The Return of Captain John Emmett (11 page)

'Hello,' she said evenly, putting the book to one side.

Eleanor didn't seem a person for light chatter or any degree of deception, so he simply expanded on the explanation in his letter and the need to fabricate a medical history for a mythical brother. But first he told her what he knew of John's deterioration once he got home. It seemed only fair. He explained Mary Emmett's fear that her brother had been mistreated at Holmwood and added some of the ideas he'd had about John's death.

For a few seconds her face showed no discernible emotion. Then she said, simply, 'I don't doubt she's right. There are far too many greedy, amoral people taking advantage of sick men and of their families, who are bankrupting themselves to have their loved ones looked after. Or,' she added darkly, 'so they believe. I've heard about a couple of such places. Something should be done about them. This government should do right by ordinary people. We should have a different sort of politics now that everything's changed so much. We shouldn't be trying to do things the same way, which ended up killing and mutilating half the men in Europe.'

She paused just long enough for Laurence to signal a waitress. Her pale, creamy skin was flushed.

'Did you ever read any of John Emmett's poetry?' she asked abruptly.

Laurence's heart sank. He didn't want any diversion at this point. 'Not really. Only the one that was published in the paper.'

'Do you like poetry?'

'Yes. Some of it, anyway,' Laurence said, hoping she wouldn't ask him to explain which bits.

'Well, John's poems, his early ones, were very much a young man's work: pretty pastoral scenes usually with a pretty Dresden shepherdess: his little Minna, sitting in them.'

'Minna?'

'His fiancee. He was engaged to be married in about 1912, I think. She was a German girl. She died. When he talked about her I always felt it was Goethe and Schiller and Schubert he'd really fallen in love with.' She was silent for a second. 'Didn't you know about Minna?'

'Mary Emmett told me but I'd forgotten her name.' He was trying to calibrate the extent of Eleanor Bolitho's knowledge of John Emmett. He'd previously assumed a very slight relationship.

'And now you're also wondering how I knew so much about John?' she asked, in a slightly teasing tone and looking him straight in the eye.

'Yes.'

'And about poetry?'

He smiled.

'Well, the answer to the second question is that before the war broke out I was reading English at Cambridge—at Girton College. We couldn't graduate but we could study. I wanted to be a teacher. But circumstances changed,' she paused, 'and I became a nurse. Which has been a more useful skill, as it turned out.'

She breathed in deeply.

'The answer to the first question is that when John came into my field hospital, it was all very quiet; lovely, very early summer weather, I remember. Beds made, bandages rolled, shrouds waiting, quarts of iodine and carbolic acid and chloroform, but no patients. Not yet. We had half a dozen soldiers plus two young officers who were ill rather than injured. One had jaundice, I think. And a Canadian major who'd been kicked by a horse. We were waiting for the big push. It was uncannily quiet, in fact. Quite eerie in its way. Not far from the hospital Irish soldiers were digging pits, great long graves, for all the dead they were expecting. The other nurses and I kept taking water out to the men; they were in surprisingly good spirits, standing there cracking jokes while up to their knees in earth amid a sweep of grass and wild oats. Anyway, John was brought in from his regimental aid post one afternoon; he'd been injured in an accident. He had various middling injuries. But he seemed quite shocked and had bad flank pain. By the next day he started bleeding quite heavily from a kidney, so we kept him in.'

And your husband was brought in then too?' Laurence added.

'Good heavens, no, this was much earlier than that. I met William when he was fighting for his life. No, there was just John and the three others. They were the only officers.'

'Can you remember what the major's name was?' asked Laurence.

'No,' she said. 'I haven't a clue. I'm sure they didn't know each other beforehand, if that's what you're thinking, and the major was moved out in a day or so. The boys were just boys. They ate together and played draughts. Only John was there for any length of time.'

She stopped.

'The MO wondered, though only to me, whether John might be adding blood to his own urine. But we never confronted him.'

Laurence must have looked puzzled, because she added, 'He appeared to be bleeding from his kidneys, but the blood could have come from anywhere.'

'You mean he was faking it?' Despite himself, he was shocked.

'Faking the degree of visible damage? Possibly. But not faking the fact he was hurt or needed care.

'After a couple of weeks things heated up and he was sent back home, lucky man. The injury had saved him. The mass graves were filled and overfilled, but he wasn't there. But when he was there and when nobody else was,' her voice dropped a little, 'I was on night duty and he couldn't sleep. The trench collapse had really rattled him.'

'Being trapped,' said Laurence.

She nodded. 'In those circumstances you get to know a man quite well.' She looked sad.

'You were saying about his poetry?' Laurence said, remembering the limits on her time and that he
had
once seen another poem of John's—when he was in Cambridge with Mary.

'All I was going to say was that after John was injured, he stopped,' she said briskly. 'Writing poems. He said it had gone. He said he had been a minor poet at best and now not even minor. It wasn't true but it's what he felt.' She hesitated. 'They were all in touch with each other,' she went on after a while, 'the would-be poets—and there was a sort of magazine he put together, even after he stopped writing himself. It had all kinds of stuff in it. Some was pretty awful, to be honest, but John said it didn't matter if it helped people to stay sane. One or two were marvellous. I remember him reading some to me. It was very late at night and warm. We had the windows wide open and you could smell the countryside. In all that misery, it was a single perfect hour.'

Laurence watched her face. She had been in love with John Emmett, he thought.

'Can you remember any of their names?' he asked.

'Most of the ones I read had pen-names. Some of their subjects were pretty strong, not likely to go down well with the general staff. And he wasn't supposed to circulate poetry, not poetry like that. You weren't really even supposed to keep diaries were you? Though I imagine that was honoured more in the breach than the observance, as they say. John said he knew who most of the poets were but nobody else did.'

Laurence suddenly remembered the other poem he'd read from John Emmett's trunk in Cambridge.

'The name Sisyphus doesn't ring any bells, does it?'

'The man in the myth doomed to push a boulder up a hill for ever?'

Laurence nodded.

She paused. 'Yes, there
was
a Sisyphus. I'd have forgotten except that, much later, John showed me a couple of his and asked what I thought of them. They were really, really good. But I've no idea who Sisyphus was in real life.'

'So, how did you come to know that John had other troubles? Neurasthenia?'

'Well, I saw him a second time. The last winter of the war. He was admitted in a state of collapse: congested lungs, a fever, but more than that. He was a broken man, much worse than before. He scarcely spoke. He couldn't sleep. He had nightmares if he did. He had black moods. Just right at the end he started to improve a little. He came out for walks despite the cold.' A ghost of a smile flickered and was gone. 'But it didn't last. I suppose, looking back on it, the strange business of his paralysed arm was part of it.'

'Paralysed arm?' Laurence was puzzled.

'Yes. Towards the end of this second stay, he began to lose the power of his right arm. He said he'd had pins and needles and weakness since the earlier trench accident and then, suddenly, he couldn't use it at all. He couldn't write properly, do up buttons, cut with a knife: all those kinds of things. Major Fortune tried the usual tests: skin pricks, offering him a glass of water and so on, seeing which hand he used if he was caught by surprise, but he was consistent; his hand hung useless at his side. They decided it didn't matter as he was going home anyway. It was going to be someone else's problem.'

She stopped quite suddenly and then looked at her watch.

'So,' she went on, 'we could use some of that for your fictitious patient. You could say to the Holmwood people that your brother is presenting with hysterical conversion—that's the proper name for John's arm problem—plus insomnia, sudden alteration in mood and feelings of guilt after this head injury; they're classic symptoms.'

Laurence stopped her. 'Would you mind if I wrote this down?' he said. As he scrawled on another piece of paper, he looked up at her; she looked much more cheerful and seemed almost to be enjoying the fiction.

'Say it seems obvious that he'll always be an invalid. They'll like that if they're dishonest: the thought that they might keep him and his pension for ever.' She attempted a scowl. 'You could say he has mostly refused medical help until now. That might help explain the lack of a medical report, and emphasise that he generally had a bad war. You men like those sort of euphemisms. And you can say that poor Dr Fortune—the MO at our field hospital—died last year.'

Laurence raised his eyebrows.

'Heart attack at work,' she said. 'Unjust after all he'd been through. Though you could make up a few horror stories from your own experience, no doubt.'

'I was quite lucky actually,' said Laurence, quickly. 'Nothing really terrible ever happened to me. Nothing especially bad. Not to me personally.'

Eleanor looked at him for a long time. He felt uneasy under her gaze.

'Didn't it?' she said finally.

They sat over the table for another half an hour or so while he scribbled notes. She even suggested that he give her name to Dr Chilvers. She had at least been John's nurse and she was prepared to blur the time and place where she had looked after her patient.

'Anything to make life a bit more difficult for these charlatans,' she said. 'They should be struck off. If they're real doctors to start with,' she added portentously. Laurence thought that Eleanor made an impressive enemy but he didn't want her to see that he was amused.

At four, just as she had warned she must, Eleanor rose to leave. As she was pushing her chair back, he suddenly thought of something else.

'Do you know whereabouts in Bavaria Minna came from?' he asked. 'Does Coburg ring a bell?'

'Sorry,' she said, shaking her head. 'I don't think I ever knew.'

'Did you know her full name?'

'No. He didn't talk much about her. Not to me. Though I think her first name was really Wilhelmina. She had an older brother; I do remember that.'

'Did you see John again?' Laurence asked as he helped her on with her coat. 'After the war?'

'No,' she said. 'No. I married not so long after the war ended. But we kept in touch by letter from time to time. I liked him. He was special. And very alone.'

'I suppose John had a pen-name too?' he said, just as they reached the door. Why the hell hadn't he got his ideas together until she was on the point of leaving?

She thought for a while. 'It was Charon,' she said rather sadly. 'The bearer of the dead.'

There were two letters waiting for him when he returned home. He tore open the one from Mary as he walked upstairs. Out fell two photographs. One was a cheerful portrait of John in a rowing vest, taken at Oxford, he guessed. The other was of the group of soldiers; the picture he'd seen that day in Cambridge. Even allowing for the fact it was of poor quality, there was something grim and defeated about the men. He picked up the letter.

Dear Laurence,

It goes without saying that the happy photograph is precious to me. John never looked so carefree after he returned from France.

I am sorry I've been slow to write—I've been quite busy and my mother has been unwell. It occurred to me that I know so little about you, although talking to you helped me. You have a skill for understanding—maybe because you are a writer.

Perhaps we could meet once you have been to Holmwood? The set-up there is not quite what it seems, I think. But I don't want to influence you.

Yours,
Mary

Laurence was still sufficiently objective to recognise that she was being disingenuous in the last sentence. Nor was research into Norman architecture likely to fit anyone for insights into the human condition. Still, he wondered whether he might bring Mary back to his rooms one day. What would she think of it? The rooms were well proportioned, and she would like the views over London. He opened the piano lid and pressed a key; it reverberated endlessly. God knows when it had last been tuned. It had been Louise's pride and joy; in the end it was the only thing of hers he could not face putting in a sale. The piano stool was covered with a worn tapestry of a horn of plenty, embroidered by his mother.

The bedroom, on the north-east corner of the building, was always colder than the other rooms and tonight the wind was wailing round the corner of the building. He felt suddenly despondent; his reactions were those of a boy, not of a man, a former soldier and a widower. Underneath his romantic fantasies he recognised a much darker physical desire for her. It had first swept over him when Charles had implied that she was not the innocent girl he had taken her to be. Surprised by the knowledge of her passionate affair, he had also been aroused by it, as well as the fact that, unknown to her, he possessed this piece of her secret self. He lay there in his chilly bed, remembering what it felt like to have a woman beside him, her naked legs against his where her nightgown had ridden up, her back curved into him and his arms around her warmth.