Elizabeth Speller: The Return of Captain John Emmett

Louise had left him money and so he was free to folow a new career. It did not make him a man of substantial means, but it was enough for him to tel Louise's father that he wouldn't be returning to the business. Even if Louise had survived and he were now the father of a lively son, he doubted he would have continued buying and seling coffee beans. The war had changed things; for him life before 1914 was a closed world he could never reach back and touch. He could recal banal fragments of people but not the whole. His mother's long fingers stabbing embroidery silks into her petit point. His father snipping and smoothing his moustache as he grimaced in the looking-glass. He could even remember the smel of his father's pomade, yet the rest of the face never quite came into focus. His memories were just a series of tableaux, disconnected from the present. Louise, and the smal hopes and plans that went with her, were simply part of these everyday losses.

He'd rented a smal flat, a quarter the size of the town house he and Louise had lived in for their eighteen months of marriage before he was sent to France. It was in Great Ormond Street and on the top floor, with windows facing in three directions so that the smal rooms were filed with light. There he could lie in bed listening to the wind and the pigeons cooing on the roof. He rarely went out socialy these days but when he did it was usualy to see his friend Charles Carfax who had been at the same school and had served in France. Charles was someone to whom nothing need be explained.

Sometimes as he gazed out across the rooftops Laurence tried to picture where he might be in a year's time—five years, ten—but he couldn't imagine a life other than this. At Oxford he had been teased about his enthusiasms: for long walks, architecture, even dancing. That excitement was a curiosity now and he had stopped worrying that he had drifted away from friends. He no longer had any imagined future different from the present.

Where he felt most alive was sitting in the chapel of Thomas More inside Chelsea Old Church, wondering at the man's courage, or in Al Halows by the Tower where bodies, including More's, had been brought after beheading at the Tower. Somehow horror was blunted by thirteen centuries. Churches, he thought, weren't buildings but stories; even their names fascinated him. However, when he tried to re-create that excitement for his own book, he was reduced to stone and floor plans and architectural terms. For St Bartholomew the Great, his notes read: bilet moulding, cloister, twelfth-century transept. Yet when he was sitting, resting his eyes, he had sometimes sensed the monks brushing by him on their way to Compline, or stumbling bewildered through the teeming streets after Henry VIII had evicted them, while the building survived as best it could: as stable, forge, factory or inn, before it returned to what it was meant to be.

He had had a happy childhood, adored by parents who had produced him quite late in life, but both had died unexpectedly before he was sixteen. His much older married sister, Milicent, had been like a second mother, but she had moved to India before their parents died, remaining there with her large family and a husband who was part of the colonial administration. She had tried her hardest to persuade her young brother to join them and, when Laurence turned out to be surprisingly stubborn in refusal, sent him stories by Rudyard Kipling, which revealed India as a magical and dangerous place. He stil kept one book near his bed, unable to imagine his sensible sister amid the gold elephants, turbaned elephant boys and rearing rattlesnakes on the cover. A distant aunt agreed to be his guardian and this satisfied Milicent, if not his need for love and comfort. In due course he went up to Oxford where his tutor had been something of a father to him from the day he arrived at Merton Colege as an undergraduate. Shortly before his death a year or so ago, this kind, unworldly man had introduced him to a publisher who had shown surprising interest in Laurence's diffidently proposed work.

Meanwhile his sister wrote regularly with an innocent assumption of his love for Wilfred, Saly, Bumble, James and Ted, his unknown, unimagined nephews and nieces. Given her determination never to speak of anything unpleasant, her letters only increased his feeling that Louise and the war were something he'd dreamed up.

For a while young widows, or girls who had once been engaged to officers in his regiment who hadn't made it through, made it fairly clear that his attentions would be welcome. He was nice-looking rather than conventionaly handsome, with thick dark hair, pale skin, brown eyes and strong nose, a combination that sometimes led people to assume a non-existent Scottish ancestry. Unable to cope with the possibilities on offer, he invariably withdrew with the excuse that he needed to focus on his research. His married friends had been kind after Louise's death but he felt uncomfortable in their houses, watching their family life unfold. He had tried it once. He had journeyed down to Hampshire for a perfectly undemanding weekend of tennis and cocktails, country walks and chatter, then found himself in the grip of overwhelming anxiety. As they trudged through waist-high bracken and folowed earth tracks through thickets of dense flowering gorse, he found himself jumping at every rustle or crack of a branch. He made his excuses straight after Sunday lunch.

Sometimes now he could go a week or more without revisiting the smels 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 hopefuly.

'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 carefuly 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 appaled. 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 smel of cinders and drains, deep into his lungs. He was lost. Too much had gone.

Chapter Two

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 finaly went to bed on these humid August nights he would find it hard to sleep. Only the bels 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 hal table. Later he came to think of it as the letter.

It had been forwarded twice: first from his old Oxford colege, then from his former marital home; it was a miracle it had got to him at al.