The Return of Captain John Emmett (47 page)

'And then what?'

'He said he dreamed of taking Gwen and Catherine Lovell abroad to start a new life. But I don't think he believed it really.'

'And all for revenge,' she said.

Laurence was silent. As well as vengeance, John's death and the pattern of his own life were simply about fathers and sons, and the struggle to make things right.

He looked at Mary. Quite late on, he'd grasped that her real question all along, even if she had never known it herself, had been why her brother had rejected her. He had an unequivocal answer to that now: her father was not who she believed him to be and, to the young and imaginative John, she was the living proof of his mother's infidelity. It was an answer he could never give her.

Instead he said, 'I hope you'll meet Eleanor Bolitho. I think you'd like her and she could tell you much more than I can about John. She looked after him during the war and even when he was really unhappy, quite cut off from the world, she cared for him.'

He was sure Mary would realise the truth about Nicholas Bolitho as soon as she set eyes on the child, but thought Eleanor would eventually tell her everything. The likeness between the little boy and John was remarkable.

Laurence thought of his own father. He couldn't remember his voice or his face, just his singing in the bath and his strong, square hands. Strangely, he could recall Mr Emmett more clearly. The affable smile, the absent-minded pats as he passed by; the sudden appearances and disappearances always with a dog or two beside him; the nightly toast to the survivors of Omdurman, at which they had all giggled.

He must have smiled at the memory because Mary asked, 'What are you thinking about?'

'Nothing. Vague memories. Your father, funnily enough.'

Something was bothering her, he could tell. Finally she said, 'John's willingness—his need—to give General Somers every last detail of the execution: the names of those involved, the circumstances, grim as they were. It probably sealed the fate of all of them, I suppose?' There was something in the tone of Mary's voice that made him think she hoped for contradiction.

'I think John's way out of despair was scrupulous honesty,' he said. 'He needed to make his peace. He could hardly guess that Somers was using his list to conduct his own war. He wasn't just speaking to a very eminent and much more senior military man, but one who had an official role, assisting a parliamentary committee. He also thought he was bringing some sort of help to Hart's mother.'

Suddenly he thought back to Somers' last conversation with him. 'You know, I think John held back on telling him of Hart's last words. Somers had told John he was Hart's father but that the boy never knew him. To discover his son knew who he was all the time and believed he'd be ashamed of him, would have been too terrible to bear. John told Somers that Hart was incoherent after the first volley. It must have been one of the few times John evaded the truth.'

Mary's face cleared a little. 'I'm glad,' she said.

Within minutes they had turned off into a village. Thatched cottages bordered the main street, with a small brook on one side. After they passed a couple of larger red-brick houses, the village petered out by a flint-and-stone church and a field gate. Laurence guessed the small church to be very old, possibly twelfth century. His eye was taken by the vast, white-chalk figure that rose up in front of them, dominating the grassy hillside above the church.

'The Long Man,' Mary said with almost proprietorial pride.

The outline, clutching a stave in each hand, was obviously pagan in design and spirit. Laurence's spirits lifted. God knows how old the figure was, or what it meant to its creators, but undoubtedly it had stood on its hillside for millennia and would stand there long after they and their strange world were reduced to dust. He found the prospect of his own irrelevance comforting.

They left the car and walked across the churchyard in which grew a yew, also of great age, its wide branches propped on wooden supports. He could see why Mary liked this place. Ahead of them lay a medieval building with a long barn at an angle. As a dark figure carrying a box across the courtyard drew closer, he saw to his astonishment that it appeared to be a nun.

'Wilmington Priory. It's a nursing order,' Mary said. They crunched across the gravel and he prepared himself for the explanation that he sensed would follow.

'The thing is,' she said very slowly, 'that when I told you Richard was lost, I meant lost. It wasn't a euphemism. He isn't dead, you see. Not really.'

Instantly Laurence felt his hair prick on the back of his neck. Mary pulled on a metal boss next to a studded wooden door, silver-grey with age, and waited. The door was opened by another nun. She left them in a dark hall, whose only ornamentation was a black oak table, two upright chairs and four religious paintings.

'Everything I told you—how he was injured—was all true.'

As she spoke, Mary wouldn't look at him.

'In a sense he died the minute the shrapnel hit him, but although his injuries were terrible, he survived.'

Finally her eyes moved, almost pleading, to Laurence's.

'He was brought back to England. It became obvious that he would live, but also obvious that he would never be able to do anything for himself. The damage to his brain was never going to heal. He was a child. An infant. He knew no one and nothing, he could not move. He—' She paused. 'He even has to wear baby napkins. So he
was
lost, you see—the man he was, the man I'd loved. He came here and here he will stay for the rest of his life. He will never walk, will never see his lovely Downs or winter seas again. A few friends come from time to time, but less and less often. His doctor is an immensely kind, wise man. It's his car, actually. I bumped into him at the concert we went to. I thought you'd seen us talking together; I wanted to explain but to start to tell you the whole story was too much then. I didn't know you well enough and I wanted you to like me, and the alternative was to lie, which I didn't want.'

He stroked her arm. 'It's all right.'

'As for his wife, despite her scruples before, she eventually divorced him and married her lover. I would have married Richard then, even as he is,
especially
as he is, but legally he can't make the vows. She can divorce him, but I can't marry him unilaterally. Besides, he has no idea who I am.'

She looked at Laurence and shrugged.

'So that's that.'

He removed his hand as an older nun, wearing a white apron, came into view and beckoned them to follow her. They went up a shallow flight of black oak stairs and turned into a long dormitory. The first thing Laurence noticed were the large Gothic windows, which filled the long room with light. The views over the hill and past the Long Man in all his vigour were superb. The second thing he noticed was the row of beds and the peace. Younger nuns in slightly different habits attended the patients. One man groaned as two nuns turned him from his back on to his side. The occupant of the bed nearest the door lay on his back, one eye half open, his hands moving jerkily under the sheets. A shining line of saliva ran down his chin. Laurence looked away, feeling embarrassed.

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. Finally 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 pillows. 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 well, 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 fell 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 tells me they've had a wonderful year for roses—most of them still 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, finally. 'I'll 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 followed.

'Then there was a fire. Some mischief by local lads.' She wrapped her arms about herself. 'Not that he will 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 full of colour. St Francis stood among butterflies and birds, all 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 ... Well, 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 killed 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 well 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 occasionally 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 William 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 ill 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. Finally he said, 'I was never sure whether I loved her, you see, so I couldn't really 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 belly.

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

'There was an attack in France, you see.' He stopped, then started again. 'Well, 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 really like that; there were all-out attacks and unexpected skirmishes, and they all 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 all 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 welled up. The darkness of the hours before morning. The discomfort, the cold and the insomnia.