The Return of Captain John Emmett

He heard Eleanor open a door down the corridor, but although he listened carefuly, he couldn't hear her speaking. After a while a door closed and a few minutes later she came back holding a steaming jug.

'Hot water,' she said. 'I could do with more tea.'

When they'd sat back in their chairs she spoke again. 'I expect you're wondering why I didn't marry John.'

'I suppose I was.'

'I was terribly in love with him. I always was from when I first nursed him. I think he was remarkable, quite different from anyone else I'd met. He was inteligent and kind and aware. He was a man of the world in the real sense and he was a man quite outside his time. Solitary, self-sufficient, but not, or not yet, shut away. I nursed him again when he had pneumonia and he had his breakdown. I expect you know that one of his men raped and murdered a young girl and nobody would bring the man to book? Then that execution. He would never discuss it but I think it finished him realy. The two things just preyed on his mind al the time. That the guilty lived and the innocent died and al because of the war.

'He could never have married. He felt he was too damaged and there was something, an absolutely impenetrable barrier, that no one could break through. He said he was cursed. That people who came too close to him suffered and he couldn't make things right. He said everyone he'd ever loved had died. I think he was fond of Minna, and he had been close to his father, though not to his mother or, I suppose, his sister.' She glanced at Laurence. 'I'm sorry; it's not what you want to hear. In many ways he was so rational but in others he had a dark, almost medieval sense of guilt and self-denial. He was quite ascetic. I think he could have lived contentedly in a hermitage or a cave by the sea or even a monastery.

'Our relationship was never going to exist in the world beyond the two of us and the present. I was posted to the Second London General Hospital. When he came home he didn't want to see me. He never answered my letters. Meanwhile, I had started visiting Wiliam in a convalescent home. I liked him a lot. He made me laugh; he too was inteligent, although less complicated than John. After a bit it was obvious he had feelings for me but he was never going to say because of his condition and also it was such a cliche to fal in love with your nurse. But Wiliam brought me serenity and, despite everything, a sense of optimism.'

'But you did see John again?'

'Wel, obviously,' she said. 'Eventualy he got back in touch with me. I think perhaps he felt he had to. I'd nursed him and we'd been lovers.' She delivered this nugget in an absolutely matter-of-fact way. 'Perhaps he felt he owed it to me. He was nervous, diffident. Not like himself at al. A stranger to be seduced. I saw myself as a sort of Orpheus to his Eurydice, fetching him back from the underworld.' Suddenly she laughed—the first time he'd heard her do so. 'No, that does sound preposterous. But I hoped that some kind of intimacy, warmth, might break through to him. It didn't, of course. He wasn't even realy there.

'I must have been mad myself, or at least terribly naive to prescribe myself like some quack medicine, but then I loved him. Quite quickly, I realised I was pregnant. Not part of my cure. In some ways finding I was pregnant made me less desperate to be with John. I couldn't care for a child as wel as him and by then I knew he would break my heart. I would never be able to have him, you see.

'I spent ages trying to decide whether to tel him, to tel Wiliam, or to run away and tel neither. In the event I told Wiliam first and he immediately offered to marry me. Then, a little later, I thought John should know; I'd been worried he was in too precarious a state to hear the news—he'd been arrested for assault by then—

but in his way he was pleased, I think. And very relieved when I said I intended to marry Wiliam—not because he was off the hook,' she added hurriedly, 'but because the baby and I were safe.

'I saw him three times after I had Nicholas. He was like an uncle, I suppose, rather than a father to him. Wiliam was and is Nicholas's father. But then John left us the money. He'd never mentioned it. It's sad. Al of it.' Her head dropped.

By the time he left, stepping out under a sky ful of stars, Laurence felt he had finaly grasped the mood of John's last months, and the man he had become between leaving Oxford and dying. He crunched off down the street as briskly as he could, hoping to find a cab on the main road.

He was determined to find out why John had gone up to London. The reason was apparently so compeling that he would risk a return to the draconian regime that young Chilvers had imposed on him before and which he so loathed. Whatever it was, the fact was that, once in London, away from Holmwood, John could have done or met anybody, and so soon before his death. It had to be significant. Obviously he could hardly write to Holmwood himself to ask what Dr Chilvers knew about John's visit to London. But Mary could.

Chapter Thirty

It took only a day or so for Laurence to decide to return to Fairford. He had already written to Mary, suggesting that she ask Dr Chilvers for more information about John's visit to London. He tried to convince himself that it was simply the possibility that George Chilvers had useful information that necessitated the journey to see him face to face but underneath he was driven by his fury at Chilvers' treatment of Eleanor and John. He knew that he'd transferred his anger, anger which he had rarely alowed himself to feel, from the dead Tucker to George Chilvers. He didn't want to tel him he was coming as he suspected he'd simply decline to see him. He decided to catch a train down to Fairford and risk George Chilvers being away.

On his way out to Paddington he picked up his post. Until recently correspondents had been few and far between. Now there were invariably letters for him.

The first was a complete surprise. It was from Westminster School. They were seeking a temporary replacement history master for the Lent term, with the possibility of a permanent position thereafter. His name had been suggested to them by an old boy, Wiliam Bolitho. Although completely out of the blue, an offer that he would have rejected out of hand a few months ago suddenly seemed like a godsend; he knew he could not and should not pursue a dead man indefinitely. It was time he left the confines of his flat and a book he doubted he would ever finish. He would go and see the school. He was also strangely touched by Wiliam's recommendation.

He remembered teling him briefly about his pre-war enjoyment of teaching but was surprised Bolitho had taken it in.

There was also a letter forwarded from Mary. Dr Chilvers had written by return in answer to her enquiry. He was brief, she said, but there was no sense of him withholding anything. He confirmed that John had wanted to go to London in late autumn the previous year. The reason John had given was that he had been asked to appear before members of Colonel Lambert Ward's commission. However, Dr Chilvers felt that revisiting the circumstances in which he had first become unwel would be less than helpful for John at this stage of his recovery. Nevertheless, Dr Chilvers had said (and Mary had scrawled beside his comment, 'Oh, one's disappointment at the ingratitude of one's patients!'), Mr Emmett had taken advantage of a delivery of provisions to hide in the back of a lorry and had managed to catch a train to London. In the event he had returned in his own good time and in equable spirits, but it was felt he should be more closely watched after that. However, Dr Chilvers had taken the liberty of writing to