Elizabeth Speller - The Return of Captain John Emmett

He sat down by the largest window, slipped a finger under the flap and tore it open. Late-afternoon sunlight fel 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 especialy as you once wrote to me and I never answered. My life was difficult then. I hope you stil remember me.

I heard that you lost your wife and I am dreadfuly 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 tel 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. Finaly 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 folowing 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 al 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 wil 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 al 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 recaled meeting eyes that were ful 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 kil himself, having survived four years of war?

Chapter Three

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 smal 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 usualy hungered for. Although good at most games, especialy rowing, he was unimpressed by being selected for teams; he driled 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 skil 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 caled 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, swalowing 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 filed 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 al about the stars. He would use his father's opinion to settle arguments decisively; Laurence could stil hear his solemn tone of voice: 'My father says...' When Laurence finaly 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 smal terrier caled 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 actualy 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 bals 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 al but the most skilful players eventualy relinquished their bals to the smal stream that ran below it. Mary, very much the little sister then, went in barefoot to retrieve them and tried to sel them back. She was always paddling in the stream, her legs were invariably muddy, he recaled, and she had a ferret she took for walks on a lead. Was it caled Kitchener? The folowing Christmas the Emmetts had sent him a present of an ivory-handled penknife with his initials on it.