The Return of Captain John Emmett (4 page)

Although her hand was trembling slightly her voice remained very calm. She ran her finger down the side of her glass.

'But it was a stranger who died, you see. He'd left us years ago.'

Laurence wished he could tell her he had heard from him, wished he could have explained that stranger to her. He wanted to believe he would have made contact if he'd known John was in trouble, but he feared that he wouldn't. He should never have lost his friend in the first place.

'Look,' he began, unsure what he was about to commit himself to and whether he was complicating a simple, if sad, event. 'I could see if I could find out anything. I mean, I don't know if I would be able to do any more than you have, but I could at least ask around people he and I both knew. At school, mostly, possibly at Oxford. See whether any of them had heard anything from him since the war. I have the time.'

Even as he said it, he knew he was only setting himself up to disappoint her. So many in their year were gone now and John had had no intimates, anyway. 'People at school' would simply mean Charles Carfax. But her face brightened irresistibly, so he continued, 'At a pinch I suppose I could talk to the people at Holmwood, see if they come up with anything.' As he said it, he thought how unlikely it was that he would be any match for the professionally discreet.

'When John died—afterwards—they sent a trunk with his things,' she said. 'There's not much in it, just clothes and books. Little things.'

A look of such extreme sadness came over her that he was embarrassed to be faced with her emotion and uneasy remembering his own reactions to Louise's possessions.

'But there might be something you'd make sense of. There are sketches and writings, a few photographs. You might see something, knowing a different side of John to us.'

He didn't know how to tell her that he felt he had never really known her brother at all.

It was getting cooler. Laurence paid for tea and they walked back to the punt, now alone on its moorings. Light breezes made the return journey faster but chilly. Mary sat, eventually accepting Laurence's offer of his coat, while he made what seemed like interminable progress downstream. After a bit she took over and he surrendered the pole with gratitude. His shoulder muscles were burning with exertion but he was damp with sweat and soon felt cold. They were both weary by the time they were back on land again.

They walked the short distance to the Emmetts' new house in silence. Laurence, remembering their Suffolk home from years back, was surprised by the dull meagreness of the tall, narrow house they lived in now. The brick was greyish-yellow, the proportions of the windows cramped. Below the railings, ferns and mosses had encroached on the damp basement. What had happened to their leisured existence before the war?

An elderly woman opened the door. Was it the same maid he remembered from long ago, Laurence wondered; she wasn't in uniform but few domestics were now. He smiled encouragingly but she just motioned to them to come in.

'My aunt, Miss Virginia Peel,' said Mary. He hoped his smile hadn't been patronising.

Mary took him into a small drawing room where, despite the warmth outside, Mrs Emmett sat by a fire. To cross the room and shake her hand, he had to squeeze between occasional tables and around a large chiffonier. Every bit of furniture that had looked at home in an affably neglected manor house appeared to have accompanied them to Cambridge. The effect was oppressive, the pieces heavy and grandiose. Weak light filtered in through thick lace curtains under a velvet pelmet. Even Mary seemed to wilt. Her mother sat on a button-back chair like a relic of another age.

'Laurence,' she said and held out a soft hand, 'how good to see you again.'

He would not have recognised Mrs Emmett. She was much smaller than he recalled and a certain excitability, which had amused him when he was a boy, was entirely gone.

'How good of you to come all this way and see Mary. She doesn't get out nearly enough.' She looked towards her daughter. 'She doesn't see much of her old friends. I don't know why. Everybody used to love Mary.'

They talked politely, touching on her son for only a second, and then only to locate them all in time.

'That was before John died, of course,' Mrs Emmett had replied to Laurence's asking when they had moved to Cambridge.

Mary jumped in at this opportunity. 'I thought it might be nice to let Laurence have one of John's books. You remember we discussed it. As a keepsake.' He could tell that Mrs Emmett actually remembered nothing of the sort and it crossed his mind that there had never even been a conversation on the subject, but Mrs Emmett smiled again vaguely.

'Oh yes, lovely. What a good idea. Certainly he should have something. Do you like poetry? John was very keen on poetry, you know.'

Laurence had worried that they would have to sit and have a second, awkward, tea, but Mary's mother seemed unconcerned with such social niceties and after a few minutes they were able to back out of the room.

John's things had been put in one of two small rooms under the eaves. As they climbed the three flights of stairs, Mary said over her shoulder, 'You don't have to take anything. I simply wanted an excuse to show you John's things without having to explain.'

Their feet clattered up a last uncarpeted flight into a small, peaceful room with a casement window. It held an iron bed, a wooden chair and a washstand. On the bed lay a trunk and a box. It reminded him a bit of school.

'We never used to come up here,' Mary said, as if the room still surprised her. 'But my aunt needed John's old room, and now this is all that's left of him ... It's hard.'

She opened the wooden box first. A battered hip flask lay on top of a yellow and black striped scarf. Mary picked it up and held to her face, smelling it.

'A school house scarf,' she said. 'Not a Marlborough scarf and not his, though I like to think that a friend gave it to him to keep out the cold. He had it with him until the end.'

Laurence took the scarf from her. He didn't say that it had probably belonged to a dead man. He picked up the corner and saw what he expected: embroidered initials and a school number next to it. He wondered what the schoolboy
MS
142
C
had been like and what had happened to him. What sporting boys in what house in what school had worn these colours? School with its numbered individuals was just like the army, he thought.

Mary was rifling through the box. 'Holmwood sent it back to us. Most of what was with him, on his body, was burned,' she said hurriedly, turning her face away. 'But there should have been a watch. It had been my grandfather's and my father bought a new chain for it when John went up to Oxford. Though I suppose it could have been damaged.'

The corner of her mouth twitched so minutely that if he hadn't been watching her closely, he might have missed it.

'These were returned to us.' She turned round, holding out an oilskin tobacco pouch, a crumpled handkerchief and a worn woman's hair ornament. She then lifted up a lined sheet of paper with writing on it and a photograph. 'The contents of his pockets. Pathetic, really. The note and photograph were in the empty pouch.'

He took the photograph from her. A deep crease ran across it and the corners were dog-eared. It was a picture of soldiers, taken from a short distance away. The image was poor quality and overexposed along one edge. Nor had they posed for it; in fact, the group seemed unaware of the photographer. They were mostly young and unsmiling. Some were smoking in a huddle. The closest was more of a boy than a man, noticeably slighter and shorter than the rest. Standing alone, leaning back against a pile of logs, his eyes half shut but looking more relaxed than the others, was a sergeant. Close by were two officers; one was considerably older, in his late forties, Laurence guessed. The younger had turned half away from the camera. Could it be John? Mary didn't comment. In the background was a cobbled farmyard. A single bare branch overhung open stalls with a covering of what looked like light snow.

He turned the picture over. In the corner was a fairly formal monogram in purple ink—the developer perhaps? He looked briefly at the sheet of paper; across the top was the word 'Coburg' underlined, and below it 'Byers' and then 'Darling' in older, pencilled writing. Next to it in different ink was written 'B. Combe Bisset and then Tucker/Florence St?'

Who had taken the photograph, and why had John got it with him at his death? Impossible to know. Were Byers and Darling men in the picture? Was Tucker a street or a person? Combe Bisset was presumably a British location and Coburg a German one. But then he thought of all the nicknames they gave to trenches in France, a stagnant pit called Piccadilly and a sand-bagged Dover Way. As he thought, he was fiddling with the metal comb, a small, cheap, gilt trinket. A unicorn's head surmounted its bent spikes, with what might be letters or simply decoration.

Mary set aside a battered tin of geometry instruments and lifted out a book on birds. He opened it at the bookmark. John had written down the margin: 'Wonderful golden orioles singing at La Comte. April '17.' The page showed a plump, bright-yellow bird with the caption
'Oriolus oriolus'.

'He and my father loved birds,' Mary said, as she handed him three more volumes. 'Heads in the air—birds and stars—both of them.'

On top was a well-worn copy of
The Iliad.
Laurence remembered struggling through it at school. He put the other books on the bed and opened the Homer. Sure enough, it was inscribed:
John Christopher Rawlston Emmett, College House.
He reached for a small anthology with a cover in pristine khaki. He thought every soldier had been given a copy on embarkation to France. It was titled
Spirit of War,
a collection of stirring works for impressionable young men. He exchanged it briefly for Browning's
The Ring and the Book.
Mary handed him a book in a brown slipcover. Taking it from her, he read the cover: Karl Marx,
Das Kapital.
He prised apart the curled-up page corners and stared at the mystery of dense Gothic script.

Mary had pulled some notebooks from under the remaining contents. The first was a mixture of sketches, poems and bits of prose. Here and there a cutting had been stuck in. She tipped a page towards him: it was a charcoal drawing of the old Suffolk house. The second book was smaller and the writing in it more cramped; following round the bottom margins of pages and up the sides.

Mary stood close to him and turned the pages slowly. There were sketches of infantrymen in a camp lying propped up with mugs of tea, and then one of a young soldier enveloped in a waterproof cape and huddled behind sandbags. They were awfully good, Laurence thought; the sense of relentless rain was invoked with a few pencil strokes. The whole of the next page was a half-finished portrait of a nurse sitting by an oil lamp, its light accentuating her bone structure. Mary handed the open book to him. He turned the page again. On the left was a studio photograph: French undoubtedly—he had seen hundreds like it—of a solid young woman, posed naked but for her hat and boots. Her hands were clasped behind her neck, the hair under her arms and between her legs was as dark and thick as that under her hat. Laurence looked up sharply but Mary was absorbed in the earlier notebook.

There were two poems on the following page. They both had the same title, 'A Lament'. The first, a sonnet, had the initials JCRE underneath. He remembered John's poem he'd read in the newspaper. This one was better, he thought. The second poem, although also handwritten, had been pasted in; the writing was quite different. It was signed 'Sisyphus'. It was long, with no real structure and incomplete sentences, yet its words painted a picture that brought the combined sensations and sounds of warfare back to Laurence so strongly that he found himself gripping the book tightly. The strange fragments summoned up the inescapable proximity to others and the simultaneous loneliness of life near the front line, of profound bonds between men dependent on each other, yet having perhaps to pass by the same men lying dead in some muddy defile.

Laurence wondered why John had stuck the poems in together. John's poem was highly competent, moving even, but diminished by the extraordinary quality of the unknown Sisyphus's work.

As Mary unlatched the trunk it emanated a faint and disconcerting stale male scent: sweat, tobacco, hair oil and mothballs. The contents were somehow depressing: towels, a worn tartan blanket, some cheap blank writing paper and envelopes. A pair of indoor shoes in need of a polish and lovat bedroom slippers lay over a couple of folded newspapers, presumably there to protect the clothes from the shoes. He picked up the top paper; it was dated the previous November. The front page had a grainy picture of the train bearing the Unknown Warrior arriving at Victoria Station. Under the slightly damp newspapers was a layer of clothing: much-washed vests, long johns and a box of collars. An army greatcoat lay under a thick navy comforter of the sort Laurence remembered well, knitted by mothers, aunts and wives who had always believed that a chill on the chest was the most formidable enemy of all.

There were four unframed photographs tucked between layers of clothes. The first was of John's father standing outside Colston House with his dog and a shotgun. The next was a studio portrait of a very young John, and Mary younger still, posed in a big chair. Some glue and a torn bit of dark paper remained on the reverse, so it had presumably been taken from an album. The third surprised him; he recognised himself, Lionel, Rupert and Charles in stiff collars and dark jackets, posing for the shot. The fourth was small: a little boy in a sailor suit with dark hair and eyes who he guessed was John. He was disconcerted to find John had held such attachments to the past and felt a momentary discomfort at revealing the inner life of such a private man.

'But this is what I wanted to show you.'

Mary pulled out a lined schoolbook. Again she opened it and handed it to Laurence. There were fewer words than in the earlier books, large, single ones or short phrases scrawled across the page. One read
Göttes Mühle mahle langsam, mahle aber trefflich klein,
but he had no idea what it meant.