The Return of Captain John Emmett (39 page)

John didn't complain about his treatment in that letter. In fact he said after he'd been up to London he'd got a lot of things off his chest. He'd been in touch with a man he needed to speak to and also a woman he'd done a great wrong to, he said. He talked about hoping his son would never see the things John had seen. John never told me that he had a little boy or even that he'd been married and I was sad that he hadn't. I didn't know he loved someone called Elly. I would have kept his secrets whatever George did. I hope you will tell his little boy that his father was a very special person.

I had nothing else left of John since George tore up my poem so I hope you will not think wrong of me that I read them. I just wanted to have him for a bit. But
don't let George know
.

Yours sincerely,
Vera Elizabeth Chilvers

As he read her rather childlike letter, Laurence felt overwhelmingly sorry for Vera whose life, he thought, must be hell. He wished he could report the theft of the watch, which Mary had said right at the start was missing, though it would probably simply make Vera's life worse. He had been unable to question her as he'd wished, yet she had still come up with crucial new information.

Vera implied that John had met a woman while he was in London. Had this been Eleanor? Was John's inability to marry her when she was pregnant this 'great wrong'? He didn't think Eleanor saw it that way. It could have been Gwen Lovell. But then he stopped himself; John's world was infinitely larger than the fragment he had been exploring. There could have been many women wronged, though he smiled to think of John as a voracious seducer.

Nevertheless, the train of thought this opened up, no matter how fantastic, raised one other question. Was there any possibility, however unlikely, that the killer, if there was one, could have been a woman? All the accounts of the deaths came down to a faceless figure in a heavy coat. Eleanor, as fearless as any man, seemed quite capable of subterfuge and, given her experience in the war, was almost certainly familiar with guns. Gwen Lovell, who had once been on the stage, was tall and well built with a low voice. He tried to imagine either woman in a greatcoat and hat with their hair up, and visualise whether they could possibly have masqueraded behind the anonymously familiar outfit. It was not impossible. What might drive them to it? The answer was the same for both of them: to protect their sons. But the image that returned to his mind's eye was of Hart, friendless and alone as he went to his death.

The first person he showed the photograph to was Mary, whom he had arranged to meet in the Lyons teashop in Piccadilly in the early afternoon. He thought it would be very hard for her to see a picture of the man her brother had been ordered to shoot. He had found it hard himself, gazing on that boyish face while it still held a little hope. When it came to it, he held back despite Charles's admonition not to treat her as a child.

From the teashop they took a cab as rain was falling heavily. The driver insisted on dropping them at the end of Lamb's Conduit Street. They half walked, half ran down the street, trying to avoid the deepest puddles, and when they reached his flat they were cold to the bone. Mary had a bag with her and he hoped that meant she intended to stay.

He lit the fire and brought her a towel. Her hair fell 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, rolling down a woollen 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 all 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 wall—'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 all 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'll draw you. You've got a handsome face—good bones. I'd enjoy it. I like doing people I know well, whose layers can be explored.'

'It sounds a bit forensic.'

'Oh it is. You'll be squirming under my all-seeing eye.'

She pulled her bag towards her and put away her comb, then took out a woolly 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 tell, 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 finally 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 called 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 small 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 killed 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 all 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 travelling 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 really difficult at home. It was all 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 selling metals. But neither side approved of my parents' marriage, my father's family being higher class than my mother's. Ironically my father was much poorer than my grandfather became. We seldom saw either grandfather; there'd been some falling-out when we were young. But still, 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, windfall 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 metallic echo of rainwater, dripping into three or four zinc bowls in the conservatory, and the women being swathed in Indian shawls on chilly summer evenings had had no significance to him then. He had liked the silent long-case clock, minus its hands. He had thought it all rather romantic. A small 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 really upset, my father wrote him a second, very hard letter. Although John paid off their debts then, for a while there was a kind of a rift. My father was humiliated and who knows what John felt? He'd always looked up to my father, was almost oblivious to his weaknesses, and suddenly there he was, begging, and my mother resentful that they should have to. My father was walking the dog one evening soon afterwards and he didn't come back. He'd had a heart attack. They found him dead in a field the next day. The dog had stayed with the body. John had never seen him again to make up. After that the war began.'

'I'm sorry. I didn't know.' He paused. 'I would never have guessed John would be someone who'd be queuing to volunteer. He never seemed the sort.'

'Not a fighter, you mean.' She smiled. 'Or not a patriot?'

'Not taken in by politicians. Certainly not the sort who might have thought war was an adventure. Particularly as he had German friends, had been going to marry a German girl.'

'I suppose,' Mary said, obviously still thinking aloud, 'that he might have reached a point in his life when he wasn't sure
which
way to go. His pieces of writing from Germany weren't selling any more. His relationship with Minna ended when hostilities became inevitable. War had come and, having been in Germany, he'd probably got a better view of what it was likely to mean for us. Because he'd travelled, his German was pretty well flawless—he was an internationalist in lots of ways—so maybe that made him try to pre-empt the inevitable? He hadn't just hidden in Minna's pro-British circle; he'd written in the papers about the clamour of the Prussian warmongers. I don't think he ever thought it was just going to be a short thing. But he never explained directly.' She looked puzzled and he guessed it was the first time she'd ever considered John's early volunteering. 'I hope it wasn't because he didn't care what happened to him.'

'People admired the first men to go,' he said.

'Yes,' she said eagerly. 'We were proud you know, in an unthinking way. But now, looking back ... You know, even though my father loved it, John would never go shooting. He didn't like killing things. Not even wasps.'

Her eyes flicked back to the photograph. For a moment she looked distressed, then went on, 'If my father had lived he would have been fearfully proud. He always said he'd wanted to join the army himself when he was young, but his heart wasn't good from a fever he'd had as a boy. The only books he read were always about battles and heroes. Ancient Greece, Agincourt, Waterloo and the most dreadful memoirs by stuffy old generals.'

The silences that fell between them now were companionable, Laurence thought, not the awkward breakdowns in conversation or head-on collisions when both had talked at once when they were trying to get to know each other. Now silence seemed more of a measure of closeness than speech.

Eventually he said, 'So that's where the bequests came from? John was wealthy?'

'Fairly. He supported my mother after my father died. And when John died himself he left my mother provided for and left me enough to ensure I could be reasonably independent. If I didn't have commitments here, I'd go to Italy and study in Florence. Art. Italian. I'd always hoped to do that before the war but it wasn't possible.' She seemed to rush past this reflection as if it pained her. 'And now I'm not free to go.'