Elizabeth Speller - The Return of Captain John Emmett

He lit the fire and brought her a towel. Her hair fel in dark curls about her face and the tip of her nose was as pink as her cheeks but her eyes were bright and she looked amused. He hung her coat over a chair near the fire. When he came out of the kitchen she was sitting on a hard chair with her back half to him, roling down a woolen stocking. She looked up.

'I hope you don't mind,'she said, easing it over her foot and wriggling her toes before hanging the sodden stocking over the arms of the chair seat next to her coat. Her calf was slim and white.

He sat down on the floor. She rubbed her leg with the towel, then reached up under her skirt and undid the other stocking. Her hair tumbled forward. Laurence was transfixed by the curve of her nape and the taut wool of her cardigan across her back. Her hands smoothed the stocking down over her knee. She sat up abruptly and he thought she had caught the intensity of his gaze before he looked away.

'I like being up here in your eyrie,' she said, rubbing her hair briskly. 'It's simple and it's cosy by night and the light pours in during the day. If you were reduced to a couple of trunks—like poor John—you'd be al nicely bound books and sheet music from Chopin to 'Roses of Picardy'—yes, you have, Laurie,' she said, as he shook his head, 'I saw it—and some impressively obscure pamphlets on churches plus those heavenly watercolours of Arabia'—she pointed to the far wal—'a good Persian carpet, worn but serviceable, French linen and the basic ingredients for a gin sling. What a cultured man he must have been, they'd say. How eclectic. Whereas I'd be al party frocks from before the war and too many hats and unsuitable novels and solidified paint brushes I forgot to clean and ticket stubs for Oh! Oh! Delphine and so on. Hmm, they'd think. What a flibbertigibbet.'

He felt his heart lurch as she tugged at the knots in her hair. She had regained some of the spirit he remembered from years ago, and with her hair loose, she looked young and vulnerable.

'You've never showed me any of your paintings,' he said.

'Ah, the man of culture speaks. You don't want to see my hats, I notice. But I can do better than paintings. I'l draw you. You've got a handsome face—good bones. I'd enjoy it. I like doing people I know wel, whose layers can be explored.'

'It sounds a bit forensic.'

'Oh it is. You'l be squirming under my al-seeing eye.'

She puled her bag towards her and put away her comb, then took out a wooly scarf. For a second he was puzzled, until she said, 'It's the one John had. I thought you might be able to find who owned it? From the number,' she added eagerly.

He took it. 'I can try.' Of course he could. Brabourne might be able to tel, he thought. But where did it get them?

He had hesitated to show her the photograph, not wanting to break into her happy mood, but as she drank her tea he finaly passed over the picture.

'I've never seen him,' she said, quietly, without him having to explain who it was. 'He doesn't look old enough to be caled up, let alone shot.' She shook her head slowly. 'Poor him. Poor John. It's not the way we were told things were.' She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand, like a smal child. 'They're past caring now, I suppose, but for every one of them there's a family who are destroyed too. And how could you bear it if your son hadn't been kiled by a German but in cold blood by his own side? You'd have a lifetime of nightmares, I would have thought.'

Laurence nodded and took back the photograph. 'I suspect nightmares were what broke John,' he said.

'Do you know anything about his parents?' Mary looked back at the photograph in his hand. 'Lieutenant Hart's? Perhaps he had brothers? Or a sister?'

'It's a good question. We know the area he came from but it's quite hard to find out. Even families often weren't told for ages.'

It sounded feeble, even to him. He urgently needed to find Edmund Hart's family. Once he'd shown the picture around, he would focus on that single task.

Nevertheless he felt uneasy. What right had he to intrude on grief or shame or anger? Even if the parents were alive, what if they were trying to hide the truth from neighbours or friends and he blundered in? He recognised that it was this that had previously deterred him from trying harder.

'There are lots of things no one can ever know,' she said. 'I'm only getting to accept that now. John was always so self-contained, the more so when he went away to school. He was probably fond enough of us al but, except for my father, he never let us in. John dying was almost a part of that: not leaving a note, not letting us even try to understand.' There was a trace of bitterness in her voice. 'You probably know more about John now than any of us ever did.'

'I'm sure that's not...'

'Oh, not from want of trying, just because John didn't want to be known. Not in life. Not in death. Probably my father understood him, though even he didn't always. Take his engagement. He wrote back to my father a few times when he was traveling and then the next thing we hear is that he has got engaged to a German girl. We didn't even know about her and there was already a lot of bad feeling against Germans. So my parents either kept it quiet, as if they were ashamed of it, or found themselves defending someone they'd never met. Then somebody told my mother that John's fiancée was in England, had visited him, yet he had never brought her home. It felt like a rejection. And by the time we knew, he'd left Oxford without a degree and they were both back in Germany, staying with her parents.

'And while he was away things had got realy difficult at home. It was al to do with money. My grandfather—my mother's father—died when John was abroad with Minna's family and left John quite a large bequest. I think neither my mother nor my father had realised none of it would come to them. John hadn't expected it either, of course. He hardly knew him. My grandfather was born a working man but had become rich in later life from buying and seling metals. But neither side approved of my parents' marriage, my father's family being higher class than my mother's. Ironicaly my father was much poorer than my grandfather became. We seldom saw either grandfather; there'd been some faling-out when we were young. But stil, my grandfather must have liked the idea of a grandson. What with my parents and Minna, and my grandfather and John, we seem to be a family where the most powerful relationships exist only at a distance.'

'Given I didn't have a proper home myself, I would never have noticed,' he said. 'I thought it was just a bit...' He paused to think of a word that wouldn't hurt her.

'Bohemian. You thought we were charmingly bohemian, from the uncut grass to our apparent imperviousness to cold, the leaking roof, the lack of staff for a biggish house, our old-fashioned dress sense and the strange potato, windfal and scrag-end aspect of our diet? No, we simply had no money.'

Laurence didn't reply. What she said was more or less true. The intermittent metalic echo of rainwater, dripping into three or four zinc bowls in the conservatory, and the women being swathed in Indian shawls on chily summer evenings had had no significance to him then. He had liked the silent long-case clock, minus its hands. He had thought it al rather romantic. A smal part of him was disappointed when Louise didn't seem to want that sort of life.

'...and of course John was a long way away,' Mary was saying, 'but he did have money after grandfather's death. I think he was just caught up in Germany and Minna and so forth. But my father, though kind in every way, was so hopeless, and in the end had to ask John for help when creditors threatened to overwhelm us. And John didn't reply. Of course, he may never even have got the letter. But, urged on by my mother who was realy upset, my father wrote him a second, very hard letter.