The Return of Captain John Emmett (42 page)

'Harry,' the man said.

Suddenly Laurence realised with astonishment that he had seen the man before him at Charles's club. He was the man pictured in the articles Brabourne had given him. It was General Gerald Somers.

Laurence was briefly puzzled but then understood. Somers was already investigating executions during the Great War. If Gwen Lovell's son
had
been shot, then there was a logical reason why Somers was here. Laurence's anxiety receded. Mrs Lovell was no killer.

'If I'd known Mrs Lovell's son...' Laurence started. Somers began to speak almost as if he hadn't heard him.

'Sit down, Mr Bartram. You see, I know who you are and why you are here and now you know why I am here. Or, if you do not, I shall tell you.' He indicated a chair at right angles to Gwen Lovell and then sat down himself.

Somers started to speak a few times and then stopped, not as if he was nervous but as if he didn't know where to embark on his story. When he did so, it was neither with the official inquiry nor with Edmund Hart, but with his own eldest son.

'When Hugh died—in the family tradition he was a career officer—it was quite early on, February 1915,' said Somers. 'Extraordinary to think of it, but we didn't then know a great many families who had lost sons.

'I never saw my wife weep. She acted on instinct. It helped her, perhaps. She wrote her black-bordered letters. Ordered her mourning from Peter Robinson. She remained, head to toe, in deepest black, just as her mother or grandmother might have done. She was a figure in a landscape that had become history and she was left stranded, nowhere. Then, I think, she realised everything had changed. It seemed almost greedy to claim so much visible grief just for oneself. So with exquisite mistiming she found herself setting aside her Victorian veils and her crape just as every collier's wife was clutching at a worn black shawl. After 1916, mourning became a way of life.'

Somers paused and looked towards the window. 'She never spoke of Hugh again. All pictures of him disappeared. She refused to engage in any discussion about him. It was hopeless. Impossible. I never knew what became of his possessions. When Miles, my younger son, came home on leave, he was furious about this and would try to force Marjorie—my wife—to acknowledge Hugh's life and death, but she would simply leave the room. Miles and I would talk of him late at night—in low voices as if he'd done something unspeakable.

'And yet she had been—we all had been—so proud of Hugh: a handsome young man, our brave boy. How naive we were. Now he was buried in another country and even more deeply in our memory. Neither place was to be revisited. The care with which we negotiated our daily conversation in order to expunge Hugh eventually caused any real communication between us to cease altogether.

'Then when Miles was lost, there wasn't even a body. Suddenly the circumstances of Hugh's death seemed almost luxurious. Somebody had seen him and handled him, laid him down and read prayers over him. He had a grave.'

Somers got up, walked to the window and gazed out.

'"Missing, presumed killed in action". My wife didn't hold out hope, as some mothers did, that our son would be found. I think she felt a degree of contempt for me as I tried to extract from the War Office information they didn't have, trying to raise the dead. For her it was over. She had no sons left. No children. More picture frames vanished. With Miles gone, I lost my last link with Hugh. Yet, unlike her and unbeknown to her, I had one son left, whom I had betrayed many years earlier and whom I could hardly claim now. Harry Hart was my son, Mr Bartram. Harry Hart should have been Harry Somers.'

Somers had returned to stand behind Gwen Lovell, his fingertips on her shoulders.

'You didn't realise?' Somers was saying to Laurence. 'About Harry? I've known Gwen for twenty-five years. Gwen should have been my wife—if I had not been a coward and a scoundrel. I met her when she was nineteen. Innocent, sweet, with all her life before her. I was already a cavalry major. Family tradition. I was keen on tradition then. Went to Berlin with some chaps in the regiment and one took me to hear Gwen sing. She captured my heart.'

His face softened.

'I went to her dressing room with my friend. We had some champagne and lingered a bit that evening. She was amusing, gentle, kind—and her voice was lovely.' He looked happy, remembering it. 'I wanted to see her again. On my own.'

Gwen tipped her head back to look at him.

'I didn't want to seem like some stage-door Johnny so I just took her for tea and for walks in Babelsberg Park. The next year I went back. One hot May day I bought her a yellow parasol and we took a boat on the Havel. I could see she was fond of me. Although the relationship was still just a friendship, I had to tell her that I was engaged to be married. The terrible thing was that she had never entertained any thought of us having a future together; not because of a betrothal she hadn't even known about but because she assumed a man like me would never have serious intentions about a girl like her. I was ashamed when she told me.'

Gwen shook her head again.

'But we carried on, by letter, through visits, for weeks, months, a year. Mine was a lonely sort of marriage even before we lost our boys. Gwen had a Welsh mother; I had had an Austrian nursemaid. We corresponded in both languages. Time passed. Eventually things changed. Her father died. She came to London. We became much closer.'

He looked down at his lover but she was gazing at her hands. Laurence stayed silent, not wanting to interrupt the flow of speech.

'I set her up in a tiny flat. It was a compromise. I hoped she knew I loved her as she did me. But just when I thought we were most happy, Gwen decided to end our relationship. She wouldn't explain why. I was upset and angry—though I had no right to be. She went abroad. Within the next year or so trouble flared up in Africa. I finally left England with my regiment in 1899. I was worried about how she would manage. I'd been helping her financially. I wrote to her, care of her father. She never answered. When I returned in 1902, I heard that Gwen had managed fine: she'd returned to the concert hall and was engaged to be married to a widower.'

He drew breath and looked down at Gwen for a few seconds.

'I went back to the formalities of my marriage and the compensation of my sons. I thought of Gwen every day: what she'd think or say. Things that would amuse her. It wasn't until a year or so later that I was walking up Piccadilly and bumped into a friend of hers, a fellow musician. Of course, I asked how Gwen was. Her friend said she was back in London and the marriage was a success, but the husband was not in the best of health. Although he had not adopted her child, he took good care of both him and Gwen. I was reeling. The friend was talking as if I knew all about the situation. I don't know what I said then but I managed to extricate Gwen's address with a plausible story and wrote to her the following day.'

He smiled again.

'And so I discovered that the dear girl had ended the relationship because she was expecting Harry and didn't want me to feel obliged to her in any way. That was how much she loved me. When Mr Lovell offered to marry her, she accepted. Harry's name remained her maiden name—Hart. She told her husband that the man who had fathered her boy was from Germany and was dead.

'Which I might as well have been. I made contact with Gwen and from then on she kept me in touch with his progress as a child, and then as a schoolboy. I stayed away as she asked—she had a daughter by then—though over the years I saw the boy from time to time from a distance. He was musical, like Gwen, and I would attend his concerts, but I never made myself known. Gwen was not prepared to tell him his real father had risen from the dead and was a married man. Understandably.'

Laurence glanced at Mrs Lovell, whose intense gaze was now fixed, unmoving, on the general.

'And then came the war,' said Somers. 'Harry failed to get a commission in his first attempt. Gwen was sensitive to questions about his background, so I wrote on his behalf, saying I was the boy's godfather. I succeeded: he was commissioned three months after his eighteenth birthday, despite his German roots. Despite his lack of a father on his birth certificate. Not in the best of regiments, not like Hugh and Miles, but, as it turned out, fighting on the same blasted river plain. The same gas, the same wire, the same guns. The same rudimentary justice. The same muddy graves.'

'He joined the moment he could,' Mrs Lovell said, softly but firmly. 'He hated the idea of war but he wanted to do his bit.'

The light was starting to go, yet it was impossible to leave. Somers took his hands off Gwen's shoulders; he had evidently not finished unburdening himself.

'Might I speak to Captain Bartram alone, do you think?'

'Of course,' she said, although her eyes stayed on his face while she rose from the chair. Laurence heard her footsteps as she went slowly down the hall, followed by the muffled bang of a door shutting. Then silence. Somers hardly seemed to have noticed her going.

'Suddenly, Gwen asked to meet me. She had never asked me to leave my wife's side, even for an hour. She had borne Harry alone and she was alone in bearing the knowledge of his death. She had been so patient, so undemanding, for years. She was as she had always been: a good woman.'

Laurence had a sudden vision of Louise, curled up in bed with her back to him, more like a child than a wife despite being five months pregnant. She was soft and relaxed, trying to get him to discuss choices of names for their unborn child before he left for France. Her hair had been in a loose plait and stray strands had tickled his nose. He thought what single word he would use to sum her up. She was not what Somers might call a good woman. Nor was she undemanding. She was, he realised with an unexpected lurch of loss, sweet. Just a sweet girl.

'Yet when I went to see her,' Somers said, 'and she told me that Harry, my only remaining son, was dead, it felt like a kind of justice. For a moment it seemed reasonable that
I
should suffer. What incredible selfishness, eh, Bartram? Three boys gone, the two women who had borne me sons both dismantled by loss, and I could think only that some celestial justice had been meted out to
me
.'

Somers got up again and walked about; he had the very slightest limp. The room seemed hardly large enough to contain the two of them and all the ghosts of the dead.

'Over the next few months there were things Gwen could not understand. The telegram notifying her of Harry's death had no details beyond the location where he'd died and it had initially gone to the address where they lived when Harry enlisted. His effects were eventually returned to her and a slightly strange letter followed from him, written shortly before his death, saying he was in a "spot of trouble" but she was not to worry. There was no subsequent letter from his CO or the adjutant. She wrote to the War Office after a while, yet received the reply only that they would forward her further details of his death once they had them.

'More months passed and no pension was forthcoming. It struck her as odd but she was always rather diffident with authority, perhaps because she was part German, and Mr Lovell had left her a little and I was happy to support her. But she asked me to see if I could use my contacts to find out anything about our boy's death. She didn't even know where he was buried.

'It took me a little longer than I had expected to find out the truth, though I already had a bad feeling about the whole business. Harry should never have been a soldier. Hugh, Miles—were different sort of men—sportsmen, confident, forceful.' Somers continued, his voice low, 'But Harry was too sensitive, too imaginative. Always had been. More like his mother than me. He could sing. Was a chorister at St Paul's. I went to hear him a couple of times, although I never told Gwen.'

His eyes flickered downwards.

'She was so generous about describing his life without ever expecting me to share it. He was like her in so many ways. He could write; he produced a libretto while he was still at school. Poetry, too. It was fine stuff.'

Laurence, observing him closely, saw a muscle in his cheek twitch.

'Not just a father's pride...' Somers faltered.

At last Laurence spoke. 'I know,' he said. 'I read some of his work once.'

It seemed years rather than months since he had stood next to Mary in the Emmetts' attic room and first read the young poet's work.

Somers blinked. He looked surprised, then resumed speaking almost immediately.

'The war took my boys and then the influenza took Marjorie. Which was a mercy, I think. She had no wish to live, as far as I could tell, and the illness was shockingly quick. But the effect of seeing my whole family vanish in four years slowed me down and I took too much time in pressing for the truth about what had happened to Harry. Perhaps I was putting off the day when I would acquire unendurable knowledge.

'The truth was told to me in a room in Whitehall on a fine summer's day. I doubt the civil servant who eventually communicated Harry's ignoble end believed a word of the story I had concocted.

'After I left Whitehall, I walked down Horse Guards to St James's Park. I sat on a bench and watched a mother with her little boy, throwing bread for the pigeons, and he was laughing and running up and down, and suddenly I was aware of the most tremendous rage. Not sorrow—I was past all that, except in anticipating Gwen's reaction to my news—but fury. Rage at my country, which I had served with pride and to the best of my ability; which had demanded my sons' service and seen all three of them act, I truly believe, to the best of their ability. Two had been taken from me in circumstances beyond anybody's control but Harry had been taken, from Gwen and from me and from his own future, by his country.
My
country. Quite deliberately. He was shot by men who had served under him. They'd buried him perfunctorily—the battalion was moving on—and, in the resulting mêlée, even the exact location of his grave was lost.

'On leaving, I had said to this young mandarin, comfortable in his pleasant office with its views of the park, that in the conditions that prevailed at the time, and given both Harry's length of service and his youth, I felt it was quite possible still to say to his mother that he had served his country. He answered, sombrely, but evidently thinking I was deluded, "You may say whatever you feel will comfort the lady, but I fear the truth is that this officer died failing to do his duty and, indeed, putting the lives of his men at great risk."'