He thought she had a slight west country accent.
'I say, you're a quiet one. You on your own?'
Inadequately dressed even for a mild winter's evening, she smiled hopefuly.
'Do you want to get warm?'
His first thought had been that he didn't feel cold. His second, that she looked nothing like Louise.
Her back curved away from him as she took off her clothes, folding them carefuly on a chair. Then she turned to him. Standing there, in just her stockings, her body thin and white and her bush of hair shocking and black, he was simultaneously aroused and appaled. She watched him incuriously as he took off his shirt and trousers. Then she lay back and opened her legs. Yet when he tried to enter her she was quite dry and he had to spit on his hand to wet her before he pushed hard against her resistance. He couldn't bear to look at her. As he took her he wished he had removed his socks. When he had finished she got up, went over to a bowl on a stool in the corner, half hidden behind a papier-mache screen, and wiped herself with a bit of cloth. He paid, noticing she wore a wedding ring, and went briskly downstairs into the dark where he drew mouthfuls of night air, with its smel of cinders and drains, deep into his lungs. He was lost. Too much had gone.
Chapter Two
Nearly three years after the war, John Emmett came back into his life. There had been six weeks without rain. Night and day had become jumbled and Laurence often sat in the dark with the sash windows wide open and let the breeze cool him as he worked, knowing that when he finaly went to bed on these humid August nights he would find it hard to sleep. Only the bels of St George's chiming the quarter-hours linked him to the outside world.
Then, one Tuesday teatime, he was surprised to find a letter, addressed in unfamiliar handwriting, lying on the hal table. Later he came to think of it as
It had been forwarded twice: first from his old Oxford colege, then from his former marital home; it was a miracle it had got to him at al.
He sat down by the largest window, slipped a finger under the flap and tore it open. Late-afternoon sunlight fel across the page. Neat, cursive writing ran over two pages, covering both sides, the lines quite close together and sloping to the right. He turned it over and looked for a signature. Instantly, foolishly, he felt a jolt of possibility.
11 Warkworth Street
Cambridge
16 June 1921
Dear Laurence,
Writing to you after so long feels like a bit of an intrusion especialy as you once wrote to me and I never answered. My life was difficult then. I hope you stil remember me.
I heard that you lost your wife and I am dreadfuly sorry. I met Louise only that one time at Henley but she was a lovely girl, you must miss her a lot.
I wanted to tel you that John died six months ago and, horribly, he shot himself. He seemed to have been luckier than many in the war, but when he came back from France he wouldn't talk and just sat in his room or went for long walks at night.
He said he couldn't sleep. I don't think he was writing or reading or any of the things he used to enjoy. Sometimes he would get in furious rages, even with our mother. Finaly he got in a fight with strangers and was arrested.
Our doctor said that he needed more help than he could provide. He found him a place in a nursing home. John went along with it but then the folowing winter he ran away. A month later a keeper found his body in a wood over thirty miles away. He didn't leave a letter. Nothing to explain it. We had thought he was getting better.
I know you saw much less of each other after school, but al John's other friends that I ever met are gone and you are the only one, ever, who John brought home.
I am sure you are a busy man, but I would be so very grateful, as would my mother, if you could talk to me a little about John. We loved him but we didn't always understand him. We can't begin to know what changed him so much in the war.
You might. I've written three letters to you before and not posted them; instead I just go over and over his last months. I know it is a lot to ask and I'm presuming on a feeling that maybe you don't share—that we had a bond— but could we meet? I wil understand if you feel you have nothing to say, of course; we knew each other such a long time ago and you have had your own troubles.
Yours sincerely,
Mary Emmett
Laurence leaned back in the chair, feeling the heat of the sun. Mary Emmett. She was right, he would have liked to have known her better. He remembered a lively, brown-haired girl with none of her brother's reserve. He had first come across her while he was at school, then been surprised by how she had changed when he bumped into her again in Oxford at a dance three or four years later. Yet he had recognised her almost immediately.
Although she was not a beauty, she had an attractive, open face with—and he smiled as he remembered it—a schoolgirl's grin at anything that was at al absurd.
They were seated at the same large table and kept catching one another's glance, but by the time he could detach himself from his neighbours, to ask her to dance, her friends were wanting to leave. They talked for perhaps ten minutes, which he wished had been longer.
Then, not long before the war, he'd seen her again at the Henley regatta. It was soon after he'd met Louise, and Mary Emmett seemed to have an attentive male friend, but he recaled meeting eyes that were ful of laughter when they sat opposite each other at some particularly pompous dinner party. Candlelight shone on her pearl necklace and he thought he remembered the shimmering eau-de-nil satin of her dress. He had thought, if water nymphs existed, they would look much like her. He had a sense of connection which was far stronger than any actual contact between them and afterwards, impulsively, he had written to her. He had never received a reply and soon his life was overtaken by marriage and war.
