cardigan that emphasised the colour of his eyes. Laurence bent and picked up the car.
'Aha, an Alvis. Now, if you look out of the window you'l see a big one.'
Nicholas ran to the window. Eleanor lifted him on to a chair where he could gaze out at Charles's car parked in the street. Laurence watched him for a few seconds. He had the shape of John's brow and chin, yet his eyes were unquestionably Eleanor's. But above al, Nicholas Bolitho was simply himself, pointing and chattering away excitedly.
While Eleanor held Nicholas up to see the Alvis, Laurence spoke to Wiliam.
'I'm sorry to rush in and out,' he said, 'but I simply wanted to see if you recognised a photograph. A man caled Edmund Hart.'
He saw that Eleanor had her eyes on them, even as she was responding to her son. Wiliam nodded, took the picture, looked at it in silence and finaly shook his head.
'I don't think so. I'm pretty certain not, but of course there were so many faces. And because of the blanket you can't see what regiment he is in here.'
'He wasn't there when the trench colapsed?'
'No. Not that I saw.'
Eleanor came over, leaving Nicholas with his face pressed to the windowpane. Laurence scanned her face closely as she took the picture from her husband, but she gave no indication that she recognised the man in the photograph, though she took longer than Wiliam to shake her head.
'I was wondering if I'd nursed him,' she said. 'For a minute I thought it was a boy I'd cared for in France. But there were so many who looked like this.
Schoolboys.' She tipped it to the light. 'Sorry. No. Anyway, I would have remembered the name—when I was at Cambridge just before the war I toiled for hours over
'I'm afraid so.'
Eleanor's first reaction was to look over at her son, stil kneeling on a chair, staring into the street, one smal hand stil clutching a solitary red guardsman. When she turned back she had tears in her eyes.
He felt embarrassed at marching in and then leaving so abruptly, and he would have liked a chance to see more of Nicholas, but he didn't want to arrive at Gwen Lovel's house too late or miss Brabourne at his office. He wished he'd taken Brabourne's home address.
When he left, Eleanor brought Nicholas down to see Charles's car. Charles shook her hand in greeting and then swung the little boy into the passenger seat.
Although Nicholas's lower lip wobbled for a moment, he was smiling within seconds as Charles flicked switches on and off. Eleanor looked chily; she wrapped her arms around herself and took her eyes off her son only briefly.
'Laurie,' she said, in a low voice, leaning towards him. 'It was one thing to tel you a secret of my own after I'd judged you could keep it but there's something else I ought to tel you if you want to understand John. Because it's someone else's secret, I hope you can give me your word, even though it involves someone you know, that it wil go no further?'
Laurence could only nod agreement to her solemn entreaty. Her glance flickered to her son and Charles, tactfuly engrossed in the dashboard.
'John loved his father very much—you may have gathered. But when he was stil a boy—thirteen or fourteen—he discovered a letter from his grandfather to his mother in his father's gunroom, of al places. It was hidden; he was young and curious. I don't know the exact contents but it made it clear that Mrs Emmett had had an affair in which she conceived her daughter. The father of Mrs Emmett's child was John's grandfather, Mr Emmett Senior.'
Laurence was stunned for a minute. 'But I gathered the older Emmetts were against the marriage?' he said.
'Wel, unsurprisingly, if Emmett Senior was in love with his prospective daughter-in-law he didn't want his son marrying her. But there was no living grandmother. John's mother had been a housekeeper to his widowed grandfather and probably rather more.'
'Good God.'
'She married, impulsively, her family thought, then had a child who died in infancy. Born prematurely, John said, but it makes you wonder who its father was.
Then she had John, unequivocaly his father's son, the letter confirmed...'
Laurence was glad of that, remembering the bond between the two.
'And then at some point soon after that the marriage evidently cooled and the relationship with John's grandfather resumed. She bore him a daughter—Mary.
John's father was not Mary's father.'
'How dreadful for John finding out, though. Did he tel his father he knew?'
'No. Impossible. But it was a terrible burden for a young boy to bear. It ruined his relationship with his mother.'
And his sister, Laurence thought. The living evidence of what had gone wrong with their family. He was certain Mary did not know. Did the maternal grandparents know or suspect? Was that why al their money had been left to John?
'Look, I have to go in,' Eleanor said. 'I'l keep in touch but it's too cold for Nicholas to be out.' She leaned forward and kissed Laurence on the cheek. 'I'd like to meet your Miss Emmett,' she said. 'Perhaps it's time she was introduced to Nicholas. If you want to tel her I knew John, wel, you can, of course. If it would help.'
Then she bent over the car and exchanged a couple of words with Charles as she retrieved her son to wails of
