Eleanor Bolitho
Laurence read it twice and sat back in his chair. Her words on the need to face forward carried echoes of Mrs Lovel's determination but, knowing Eleanor Bolitho had been a nurse in France, he should have thought to ask her whether she knew John. Nevertheless, he had never considered for a minute that John's death could have been an accident. Was that naive of him, being so ready to believe the man he once known and admired had loaded his gun and shot himself in the—what? temple?
mouth? He'd had a corporal once who'd shot himself, though no one was sure whether it was because he was careless or had had enough. The shot had gone through his chin and taken off the back of his head.
Eleanor was right. He had accepted the story at face value because John was already unstable. It dawned on him that he knew very little about how John had died. Where
Once Laurence started to consider what he did not know, or even what Mary might know but had not volunteered, he realised how little substance there was to the account of John Emmett's death. Where was the wood where the body was found, for instance? Mary had said it was on the edge of the county.
He puled out an elderly atlas of England from his shelves. Fairford was in south-east Gloucestershire, almost on the border where three counties met: Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Wiltshire. But Somerset, Monmouthshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire also shared boundaries, though much further away. How far had John traveled before dying? Where was the inquest held?
He wasn't sure whether acting as Mary's private detective was quixotic or ridiculous, but there were surprisingly positive aspects to it and not just the emotions he was trying to suppress regarding Mary herself. He'd enjoyed meeting Wiliam and Eleanor Bolitho and he was intrigued by Mrs Lovel. He had wondered briefly whether either she or her daughter had been John's lover, but the girl was far too young and he just couldn't see Mrs Lovel's charms appealing to a man in his twenties.
He was stil puzzled by John having that much money to leave. It didn't fit in with the gossip relayed by Charles. He could ask Mary, if he phrased it subtly. But at least John's wil had established a scale of things. Bolitho had received a goodish sum for helping John survive an accident, although Bolitho had represented himself as little more than an observer. Whatever Mrs Lovel had done, it was evidently of slightly less importance than that, judging by the size of the bequest. The lost or dead Frenchman, M. Meurice, had been left half the sum Bolitho had received. Doulens was near the battlefields of the Somme. Had Meurice helped John out there in some way?
Realisticaly, Lovel and Meurice had to be connected through John's military service. Bolitho certainly was and, anyway, war had been John's occupation for most of the years leading up to his incarceration and death, leaving little time for anything else. Was it possible that Mrs Lovel, like Eleanor Bolitho, had been a nurse in France? It seemed highly unlikely as she had a young daughter. Yet whatever the connection was, it had not existed, or had not been pressing enough, for John to recognise it in his previous wil, made in 1914. Yet perhaps that first wil had been made with very little thought of death as a real possibility. It was just a routine for al departing officers and they were al such gung-ho optimists then.
He muled over a few other vague ideas. Could Mr Emmett Senior have been married before, and Mrs Lovel been a half-sister of John's? Unlikely, he thought; she and her daughter were unusualy fair-haired and fair-skinned, while John, like his father, was dark-haired and brown-eyed. Anyway, in that case Mrs Lovel would surely have recognised the name Emmett instantly when she received the letter and he doubted John's father was old enough to have squeezed in an earlier marriage. It was equaly unlikely that Catherine Lovel was actualy an ilegitimate child of Mr Emmett and Mrs Lovel, making her a half-sister to John and Mary.
So, the uncomplicated and old-fashioned Cecil Emmett— a man whose main relationship seemed to be with his animals and the kitchen garden, and who refused to spend a night away from home—hardly seemed the type to maintain a handsome widow in a North London vila. His favourite phrase had been, Always set things right,' which he applied to everything from not leaving tennis bals in the rain to having cottages repaired for aged tenants while his own roof leaked. However, there were also Charles's alegations about his carelessness with money.
Could there realy be some connection with Germany? If so, Laurence couldn't begin to think how it could be unraveled now. By the time it began to get dark, he had decided to ask Charles to check the name Lovel with some of his army cronies. Charles would find the mystery irresistible. He should have asked Mrs Lovel for her son's regiment but Charles would enjoy finding it.
The one idea he'd been muling over since his first meeting with Mary was seeing Holmwood for himself. He had rejected his initial vague notion as reckless once he got home, but in the absence of other answers he was starting to think that it wouldn't be so difficult to carry off; he could simply present himself as looking for a place for a troubled relative. It would be a gesture to prove his commitment to finding out more about John Emmett.
The next morning he wrote to Mary to propose it again. She wrote back by return of post and with such enthusiasm that his heart sank slightly as he realised he was now committed to a deceit. However, his spirits rose at the rest of her letter, which described the easterly wind, leaves faling, Michaelmas undergraduates wandering about like lost schoolboys in their gowns, and how she had been to a recital in Trinity chapel which she thought he might have enjoyed. She added, almost as an afterthought, that she had found a few more of John's things although there was nothing remarkable among them. Next time they met, she'd bring them. She hoped this would be soon— she underlined the word soon. It was a very different Mary, more informal and light-hearted than in her earlier letter.
Buoyed up by her tone, he wrote to Holmwood immediately. Mary had said they had instaled a telephone system although he was in no great hurry. Wanting it to seem like an ordinary enquiry, he created an older brother, Robert, who owed quite a lot to a character in a book by John Buchan, but was, additionaly and essentialy, given to melancholy and seizures, having being injured at Loos. He went out to the postbox straight away, before he could deliberate any further, but after he'd posted his letter he wondered whether the fits were too much. On the way back, he picked up a newspaper from the news boy in the square; since he had started involving himself with John Emmett, he had found his broader curiosity for the world returning intermittently.
When he got in, not being in the mood to look at his work, he opened his sister's letter. It was ful of the usual cheerful inconsequentialities and devoid of any sense of what she was thinking, only of what she—or, more often, other people—were doing. He felt saddened by the distance that had come between them; even the vocabulary of her life seemed old-fashioned, as if time as wel as oceans separated them.
He thought back to school and the days when his parents were both alive. His father had been a handsome man who, his mother feared, had an eye for other women. Laurence remembered how funny this had seemed at the time, when he was fourteen or so, with his father in his late forties, and his mother sensitive to any straying glance or conversation.
'Oh Laurie,' she would say anxiously, 'your teacher, Miss Beames, do you think she might be generaly
