Elizabeth Speller - The Return of Captain John Emmett

Laurence could hear in her voice her attempt to be matter-of-fact.

'He could have been seeing lawyers or something, I suppose?' he said, although Mary had said he'd remade his wil after the war and there was no indication he had revised it. He tried to picture the hotel. 'Where is it?' he said. The name rang a bel.

'Carlos Place, it says, Mayfair.'

He shook his head, trying to remember where Brabourne had been interviewed about Hart's execution.

'It's caled the Connaught now, after some useless princeling,' she said. 'But before the war it was the Coburg. Do you remember? They had to change it because it was German. Pretending al the time that the veins and arteries of our own dear royal family weren't running with German blood. I stil think of it as the Coburg, though.'

'The Coburg?' he said.

Eleanor was stil looking at the letters.

'The Coburg. Of course.' He almost laughed. 'John wrote down the name on a note in his room at Holmwood—Mary had it—and there I was dreaming up an international conspiracy.'

'You idiot,' she said, visibly amused.

'Wel, it was always possible he might have drifted into something through Minna. Or through other people he met through her in Germany.'

'Possible, Laurence, but not realy very likely,' said Eleanor. 'Did he seem like a spy to you? Minna died young and, anyway, he didn't meet her in Germany; he was at university with her brother.'

At Oxford?'

'Yes. Her brother was a philosopher, I think. The two men met through a love of rowing, as far as I can remember. There were plenty of Germans there before the war and the Baumeisters were a very pro-English family, John said. Minna was visiting her brother, she met John and they fel in love.'

'I hadn't realised.'

Laurence was thinking that, if they had met in England, the fact that none of the Emmetts had ever met John's fiancee spoke of a wider estrangement than he'd understood from Mary.

'Minna died not long after they broke off their engagement. He felt very bad about it. And her brother was kiled in the war. John felt bad about that too. But then he'd reached the point of carrying the whole world's troubles on his shoulders. And there were plenty to carry.'

'There was something else, in German,' he said, trying not to sound defensive. '" Gottes Mühle mahle ..." is al I can remember now.'

'" Gottes Mühle mahle langsam ..." I expect?' Laurence smiled at her. 'It's a film,' she said. 'But also a German proverb that means something like God comes at last when we think him furthest off.'

He sensed she was about to speak again but they heard Wiliam coughing from down the corridor, so she left the room. Although he had been caught out by the relevance of the name Coburg having a more innocent explanation than he'd dreamed, the location connected it unequivocaly with the execution of Edmund Hart. Was John giving evidence as Brabourne had? It was the same hotel.

He heard Eleanor open a door down the corridor, but although he listened carefuly, he couldn't hear her speaking. After a while a door closed and a few minutes later she came back holding a steaming jug.

'Hot water,' she said. 'I could do with more tea.'

When they'd sat back in their chairs she spoke again. 'I expect you're wondering why I didn't marry John.'

'I suppose I was.'

'I was terribly in love with him. I always was from when I first nursed him. I think he was remarkable, quite different from anyone else I'd met. He was inteligent and kind and aware. He was a man of the world in the real sense and he was a man quite outside his time. Solitary, self-sufficient, but not, or not yet, shut away. I nursed him again when he had pneumonia and he had his breakdown. I expect you know that one of his men raped and murdered a young girl and nobody would bring the man to book? Then that execution. He would never discuss it but I think it finished him realy. The two things just preyed on his mind al the time. That the guilty lived and the innocent died and al because of the war.

'He could never have married. He felt he was too damaged and there was something, an absolutely impenetrable barrier, that no one could break through. He said he was cursed. That people who came too close to him suffered and he couldn't make things right. He said everyone he'd ever loved had died. I think he was fond of Minna, and he had been close to his father, though not to his mother or, I suppose, his sister.' She glanced at Laurence. 'I'm sorry; it's not what you want to hear. In many ways he was so rational but in others he had a dark, almost medieval sense of guilt and self-denial. He was quite ascetic. I think he could have lived contentedly in a hermitage or a cave by the sea or even a monastery.

'Our relationship was never going to exist in the world beyond the two of us and the present. I was posted to the Second London General Hospital. When he came home he didn't want to see me. He never answered my letters. Meanwhile, I had started visiting Wiliam in a convalescent home. I liked him a lot. He made me laugh; he too was inteligent, although less complicated than John. After a bit it was obvious he had feelings for me but he was never going to say because of his condition and also it was such a cliché to fal in love with your nurse. But Wiliam brought me serenity and, despite everything, a sense of optimism.'

'But you did see John again?'

'Wel, obviously,' she said. 'Eventualy he got back in touch with me. I think perhaps he felt he had to. I'd nursed him and we'd been lovers.' She delivered this nugget in an absolutely matter-of-fact way. 'Perhaps he felt he owed it to me. He was nervous, diffident. Not like himself at al. A stranger to be seduced. I saw myself as a sort of Orpheus to his Eurydice, fetching him back from the underworld.' Suddenly she laughed—the first time he'd heard her do so. 'No, that does sound preposterous. But I hoped that some kind of intimacy, warmth, might break through to him. It didn't, of course. He wasn't even realy there.

'I must have been mad myself, or at least terribly naive to prescribe myself like some quack medicine, but then I loved him. Quite quickly, I realised I was pregnant. Not part of my cure. In some ways finding I was pregnant made me less desperate to be with John. I couldn't care for a child as wel as him and by then I knew he would break my heart. I would never be able to have him, you see.

'I spent ages trying to decide whether to tel him, to tel Wiliam, or to run away and tel neither. In the event I told Wiliam first and he immediately offered to marry me. Then, a little later, I thought John should know; I'd been worried he was in too precarious a state to hear the news—he'd been arrested for assault by then—

but in his way he was pleased, I think. And very relieved when I said I intended to marry Wiliam—not because he was off the hook,' she added hurriedly, 'but because the baby and I were safe.

'I saw him three times after I had Nicholas. He was like an uncle, I suppose, rather than a father to him. Wiliam was and is Nicholas's father. But then John left us the money. He'd never mentioned it. It's sad. Al of it.' Her head dropped.

By the time he left, stepping out under a sky ful of stars, Laurence felt he had finaly grasped the mood of John's last months, and the man he had become between leaving Oxford and dying. He crunched off down the street as briskly as he could, hoping to find a cab on the main road.

He was determined to find out why John had gone up to London. The reason was apparently so compeling that he would risk a return to the draconian regime that young Chilvers had imposed on him before and which he so loathed. Whatever it was, the fact was that, once in London, away from Holmwood, John could have done or met anybody, and so soon before his death. It had to be significant. Obviously he could hardly write to Holmwood himself to ask what Dr Chilvers knew about John's visit to London. But Mary could.