Elizabeth Speller: The Return of Captain John Emmett

Although Mary was silent, she looked much happier.

'Might I take the note he had with him?' he asked. 'It might be useful.' Though he couldn't think how. She nodded and reached for it.

'Why don't you come up and see me in London?' he said. 'Next week, say? We could go to a concert, if you'd like that. Have you been to the Wigmore Hal? I could try to get tickets. We could talk more then. In the meantime I'l think whether there's anything else I can do.'

Mary visibly brightened. 'I'd love that. I went there with John just before he joined up and before it was closed down. It must have been before 1914, because it was stil a German business. The Bechstein Hal, it was then. They were stil playing Schubert and Brahms: dangerous German music.' She smiled again. 'John's favourites. It was the only time we'd ever gone anywhere like that together. It was only because somebody else had let him down at the last minute.'

He went downstairs ahead of her, said a rather perfunctory goodbye to Mrs Emmett and her sister and shook hands on the doorstep with Mary who was clearly trying not to cry. He wanted to say something to help her, but then she thrust a sheet of paper at him. He was puzzled for a second until he realised it was a copy of John's wil.

Speaking fast, she said, 'You probably think I'm just not accepting it, John's death. But I do accept it. We'd lived with that possibility for four years. It's realy his life I'm trying to understand. There's this hole where I should know things. And then there are things I do know—such as the people in his wil whom we'd never even heard of, and my impression that he was definitely getting better—that I simply can't make sense of'

He took her hands in his. She bit her lip, looking at him without speaking. 'I'l do everything I can,' he promised.

He caught a bus to the station and only made the train by running down the platform. Once in a seat, he rested his head against the window and his breathing calmed. The train gathered speed. He had to close his eyes against the setting sun and, drifting on the edge of sleep, he reflected on the afternoon.

He was disoriented by his encounter. It wouldn't be hard to be attracted to Mary Emmett—he had been in a way, al those years ago—yet he knew he was now responding to emotions and a vulnerability that had nothing to do with him.

He took out the wil. Mrs Gwen Lovel was the first beneficiary—or was it Lowel? The legal hand was clear but the letter 'v' less so. Her address was 11

Lynmouth Road, Kentish Town, London. Bolitho's address was a convalescent home at Brighton. Those bits would be easy, he thought.

Chapter Six

Laurence managed to get home, change and stil be only a quarter of an hour late, but he was so tired he feared being poor company. He and Charles sat down to eat in an almost empty dining room.

'Everybody's on the moors,' Charles grunted. 'Lucky devils. But you look as if you've come hot saddle from Aix to Ghent.'

'Actualy I went and saw John Emmett's people today.'

'Did you, by God?' For once Charles looked surprised. 'What are they like? I heard they were cooped up in some ghastly place in Cambridge.'

'Mary's a realy nice girl. I hardly recognised her, though.' It wasn't true but he wanted to resist acknowledging the impact she'd made on him.

'Bad business,' said Charles, picking up his glass and half closing his eyes in appreciation of the wine. 'Have they taken it hard?'

'Wel, it doesn't help that he didn't leave a letter.'

'They've realy been through it,' Charles reflected. 'Pa died suddenly before the war, I heard from Jack—that's the Ayrshire cousin—and the Emmetts can hardly have come out with anything, once they'd paid off his debts. The mother was always pretty batty, he'd heard tel—must be where Emmett got it from—and more so when they had to sel the house. And before then, John gets engaged to some Fräulein and it takes a war to get him out of it. And the sister, Mary, my aunt said had been involved in some scandal with a married man. Takes a war to get her out of that too. Blown to smithereens at Vimy Ridge.' He added as an afterthought, 'Jack said he had been at school at Ampleforth with the felow. RC. Can't remember the name. Nice chap, though notoriously flighty wife.'

Laurence was shocked by the lurch of his heart. He was unable to distinguish whether his annoyance was with Charles, Mary or himself. To his astonishment and discomfiture he felt jealous. Mary wasn't what he'd taken her for. Immediately he knew he was being ridiculous. Not only did he hardly know her but she had not volunteered anything about herself to him and why should he have expected her to? He was being a fool. She must be in her mid- to late-twenties by now. Why shouldn't she have had another life, a life away from her family? Why shouldn't she have been happy for a while?

'John's father can't have been too profligate as John was able to make generous bequests in his own wil. One to a chap caled Bolitho.' Laurence knew he sounded gruff. 'Served with him, apparently. Do you know him?'

Charles's social antennae meant that, even unasked, he could provide chapter and verse on just about any officer or outfit he had come across.

'Bolitho? Bil Bolitho, I expect that'l be; he was with John's lot,' he answered, almost like a music-hal memory man. 'Good man. Legs shot off in 1917. Wel, not shot off but gangrene or something. One, anyway. Not sure about the other.' He paused, thinking. 'So Emmett left him some money? Not entirely surprising that he felt grateful, I suppose.' His expression belied his words. 'More surprising to find Emmett had any to leave. Jack's usualy spot on about stuff. Emmett and Bolitho served together in France. Emmett was inspecting a redoubt when it colapsed. Nothing to do with Jerry, just one of those things. Two other chaps with him died but Emmett wasn't far in and I heard that old Bolitho dug like fury and got him out. Banged him about, got him breathing. Heroic measures. Emmett must have remembered when Bolitho was invalided out.'

'And a Frenchman who's disappeared and a woman caled Lovel, or Lowel? Does she mean anything to you? She lives in London now, Kentish Town way.'

Charles thought for a moment. 'No,' he said. 'No. Can't say it does. No, don't personaly know any Lowels, Lovels or whoever. Or anybody at al in Kentish Town.' He looked amazed at his own falibility. 'The Cat, the Rat, and Lovel the Dog, rule al England under the Hog.'

Laurence stared at his friend, speechless.

'Richard III's nasty chums,' said Charles, happily. 'Only bit of history I remember from school. So, this Miss Lovel, an heiress too now, is she? Some floozy of Emmett's? Wel, at least she sounds English this time. Always a dark horse, that man.'

' Mrs Lovel, I think.'

Charles raised his eyebrows. 'Just so,' he said.

After the strangely disquieting day in Cambridge and the dinner with Charles, Laurence half expected Louise to come; she so often did when he had drunk a bit. Trying to avoid her, he delayed getting undressed. Eventualy he fel into bed around two, thinking briefly about the sun and the river. He must have falen asleep as the next thing he knew it was morning; he had been woken by a bee buzzing angrily between curtain and windowpane. He flicked it out into the day and lay back. Despite his aching shoulders and back, he felt content, relaxing in the early light, recaling his meeting with Mary, and he pushed away thoughts of her now-dead lover.

He considered the feasibility of actualy contacting people who had known John. What questions could he reasonably ask on her behalf? Nothing too wild; there was a limit to how far anybody wanted to look back these days. He simply hoped to give Mary some sense of her brother's war and of what others made of him.