to do things the same way, which ended up kiling and mutilating half the men in Europe.'

She paused just long enough for Laurence to signal a waitress. Her pale, creamy skin was flushed.

'Did you ever read any of John Emmett's poetry?' she asked abruptly.

Laurence's heart sank. He didn't want any diversion at this point. 'Not realy. Only the one that was published in the paper.'

'Do you like poetry?'

'Yes. Some of it, anyway,' Laurence said, hoping she wouldn't ask him to explain which bits.

'Wel, John's poems, his early ones, were very much a young man's work: pretty pastoral scenes usualy with a pretty Dresden shepherdess: his little Minna, sitting in them.'

'Minna?'

'His fiancee. He was engaged to be married in about 1912, I think. She was a German girl. She died. When he talked about her I always felt it was Goethe and Schiler and Schubert he'd realy falen in love with.' She was silent for a second. 'Didn't you know about Minna?'

'Mary Emmett told me but I'd forgotten her name.' He was trying to calibrate the extent of Eleanor Bolitho's knowledge of John Emmett. He'd previously assumed a very slight relationship.

'And now you're also wondering how I knew so much about John?' she asked, in a slightly teasing tone and looking him straight in the eye.

'Yes.'

'And about poetry?'

He smiled.

'Wel, the answer to the second question is that before the war broke out I was reading English at Cambridge—at Girton Colege. We couldn't graduate but we could study. I wanted to be a teacher. But circumstances changed,' she paused, 'and I became a nurse. Which has been a more useful skil, as it turned out.'

She breathed in deeply.

'The answer to the first question is that when John came into my field hospital, it was al very quiet; lovely, very early summer weather, I remember. Beds made, bandages roled, shrouds waiting, quarts of iodine and carbolic acid and chloroform, but no patients. Not yet. We had half a dozen soldiers plus two young officers who were il rather than injured. One had jaundice, I think. And a Canadian major who'd been kicked by a horse. We were waiting for the big push. It was uncannily quiet, in fact. Quite eerie in its way. Not far from the hospital Irish soldiers were digging pits, great long graves, for al the dead they were expecting. The other nurses and I kept taking water out to the men; they were in surprisingly good spirits, standing there cracking jokes while up to their knees in earth amid a sweep of grass and wild oats. Anyway, John was brought in from his regimental aid post one afternoon; he'd been injured in an accident. He had various middling injuries. But he seemed quite shocked and had bad flank pain. By the next day he started bleeding quite heavily from a kidney, so we kept him in.'

And your husband was brought in then too?' Laurence added.

'Good heavens, no, this was much earlier than that. I met Wiliam when he was fighting for his life. No, there was just John and the three others. They were the only officers.'

'Can you remember what the major's name was?' asked Laurence.

'No,' she said. 'I haven't a clue. I'm sure they didn't know each other beforehand, if that's what you're thinking, and the major was moved out in a day or so.

The boys were just boys. They ate together and played draughts. Only John was there for any length of time.'

She stopped.

'The MO wondered, though only to me, whether John might be adding blood to his own urine. But we never confronted him.'

Laurence must have looked puzzled, because she added, 'He appeared to be bleeding from his kidneys, but the blood could have come from anywhere.'

'You mean he was faking it?' Despite himself, he was shocked.

'Faking the degree of visible damage? Possibly. But not faking the fact he was hurt or needed care.

'After a couple of weeks things heated up and he was sent back home, lucky man. The injury had saved him. The mass graves were filed and overfiled, but he wasn't there. But when he was there and when nobody else was,' her voice dropped a little, 'I was on night duty and he couldn't sleep. The trench colapse had realy rattled him.'

'Being trapped,' said Laurence.

She nodded. 'In those circumstances you get to know a man quite wel.' She looked sad.

'You were saying about his poetry?' Laurence said, remembering the limits on her time and that he had once seen another poem of John's—when he was in Cambridge with Mary.

'Al I was going to say was that after John was injured, he stopped,' she said briskly. 'Writing poems. He said it had gone. He said he had been a minor poet at best and now not even minor. It wasn't true but it's what he felt.' She hesitated. 'They were al in touch with each other,' she went on after a while, 'the would-be poets

—and there was a sort of magazine he put together, even after he stopped writing himself. It had al kinds of stuff in it. Some was pretty awful, to be honest, but John said it didn't matter if it helped people to stay sane. One or two were marvelous. I remember him reading some to me. It was very late at night and warm. We had the windows wide open and you could smel the countryside. In al that misery, it was a single perfect hour.'

Laurence watched her face. She had been in love with John Emmett, he thought.

'Can you remember any of their names?' he asked.

'Most of the ones I read had pen-names. Some of their subjects were pretty strong, not likely to go down wel with the general staff. And he wasn't supposed to circulate poetry, not poetry like that. You weren't realy even supposed to keep diaries were you? Though I imagine that was honoured more in the breach than the observance, as they say. John said he knew who most of the poets were but nobody else did.'

Laurence suddenly remembered the other poem he'd read from John Emmett's trunk in Cambridge.

'The name Sisyphus doesn't ring any bels, does it?'

'The man in the myth doomed to push a boulder up a hil for ever?'

Laurence nodded.

She paused. 'Yes, there was a Sisyphus. I'd have forgotten except that, much later, John showed me a couple of his and asked what I thought of them. They were realy, realy good. But I've no idea who Sisyphus was in real life.'

'So, how did you come to know that John had other troubles? Neurasthenia?'

'Wel, I saw him a second time. The last winter of the war. He was admitted in a state of colapse: congested lungs, a fever, but more than that. He was a broken man, much worse than before. He scarcely spoke. He couldn't sleep. He had nightmares if he did. He had black moods. Just right at the end he started to improve a little. He came out for walks despite the cold.' A ghost of a smile flickered and was gone. 'But it didn't last. I suppose, looking back on it, the strange business of his paralysed arm was part of it.'

'Paralysed arm?' Laurence was puzzled.

'Yes. Towards the end of this second stay, he began to lose the power of his right arm. He said he'd had pins and needles and weakness since the earlier trench accident and then, suddenly, he couldn't use it at al. He couldn't write properly, do up buttons, cut with a knife: al those kinds of things. Major Fortune tried the usual tests: skin pricks, offering him a glass of water and so on, seeing which hand he used if he was caught by surprise, but he was consistent; his hand hung useless at his side. They decided it didn't matter as he was going home anyway. It was going to be someone else's problem.'