The Return of Captain John Emmett (23 page)

They looked at each other.

'It's nice, isn't it?' said Mary, hopefully.

Laurence, lost in the last sentence, was startled for a second but realised she meant the birdwatching. It was true, he could feel John's old enthusiasm. The quote was Edward Thomas, he thought. This was the first he'd seen of a John he recognised in anything he'd heard about him since the war. It went a small way to dispelling the image of him as just an angry and unstable officer. Nor had he been alone, from the sound of it. Could his timid companion, frightened by birds of prey, have been the fragile Mrs George Chilvers, he wondered?

'But who do you think wrote this?' he asked, pointing to the foot of the page.

'Well, I assumed it was
about
the younger Chilvers. Not an actual bird, obviously. I suppose it could be anybody. Briefly I thought it might be John writing about himself; it has his sort of wit, and even calling himself a coward ... but nothing else fits. He was never puffed up and couldn't give an earthly for money. He worried about my father when Daddy kept putting too much on the horses—Daddy was a bit of an optimist where racing was concerned and our mother used to rage at him—but I don't think he was happy when he discovered that my maternal grandparents' wealth had always been entailed to him.'

Laurence mentally ticked off one question: which was how John had had any money to leave Bolitho and Mrs Lovell, and how the Emmetts came by their current house. Had John got everything simply because he was the male heir, he wondered?

'And the bottom bit's not John's writing,' she said. 'He had to use his left hand because his right was paralysed. And all those tails like umbrella handles on the Ys, not him. If not Mrs Chilvers, another inmate, perhaps?'

Even as she spoke, Laurence felt certain the unknown companion must have been Eleanor but he didn't want to raise this with Mary yet.

'A disaffected member of staff?' she suggested. 'And it could be
about
anybody. But my money's on Chilvers. Did you see the man's driving gloves?'

'What were they?' John asked, trying to sound light-hearted and disguise his discomfort at withholding information. 'Mink, studded with emeralds, or spiked metal gauntlets to incapacitate any motorist who impedes his way?'

'Well, nearer the mink. Bright-yellow kid, fine and soft. Must have cost a fortune. I know because when we met, he had just got out of that car of his and rather creepily he shook hands—well, he squeezed hands—without taking them off. It was like warm loose skin against my own flesh. Disgusting. Had his poor wife with him. Like a mannequin. All the latest fashions—French probably. Perfect hair. Perfect marcasite earrings. Enviable hat. Well, I was envious. Fox stole. Just the thing for a madhouse in some rural back of beyond.'

She stopped and seemed to consider what she'd said.

'Poor woman. She didn't say a word and he didn't introduce us. A life sentence, however many hats.'

'Rumour has it, she was the one with hats in the first place. It's he who wasn't in gloves until she came along.'

Mary summoned a half-hearted expression of scorn, but she was focused on pulling a pamphlet out of the manila envelope. It was poor-quality paper that had obviously been rolled up at some time. She tried to smooth it out on the table, weighing down one end with the sugar bowl. The front cover had an ink drawing of a cluster of stars and across it, in what might almost have been potato print, the word
Constellations.
Inside the front cover was a short typed paragraph, signed only: Charon. He read it.

'Read, stranger, passing by. Here disobedient to their laws, we cry. 1916.'

The epigraph echoed something he knew from school. Ancient Greek, he thought, but the words were not quite right. He read on. The following pages were all typed poems. After a few pages he came to the one he'd seen scrawled in one of John's notebooks back in Cambridge. He turned it to show Mary. She nodded. 'That one again,' she said. '"Sisyphus".'

He read it for a second time. Its brilliance struck him, just as it had in the stuffy attic at the end of the summer. Once he had been an enthusiastic reader of poetry but since the war he had read very little. He found the best modern poets so disturbing that he was invariably left melancholic; the worst were excruciating lists of rhyming clichés. This poem, however, was beyond categorisation; there was a strangely mystical feel about it. He remembered reading Gerard Manley Hopkins at Oxford. This Sisyphus had the same mad beauty in his writing. Reality had all but disappeared and what was left was like the unease of a dream.

'I can't understand it,' said Mary. 'In fact the more I try, the less I succeed—but when I relax, I seem to absorb it. Or something...' She trailed off embarrassed and then said as if to defuse her emotional response, 'But it's bit affected, this pseudonym stuff. I mean, they're not boys in the classical sixth. Why can't they just use their initials if they're feeling coy? Anyway, if they'd put their names to them, they might be famous by now'

'They wouldn't risk it,' said Laurence. 'It had to be private unless it was frightfully gung-ho, our glorious dead, noble sacrifice sort of stuff. The one John had published earlier was just on the right side of the divide. But most were never intended for publication. Although this is obviously a bit more than the work of a few friends.'

He remembered what Eleanor Bolitho had told him about John publishing poetry, his own and others', and was certain this was the project she'd spoken of. Again, he felt forced to keep information back until he'd tried to speak to Eleanor but he felt fraudulent presenting knowledge as a conclusion.

'Someone's typed it, for a start; it's in semi-circulation, I think, and well before the war ended, judging by the date on the introduction.' He turned back a page. 'I mean, look at this one, it's not satire, it's simply contempt: "The pink brigadier lifts his snout from the swill." I don't think it would have advanced anybody's career.'

Opposite the farmyard ditty was a neat traditional poem. Unlike much of the poetry, this was oddly cheerful and complete. So many of the poems were raw and rough-edged. Yet here was a tidy pastoral sonnet. The work of an optimist or a blind man. Blue speedwell, bluer sky, skylarks, hawthorn after rain. Distant guns like summer thunder. Laurence rather liked it. The pen name was 'Hermes'.

'Hermes,' said Mary, 'the messenger.'

'The winged messenger,' said Laurence. 'And Sisyphus had a vast rock to roll uphill for ever, and Charon rowed the dead, of course.' He looked again at the page. 'Would you mind if I borrowed this?' he asked. 'I can see it's fragile but I'll be really careful.'

He gave her no reason. There was none beyond a wish to read it, at his leisure and unobserved.

'Have it all—everything—if it helps.'

He refilled Mary's cup with lukewarm tea. The waitress was outside, peering up the street. He could no longer put off recounting his interview with Byers. What he told Mary was pretty faithful to what he'd heard, though omitting the severed penis and the brains that had splattered on John's boot.

Nonetheless, when he had finished, her head was bowed. She was absolutely silent and then two tears dropped from the end of her nose on to the willow pattern of her plate. She rubbed her nose with her hand, rustling around in her bag and her pockets, apologising and sniffing, until Laurence found his own handkerchief, clean, even ironed. She dabbed rather ineffectually, then held it across her eyes, almost hiding behind it. Then she sat for a minute with the handkerchief screwed up in her hand and her hand bunched against her forehead. Eventually she took a deep, slightly uneven breath.

'I'm sure we could have helped if he'd spoken to us.' Her eyes filled with tears again.

'I think,' said Laurence very cautiously, 'that many men—just couldn't talk about things. It was as if once they put words to it, it would overwhelm them completely. And they didn't want to place that burden on people they loved. Couldn't.'

Mary sniffed but he thought it was an encouraging sniff.

'Even now, if I meet another man my sort of age, we know we probably share the same sort of memories; we don't discuss it but it's there between us. But with families there's a sort of innocence. It can be exasperating'—he thought back to Louise's patriotic certainties—'but sometimes it's easier to be with people who haven't been,' he searched for a word, 'corrupted,' he said finally. He knew that he had moved from the general to the particular, revealing himself more than he'd intended.

'But the price is that you'll always be alone,' Mary said heatedly. 'And a whole generation of women are excluded. Redundant. Irrelevant.'

Laurence nodded. He thought of Eleanor Bolitho and wondered how different it must be to be with a woman who had shared some of the horror.

'It's not fair. You don't give us a chance.' Mary's voice rose slightly.

'The man I was telling you about—Byers. He's not been married long. Yet he's never ever told his wife all this.'

'And perhaps Mrs Byers has lots of things she'd like to tell him. Of fear and loneliness and never knowing who was coming back or in what shape. Sitting. Waiting. Perhaps you should ask us whether we'd like to know? We're women, not children.'

'He means well ... he's trying to protect her.'

Mary snorted, or something like it. 'So from now on we conduct our relationships in a dense fog with areas marked
do not enter.
Brilliant, Laurence.'

He didn't know how to respond. He didn't want to tell her she had no idea. That he, at least,
couldn't
put the past into words, not that he wouldn't. His heart was beating erratically.

'So do you have secrets tucked away? Do
all
you men have secrets?' she asked almost angrily.

He wanted to say, 'Do you?' but instead he said, 'Yes, of course I do.' Then he found himself blurring his truth. 'Everybody has secret bits of their life, I suppose.' He tried to stop it sounding too much like an accusation.

She nodded almost imperceptibly, suddenly calmer. 'Was it all really, really awful? Out there?'

'No. Some of it was boring. Some of it was funny. Living in a cottage with two other subalterns and a French family: the mother giving birth noisily upstairs while we ate sausages and lentils. Some of it was plain ludicrous. There were two men in my platoon, and every time we seemed settled for more than a week, they'd start growing vegetables. And rhubarb. A year or so later we passed through the village again and the rhubarb was thriving—the only thing that was, amid the ruins. Nearly all of it was uncomfortable. Some people enjoyed bits of it, especially at first. My friend Charles; he was a natural. He was good at it. His men respected him. He liked his men. I liked mine. Most of them. But we both had an easy war compared with some.'

He had a sudden image of a soldier beaming at him. It was Pollock, the fat man, khaki uniform straining. There never was such a man for belching. He could do it to 'God Save the King'. The men counted on his last lucky belch each time they went over the top.

She sat quietly for a while, gazing at the closed pamphlet. Eventually she said, 'I'm glad in a way we have that list of bird-watching. That's a long time after the worst of it. So at least I know that he didn't always feel as wretched and raging as he was when he came back. This,' she picked up the list, 'is a John I recognise. Look, he can even joke about not throwing himself in the river. He's simply glad to be alive. I think he is, at last, I really do.'

'Yes.' Strangely, his own reaction to glimpsing this hour of pleasure was sadness.

'But come the winter, it all goes wrong.'

He couldn't decide whether to tell her of his faint disquiet about John's death. What he and Charles might have found plausible after a good dinner was too far-fetched to be presented as real speculation, although it didn't really seem to make much difference. Mary had still lost her only brother. Unless you were a policeman, the need to reveal and avenge murder was reduced almost to a philosophical enquiry after the losses of the last years.

While Laurence was mulling over Tucker's intentions and paying the bill, Mary's mood seemed to shift. She took his arm as they walked into the street.

'Have you ever gone to the films? I suppose you have, living in London?'

Laurence shook his head. 'Not recently,' he said. The only films he'd seen were flickering newsreels at HQ. 'Would you like to, next time, perhaps?'

'I'd love that,' said Mary. 'I saw Lillian Gish a while back, in
The Greatest Thing in Life,
and she was beautiful and funny. Or we could go to a play?
Heartbreak House
might be more your thing. More serious.'

Laurence relaxed into Mary's easy assumption that she knew what he'd like. He clamped his arm down a little so that her hand was caught between his upper arm and his ribs. He looked sideways at her, half hidden under the rim of her dark-red hat. She returned his gaze, apparently amused.

When they arrived at the station, there was an unexpectedly large crowd by the platform. Laurence pushed himself to the front to speak to the stationmaster.

'No train,' he said when he'd fought his way back to her. 'There's been a landslip. Nothing until tomorrow. Do you want me to arrange for you to be put up at a hotel? Or can you go to your cousin?'

'My cousin's about to produce her fourth baby,' said Mary. 'I really don't think I could pitch up unannounced.'

To Laurence's relief she didn't look particularly bothered.

'Isn't your mother going to be worried?'

'No. She and Aunt Virginia are in Buxton. They're taking the waters in the hope it might help my mother's rheumatism.'

They had turned away from the platform. After a long silence, Mary said hurriedly, 'Look, would it be possible, say if it wouldn't, if I came back with you?' She looked slightly embarrassed.

'Yes. Of course. I just thought you wouldn't really want to. It's not terribly comfortable.' He was worrying that it might not be terribly clean, either.

'No, that's fine. More than fine. Anyway I'd love to see where you live. There's a limit to the appeal of teashops.'