Elizabeth Speller - The Return of Captain John Emmett

It was much rarer the other way. A costermonger or a miner didn't get a commission, however good a soldier or however bravely he fought. Although an exceptionaly able bank clerk or a seed merchant might work his way up to major if casualties were sufficiently high, he doubted they'd find an unstinting welcome in the mess. Even in the face of imminent death and conditions of massive discomfort, the nuances were always there. Snobbery, prejudice, bulying: al of it transported straight from the playing fields and drawing rooms of English society. He had been guilty of it himself, assuming the son of the wel-spoken Mrs Lovel would automaticaly have held a commission.

If young Lovel was the link between John Emmett and the bequest to Mrs Lovel, and Lovel was a private soldier, not an officer, the puzzle became more complex stil, simply in terms of numbers. It was just possible that the man his mother had described as sensitive and music-loving might have refused a commission despite his background. He cast back to the events that people had described to him over the last few weeks and thought how often he'd heard the phrase 'some corporal' or been told of 'a young soldier' or 'a private—I don't think I ever knew his name'. He felt momentarily dispirited but then recaled that Lovel, though an interesting loose end, didn't seem to be at the centre of his enquiry. Why was he making everything so complicated?

As he got ready for bed, he thought about seeing Mary again. Tomorrow, no, he tipped his watch to the light, today, she'd be here, in London. Yet since her unexplained encounter with Charles in Tunbridge Wels and that fleeting exchange with a stranger at the Wigmore Hal, he was wary. He could hardly ask her to explain herself.

Several hours later, when she appeared waving vigorously from the far end of the platform, so that the pompons on the ends of her scarf danced on her coat, the minutiae of his concerns about her fled away. She tucked her arm in his as if they were the oldest friends in the world. Her other arm clutched a bag to her body.

'Gosh, it's cold,' she said. 'Do you think it's going to snow early this year? It'l make the winter seem awfuly long.'

She had put on a little weight, he thought, and it suited her. Today the cold had also flushed her cheeks and her eyes sparkled.

'How've you been?' he asked once they were settled on the bus, knowing that he realy wanted to ask what she had been doing.

'Oh, al right. You know. Up and down but I think, on the whole, more up than down. It's not so easy for my mother.'

'But she's stil got you,' said Laurence.

'Maybe you always count the cost of what you've lost more than what you stil have,' she said. Anyway, she was always trying to get rid of me—marry me off.

Ghastly men. Whiskery bachelor academics, mournful widowers.' She looked mortified. 'Oh Laurence, how frightful of me. I'm dreadfuly sorry.' She put her warm, gloveless hand over his. 'I didn't mean you or anyone like you. It was just a joke. I talk too much, always have, especialy when I'm trying to impress someone. Say things I shouldn't even think.'

He was more amused than anything else, though glad she might want to impress him.

As he helped her down from the bus he said, 'Perhaps she's eager for grandchildren. Another generation to live for.' He added swiftly, 'There, that sounds awfuly clumsy too. I don't mean to suggest your only purpose is to produce babies as her consolation.'

'You're probably right, though,' said Mary. 'Idealy they'd be boys and the oldest one could be caled John. The youngest too, possibly. That should do it. A girl caled Johanna in the middle. But I need to find the right man first.' He knew she was teasing him as she squeezed his arm a little more tightly.

'Let's get out of the cold and have tea,' he said, already turning up a street in the direction of the British Museum. They were walking too fast to talk easily.

It was the same smal place that he had used to meet Eleanor. The waitress who took their order seemed completely indifferent to them. Her cap was pinned far back on her crimped yelow hair and with her lips coloured into a surprised-looking bow, she looked like a large, rather peevish dol. In any case she was too busy watching the door, waiting for somebody she evidently expected. But nobody else ever arrived; the room was theirs. Laurence curved his cold fingers round his cup.

Before he could start to tel Mary of what he stil thought of as his detective work, she took out a brown envelope from her bag.

'Look,' she said, 'these were things I found in the bedside cupboard in John's room. They were just odds and ends that came back with his things from Holmwood, so we shoved them in there and forgot about them. Nothing very exciting. A couple of laundry lists, notes of some birds he'd seen in the garden. You see,'

she said, puling out a lined sheet, 'he did have some interest in what was going on.'

Laurence took the bit of paper. The writing was uncontroled but the content was clear: H'wood

Blackbird.

Mistle thrush, M. and F.

Great tit.

Blue tit (nesting in garage wal?)

Beside it John had sketched a blue tit, a coal tit and a great tit, and labeled them.

Chaffinches.

Woodpecker (heard, but never seen).

Hedge sparrow —lots.

Pipit? Chiffchaff.

Wren (in honeysuckle outside music-room window)

Red kite. A pair. Just once, walking out. Mewling over the river valey. Wonderful. N. was a little frightened at first.

Larks. 'Al the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.' Went as far as river watching them through Dr C's glasses. As agreed did not throw myself in!

Another, much neater hand, had added:

Greater puff-chested yellow fiddler. Fine plumage; watchful demeanour. Mates prolificaly with weaker females.

Harsh and irritating repetitive cry. Minemineminemine. Moneemoneemonee. Rarely leaves his natural habitat, where he is king of his tattered little flock, for the open countryside where the woodland animals might tear him apart.

They looked at each other.

'It's nice, isn't it?' said Mary, hopefuly.

Laurence, lost in the last sentence, was startled for a second but realised she meant the birdwatching. It was true, he could feel John's old enthusiasm. The quote was Edward Thomas, he thought. This was the first he'd seen of a John he recognised in anything he'd heard about him since the war. It went a smal way to dispeling the image of him as just an angry and unstable officer. Nor had he been alone, from the sound of it. Could his timid companion, frightened by birds of prey, have been the fragile Mrs George Chilvers, he wondered?

'But who do you think wrote this?' he asked, pointing to the foot of the page.

'Wel, I assumed it was about the younger Chilvers. Not an actual bird, obviously. I suppose it could be anybody. Briefly I thought it might be John writing about himself; it has his sort of wit, and even caling himself a coward ... but nothing else fits. He was never puffed up and couldn't give an earthly for money. He worried about my father when Daddy kept putting too much on the horses—Daddy was a bit of an optimist where racing was concerned and our mother used to rage at him—

but I don't think he was happy when he discovered that my maternal grandparents' wealth had always been entailed to him.'

Laurence mentaly ticked off one question: which was how John had had any money to leave Bolitho and Mrs Lovel, and how the Emmetts came by their current house. Had John got everything simply because he was the male heir, he wondered?

'And the bottom bit's not John's writing,' she said. 'He had to use his left hand because his right was paralysed. And al those tails like umbrela handles on the Ys, not him. If not Mrs Chilvers, another inmate, perhaps?'