Elizabeth Speller - The Return of Captain John Emmett

He had thought their guide might have taken a vow of silence, but now she was talking quietly to Mary as they moved down the beds. Finaly she left them at the last one, under a window in the corner. Mary leaned over and kissed the supine form, his head supported on either side by pilows. She looked back at Laurence, who was hovering uncertainly, and motioned him over.

'Richard, this is Laurie Bartram,' she said in a low but even voice.

Sitting down on a plain wooden chair by the bed, she brought the man's hand out from under the covers and held it.

'He's been wonderful in finding out what happened to John.' She leaned forward to do up a pyjama button that had come adrift. Then she sat in silence for a while, stroking his fingers.

Laurence studied Mary's lover's face. He was freshly shaven and his hair was slightly damp. Mary was right: he was a handsome man. He looked wel, were it not for the puckered crater of healed tissue visible on the nearside of his head and the absolute lack of any facial response. His eyes were open, his irises very blue, yet Laurence could detect not a single indication that he had any awareness of their presence. When Mary let go of his hand, it fel loosely to the cover. She tucked it away, under the blanket.

'I can't stay today. But I went to see the house this morning and it's looking at its best. They've repaired the window frames and since the boys came home from the war, the gardens are getting back into shape. Mr Strangeways tels me they've had a wonderful year for roses—most of them stil blooming until the last few weeks.'

She stood up, bent over and stroked Richard's brow, then looked down at his face intently, as if she couldn't believe what she saw. 'Bye bye,' she said, finaly.

'I'l be back to see you soon, darling.'

She nodded to a nun by the door. 'Thank you,' she said simply.

They walked down the stairs and out into the open towards the church.

'The house is gone, of course,' she said. 'I haven't seen it since before the war. Strangeways, the head gardener, has gone to work at Compton Place. The court-appointed guardians decided that, as Richard had no heir, they needed to raise funds for his care throughout his remaining life and the house was too dilapidated to leave empty.'

She walked down the path between gravestones made smooth by time and through the Saxon doorway into the church. He folowed.

'Then there was a fire. Some mischief by local lads.' She wrapped her arms about herself. 'Not that he wil ever know.'

They sat in the empty church. It was cold. The tiny vestry held one of the most beautiful stained-glass windows Laurence had ever seen, simple and ful of colour. St Francis stood among butterflies and birds, al depicted as identifiable specimens. Beneath its rich light, the parish registers lay on a table.

'So you don't consider yourself free to make a life with anyone else?' asked Laurence.

'No, I don't. I'm not. Who knows, one day...'

'It's fine. You don't have to say anything. I should have liked ... Wel, you must know ... But I'm sad. Not mostly for me,' he hoped this was true, 'but for you and for him.'

'It was one of the reasons I wanted to know more about John,' she said. 'I was so angry when he kiled himself. Perhaps not with him but with God or fate.

There was Richard, a body without a working brain, and there was John, only slightly injured, with a proper life if only he'd grasp it, and it seemed that he'd just thrown it away. I know that's unfair. I knew his mind was probably as damaged in its way as Richard's, but I needed to know that for certain. I needed to grieve, not rage.

That's why I got in touch with you, I suppose.'

'Yet I turned out to know John a lot less wel than you thought,' said Laurence. 'Less than you, certainly. And Eleanor Bolitho knew him best.'

She looked at him questioningly. 'But you were the only friend John ever brought home. It had to count for something. I'd very occasionaly seen him with others, heard him mention names, but you'd been to our house. Anyway,' she smiled rather sadly, 'you and I—we saw something in each other ages ago, didn't we?

Back then? Something that might have been but wasn't?'

'I wish I'd been braver.'

She headed him off. And of course, you took finding John so much further than I'd ever intended and I became much more involved with you than I'd ever dreamed. And because you found out the real story, I have General Somers and the odious Tucker to feel angry about, instead of my own brother, and that's easier.'

'I'm not sure you'd feel angry at General Somers if you met him,' he said. 'Angrier at circumstances. Sad, even.'

Then he added, 'I've been thinking about our first meeting, that summer—when I was at school. I suspect John's invitation came from the same instinct that he showed in his bequest to Wiliam Bolitho, and to Edmund's mother, and probably to the unknown Monsieur Meurice. He may have been a solitary man, but he was a kind one, you know: a man who wasn't very good at intimate friendship but was very aware of others' unhappiness. Not an easy combination. And I was a very lonely boy after my parents died.'

'Have you exorcised your ghosts?' sad Mary, so quietly he almost didn't take it in.

'Ghosts?'

'You said earlier that John and, to a degree, Tresham Brabourne, were exorcising ghosts by speaking up. Somers was too, I suppose, in a ghastly way. Even Byers, in talking to you, from what you say. Are you the only man who walked through these horrors unscathed?'

'I was lucky,' he said, though he knew it sounded implausible. 'I was il with pleurisy once and in hospital, and I hurt my back helping an injured soldier, but apart from that I was lucky.'

'But you lost Louise?'

He was quiet for a very long time. Finaly he said, 'I was never sure whether I loved her, you see, so I couldn't realy grieve for her.'

'And your son?'

The silence seemed to go on and on. She didn't come to his rescue. He looked up at the glass butterflies. He tried to remember Louise as he had last seen her.

She was standing on the station in a summer dress and a straw hat. She wore white stockings and button shoes, and her pregnancy showed. It must have done because he suddenly remembered that she'd placed his hand on her hard bely.

'It's moving,' she'd said, her face bright with excitement. He had puled his hand away too soon.

'There was an attack in France, you see.' He stopped, then started again. 'Wel, there were lots of attacks, of course. It was only if you weren't there that you could think in terms of battles. The Battle of the Somme, the Third Battle of Ypres and so on. It wasn't realy like that; there were al-out attacks and unexpected skirmishes, and they al led one into another. Just one attack stands out. It wasn't the worst, though it was bad. But it's the one that stands for al the rest. Rosières. It was the end.'

He felt a sharp and terrible ache. Love and failure and betrayal. Fathers and sons. His chest felt tight and his eyes were sore. The memory that he had tried so hard to suppress weled up. The darkness of the hours before morning. The discomfort, the cold and the insomnia.

***

If only he could sleep he knew he would cope better.

Twenty minutes to go.

As the creeping barrage had died away, he found himself with hypersensitive hearing. All around him the shuffling and muttering of weary and scared men. Someone having a piss. A cough, the rasp of metal against a flint, the flat noise of rain falling on waterproof capes, and the occasional innocent snore from the rare soldier who could sleep despite everything. He had indigestion and was trying to find the bismuth that the MO had given him. The MO

thought he had a peptic ulcer but could offer no better treatment until Laurence returned to England. A few weeks ago one of the regimental majors had collapsed and died of a heart attack. He'd been complaining of pains in the chest for months. Laurence slipped his fingers between his tunic buttons and rubbed the centre of his chest tentatively through his shirt and vest.