Elizabeth Speller - The Return of Captain John Emmett

He remembered how hard Louise had tried. Her mother had thought her exceptional.

'Actualy,' he went on, with a sudden burst of honesty, 'she was probably a bit hopeless, but she enjoyed it and she loved the piano. That's why I've kept it, even though I can't play a note.'

'You should learn to play. It would relax you.'

'I don't know any teachers,' he countered. 'Anyway, I'm far too relaxed half the time. I need to be less relaxed.'

She looked at him knowingly. 'I don't think so, Laurie. I don't think you're ever truly relaxed. In fact, I seem to recal thinking you were a very coiled-up, contained man when I first met you.'

He was about to protest but she had already returned to the music.

'Right, Liszt. That's a good start,' she said, sitting down. 'I used to be quite good at this. Or perhaps not?' she said, as she began to play, faltering a little on the first notes.

He finaly found a pair of sheets. They were old and had been neatly turned, sides to middle, but they were clean and without holes. While she was engrossed in the music he held them to his face to check they didn't smel damp. When he shook them out, they were plainly for a double bed. Swags of embroidered flowers and bows decorated the upper edges. He found one recently laundered pilowcase and for the lower pilow kept the case already on it, smoothing it with his hand.

She went on playing. Her touch was assured but the tone was pretty awful. When he'd finished making the bed— her bed, he realised with pleasure—adding an extra blanket under the eiderdown because she might not be used to a bedroom as cold as his could be, he stood in the doorway and watched her. She thudded on a dead key, and not for the first time.

'It's stuck,' she said. 'You realy ought to get this tuned, Laurie. It's a good piano, a wiling one. It deserves to be tuned.'

'Pianos have personalities?'

'Of course they do. There are good pianos and bad pianos, wiling ones and disobliging ones, modest ones and blustering ones. And this one shouldn't be abandoned.'

She leaned over and touched a slightly warped panel on the front where a shel in faded mother-of-pearl inlay was contained in a cartouche.

'Nor should her finery be neglected. When we stil lived in the country, I had a lovely piano: a smal Bluthner. Wel, it was my mother's, realy. My paternal grandfather had given it to her as a wedding present. My mother could play beautifuly, much better than I can. When I was very little we used to laugh when she played duets with my grandfather.'

'You haven't got it now?'

'No. No room and anyway it was too valuable. We had to sel it.'

'I didn't realise...' Laurence began.

'Actualy father was dreadful with money,' she said. 'Hopeless. The house in Suffolk was in trust for John. My grandfather—my other one, my mother's father—

must have seen the way things were going long before he died. My father was realy kind—wel, you know he was,' her eyes shone, 'but he believed everybody. Every chancer with a half-baked scheme to make money. Every tip on a horse that might reverse our fortunes. And he never learned. He always wanted to see the good in people. Like John, in a way.'

'I'm sorry. Your parents were awfuly good to me.'

'They were good people. But my mother was always a bit disappointed. She would have liked more of London life, I think, and she got worn down by staving off one crisis after another. Although my father was a steadfast family man, he never seemed to notice the odd writ, or the grass three feet tal, or living on mutton and onion tart for a week, or the smel of boiling soap ends.'

She changed the music and played some Brahms he recognised. He opened a kitchen drawer, found some candles and inserted them in the piano candleholders; as he pushed them into place, he could feel the accretion of old wax on his fingers. Wax that had dripped there when Louise was stil thudding through her Chopin. He put some more coal on the fire and lit the oil lamp that had been his mother's.

Mary played for a little longer; the soft light on her skin made her look as young as he remembered her from before the war. But after a while she stopped suddenly, and swung her legs back over the stool.

'No, the piano needs more love to do Brahms justice. I'l tel you what, you get her tuned and I'l give you a concert.'

'I don't have any wine, to reward your efforts, I'm afraid,' he said. 'But I've got gin. And biscuits,' he added as an afterthought. 'Sweet-meal. Mostly broken. Or would you like cocoa?'

'What a feast,' she said.

In the end he found some bottled plums and a loaf of bread, as wel as the biscuit fragments. The combination had shades of a school midnight feast. While he put them on a tray, she was looking at his bookcase.

'A man's shelves reveal al his secrets,' she said as she puled out a book.

After a second of anxiety, he felt pleasure at this strange intimacy. 'Mostly my father's secrets, in this case.'

'Fair enough for the Dickens and the Wordsworth, and I don't think you'd have chosen Meredith, but The Return of the Native is a bit racy for somebody's father, I'd have thought. And—goodness, Laurence— Sons and Lovers .' She looked back at him questioningly. 'Whatever next?' She squatted down to look at the lower shelf. 'Now we get to it.'

Again he felt a flicker of unease.

' Three Men in a Boat next to their natural companion-on-shelf, Foxe's Martyrs. The many faces of Laurence Bartram.'

'Foxe is for my book research.'

'But you don't like your book.'

'No, I do.'

'No, you don't. You never talk about it. We've passed scores of churches and you've never said a thing about any of them.'

He didn't like to say that he had assumed she wouldn't be interested. When he didn't answer, she got to her feet. 'I didn't mean to pry.'

'No. It's fine.' He forced a smile. 'I do like churches a lot but the book's an excuse not to have to do anything else. I haven't looked at it for weeks.'

'Am I an excuse?'

'No, of course not.'

'But helping me is?'

'You mean, is it a diversion? Wel, yes, but not in the way you think.'

Fatigue and gin had relaxed them by the time she finaly braved the iciness of his bathroom, took a glass of water and kissed him on the cheek. He waited until she'd closed the door of the bedroom before stripping down to his shirt, drawers and socks.

He could hear her moving about for a while and the creak as she got into bed. He snuffed out the candles and then stubbed his toe on the armchair he'd arranged. He puled his dressing-gown colar up around his face, covered himself with a blanket and tried to settle for the next half an hour. Eventualy he dragged the seat cushions on to the floor, lay down on them and roled himself up in the old blanket. He had not slept on a floor for three years. He hadn't expected to do so again but he was quietly content and lay for a while, looking towards the grey shape of the window and listening intently to any noise from next door. Was she awake? What was she thinking? He fancied he could hear her breathe though he knew it was impossible.

Chapter Twenty-two

The deep contentment he felt in Mary's company lasted him al the next day, even when she'd gone. He thought how pretty she looked in the morning, dressed but with her hair loose and legs bare. She had insisted on assembling a rudimentary breakfast. Eventualy he'd surrendered and watched her as she handled his china and put a kettle on the stove as if she had visited many times before. He ached for her, not just to possess her, although certainly that, but also to protect her and to know her with an absolute familiarity.

But she ate swiftly, returned to the bedroom and sat, tidying her hair in front of the looking-glass. He turned away. She emerged with her hat on and her bag in her hand. To his surprise, she now wanted to go to Charing Cross. She had decided not to go back to Cambridge yet, she said. She referred vaguely to cousins near Wadhurst. Instead of asking her about them quite naturaly, he'd resisted, convinced it would sound like an interrogation.