The Return of Captain John Emmett

behind her.

'Look, I'm awfuly sorry to barge in like this,' Laurence said. 'It's obviously not convenient.'

'Not at al, Mr Bartram.' She sat down. 'It's perfectly convenient but I'm not sure how I can help you.'

'This is going to sound frightfuly rude, I'm afraid,' he began, 'but I represent the family of John Emmett. We, that is, they—his sister—gathered that John had left you a smal amount of money...'

A flush swept up her neck and face, and he regretted leaping in.

'But I never wanted the money. So much money. I never expected it. I never even knew about it until a letter came from a solicitor at the beginning of the summer.'

'No one has any problem at al with the bequest. Not at al.' Laurence spoke in what he hoped was a soothing voice. 'They were glad it had come to you,' he improvised.

Heaven knew what they actualy felt. He was embarrassed to see that she thought he was in some way attacking the propriety of it.

'It's just that John Emmett kiled himself. His family has very little idea why he did so. His mother's a widow. He has a sister. Forgive me; they just thought that you might have been a friend or the wife of a friend of his.' He didn't want to say outright that he'd just been told she too had lost a son. 'They never wanted to bother you.'

'Stil, I understand it no more than you, Mr Bartram,' she said. 'Until a year or so ago I had never heard of Captain Emmett. And then I received a letter from him. Just a few months later I hear that he has died in that dreadful way, leaving me al this money. Discovering that we had received this from a complete stranger, and a stranger who had then kiled himself, was very disturbing.'

'A letter?' Laurence hoped he hadn't sounded too excited.

'Yes. It was an odd letter in its way, but then it turned out to have been written only weeks before he took his life. It came in November last year. Captain Emmett said he wanted to meet me, that he had something to tel me about Harry, my son. I can't remember his phrasing but he was quite pressing. However, sadly, he never made an appointment.'

'Do you stil have the letter?' Laurence asked.

'Not any more. I'm sorry. But I knew men sometimes wrote to parents of friends who'd been kiled and I was grateful to hear from him.'

When she went to fetch the tea-tray he paced around the room. To one side of the door were two silhouettes: a boy and a younger girl. He presumed they were Catherine and her brother. There was a lithograph of a Gothic- looking castle and an old theatre poster in a frame. A young woman in an elaborate feather headdress stood singing, hands clasped. He looked closely. It looked like Catherine, but could be a much younger Mrs Lovel.

She returned, set a teapot, china and a plate of cake on a smal table, then sat in a chair with her back to the window.

'Did you reply?' he said. 'To the letter?'

'Of course. But he never wrote again.'

There was an awkward silence, which she filed abruptly.

'You knew Captain Emmett wel? It must be very terrible for his family.'

Laurence hastily swalowed his mouthful of Dundee cake. Crumbs fel on his tie. 'I was at school with him, but he wasn't a close friend. Not realy. Not as adults.'

'But Miss Emmett, his sister, she is a friend?'

'Wel, I suppose so. I don't realy know her either. I mean, not wel.'

She looked at him quizzicaly. 'My husband died when Captain Emmett must have been scarcely more than a child,' she said, effectively pre-empting his next question. 'He was older than me and had been an invalid for many years. He died in Nice when Catherine was three. Then my son was kiled in the war.' Her eyes dropped to her linked hands. She wore no jewelery. 'He was twenty-one. Now we are just the two of us.'

This time the silence seemed infinite. To say he was sorry seemed an absurd irrelevance.

'Harry volunteered as soon as he was eighteen. He was buried near Le Crotoy. But I am told his grave is lost.' She looked at Laurence. 'Captain Emmett must have been a friend of Harry's. Don't you think so? I met only one or two of his friends, and one died out in Flanders, but I don't remember an Emmett. Wouldn't he have told me?'

'I simply have no idea. But certainly one of the other bequests, apart from his family, was to an officer who served with him, so it's possible. Was Harry in the West Kents?'

This time it was she who had a mouthful of cake, so she shook her head. He put down his plate and when he looked up she had turned to gaze out of the side pane of the bay window.

'You know al these stories people tel about how they were lying in bed one night and their loved one walked in, or they were out walking and heard a voice caling them from far away, and soon after the news came of their death? How they just knew? Wel, nothing like that happened to me,' she said quietly. 'If it were possible, then it would have. We were very close, you see. He was quite a solitary boy and he would share things with me: stories, pictures, shels, birds' eggs.

'One afternoon Catherine and I went walking on Parliament Hil Fields. It was March and we were trying to fly a kite. We weren't very good: it was Harry's kite realy and he was so clever with it. Finaly it went soaring off and caught round a chimney. It looked like a flag: white, red and black, and I said to Catherine that we had better escape or we might be arrested as foreign agents.' She smiled, more to herself than him. 'We came back laughing to the house, just clutching the string, and when I turned a corner I saw him. The telegraph boy. Standing at the bottom of our steps, just out there.'

She turned her head a little towards the window.

'I held Catherine's hand so tightly that she cried out, and I turned round and I walked with her across the road and back to the green, and then I ran and ran, puling her along, and she kept stumbling and she started to cry, and I looked up and saw the kite, bright on the rooftops, and I knew it was no good. I couldn't turn the clock back an