Elizabeth Speller - The Return of Captain John Emmett

'Which I might as wel have been. I made contact with Gwen and from then on she kept me in touch with his progress as a child, and then as a schoolboy. I stayed away as she asked—she had a daughter by then—though over the years I saw the boy from time to time from a distance. He was musical, like Gwen, and I would attend his concerts, but I never made myself known. Gwen was not prepared to tel him his real father had risen from the dead and was a married man.

Understandably.'

Laurence glanced at Mrs Lovel, whose intense gaze was now fixed, unmoving, on the general.

'And then came the war,' said Somers. 'Harry failed to get a commission in his first attempt. Gwen was sensitive to questions about his background, so I wrote on his behalf, saying I was the boy's godfather. I succeeded: he was commissioned three months after his eighteenth birthday, despite his German roots. Despite his lack of a father on his birth certificate. Not in the best of regiments, not like Hugh and Miles, but, as it turned out, fighting on the same blasted river plain. The same gas, the same wire, the same guns. The same rudimentary justice. The same muddy graves.'

'He joined the moment he could,' Mrs Lovel said, softly but firmly. 'He hated the idea of war but he wanted to do his bit.'

The light was starting to go, yet it was impossible to leave. Somers took his hands off Gwen's shoulders; he had evidently not finished unburdening himself.

'Might I speak to Captain Bartram alone, do you think?'

'Of course,' she said, although her eyes stayed on his face while she rose from the chair. Laurence heard her footsteps as she went slowly down the hal, folowed by the muffled bang of a door shutting. Then silence. Somers hardly seemed to have noticed her going.

'Suddenly, Gwen asked to meet me. She had never asked me to leave my wife's side, even for an hour. She had borne Harry alone and she was alone in bearing the knowledge of his death. She had been so patient, so undemanding, for years. She was as she had always been: a good woman.'

Laurence had a sudden vision of Louise, curled up in bed with her back to him, more like a child than a wife despite being five months pregnant. She was soft and relaxed, trying to get him to discuss choices of names for their unborn child before he left for France. Her hair had been in a loose plait and stray strands had tickled his nose. He thought what single word he would use to sum her up. She was not what Somers might cal a good woman. Nor was she undemanding. She was, he realised with an unexpected lurch of loss, sweet. Just a sweet girl.

'Yet when I went to see her,' Somers said, 'and she told me that Harry, my only remaining son, was dead, it felt like a kind of justice. For a moment it seemed reasonable that I should suffer. What incredible selfishness, eh, Bartram? Three boys gone, the two women who had borne me sons both dismantled by loss, and I could think only that some celestial justice had been meted out to me .'

Somers got up again and walked about; he had the very slightest limp. The room seemed hardly large enough to contain the two of them and al the ghosts of the dead.

'Over the next few months there were things Gwen could not understand. The telegram notifying her of Harry's death had no details beyond the location where he'd died and it had initialy gone to the address where they lived when Harry enlisted. His effects were eventualy returned to her and a slightly strange letter folowed from him, written shortly before his death, saying he was in a "spot of trouble" but she was not to worry. There was no subsequent letter from his CO or the adjutant.

She wrote to the War Office after a while, yet received the reply only that they would forward her further details of his death once they had them.

'More months passed and no pension was forthcoming. It struck her as odd but she was always rather diffident with authority, perhaps because she was part German, and Mr Lovel had left her a little and I was happy to support her. But she asked me to see if I could use my contacts to find out anything about our boy's death. She didn't even know where he was buried.

'It took me a little longer than I had expected to find out the truth, though I already had a bad feeling about the whole business. Harry should never have been a soldier. Hugh, Miles—were different sort of men—sportsmen, confident, forceful.' Somers continued, his voice low, 'But Harry was too sensitive, too imaginative.

Always had been. More like his mother than me. He could sing. Was a chorister at St Paul's. I went to hear him a couple of times, although I never told Gwen.'

His eyes flickered downwards.

'She was so generous about describing his life without ever expecting me to share it. He was like her in so many ways. He could write; he produced a libretto while he was stil at school. Poetry, too. It was fine stuff.'

Laurence, observing him closely, saw a muscle in his cheek twitch.

'Not just a father's pride...' Somers faltered.

At last Laurence spoke. 'I know,' he said. 'I read some of his work once.'

It seemed years rather than months since he had stood next to Mary in the Emmetts' attic room and first read the young poet's work.

Somers blinked. He looked surprised, then resumed speaking almost immediately.

'The war took my boys and then the influenza took Marjorie. Which was a mercy, I think. She had no wish to live, as far as I could tel, and the ilness was shockingly quick. But the effect of seeing my whole family vanish in four years slowed me down and I took too much time in pressing for the truth about what had happened to Harry. Perhaps I was putting off the day when I would acquire unendurable knowledge.

'The truth was told to me in a room in Whitehal on a fine summer's day. I doubt the civil servant who eventualy communicated Harry's ignoble end believed a word of the story I had concocted.

'After I left Whitehal, I walked down Horse Guards to St James's Park. I sat on a bench and watched a mother with her little boy, throwing bread for the pigeons, and he was laughing and running up and down, and suddenly I was aware of the most tremendous rage. Not sorrow—I was past al that, except in anticipating Gwen's reaction to my news—but fury. Rage at my country, which I had served with pride and to the best of my ability; which had demanded my sons' service and seen al three of them act, I truly believe, to the best of their ability. Two had been taken from me in circumstances beyond anybody's control but Harry had been taken, from Gwen and from me and from his own future, by his country. My country. Quite deliberately. He was shot by men who had served under him. They'd buried him perfunctorily—the battalion was moving on—and, in the resulting mêlée, even the exact location of his grave was lost.

'On leaving, I had said to this young mandarin, comfortable in his pleasant office with its views of the park, that in the conditions that prevailed at the time, and given both Harry's length of service and his youth, I felt it was quite possible stil to say to his mother that he had served his country. He answered, sombrely, but evidently thinking I was deluded, "You may say whatever you feel wil comfort the lady, but I fear the truth is that this officer died failing to do his duty and, indeed, putting the lives of his men at great risk."'

Laurence was silent; there was nothing he could say.

'But it took a chance meeting to make me see the way ahead. You might describe it as an act of God.'

Chapter Thirty-six

'I hadn't been idle since the war. I'd needed to do something. I'd met Philip Morrel many years before. My wife was a distant relation of Lady Ottoline, Morrel's wife.

He had odd views, frankly, but was wel meaning and wel connected. He talked to me round about the time of the Darling Committee. Asked if I'd be involved. They needed reliable fact-gatherers. People who could talk to people.'