Elizabeth Speller - The Return of Captain John Emmett

Even as she spoke, Laurence felt certain the unknown companion must have been Eleanor but he didn't want to raise this with Mary yet.

'A disaffected member of staff?' she suggested. 'And it could be about anybody. But my money's on Chilvers. Did you see the man's driving gloves?'

'What were they?' John asked, trying to sound light-hearted and disguise his discomfort at withholding information. 'Mink, studded with emeralds, or spiked metal gauntlets to incapacitate any motorist who impedes his way?'

'Wel, nearer the mink. Bright-yelow kid, fine and soft. Must have cost a fortune. I know because when we met, he had just got out of that car of his and rather creepily he shook hands—wel, he squeezed hands—without taking them off. It was like warm loose skin against my own flesh. Disgusting. Had his poor wife with him.

Like a mannequin. Al the latest fashions—French probably. Perfect hair. Perfect marcasite earrings. Enviable hat. Wel, I was envious. Fox stole. Just the thing for a madhouse in some rural back of beyond.'

She stopped and seemed to consider what she'd said.

'Poor woman. She didn't say a word and he didn't introduce us. A life sentence, however many hats.'

'Rumour has it, she was the one with hats in the first place. It's he who wasn't in gloves until she came along.'

Mary summoned a half-hearted expression of scorn, but she was focused on puling a pamphlet out of the manila envelope. It was poor-quality paper that had obviously been roled up at some time. She tried to smooth it out on the table, weighing down one end with the sugar bowl. The front cover had an ink drawing of a cluster of stars and across it, in what might almost have been potato print, the word Constellations. Inside the front cover was a short typed paragraph, signed only: Charon. He read it.

'Read, stranger, passing by. Here disobedient to their laws, we cry. 1916.'

The epigraph echoed something he knew from school. Ancient Greek, he thought, but the words were not quite right. He read on. The folowing pages were al typed poems. After a few pages he came to the one he'd seen scrawled in one of John's notebooks back in Cambridge. He turned it to show Mary. She nodded. 'That one again,' she said. '"Sisyphus".'

He read it for a second time. Its briliance struck him, just as it had in the stuffy attic at the end of the summer. Once he had been an enthusiastic reader of poetry but since the war he had read very little. He found the best modern poets so disturbing that he was invariably left melancholic; the worst were excruciating lists of rhyming clichés. This poem, however, was beyond categorisation; there was a strangely mystical feel about it. He remembered reading Gerard Manley Hopkins at Oxford. This Sisyphus had the same mad beauty in his writing. Reality had al but disappeared and what was left was like the unease of a dream.

'I can't understand it,' said Mary. 'In fact the more I try, the less I succeed—but when I relax, I seem to absorb it. Or something...' She trailed off embarrassed and then said as if to defuse her emotional response, 'But it's bit affected, this pseudonym stuff. I mean, they're not boys in the classical sixth. Why can't they just use their initials if they're feeling coy? Anyway, if they'd put their names to them, they might be famous by now'

'They wouldn't risk it,' said Laurence. 'It had to be private unless it was frightfuly gung-ho, our glorious dead, noble sacrifice sort of stuff. The one John had published earlier was just on the right side of the divide. But most were never intended for publication. Although this is obviously a bit more than the work of a few friends.'

He remembered what Eleanor Bolitho had told him about John publishing poetry, his own and others', and was certain this was the project she'd spoken of.

Again, he felt forced to keep information back until he'd tried to speak to Eleanor but he felt fraudulent presenting knowledge as a conclusion.

'Someone's typed it, for a start; it's in semi-circulation, I think, and wel before the war ended, judging by the date on the introduction.' He turned back a page.

'I mean, look at this one, it's not satire, it's simply contempt: "The pink brigadier lifts his snout from the swil." I don't think it would have advanced anybody's career.'

Opposite the farmyard ditty was a neat traditional poem. Unlike much of the poetry, this was oddly cheerful and complete. So many of the poems were raw and rough-edged. Yet here was a tidy pastoral sonnet. The work of an optimist or a blind man. Blue speedwel, bluer sky, skylarks, hawthorn after rain. Distant guns like summer thunder. Laurence rather liked it. The pen name was 'Hermes'.

'Hermes,' said Mary, 'the messenger.'

'The winged messenger,' said Laurence. 'And Sisyphus had a vast rock to rol uphil for ever, and Charon rowed the dead, of course.' He looked again at the page. 'Would you mind if I borrowed this?' he asked. 'I can see it's fragile but I'l be realy careful.'

He gave her no reason. There was none beyond a wish to read it, at his leisure and unobserved.

'Have it al—everything—if it helps.'

He refiled Mary's cup with lukewarm tea. The waitress was outside, peering up the street. He could no longer put off recounting his interview with Byers. What he told Mary was pretty faithful to what he'd heard, though omitting the severed penis and the brains that had splattered on John's boot.

Nonetheless, when he had finished, her head was bowed. She was absolutely silent and then two tears dropped from the end of her nose on to the wilow pattern of her plate. She rubbed her nose with her hand, rustling around in her bag and her pockets, apologising and sniffing, until Laurence found his own handkerchief, clean, even ironed. She dabbed rather ineffectualy, then held it across her eyes, almost hiding behind it. Then she sat for a minute with the handkerchief screwed up in her hand and her hand bunched against her forehead. Eventualy she took a deep, slightly uneven breath.

'I'm sure we could have helped if he'd spoken to us.' Her eyes filed with tears again.

'I think,' said Laurence very cautiously, 'that many men—just couldn't talk about things. It was as if once they put words to it, it would overwhelm them completely. And they didn't want to place that burden on people they loved. Couldn't.'

Mary sniffed but he thought it was an encouraging sniff.

'Even now, if I meet another man my sort of age, we know we probably share the same sort of memories; we don't discuss it but it's there between us. But with families there's a sort of innocence. It can be exasperating'—he thought back to Louise's patriotic certainties—'but sometimes it's easier to be with people who haven't been,' he searched for a word, 'corrupted,' he said finaly. He knew that he had moved from the general to the particular, revealing himself more than he'd intended.

'But the price is that you'l always be alone,' Mary said heatedly. 'And a whole generation of women are excluded. Redundant. Irrelevant.'

Laurence nodded. He thought of Eleanor Bolitho and wondered how different it must be to be with a woman who had shared some of the horror.

'It's not fair. You don't give us a chance.' Mary's voice rose slightly.

'The man I was teling you about—Byers. He's not been married long. Yet he's never ever told his wife al this.'

'And perhaps Mrs Byers has lots of things she'd like to tel him. Of fear and loneliness and never knowing who was coming back or in what shape. Sitting.

Waiting. Perhaps you should ask us whether we'd like to know? We're women, not children.'

'He means wel ... he's trying to protect her.'

Mary snorted, or something like it. 'So from now on we conduct our relationships in a dense fog with areas marked do not enter. Briliant, Laurence.'