The Return of Captain John Emmett

The Return of

Captain John Emmet

Elizabeth Speller

Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

...

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Epilogue

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Boston New York

2011

Copyright © 2011 by Elizabeth Speler

Al rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Virago Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Speler, Elizabeth.

The return of Captain John Emmett / Elizabeth Speler.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-547-51169-6

1. World War, 1914–1918—Veterans—England—London—Fiction.

2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6119.P39R47 2011

823'.92—dc22

2010052590

Printed in the United States of America

DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my brother, Richard, and for my nephews Dominic, Tristan, Wiliam, Barnaby and Charlie, who, had they been born exactly one hundred years earlier, might al have found themselves on the Western Front.

You were only David's father,

But I had fifty sons

When we went up in the evening

Under the arch of the guns.

Lieutenant Ewart Alan Mackintosh

(died Cambrai 1917)

Prologue

NOVEMBER 1920, KENT

They gathered in the dark long before the train arrived at the smal station. It was mostly women: young mothers holding tightly wrapped infants, elderly women in shawls, black-coated middle-aged matrons alongside grown children. There were men too, of course, some already holding their hats self-consciously at their sides, and a cluster of soldiers stood to one end of the platform near the bearded stationmaster. Even so, the men were outnumbered by the women as they always were these days.

Occasionaly the station buffet sign creaked or a baby wailed and the isolated murmur of one woman to another was almost indistinguishable from the faint sigh of wind, but mostly there was quiet as they waited. Stil others stood a little further away. In the houses on either side of the line, behind lighted windows, silhouetted occupants held back curtains. Below them, at rail-side garden fences or on the banks, stood a handful more. On the far platform, almost out of reach of the lights, it was just possible to pick out one individual, swathed in a dark coat and hat, who stood at a distance from the rest. The stationmaster looked across the rails with some apprehension. In a long career he had never had a suicide, but tonight was different; this train's freight was despair and sorrow. However, the watcher seemed calm, standing at a reasonable distance from the platform's edge, with the width of the down track separating his stiffly upright figure from the expected train.

They felt it before they heard it. A faint vibration in the rails seemed to transmit itself to the people waiting, and a shiver trembled through them, folowed by a more audible hum and finaly a crescendo of noise as the train, puled by its great dark engine, appeared around the bend. Tiny points of fire danced red in its smoke and singed the grass. The last hats were removed hurriedly and one young woman buried her face in her companion's chest. The soldiers stood to attention and, as the train thundered by without stopping, its compartments briliantly iluminated, they saluted. A wave ran through the crowd as several of the spectators craned forward, desperate to catch a momentary glimpse of the red, blue and white flag, draped over the coffin of English oak, before its passing left them to the dark loneliness of their changed world.

As the crowd slowly dispersed, almost as silently as they had assembled, the stationmaster looked along his platform once more. Now quite alone on the far side of the track, one figure stayed immobile. Hours after the stationmaster had gone to his bed, reassured in the knowledge that it was six hours until the milk train, the last watcher remained solitary and now invisible in the darkness, waiting for dawn and the last battle to begin.

Chapter One

In years to come, Laurence Bartram would look back and think that the event that realy changed everything was not the war, nor the attack at Rosières, nor even the loss of his wife, but the return of John Emmett into his life. Before then, Laurence had been trying to develop a routine around the writing of a book on London churches. Astonishingly, a mere six or so years earlier when he came down from Oxford, he had taught, briefly and happily, but on marrying he had been persuaded that teaching was not a means of supporting Louise and the large family she had planned. After only token resistance he had joined her family's long-established coffee importing business. It al seemed so long ago, now. There was no coffee, no business—or not for him—and Louise and his only child were dead.

When his wife and son lay dying in Bristol, Laurence was crouched in the colourless light of dawn, waiting to move towards the German guns and praying fervently to a God he no longer believed in. He had long been indifferent to which side won; he wished only that one or the other would do so decisively while he was stil alive. It would be days before the news of Louise and their baby's death reached him. It was not until he was home, with his grief-stricken mother-in-law endlessly supplying unwanted details, that he realised that Louise had died at precisely the moment he was giving the order to advance. When he finaly got leave, he had stood by the grave with its thin, new grass while his father-in-law hovered near by, embarrassed. When the older man had withdrawn, Laurence crouched down. He could smel the damp earth but there was nothing of her here. Later, he chose the granite and speled out both names and the dates to the stonemason. He wanted to mourn, yet his emotions seemed unreachable. Indeed, after a few days shut up with his parents-in-law, desolate and aged by loss, he was soon searching for an excuse to return to London and escape the intensity of their misery.

As he sat on the train, returning to close up his London house, he had felt a brief but shocking wave of elation. Louise was gone, so many were gone, but he had made it through—he was stil quite young and with a life ahead of him. The mood passed as quickly as it always did, to be replaced by emptiness. The house felt airless and stale. He started packing everything himself but after opening a smal chest to find a soft whiteness of matinée jackets, bootees, embroidered baby gowns and tiny bonnets, al carefuly folded in tissue paper, he had recoiled from the task and paid someone to make sure he never saw any of it again.

Louise had left him money and so he was free to folow a new career. It did not make him a man of substantial means, but it was enough for him to tel Louise's father that he wouldn't be returning to the business. Even if Louise had survived and he were now the father of a lively son, he doubted he would have continued buying and seling coffee beans. The war had changed things; for him life before 1914 was a closed world he could never reach back and touch. He could recal banal fragments of people but not the whole. His mother's long fingers stabbing embroidery silks into her petit point. His father snipping and smoothing his moustache as he grimaced in the looking-glass. He could even remember the smel of his father's pomade, yet the rest of the face never quite came into focus. His memories were just a series of tableaux, disconnected from the present. Louise, and the smal hopes and plans that went with her, were simply part of these everyday losses.

He'd rented a smal flat, a quarter the size of the town house he and Louise had lived in for their eighteen months of marriage before he was sent to France. It was in Great Ormond Street and on the top floor, with windows facing in three directions so that the smal rooms were filed with light. There he could lie in bed listening to the wind and the pigeons cooing on the roof. He rarely went out socialy these days but when he did it was usualy to see his friend Charles Carfax who had been at the same school and had served in France. Charles was someone to whom nothing need be explained.

Sometimes as he gazed out across the rooftops Laurence tried to picture where he might be in a year's time—five years, ten—but he couldn't imagine a life other than this. At Oxford he had been teased about his enthusiasms: for long walks, architecture, even dancing. That excitement was a curiosity now and he had stopped worrying that he had drifted away from friends. He no longer had any imagined future different from the present.

Where he felt most alive was sitting in the chapel of Thomas More inside Chelsea Old Church, wondering at the man's courage, or in Al Halows by the Tower where bodies, including More's, had been brought after beheading at the Tower. Somehow horror was blunted by thirteen centuries. Churches, he thought, weren't buildings but stories; even their names fascinated him. However, when he tried to re-create that excitement for his own book, he was reduced to stone and floor plans and architectural terms. For St Bartholomew the Great, his notes read: bilet moulding, cloister, twelfth-century transept. Yet when he was sitting, resting his eyes, he had sometimes sensed the monks brushing by him on their way to Compline, or stumbling bewildered through the teeming streets after Henry VIII had evicted them, while the building survived as best it could: as stable, forge, factory or inn, before it returned to what it was meant to be.

He had had a happy childhood, adored by parents who had produced him quite late in life, but both had died unexpectedly before he was sixteen. His much older married sister, Milicent, had been like a second mother, but she had moved to India before their parents died, remaining there with her large family and a husband who was part of the colonial administration. She had tried her hardest to persuade her young brother to join them and, when Laurence turned out to be surprisingly stubborn in refusal, sent him stories by Rudyard Kipling, which revealed India as a magical and dangerous place. He stil kept one book near his bed, unable to imagine his sensible sister amid the gold elephants, turbaned elephant boys and rearing rattlesnakes on the cover. A distant aunt agreed to be his guardian and this satisfied Milicent, if not his need for love and comfort. In due course he went up to Oxford where his tutor had been something of a father to him from the day he arrived at Merton Colege as an undergraduate. Shortly before his death a year or so ago, this kind, unworldly man had introduced him to a publisher who had shown surprising interest in Laurence's diffidently proposed work.

Meanwhile his sister wrote regularly with an innocent assumption of his love for Wilfred, Saly, Bumble, James and Ted, his unknown, unimagined nephews and nieces. Given her determination never to speak of anything unpleasant, her letters only increased his feeling that Louise and the war were something he'd dreamed up.

For a while young widows, or girls who had once been engaged to officers in his regiment who hadn't made it through, made it fairly clear that his attentions would be welcome. He was nice-looking rather than conventionaly handsome, with thick dark hair, pale skin, brown eyes and strong nose, a combination that sometimes led people to assume a non-existent Scottish ancestry. Unable to cope with the possibilities on offer, he invariably withdrew with the excuse that he needed to focus on his research. His married friends had been kind after Louise's death but he felt uncomfortable in their houses, watching their family life unfold. He had tried it once. He had journeyed down to Hampshire for a perfectly undemanding weekend of tennis and cocktails, country walks and chatter, then found himself in the grip of overwhelming anxiety. As they trudged through waist-high bracken and folowed earth tracks through thickets of dense flowering gorse, he found himself jumping at every rustle or crack of a branch. He made his excuses straight after Sunday lunch.

Sometimes now he could go a week or more without revisiting the smels and tremors of the war, and a whole month without dreaming of Louise: that unknown Louise, ever pliant, ever accommodating. It was an irony that he thought about the dead Louise a great deal more intensely than he ever had the living woman, and with real physical longing.

Just once he had weakened. He was walking alone late when a woman stepped from a doorway.

'On your own?' she said.

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 the letter.

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.

He read the letter again and slowly the impact of her news sank in. What on earth had led the self-contained but confident boy he had known at school to kil himself, having survived four years of war?

Chapter Three

John and Laurence had arrived at Marlborough on the same day in 1903. Laurence's first impression of school was of warm reds and rusts: one handsome, square brick building after another and the early autumn colours of huge horse-chestnut trees. He was smal for his age and after a sheltered childhood the changes came as a shock.

Amid the clamour and occasional brutality of a large public school, the two thirteen-year-olds had banded together with Charles, who had been there a term already, Rupert—who later died in Africa—and Lionel, who was destined for the Church. But it was John Emmett who was the unacknowledged leader. He appeared fearless and was dogged in the pursuit of justice. When he was younger, things simply went wrong for those who crossed him; as he got older, he would quietly confront anyone who made a weaker boy's life a misery.

John Emmett had very little interest in the sort of success that schoolboys usualy hungered for. Although good at most games, especialy rowing, he was unimpressed by being selected for teams; he driled with the cadets but made no effort to be promoted; he sang in the chapel choir but by sixteen was privately expressing doubts about God. He argued with masters with such skil that contradiction seemed like enthusiasm. He was a natural linguist. He even wrote poetry, yet avoided being seen as effete by the school's dominating clique of hearty sportsmen. Yet although many respected him, nobody would have caled John their best friend.

For the young Laurence he represented everything that was mysterious and brave.

John was notorious for his night-time adventures. One summer Laurence went out onto the leads of the roof, swalowing hard to try to conquer his nausea at being four storeys above the stone-flagged courtyard. There was nobody else he would have gone with. It was a perfect, absolutely clear night and the sky was filed with stars. Laurence looked up, feeling giddy as John named the galaxies and planets above them.

'Don't like heights, do you?' John said, matter-of-factly. 'Me, I can go as high as you like, it's being shut in that gives me the heebie-jeebies. But look,' he pointed, 'tonight you can just see the rings of Saturn with the naked eye.' He stepped dangerously near the edge, silhouetted against the bright night sky.

It was from his father that John had learned al about the stars. He would use his father's opinion to settle arguments decisively; Laurence could stil hear his solemn tone of voice: 'My father says...' When Laurence finaly went to stay with John, the year before they were to take university entrance, he found that Mr Emmett was in fact a bluff gentleman farmer, whose main topic of conversation was shooting, whose hobby was stargazing through his old telescope and whose closest confidant was a smal terrier caled Sirius.

'Dog star, d'ye see?'

John and his father seemed to understand each other without speaking and on several mornings Laurence woke to find the two of them already up and walking the fields.

He had liked the warm informality of the Emmett household. There was a freedom there he had never known. When Laurence's parents died, the Marlborough code meant that no one actualy mentioned his new status as an orphan. When John came into Laurence's study a day or so after his mother's funeral to find him red-eyed, he had asked him to stay during the holidays. The Emmetts lived in a large, rather isolated house in Suffolk. Rooms were dusty, furniture faded. The grass on the tennis court was two inches high and choked with dandelions and the worn bals were as likely to go through the holes in the net as over it. There was a croquet lawn of sorts on a slope so steep that al but the most skilful players eventualy relinquished their bals to the smal stream that ran below it. Mary, very much the little sister then, went in barefoot to retrieve them and tried to sel them back. She was always paddling in the stream, her legs were invariably muddy, he recaled, and she had a ferret she took for walks on a lead. Was it caled Kitchener? The folowing Christmas the Emmetts had sent him a present of an ivory-handled penknife with his initials on it.

He had it with him in France.

He looked again at her letter. Why had they lost touch? He supposed they had rapidly become different men on leaving school but the truth was that John had probably grown up more quickly than he had. Laurence remembered being surprised to hear that Emmett had joined as a volunteer at the beginning of the war. John was the last person to be swayed by popular excitement and at Oxford he liked to speak of himself as a European. The only jingoist in the Emmett family had been John's father, who toasted the King every evening and mistrusted the French, Germans and Londoners. Laurence thought, uncomfortably, of his own, discreditable motives for volunteering and hoped his friends would be equaly surprised if they knew that truth.

For a moment he felt a surprisingly intense sadness, the sort of emotion he could remember once feeling quite often. Now that odd, passionate schoolboy was gone, and, judging by the address on Mary's letter, so was the lovingly neglected house. John had been different when so many of them were so ordinary. Laurence counted himself among the ordinary sort. If the war hadn't come, they would al have become stout solicitors and brewers, doctors and cattle-breeders, with tolerant wives and children, most of them living in the same vilages, towns and counties they came from.

For much of the war Laurence had hung on to the idea that he would go back to the smal world he had been so eager to leave. Only when the end of the war seemed a possibility did life suddenly become precious and death a terrifying reality. Both he and John had returned, but now he knew that death had caught up with John and, moreover, by his own choice.

Laurence's second reaction as he read Mary Emmett's letter was a sinking feeling. He couldn't bring John back, nor could he tel her anything she wanted to hear, and he hadn't—as far as he knew—served near him in France. The truth was that he had heard nothing directly from his old school friend since they'd left Oxford.

At university they had effectively parted ways. John had gone into a different colege; his circle were clever men: writers, debaters, thinkers. Laurence had falen in with an easier set, who held parties and played games, thinking of little outside their own lives. Laurence had migrated to London, surrendered to the coffee trade and married Louise. John had apparently gone abroad to Switzerland, then Germany. Laurence had read his occasional reports in the London newspapers. They were usualy cameo pieces: Bavarian farmers struggling to make ends meet, the chocolate-smeling girls in a Berne factory or a veteran who had been Bismarck's footman. As tensions rose in Europe, he supposed John's smal contributions had slipped out of favour. During the war one of his poems had been published in a newspaper but apart from that his work had disappeared from view.

Laurence had nothing new to give Mary. He told himself that a visit to Cambridge would simply raise her hopes, and probably her mother's too. If she came to London he couldn't think where he could take her. But he couldn't forget the kindnesses shown by al the Emmetts when he was a lonely boy without any real family of his own.

Dressing for dinner with Charles, he took out his cufflinks and there nestling beside them was the little ivory-handled penknife. That decided him. He was deluding himself that any kind of book was taking shape and a few days away from stifling London could do no harm. But as he walked through the London streets to dinner, it was Mary's conspiratorial and almost forgotten smile which occupied his mind.

'But why the hel didn't you tel me?' he asked Charles later, as they sat back in deep armchairs, nursing their port.

Charles coughed, loud enough to make two men sitting across the room look up. His stil-boyish face flushed with embarrassment. 'Unforgivable. I was in Scotland when I heard. My cousin Jack's place. Damn cold. Then I forgot.'

'Why did he do it?' Laurence asked himself as much as Charles.

'Usual thing, I suppose. France? Seems to have taken some men like that. Mind you,' Charles reflected, 'he was home when the West Kents realy took a pounding. Back in England—smashed leg, something like that. Must have avoided the whole scrap. Perhaps he felt he didn't deserve the luck.'

Charles seemed to have regarded his military service as a bit of a lark. He'd embraced war as an escape from destiny in the form of the successful family leather factories and he flourished in the infantry. He had escaped death, serious injury or ilness for three grueling years and had been mentioned in despatches twice by the time the war ended.

They both fel quiet. Laurence gazed at the flare of copper chrysanthemums in the fireplace. Eventualy Charles broke the silence.

'Look, I'm sorry I didn't fil you in about Emmett. I know he was a joly close friend at school but then the Harcourts didn't make it either, nor did Sorely and that odd chap Greaves you liked so much, and that Scot—what was he caled—with the terrible temper. The one who joined the RFC? It's not as if we'd al been in touch and I rather thought you'd had enough of talking about that kind of thing. You know, with Louise and everything. No-go area and al that.' He reddened again.

'Lachlan. It was Lachlan Ramsay who had the temper,' said Laurence quickly. 'But yes, I did admire John. His odd courage; his independence. What may have happened after the war doesn't alter that. It's a shame.' He paused. 'Quite honestly, I wish I could say he was my friend, but he wasn't, not realy. Friendly, while we were at school, but not a friend. Hardly even that at Oxford. A few words if we'd met in the street, no more.'

As he spoke, one of the two older men who had sat across the room from them got up to leave. His companion rose to folow him. Charles, who had been glancing in their direction for the last half-hour, jumped up from his chair and went over to shake the first man's hand, and was then introduced to the other. The slightly younger man had a distinguished and inteligent face, the older one a slightly stiff military bearing.

As Charles sat down again he looked pleased. 'You know who they were, of course?'

Laurence never knew who anybody was, however eagerly Charles assumed that figures who loomed large in his own life were as significant in anyone else's.

'Gerald Somers,' Charles said triumphantly, and then when Laurence failed to respond quickly enough: 'Major general. Zulu wars. Boer scrap. Mafeking.

Enough medals for a jubilee. A real hero, not just medals for other men's courage. Of course you know who he is, Laurence. Mind you, he's not so popular with the powers that be now. Got some very unfashionable views on military discipline.'

Simply to be left in peace Laurence nodded. 'Of course.' These ageing generals loved their hanging and flogging, he thought wearily.

'Wel, they can't say much. Not to his face. Career like that and gave both his sons to his country. The other man was Philip Morrel. Used to be an MP. I'm surprised you didn't recognise him, Laurence. Though he's a Liberal, of course. His wife is Lady Ottoline, sister of the Duke of Portland. You know. Bohemians.

Absolutely terrifying.'

Laurence had at least heard of the Morrels and their circle, so felt able to nod. 'Absolutely. But why would Mary write to me?' he added.

Although even as he said it, he realised Charles was right—attrition had been high among their school friends. In the aftermath of the last few years, her choice was limited.

***

When he got in, Laurence sat down to write to Mary Emmett. He kept it brief, just his condolences and a gentle warning that he doubted he could throw any light on anything, but would visit as soon as she wanted. Then, with a sense of urgency—her letter had taken eight weeks to find him—he went out into the dark to post it.

When he returned he lay on his bed, unsettled by the heat, and by thoughts of John.

Chapter Four

It was a perfect early September day, the sky a cloudless deep blue, as Laurence's train crossed the flatlands of eastern England. It was not an area he knew wel or found particularly attractive but on such a fine morning it was hard not to feel a sense of wel-being. As the train gathered speed leaving London behind, he had felt a wonderful sense of liberation despite the probable awkwardness of the day ahead. The fields spread away to the horizon, al bleached stubble and hayricks, and occasionaly a line of elms marking a road going from one smal vilage to another. Nothing seemed to move, although as they rattled across a level crossing a horse and cart laden with hay and two bicyclists waited to cross.

His mood stayed calm even as they drew into Cambridge and he left the train. The country summer had straggled into the city; Michaelmas daisies and roses grew in tired beds by the station, and a few ripe blackberries hung on sooty brambles in the no-man's land between the platform and the picket fence. On the platform a group of young women laughed in the pastel shade of Chinese parasols.

Rather to his relief, he recognised Mary Emmett almost immediately, standing outside the ticket office in a pale-green dress and a soft straw hat, her wavy brown hair caught in a bun at the nape of her neck. Her once laughing greenish eyes were solemn. But when he approached she smiled and he saw the girl he remembered in the older, thinner face.

She put out her hand. 'Laurence,' she said, 'welcome to Cambridge. Thank you so, so much for coming.'

She had a wide, pretty mouth and when she talked a dimple appeared to one side. She looked genuinely delighted to see him, and only dark smudges under her eyes hinted at sadness.

They took a bus, which drove slowly past the Botanic Gardens—a dark-green jungle behind tidy railings. The warm stone buildings of the ancient coleges lay on either side of them.

'Now,' Mary said as they got off by Magdalene Bridge, 'here we are at the crossroads of duty and pleasure: we could go home but if we do we'l get caught up with Mother and Aunt Virginia. She lives with us now, as a companion for my mother.' She made a face.

Laurence waited to see where the other road led.

'Or,' she continued, 'seeing as it's such a perfect day, we could go out to Granchester for early tea. We could take the bus or even punt. Do you punt?'

'Wel, I could punt more than a decade ago. I suppose I could test my surviving punting skils if you feel brave?'

'I can actualy punt myself.' She smiled. 'It's just much more fun to be a puntee.'

However he had thought the day might turn out, Laurence had never expected to be drinking lemon squash under trees so heavy with fruit that under their weight the branches had curved to the ground to form green-latticed caves. They made good time up the river. After tying up next to a couple of other boats, and swatting away midges at the water's edge, they walked through meadows to the tearooms. Apart from their footsteps in the dry grass, the only sound was a distant corncrake.

Mary asked whether he'd read Brooke's poem about the vilage and Laurence felt absurdly glad to be able to recite at least some of it.

'I met him, you know,' Mary said. 'I don't think he was very impressed—I was far too young and not nearly clever or beautiful enough for his set, but John liked him. They'd come over here and talk and read. That's how I first knew of the tearoom. But I love the river. Cambridge can be so dusty and yelow but the river is always so cool and green. It reminds me of our old house out here. I'd live on an island or a houseboat if I could.'

'You'l be horrified to know that when I was at Oxford I used to think you were like a water nymph,' he said. For a second he couldn't believe he had blurted out something so ridiculously inappropriate but she looked so delighted and happy at his absurd revelation that he laughed with her.

Laurence began to wonder whether the whole day would pass without either of them mentioning the reason for his visit. It was only the almost untouched seed cake on her plate that suggested Mary Emmett was more anxious than she appeared. He was fighting off sleepiness from the punting and the sun as he sat in his shirtsleeves, eyes slightly screwed up against the light. He had become adept at sensing the turn of a conversation so that he could head off any direction that led to Louise and sympathy. Now he found himself on the other side, trying to reach a place where John could be there quite naturaly.

'Is your mother al right?' It was a lame question.

'No,' said Mary. 'No, she's not, actualy. She was never very strong and she's just retreated from the world. Al the anxiety about John during the war, and then a brief happiness when he came back. Then it was soon obvious things were badly wrong, and she was scared and embarrassed by his violent outbursts. He got involved in a fight, miles away, and was arrested. He wouldn't talk about it but he would have been charged if he hadn't been admitted into a nursing home. Al the same, she wasn't sure whether she should have let him be put away—because we were putting him away; we both felt it. He wouldn't speak and something was wrong with his arm; it made his life even harder that he couldn't use it. He needed us. Needed somebody who loved him.'

'I'm sure he understood,' Laurence said. 'I'm sorry, that sounds such a cliché.' However, he was wondering whether John might also have needed distance from his over-protective mother.

'Yes, but the place was too far away and he was among strangers and I'm not even sure they—the people in charge—were al very nice people. Not very kind.

And the worst thing of al was that truthfuly it was quite a relief to have him out of the house.'

Her voice wobbled. Laurence automaticaly put out his hand to comfort her and cursed himself for being a fool as it neither reached her nor was noticed. After a second he withdrew it. There was silence for a minute or two, except for wasps buzzing round the jug of cordial.

'Do you realy think he was mistreated?'

'Wel, not actively mistreated, but not always understood. He was complicated.'

She described what she knew of John's last days, though the story she told was not greatly amplified from her long letter. John had settled into Holmwood, an institution in the market town of Fairford in the Cotswolds. It had long been a hospital specialising in neurasthenia. Before the war it had taken men and women in more or less equal numbers but soon it began to fil with troubled officers.

'Shel-shock: that's what they cal it now. To give them their due, they got John speaking and he'd put on a bit of weight by the last time I saw him.'

'Who was actualy in charge?' asked Laurence.

A Doctor Chilvers was in charge medicaly but his son had a share in ownership, I think; he seemed to have a lot of influence in how things were done. Although Dr Chilvers was quite old, he seemed to be doing his best. His son, George, was thirty-five or so but I didn't get the feeling he'd served in the war. He's a solicitor. I didn't like him. The staff were nervous of him, I thought. And either there's family money or they're doing quite nicely out of Holmwood. Is that unfair? I suppose it is.'

She rushed on, 'Why shouldn't they do wel? Somebody has to care for these poor men.'

'Did anyone expect things to turn out so badly?'

'I would have said suicide was the last thing he'd do. Earlier, maybe. Not then. I saw him about six weeks before he—escaped—and he was a bit restless. But in a way I thought that was good. He hated being cooped up; said he had things he needed to do, which must mean he intended to have time to do them in, surely? He talked a bit. About Suffolk. Lots about our father. He said he had regrets—he didn't say about what but I assumed the war. Yet that last time I thought he was more himself, if anything. In fact, I went back more hopeful than I had for ages. I even suggested Mother went over to see him.'

She stopped and breathed in deeply. They were both so stil that a sparrow hopped on to the table and pecked at crumbs. As she began to speak again, it flew a few feet away to perch on a chairback.

'She never did, of course. She never saw him again. That Christmas Day he was taken il in church or pretended he was. A Holmwood attendant folowed him out but John either knocked him out or just pushed him out of his way—it depends which version you believe. And John ran off and ended up dead in a wood. Heaven knows how long he'd been there. He could have lived rough for a while, I suppose. It was an awful, awful shock.

Anyway, apparently Dr Chilvers told the inquest—we didn't go; my mother would have been terribly distressed and I couldn't face it on my own—there was a blot on John's copybook at Holmwood: he'd "absconded" only weeks earlier. Absconded! When he'd gone to Holmwood voluntarily.'

She was sitting forward now, her elbows on the table. Sun filtered through the brim of her hat on to her skin. She was beautiful, he thought.

'After that they'd been keeping him under closer confinement for a bit,' she went on. 'That alone would have driven him mad. No wonder he broke out. But Chilvers' slimy son backed up the doctor and one of the attendants said John was volatile.' She looked upset and paused as if waiting for him to see the injustice of it al.

As if the rest of their patients were models of composure. They kept referring to what they caled a violent attack on their warder outside the church. Not pointing out it was the only way John could get away.'

Laurence must have looked puzzled because Mary added, 'Of course, men like John do kil themselves sometimes. I know that. In fact there'd been another death there—right in the house itself—only a few months before John arrived. But on the day John disappeared, they didn't cal the police out for twelve hours while young Mr Chilvers drove around, trying to retrieve their lost patient with minimum fuss. If they'd got others involved they might have found John before he did it.'

Although her hand was trembling slightly her voice remained very calm. She ran her finger down the side of her glass.

'But it was a stranger who died, you see. He'd left us years ago.'

Laurence wished he could tel her he had heard from him, wished he could have explained that stranger to her. He wanted to believe he would have made contact if he'd known John was in trouble, but he feared that he wouldn't. He should never have lost his friend in the first place.

'Look,' he began, unsure what he was about to commit himself to and whether he was complicating a simple, if sad, event. 'I could see if I could find out anything. I mean, I don't know if I would be able to do any more than you have, but I could at least ask around people he and I both knew. At school, mostly, possibly at Oxford. See whether any of them had heard anything from him since the war. I have the time.'

Even as he said it, he knew he was only setting himself up to disappoint her. So many in their year were gone now and John had had no intimates, anyway.

'People at school' would simply mean Charles Carfax. But her face brightened irresistibly, so he continued, 'At a pinch I suppose I could talk to the people at Holmwood, see if they come up with anything.' As he said it, he thought how unlikely it was that he would be any match for the professionaly discreet.

'When John died—afterwards—they sent a trunk with his things,' she said. 'There's not much in it, just clothes and books. Little things.'

A look of such extreme sadness came over her that he was embarrassed to be faced with her emotion and uneasy remembering his own reactions to Louise's possessions.

'But there might be something you'd make sense of. There are sketches and writings, a few photographs. You might see something, knowing a different side of John to us.'

He didn't know how to tel her that he felt he had never realy known her brother at al.

It was getting cooler. Laurence paid for tea and they walked back to the punt, now alone on its moorings. Light breezes made the return journey faster but chily. Mary sat, eventualy accepting Laurence's offer of his coat, while he made what seemed like interminable progress downstream. After a bit she took over and he surrendered the pole with gratitude. His shoulder muscles were burning with exertion but he was damp with sweat and soon felt cold. They were both weary by the time they were back on land again.

They walked the short distance to the Emmetts' new house in silence. Laurence, remembering their Suffolk home from years back, was surprised by the dul meagreness of the tal, narrow house they lived in now. The brick was greyish-yelow, the proportions of the windows cramped. Below the railings, ferns and mosses had encroached on the damp basement. What had happened to their leisured existence before the war?

Chapter Five

An elderly woman opened the door. Was it the same maid he remembered from long ago, Laurence wondered; she wasn't in uniform but few domestics were now. He smiled encouragingly but she just motioned to them to come in.

'My aunt, Miss Virginia Peel,' said Mary. He hoped his smile hadn't been patronising.

Mary took him into a smal drawing room where, despite the warmth outside, Mrs Emmett sat by a fire. To cross the room and shake her hand, he had to squeeze between occasional tables and around a large chiffonier. Every bit of furniture that had looked at home in an affably neglected manor house appeared to have accompanied them to Cambridge. The effect was oppressive, the pieces heavy and grandiose. Weak light filtered in through thick lace curtains under a velvet pelmet.

Even Mary seemed to wilt. Her mother sat on a button-back chair like a relic of another age.

'Laurence,' she said and held out a soft hand, 'how good to see you again.'

He would not have recognised Mrs Emmett. She was much smaler than he recaled and a certain excitability, which had amused him when he was a boy, was entirely gone.

'How good of you to come al this way and see Mary. She doesn't get out nearly enough.' She looked towards her daughter. 'She doesn't see much of her old friends. I don't know why. Everybody used to love Mary.'

They talked politely, touching on her son for only a second, and then only to locate them al in time.

'That was before John died, of course,' Mrs Emmett had replied to Laurence's asking when they had moved to Cambridge.

Mary jumped in at this opportunity. 'I thought it might be nice to let Laurence have one of John's books. You remember we discussed it. As a keepsake.' He could tel that Mrs Emmett actualy remembered nothing of the sort and it crossed his mind that there had never even been a conversation on the subject, but Mrs Emmett smiled again vaguely.

'Oh yes, lovely. What a good idea. Certainly he should have something. Do you like poetry? John was very keen on poetry, you know.'

Laurence had worried that they would have to sit and have a second, awkward, tea, but Mary's mother seemed unconcerned with such social niceties and after a few minutes they were able to back out of the room.

John's things had been put in one of two smal rooms under the eaves. As they climbed the three flights of stairs, Mary said over her shoulder, 'You don't have to take anything. I simply wanted an excuse to show you John's things without having to explain.'

Their feet clattered up a last uncarpeted flight into a smal, peaceful room with a casement window. It held an iron bed, a wooden chair and a washstand. On the bed lay a trunk and a box. It reminded him a bit of school.

'We never used to come up here,' Mary said, as if the room stil surprised her. 'But my aunt needed John's old room, and now this is al that's left of him ... It's hard.'

She opened the wooden box first. A battered hip flask lay on top of a yelow and black striped scarf. Mary picked it up and held to her face, smeling it.

'A school house scarf,' she said. 'Not a Marlborough scarf and not his, though I like to think that a friend gave it to him to keep out the cold. He had it with him until the end.'

Laurence took the scarf from her. He didn't say that it had probably belonged to a dead man. He picked up the corner and saw what he expected: embroidered initials and a school number next to it. He wondered what the schoolboy MS142C had been like and what had happened to him. What sporting boys in what house in what school had worn these colours? School with its numbered individuals was just like the army, he thought.

Mary was rifling through the box. 'Holmwood sent it back to us. Most of what was with him, on his body, was burned,' she said hurriedly, turning her face away. 'But there should have been a watch. It had been my grandfather's and my father bought a new chain for it when John went up to Oxford. Though I suppose it could have been damaged.'

The corner of her mouth twitched so minutely that if he hadn't been watching her closely, he might have missed it.

'These were returned to us.' She turned round, holding out an oilskin tobacco pouch, a crumpled handkerchief and a worn woman's hair ornament. She then lifted up a lined sheet of paper with writing on it and a photograph. 'The contents of his pockets. Pathetic, realy. The note and photograph were in the empty pouch.'

He took the photograph from her. A deep crease ran across it and the corners were dog-eared. It was a picture of soldiers, taken from a short distance away.

The image was poor quality and overexposed along one edge. Nor had they posed for it; in fact, the group seemed unaware of the photographer. They were mostly young and unsmiling. Some were smoking in a huddle. The closest was more of a boy than a man, noticeably slighter and shorter than the rest. Standing alone, leaning back against a pile of logs, his eyes half shut but looking more relaxed than the others, was a sergeant. Close by were two officers; one was considerably older, in his late forties, Laurence guessed. The younger had turned half away from the camera. Could it be John? Mary didn't comment. In the background was a cobbled farmyard. A single bare branch overhung open stals with a covering of what looked like light snow.

He turned the picture over. In the corner was a fairly formal monogram in purple ink—the developer perhaps? He looked briefly at the sheet of paper; across the top was the word 'Coburg' underlined, and below it 'Byers' and then 'Darling' in older, penciled writing. Next to it in different ink was written 'B. Combe Bisset and then Tucker/Florence St?'

Who had taken the photograph, and why had John got it with him at his death? Impossible to know. Were Byers and Darling men in the picture? Was Tucker a street or a person? Combe Bisset was presumably a British location and Coburg a German one. But then he thought of al the nicknames they gave to trenches in France, a stagnant pit caled Piccadily and a sand-bagged Dover Way. As he thought, he was fiddling with the metal comb, a smal, cheap, gilt trinket. A unicorn's head surmounted its bent spikes, with what might be letters or simply decoration.

Mary set aside a battered tin of geometry instruments and lifted out a book on birds. He opened it at the bookmark. John had written down the margin:

'Wonderful golden orioles singing at La Comte. April '17.' The page showed a plump, bright-yelow bird with the caption 'Oriolus oriolus'.

'He and my father loved birds,' Mary said, as she handed him three more volumes. 'Heads in the air—birds and stars—both of them.'

On top was a wel-worn copy of The Iliad. Laurence remembered struggling through it at school. He put the other books on the bed and opened the Homer.

Sure enough, it was inscribed: John Christopher Rawlston Emmett, College House. He reached for a smal anthology with a cover in pristine khaki. He thought every soldier had been given a copy on embarkation to France. It was titled Spirit of War, a colection of stirring works for impressionable young men. He exchanged it briefly for Browning's The Ring and the Book. Mary handed him a book in a brown slipcover. Taking it from her, he read the cover: Karl Marx, Das Kapital. He prised apart the curled-up page corners and stared at the mystery of dense Gothic script.

Mary had puled some notebooks from under the remaining contents. The first was a mixture of sketches, poems and bits of prose. Here and there a cutting had been stuck in. She tipped a page towards him: it was a charcoal drawing of the old Suffolk house. The second book was smaler and the writing in it more cramped; folowing round the bottom margins of pages and up the sides.

Mary stood close to him and turned the pages slowly. There were sketches of infantrymen in a camp lying propped up with mugs of tea, and then one of a young soldier enveloped in a waterproof cape and huddled behind sandbags. They were awfuly good, Laurence thought; the sense of relentless rain was invoked with a few pencil strokes. The whole of the next page was a half-finished portrait of a nurse sitting by an oil lamp, its light accentuating her bone structure. Mary handed the open book to him. He turned the page again. On the left was a studio photograph: French undoubtedly—he had seen hundreds like it—of a solid young woman, posed naked but for her hat and boots. Her hands were clasped behind her neck, the hair under her arms and between her legs was as dark and thick as that under her hat.

Laurence looked up sharply but Mary was absorbed in the earlier notebook.

There were two poems on the folowing page. They both had the same title, 'A Lament'. The first, a sonnet, had the initials JCRE underneath. He remembered John's poem he'd read in the newspaper. This one was better, he thought. The second poem, although also handwritten, had been pasted in; the writing was quite different. It was signed 'Sisyphus'. It was long, with no real structure and incomplete sentences, yet its words painted a picture that brought the combined sensations and sounds of warfare back to Laurence so strongly that he found himself gripping the book tightly. The strange fragments summoned up the inescapable proximity to others and the simultaneous loneliness of life near the front line, of profound bonds between men dependent on each other, yet having perhaps to pass by the same men lying dead in some muddy defile.

Laurence wondered why John had stuck the poems in together. John's poem was highly competent, moving even, but diminished by the extraordinary quality of the unknown Sisyphus's work.

As Mary unlatched the trunk it emanated a faint and disconcerting stale male scent: sweat, tobacco, hair oil and mothbals. The contents were somehow depressing: towels, a worn tartan blanket, some cheap blank writing paper and envelopes. A pair of indoor shoes in need of a polish and lovat bedroom slippers lay over a couple of folded newspapers, presumably there to protect the clothes from the shoes. He picked up the top paper; it was dated the previous November. The front page had a grainy picture of the train bearing the Unknown Warrior arriving at Victoria Station. Under the slightly damp newspapers was a layer of clothing: much-washed vests, long johns and a box of colars. An army greatcoat lay under a thick navy comforter of the sort Laurence remembered wel, knitted by mothers, aunts and wives who had always believed that a chil on the chest was the most formidable enemy of al.

There were four unframed photographs tucked between layers of clothes. The first was of John's father standing outside Colston House with his dog and a shotgun. The next was a studio portrait of a very young John, and Mary younger stil, posed in a big chair. Some glue and a torn bit of dark paper remained on the reverse, so it had presumably been taken from an album. The third surprised him; he recognised himself, Lionel, Rupert and Charles in stiff colars and dark jackets, posing for the shot. The fourth was smal: a little boy in a sailor suit with dark hair and eyes who he guessed was John. He was disconcerted to find John had held such attachments to the past and felt a momentary discomfort at revealing the inner life of such a private man.

'But this is what I wanted to show you.'

Mary puled out a lined schoolbook. Again she opened it and handed it to Laurence. There were fewer words than in the earlier books, large, single ones or short phrases scrawled across the page. One read Göttes Mühle mahle langsam, mahle aber trefflich klein, but he had no idea what it meant.

The pictures were no longer portraits and smal landscapes. Ghoul-like faces—eyeless, formless—rose, dripping, out of some viscous glue. He turned a few more pages: bodies, German soldiers by the look of the uniform, thrown outwards by a central explosion. A rat was crouched on the corner of the next page, a subaltern's pips hanging from its claws and a human grin on its mouth. He turned over the page. A man slumped away from a post, almost on his knees but restrained by a rope with his hands behind him, a blindfold over his eyes. Dark, shiny penciling over his shirt indicated mortal injury. The lead had pierced the page at one point. Six soldiers were standing with their guns half raised. Along the bottom on both sides of the next double-page spread men walked, single file, with bandaged eyes, one hand on the shoulder of the man in front. They'd been gassed, Laurence assumed, or were prisoners. It was hard to tel from the uniforms. The quality of drawing was stil very fine, which made their impact acute.

Laurence turned the page again; he hated seeing al these nightmarish images here in front of Mary. Until now he had been unable to reconcile the boy he had known at school, as wel as the man revealed by his possessions and whose sister loved him, with the kind of person who would blow his brains out in a winter wood.

Now he had become privy to the preoccupations of a different sort of man.

There were a few blank pages, then one last drawing, in pencil. In it a girl lay apparently dead across some sacks, one arm thrown behind her, the other across her chest. Her head was turned to one side, her hair was tangled. What was most shocking was that her skirts were raised, showing her nakedness underneath. One stocking was torn, the other leg was bare, her foot turned outwards.

He suddenly realised that he had been silent for some time. When he glanced up, Mary had moved to the window and was half turned away from him, looking out. She stil clutched the striped scarf. There were tears on her cheeks but her crying was silent. She pressed one end of the scarf to her eyes. He left the book on the bed and went over to her, putting his arm clumsily round her shoulders. She stayed immobile for a second before turning towards him. He held her for a minute, conscious of the scent of her, and of the scarf, and of her hair against his face, the slightness of her body against his chest. It was the first time he had touched another human being, apart from trying to comfort injured men, he thought, since he had last held Louise in the darkness of their bed. But then he remembered the whore in Soho just as Mary broke away, covering her embarrassment by puling a handkerchief out of her sleeve.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I can't bear thinking what must have happened to him out there. After I found it I was going to burn it so that Mother never saw it, but it turned out she didn't want to look at John's things. She has his photo by the bed and that's enough for her. A tidy relationship.' She raised her eyes to his. 'She always did like everything to be nice and everybody to be happy. She can't cope with complicated things. I'm quite sure she wishes John had simply died in action like half the other officers in his regiment.'

It occurred to Laurence that Mary must feel suffocated in this claustrophobic house with two prematurely old women.

'Look,' he said, 'I'm happy to do anything I can to help but you're wrong in thinking I knew your brother wel. I knew him. I liked him. I liked him a lot. But that was a long time ago.'

Mary looked at him. 'You probably knew him as wel as any of us, then.'

She rummaged through the trunk, under the heavy layers of clothing, then sat back on her heels.

'No, wait a minute,' she said, hurriedly, 'I've got something in my room I want you to see. You stay here.'

Laurence sat on the chair, hearing her clatter down the second flight of stairs. It was stuffy under the roof, and moving John's things about had raised dust, which shimmered in the light. He walked to the window, lifted the latch and pushed. The window seemed stuck fast. Dead flies lay on the sil. He banged on the frame with the side of his clenched fist and then harder with his hand protected in the sleeve of his jacket. It burst free, explosively, and swung wide to alow in a rush of fresh air. Old moss and flakes of paint fel on to the floor; God knows when it had last been opened. The light beyond the slate roofs showed that evening was not far away. He looked at his watch. It was getting late. He was standing at the window when Mary returned with a manila envelope.

'Look, I'm going to have to be off soon if I'm to catch my train,' he said. Her face fel instantly. 'We can meet again,' he went on hurriedly, 'but I'm supposed to be at dinner in London tonight.' It was only with Charles but he had left it too late to change the arrangements. 'I've got half an hour.'

'John was engaged once, you know.'

Laurence found himself surprised, not because he couldn't imagine John liking women, but simply because he couldn't imagine him being that intimate with anyone.

'She was German, her name was Minna. She lived near Munich. A lawyer's daughter, I think. He met her before the war, presumably when he was traveling.

Wel, obviously before the war.' She shrugged. 'We'd never got to meet her. Her family had been going to come over in 1913 but then everything caught up with us and they never came. My father died late that year. John came home for the funeral and he never went back to Germany. Then, when war seemed inevitable, Minna's father forced her to cal off the engagement. A good thing probably. She was very young. It was made worse because she died not long afterwards. Appendicitis, John said.'

'There's no picture of her?'

'No. He did have one once although I never saw it after they separated. He took her death quite hard. But there may have been other people in his life that we knew nothing of. He left a wil before he went to France; they al did. When he came back from the war he made another wil. We didn't know anything about it and it wasn't with the family solicitors. He used a smal London firm. They sent us a copy. It wasn't very different—he provided for my mother and me—but there were three individual bequests as wel. One was to a Captain Wiliam Bolitho whose address was a convalescent home. One was to a Frenchman, a Monsieur Meurice of ...

somewhere that sounded like Rouen. Doulon—no, Doulens, I think—and the other was to a married woman. I've got her name downstairs. Sadly the Frenchman and al his family were untraceable. Even the vilage was gone. The solicitors are holding money in case he is found. There were no reasons given for any of the bequests.

'Captain Bolitho was in John's regiment. He survived although apparently he lost his legs. But nobody knew anything about the Frenchman or the woman. I wondered whether they had been...' She paused. 'Wel, whether they had been close, I suppose, and whether he would have written to her if they were. In the end I never tried to speak to her and she never contacted us, though the solicitors could have passed on any letter to us.'

She looked at him with an expression he found hard to read. Her eyes were steady and almost on a level with his.

'Look,' he said, quickly, aware of the clumsiness of his timing, 'I'm realy sorry but I do have to go very soon.' He glanced at his watch again. He was going to be lucky to catch the half past six train. 'But if you want me to try to contact Bolitho or this woman, I'l gladly make enquiries. Nothing that would embarrass you, enough to put your mind at rest.'

Although Mary was silent, she looked much happier.

'Might I take the note he had with him?' he asked. 'It might be useful.' Though he couldn't think how. She nodded and reached for it.

'Why don't you come up and see me in London?' he said. 'Next week, say? We could go to a concert, if you'd like that. Have you been to the Wigmore Hal? I could try to get tickets. We could talk more then. In the meantime I'l think whether there's anything else I can do.'

Mary visibly brightened. 'I'd love that. I went there with John just before he joined up and before it was closed down. It must have been before 1914, because it was stil a German business. The Bechstein Hal, it was then. They were stil playing Schubert and Brahms: dangerous German music.' She smiled again. 'John's favourites. It was the only time we'd ever gone anywhere like that together. It was only because somebody else had let him down at the last minute.'

He went downstairs ahead of her, said a rather perfunctory goodbye to Mrs Emmett and her sister and shook hands on the doorstep with Mary who was clearly trying not to cry. He wanted to say something to help her, but then she thrust a sheet of paper at him. He was puzzled for a second until he realised it was a copy of John's wil.

Speaking fast, she said, 'You probably think I'm just not accepting it, John's death. But I do accept it. We'd lived with that possibility for four years. It's realy his life I'm trying to understand. There's this hole where I should know things. And then there are things I do know—such as the people in his wil whom we'd never even heard of, and my impression that he was definitely getting better—that I simply can't make sense of'

He took her hands in his. She bit her lip, looking at him without speaking. 'I'l do everything I can,' he promised.

He caught a bus to the station and only made the train by running down the platform. Once in a seat, he rested his head against the window and his breathing calmed. The train gathered speed. He had to close his eyes against the setting sun and, drifting on the edge of sleep, he reflected on the afternoon.

He was disoriented by his encounter. It wouldn't be hard to be attracted to Mary Emmett—he had been in a way, al those years ago—yet he knew he was now responding to emotions and a vulnerability that had nothing to do with him.

He took out the wil. Mrs Gwen Lovel was the first beneficiary—or was it Lowel? The legal hand was clear but the letter 'v' less so. Her address was 11

Lynmouth Road, Kentish Town, London. Bolitho's address was a convalescent home at Brighton. Those bits would be easy, he thought.

Chapter Six

Laurence managed to get home, change and stil be only a quarter of an hour late, but he was so tired he feared being poor company. He and Charles sat down to eat in an almost empty dining room.

'Everybody's on the moors,' Charles grunted. 'Lucky devils. But you look as if you've come hot saddle from Aix to Ghent.'

'Actualy I went and saw John Emmett's people today.'

'Did you, by God?' For once Charles looked surprised. 'What are they like? I heard they were cooped up in some ghastly place in Cambridge.'

'Mary's a realy nice girl. I hardly recognised her, though.' It wasn't true but he wanted to resist acknowledging the impact she'd made on him.

'Bad business,' said Charles, picking up his glass and half closing his eyes in appreciation of the wine. 'Have they taken it hard?'

'Wel, it doesn't help that he didn't leave a letter.'

'They've realy been through it,' Charles reflected. 'Pa died suddenly before the war, I heard from Jack—that's the Ayrshire cousin—and the Emmetts can hardly have come out with anything, once they'd paid off his debts. The mother was always pretty batty, he'd heard tel—must be where Emmett got it from—and more so when they had to sel the house. And before then, John gets engaged to some Fräulein and it takes a war to get him out of it. And the sister, Mary, my aunt said had been involved in some scandal with a married man. Takes a war to get her out of that too. Blown to smithereens at Vimy Ridge.' He added as an afterthought, 'Jack said he had been at school at Ampleforth with the felow. RC. Can't remember the name. Nice chap, though notoriously flighty wife.'

Laurence was shocked by the lurch of his heart. He was unable to distinguish whether his annoyance was with Charles, Mary or himself. To his astonishment and discomfiture he felt jealous. Mary wasn't what he'd taken her for. Immediately he knew he was being ridiculous. Not only did he hardly know her but she had not volunteered anything about herself to him and why should he have expected her to? He was being a fool. She must be in her mid- to late-twenties by now. Why shouldn't she have had another life, a life away from her family? Why shouldn't she have been happy for a while?

'John's father can't have been too profligate as John was able to make generous bequests in his own wil. One to a chap caled Bolitho.' Laurence knew he sounded gruff. 'Served with him, apparently. Do you know him?'

Charles's social antennae meant that, even unasked, he could provide chapter and verse on just about any officer or outfit he had come across.

'Bolitho? Bil Bolitho, I expect that'l be; he was with John's lot,' he answered, almost like a music-hal memory man. 'Good man. Legs shot off in 1917. Wel, not shot off but gangrene or something. One, anyway. Not sure about the other.' He paused, thinking. 'So Emmett left him some money? Not entirely surprising that he felt grateful, I suppose.' His expression belied his words. 'More surprising to find Emmett had any to leave. Jack's usualy spot on about stuff. Emmett and Bolitho served together in France. Emmett was inspecting a redoubt when it colapsed. Nothing to do with Jerry, just one of those things. Two other chaps with him died but Emmett wasn't far in and I heard that old Bolitho dug like fury and got him out. Banged him about, got him breathing. Heroic measures. Emmett must have remembered when Bolitho was invalided out.'

'And a Frenchman who's disappeared and a woman caled Lovel, or Lowel? Does she mean anything to you? She lives in London now, Kentish Town way.'

Charles thought for a moment. 'No,' he said. 'No. Can't say it does. No, don't personaly know any Lowels, Lovels or whoever. Or anybody at al in Kentish Town.' He looked amazed at his own falibility. 'The Cat, the Rat, and Lovel the Dog, rule al England under the Hog.'

Laurence stared at his friend, speechless.

'Richard III's nasty chums,' said Charles, happily. 'Only bit of history I remember from school. So, this Miss Lovel, an heiress too now, is she? Some floozy of Emmett's? Wel, at least she sounds English this time. Always a dark horse, that man.'

' Mrs Lovel, I think.'

Charles raised his eyebrows. 'Just so,' he said.

After the strangely disquieting day in Cambridge and the dinner with Charles, Laurence half expected Louise to come; she so often did when he had drunk a bit. Trying to avoid her, he delayed getting undressed. Eventualy he fel into bed around two, thinking briefly about the sun and the river. He must have falen asleep as the next thing he knew it was morning; he had been woken by a bee buzzing angrily between curtain and windowpane. He flicked it out into the day and lay back. Despite his aching shoulders and back, he felt content, relaxing in the early light, recaling his meeting with Mary, and he pushed away thoughts of her now-dead lover.

He considered the feasibility of actualy contacting people who had known John. What questions could he reasonably ask on her behalf? Nothing too wild; there was a limit to how far anybody wanted to look back these days. He simply hoped to give Mary some sense of her brother's war and of what others made of him.

He thought of his own sister, as he almost never did, and reflected how very little she would know about him if he should die suddenly. He puled out his bedside drawer and found the picture he had of them, side by side, just before she left to go on honeymoon and out of his life. He was already taler than her. Al these photographs looked so real, yet were as much ilusions and ghosts as oil paintings in a galery. He had left al those he had of Louise in their London house. He thought back to the family portrait of the Emmett children. Who was the baby, he wondered? Had they once had a younger sibling? He felt sorry for Mary, now the lone survivor.

He felt happy in a way he hadn't for years at the thought of simply walking over to the concert hal to check the programme. To satisfy his conscience, he wrote solidly al day. The pages at the end of it suddenly looked remarkably like a proper chapter.

He decided to start folowing up John Emmett's trail the next morning, although when he woke heavy skies threatened rain, putting him in two minds whether to postpone his day's plans or not. There was, after al, no hurry: John Emmett had been dead for nine months or so.

The postman delivered a letter from Charles. He took out the single, crisp page with a smile. Having inherited and swiftly sold the substantial business built up by four generations of Carfaxes, Charles had time to involve himself in other men's lives. Sometimes Laurence wondered whether, in the absence of war, Charles was bored.

Albany

10 September 1921

Dear Bartram,

Before you turn detective, because any fool can see that's what you've got in mind, and probably a lady behind your transformation into Mr. Holmes, I thought I might help you by tracking down Bolitho. Turns out he's not in a convalescent home and not far away. Lives in a mansion flat in Kensington with his wife. Not doing too badly, I'm told, and quite happy to have visitors. Anyway, he's at 2 Moscow Mansions, South Kensington. I had an aunt who lived in the same block before the war, ful of faded gentlefolk. I think the Bolithos must be on the ground floor. You're on your own with the mysterious Mrs Lovel, though.

Charles

The folowing week, Laurence met Mary off the train at Liverpool Street. He stood right under the clock, excitement turning to nervousness and then to embarrassment as he realised two other men and a single anxious-faced woman were sharing his chosen rendezvous. It was a cliché. He was a cliché. He moved further away. There were a surprising number of people on the platform: a gaggle of girls in plaits with identical navy coats and felt hats puled down hard on their heads, while they, their trunks and their lacrosse sticks were overseen by two stern-looking ladies; it was obviously the beginning of term.

Al these journeys momentarily intersecting here, he thought. Al the farewels. A stout older man huffed by, preceded by a porter with a large case. From childhood, Laurence had always been drawn to inventing lives for unknown people. This man was a Harley Street physician, he decided, whom the war had saved from retirement. Now he was off to a difficult but profitable case in the shires. Laurence looked up at the clock; the Cambridge train was already ten minutes late.

Perhaps he and Mary would forever be meeting like this. He stil felt uneasy in stations. Memories of three journeys to or from France stil haunted him. The first time, nervous but confident, he was ridiculously over-equipped: a Swaine Adeney Brigg catalogue model, his uniform stiff, his badges bright and untested, chatting eagerly to new faces, wanting to make a good impression on the two subalterns traveling out with him. They were al so junior that they had no choice but to sit on wooden benches in the crowded compartments, back-to-back with ordinary soldiers. It was winter and the fug of cheap cigarettes, the range of accents and the stink of stale uniform was overwhelming. He observed the contrast between excitement in some men and grim disengagement in others.

The second time—when a period of leave in May, spent with Louise and some friends in Oxfordshire, had cruely reminded him of al he had to leave behind and that the gap between normality and hel was only a day's travel—had been hideous. He had sat on the train taking him back to the front almost unable to speak.

That time he had recognised the silences he had met on his first embarkation.

Much later, he had returned to England on a hospital train. Although he had traveled in reasonable comfort on this journey, when he got off it was to a sea of stretchers bearing casualties, some in blood-stained bandages, others apparently blind or minus limbs. The sight of them was more shocking, lying on a familiar London platform, than amid the chaos of injury and mutilation he'd encountered in the trenches. He remembered an orderly and a nurse leaning over one man. She puled his grey blanket over his head as she signaled to two soldiers to carry him away. Contemplating the horror of the man's long journey, the pain and disruption of coming home, just to die next to the buffers, Laurence had turned his head away.

He jerked back to the present. The landscape of khaki and grey faded away. The Cambridge train was puling in with a last exhalation of steam. He watched various individuals pass but he could not see Mary.

She had almost reached his end of the platform before he recognised her. With her hair covered by a deep-crimson hat and wearing a coat, she looked different: more sophisticated and more in control. Everything about her declared her a modern woman, he thought as she drew closer, yet her eyes were less confident as she searched the crowd and she clutched her bag tightly to her. He was grinning like an idiot; he could feel his cheek muscles aching. He waved, although it was quite redundant; she was near enough to have seen him already and then she was in front of him. Quite on the spur of the moment he kissed her on the cheek. She smeled of Lily of the Valey.

'Laurence,' she said, with her amused, crooked smile, 'it's so good to be here.' She looked round almost excitedly and took a deep breath of anticipation.

'We need to get a cab,' he said, gently ushering her through the crowds, his hand in the smal of her back. 'We've got plenty of time so we could have tea before the concert. If you'd like that, that is? Talk a bit and so on?'

'Talk a bit,' she said teasingly but then laughed. 'Oh Laurence, I love just being here. Getting away.' Her voice became more serious. 'We'l have a bit of time afterwards though, I hope?' He was very conscious of her body even through the smal area under his palm and through a wool coat. She broke away only as a cab drew up.

Within a quarter of an hour they were sitting over tea in Durrants Hotel.

'I struck lucky with Captain Bolitho,' he told her happily. 'Nice wife too. It al seems quite straightforward.'

His confidence that evening, the uncomplicated nature of the story he had to tel, was something Laurence would remember long afterwards.

Chapter Seven

Laurence had been surprised to get a letter by return of post from Wiliam Bolitho, suggesting he come to lunch the folowing day. He had taken a bus and then, folowing Charles's very precise directions, walked through the streets to Moscow Mansions.

Mrs Bolitho had opened the door. She was slim and of middling height with curly auburn hair and an inteligent face. Bolitho sat by a window in the sitting room with a blanket over his lap. The shutters were folded back and light poured into a slightly shabby but pleasing room. Some draughtsman's drawings, mostly of big but unfamiliar houses, hung on the largest wal, and on the wooden floor lay a rose and indigo Persian rug faded by the sun. One wal was lined with books; the other was dominated by an abstract picture of strong ochre and black squares and curves, with odd glued and painted newspaper scraps. Laurence had no idea what it meant, but he liked it.

Laurence turned as Bolitho reached out to shake him by the hand. It was a strong grip that matched the strength of character in the man's face. Bolitho had caught the direction of Laurence's gaze.

'It's Braque,' he said. 'Wel, not a Braque, obviously, but a copy.' Then he went on, 'It's very good to meet you.'

Laurence sat down in a deep chair opposite Wiliam. They talked for a while about nothing particularly significant, although Laurence was trying to gauge the man and suspected Wiliam was doing much the same with him, until Eleanor suggested they move through for luncheon. He tried not to look shocked when she removed a blanket, revealing one of Wiliam's legs apparently ending at the knee, the trouser neatly pinned up, and no sign of the other limb at al. She helped Wiliam into a wheelchair, bracing it with her foot, while he swung himself over.

'Can I help?' Laurence asked, although it was obviously a practised routine.

'No, no it's fine,' said Wiliam. 'Most chaps in my situation sit in the wheelchair most of the day but I get damn bored. I prefer to move about.'

Eleanor pushed the chair through double doors to the smal dining room where a table was laid near the window.

Any fear he'd had that the meeting would be gloomy and difficult was dispersed over a simple meal of cold meats, boiled potatoes, sweet pickled beetroot and a blackcurrant fool. The Bolithos were excelent hosts and the affection between them was tangible. Wiliam had been an architect before the war, he told Laurence, and stil hoped that he might find a job that would alow him to work again. Laurence glanced at his wife whose face was one of determined good cheer as her husband spoke.

'I was trained in Glasgow and studied in Vienna. There's so much I'd like to be part of—so much happening in architecture that's exciting, innovative...' His face lit up with enthusiasm. 'It's difficult, of course, but with al the new building in London I'm keeping my ears open. I write letters, I keep up with my reading and so on.'

He indicated a pile of journals on a table. 'Eleanor says it can be only a matter of time.'

'Sadly,' she said, 'they're as short of young architects now as they are of so many other professional men.'

Apparently ignoring her earnestness, Wiliam looked over his shoulder, his waving fork indicating the room and the painting behind them.

Alternatively, I do feel I might have a good future in forging Braques,' he said. 'Cubism seems to invite it, realy.'

An hour or more went by without Laurence realy noticing time pass but it was long enough for him to realise, as he had with Mary, that he was quite useless in controling the direction of a conversation. He let it find its own level. Eleanor held forth on the prospect of the Independent Labour Party ever winning an election. Her enthusiasm and inteligence were infectious and Wiliam, who must have heard it al before, looked on with evident pleasure. Laurence found himself teling them about his teaching and his reservations about the book he was writing.

'But obviously you want to talk about John Emmett's wil?' Wiliam said eventualy, with no embarrassment. 'Wel, one of the things we were able to do with his bequest was to buy a gramophone.' He looked towards the corner. 'Tidy, isn't it?' As Laurence folowed his glance, Wiliam added, 'I expect you're wondering where the horn is. You see, it's got a pleated diaphragm instead, it's the latest thing. I first saw it out in France, as we had one in the mess at HQ. A friend has just sent me Beethoven's complete works. They've just been recorded.' He picked up a couple of crimson-centred records and carefuly slipped them out of their brown-paper covers. 'Beautiful. And Bach as wel. There's much more interest in him these days. About time too.' He looked completely happy, Laurence thought. 'Frankly, Emmett's bequest changed our lives. The sum he left us surprised us both.'

'It was being able to move here, you see,' said Eleanor. Just fleetingly she sounded defensive. 'It wasn't al about luxuries, however welcome.' She smiled at her husband and then turned to Laurence. 'We realy wanted more room; with the wheelchair you need more space to manoeuvre—you can imagine. We were in Bayswater, but it was smal and Wiliam was a prisoner if he was on his own, and then there was Nicholas.' Laurence must have looked puzzled because she went on,

'Our son. He's nearly three now.'

Laurence tried not to let his surprise show on his face. Eleanor laughed.

'The flat seems a lot smaler with him around; he's never stil for a minute. Today he's at my sister-in-law's near by with his little cousins.'

She got up to carry the plates through to the kitchen and caled back, 'Moving here, living near her, has made a huge difference to us al. She's a widow—my brother Max was kiled at Cambrai. Now we can al start again.'

Laurence looked at Wiliam and saw a handsome man with thick, light-brown hair, which was just beginning to turn grey around his ears; the first lines of middle age only gave his face more expression. Any pity Laurence had felt for him on arrival had long subsided.

After they'd finished lunch, and Eleanor had left to fetch their son, the two men settled back in the drawing room. Wiliam took out his pipe and held it in his hand without lighting it.

'You were a close friend of John Emmett's, then?'

'Wel, the thing is, I wasn't a particular friend of his,' Laurence began. 'I was while we were at school, I suppose, but I'd hardly heard from him since; in fact I didn't even know he'd died until his sister—Mary—contacted me. It's just that his family were very kind to me when I was young and so I thought I might help them a bit by trying to find out more about his state of mind.'

'No letter, I gather? Or so the solicitor told us.'

Laurence shook his head.

'Hard. I'm unlikely to add to what you probably know already but I can tel you it was damned odd hearing about the bequest and, of course, hearing it with the news of his suicide.'

'But you saved his life, didn't you?' said Laurence. He wondered how Wiliam felt now that the life he saved had been thrown away.

'Not realy. In fact, not at al. I just happened to be there. Anyone would have done the same. They did, in fact.'

Laurence recognised English diffidence. No doubt he would have explained it like that too.

'It was in the run-up to the Somme. He was in a covered trench just outside Albert. It was an old one that had been blown in a while back and was being redug. They knew their stuff, those sappers. Though the chap in charge of the sector had come across from HQ at the time because there was some question of whether the earthworks were viable at al. Rightly, as it turned out.

'Emmett had gone down there with a corporal and two other men who were stringing up some cables. It was probably rotten wood that did it. We'd run out of decent material for revetment by then and we were reusing timbers that had been waterlogged. It had been hot and dry for weeks and I suspect the wood had simply dried out too quickly, even underground. You know what it was like.'

Laurence nodded.

'Anyway,' Wiliam went on, 'I was just standing there in the sunshine, glad it was al quiet. I can remember it exactly because one of the men had just brought me a flint arrowhead. The whole river valey was ful of Iron Age remains. Every time we dug, these things were turning up—stone axes sometimes. Everyone knew I colected them so if they found any odd-looking bits they brought them over. I've stil got some.' He waved at a cabinet against the far wal. 'This one was tiny but a beauty; you could see where it had been chipped around the edge as if it had been done yesterday. Perfect. When, bang, there's this God-awful crack and a few seconds of dul rumbling under the feet, and the tunnel's gone. A great puff of dirt comes back out of it, smeling of damp and worse things, to be honest. That damn awful smel.

'My immediate response was that we were under fire and we al ducked down instinctively, but within seconds we realised the tunnel had gone. I started trying to tear at the debris and the earth with my hands, but it was hopeless, the entrance was almost completely blocked. The sergeant caled for proper tools and someone went for an orderly. I went in with the sergeant—Tucker, as I recal—and we took turns clearing it. Another lad helped. I think he was the servant of the visiting sapper officer.'

The name Tucker registered almost immediately with Laurence. Although a common enough name, it was also on the list John Emmett had with him when he died.

'It was Tucker who ran the risks, no question; we stil weren't entirely sure whether they'd found a shel. Tucker had had his run-ins with Emmett but on that day he was digging like a man possessed to get him out. He reached one of the soldiers in a few minutes or at least got hold of his feet. We puled him clear but he was in a bad way. Tucker cleared his nose and mouth but apparently he was gone within seconds—the man was his friend, someone said—and then the orderly arrived and had him taken off.

'One of the soldiers dug with anything he could find and while Tucker was stil dealing with his friend, I changed places, without much hope realy, and I found John there about twenty feet in. Cleared the filth away to help him breathe. The tunnel hadn't falen in al along its length. The nearest section had come right down and did for the man we'd got to first. Further in the timbers had held on one side and colapsed on the other, so they were at an angle across the trench. John lay under this; the top half of his body was towards us. He was conscious and had air, but his right arm was caught under him, his back and legs were buried by the earth and he couldn't turn his head. Even the timber above him was bowing and there was a steady trickle of soil. I don't mind teling you I was on a hair-trigger to run out of there. I always hated those tunnels, especialy re-digs. But slowly I calmed down and realised I couldn't smel explosive or burning.'

Wiliam turned in his chair, opened a carved box on the side table, took out a silver lighter and a tobacco pouch and proceeded to fil and light his pipe. He drew the smoke in, slowly and deeply.

'I started excavating round him, hoping to hel the whole thing wouldn't fal in.'

'And you got him out?'

'Wel, he was a lucky man in the event; scarcely a scratch on him, but he wasn't doing too wel down there. Covered in sweat, ashen in the light of my torch and gasping. Eventualy Tucker had to finish the job. I was too big, you see. Tal man, back then ... couldn't squeeze through properly. Every time I moved, I scraped against the sides and brought more stuff down, but Tucker was wiry, almost skinny, he could wriggle about down there. Until we had John out, I thought he must be bleeding somewhere, even wondered if he'd die before we'd got him clear. Ghastly look on his face. But nothing; wel, a broken finger and ankle, but nothing major that you could see. It turned out he'd also injured a kidney, which eventualy saw him sent back to Blighty, but what he was suffering from right then was fear, I suppose.

Simple, unaloyed fear. We weren't supposed to be frightened, not so that it showed. Now when you look back, you can see that fear was the rational response to much of it, but there was another set of rules then, wasn't there?'

Laurence nodded silently. He had never been able to say outright, 'I was frightened.' The band of iron round his chest might have been so tight that pain shot down his arms and his fingers tingled as he laboured to draw in a breath, but he'd always hidden it, or at least he hoped he had.

Bolitho went on matter-of-factly, 'The men could scream for hours out in no-man's land, especialy the young ones. Disturb your rest for a bit, rather like a neighbour's barking dog, but eventualy you'd learn to sleep through. Officers, though, were supposed to be above al that. You might have been a Sunday school teacher or a corn merchant back home, but get a commission and al your emotions had to be left at the door.' He inhaled on his pipe.

'And there was Tucker,' Bolitho continued after a while, 'who was close to losing his stripes for this and that, working like a dervish to get John out. Absolutely fearless; on his stomach practicaly keeping the ceiling up with his own body and the whole thing creaking in a way that made you remember how many hundredweight of earth was above it, lying with his body pressed against John, so close that he could have kissed him just by dropping his head a few inches. Yet when we finaly puled John clear, only minutes before the whole damn thing fel in with one last, long rumble, and Smith left in what was now his tomb—pray God he was dead already, not a squeak from him—I saw Tucker was looking at John with a sort of amused contempt and something nastier: triumph, I'd say. And he didn't seem that bothered by the corporal—Perkins was his name, I think—getting it, either, given the man was what passed for a friend.'

'And no bequest from John for him?'

Bolitho tapped at his pipe. 'Unlikely. There was definitely business between John and Tucker. Something going on.'

'Business?'

'Haven't a clue what it was,' Wiliam said breezily. 'Just an impression. Antagonism of some sort. Tucker had his finger in various pies. Buying and seling, doing favours, even dead men's effects, some said. He nearly went down over some rabbit-skin fiddle.'

'Rabbit skin?' Laurence wondered whether there was a whole lexicon of army jargon that had passed him by.

'You remember rabbit stew? Sometimes more stew than rabbit, sometimes the men claimed it was rat? Procurement people made a fortune on seling rabbit skins. Hundreds of thousand of pounds from clothes manufacturers to warm the slender necks of shop girls and kindergarten teachers, with fur colars straight from the mess kitchens. Only Tucker had seen the opportunity first and he'd been seling them localy. Argued he thought it was al just rubbish. Got away with it, but only just.

His mate, Perkins, who'd enlisted with him and who was definitely part of the scheme, caled him Bunny from then on, but nobody else would have dared.'

'How on earth had he got to sergeant?' Laurence asked.

'Wel, they were very short of NCOs at the start and he'd been a factory foreman, somewhere in the Black Country, so actualy he was quite good with the men

—the ones he hadn't taken against—and he was fearless, albeit vicious, or he would have been in trouble before. But there were always rumours. The men said he was a devil with the ladies and we'd nearly had him up on a charge for seling coloured water as a cure for the clap. The lads didn't like getting the lecture from the MO, and Tucker's stuff worked a treat because most of them never had the clap in the first place. First-timers, boys, with nothing worse than a guilty conscience. But we were a long way forward at that time, so there weren't a whole lot of mesdemoiseless in petticoats waiting for Tucker's blandishments. I seldom dealt with him directly but the man was a clever opportunist and, I can quite believe, a brute at heart. And he'd disappear from time to time. I suppose we thought he might have been out poaching.'

Again Laurence must have looked puzzled because Wiliam's expression changed to one of weary distaste.

'You must have come across them. Loners? Men made for kiling? Couldn't have enough of it, so went out to find the odd extra German for sport or mementoes?' He ran a finger across his throat.

Laurence nodded. Angels in the sky; bulets deflected by prayer books or cigarette cases; footbal armistices; berserkers. Battlefields acquired their own myths; he'd rarely found much truth in them.

Wiliam went on, 'Stil, John had him down for something else. He wouldn't say, or not to me—I was new to the unit then—but he clearly loathed the man. I went to see Emmett once he was strapped up and waiting to go. He was stil very pale but quite composed, and he asked me about Perkins, and where Tucker had been when the tunnel colapsed. He was more suspicious than grateful. I told him I hadn't seen Tucker at al until everyone came running and that he owed his life to him.

But I got the feeling that John thought Tucker might have had something to do with the accident itself. Perhaps that's a bit strong. He didn't say anything specific and he'd had a bad shock.'

'He didn't like smal spaces,' Laurence said. 'He had claustrophobia, I suppose. Even at school.'

'God.' Wiliam puffed at the pipe. 'Must have been hel, then. He was two hours down there, at least. Must have seemed like a lifetime. Anyway, a few weeks later everything goes up. John's in hospital, localy until the casualties start pouring in, then shipped home. Never gets a chance to cal it with Tucker. Not then.'

'And when he died he left you the money?' Laurence said. 'Do you mind me asking?'

'Of course not. It was as much a surprise to us as I fear it must have been to his family. In fact, when John's solicitors wrote, we asked them what the family's circumstances were. Didn't want to leave them in dire straits. Can't say but that the money was helpful—you can see how it is—but no reason for them to do without.

Chap said that he didn't know the family personaly but that John had left his people the house they were already living in, which he owned, and most of the rest of his estate. The solicitor seemed to think their needs were covered quite wel. Eleanor wrote to the family, too—partly with condolences, partly to try to find out what John had meant by it. No answer.'

Laurence stayed silent, trying to remember if Mary had mentioned a letter.

'They're not in trouble are they—the Emmetts?' Wiliam looked concerned.

'No. There's no question of that. His mother and sister would be grateful you saved him, even though the end came as it did. They just—wel, his sister mostly, to be honest—wanted to understand.'

Wiliam nodded. 'It's a funny thing,' he said slowly. 'I was angry when I heard John had shot himself. There were so many men who didn't come back, and then John makes it, and makes it in one piece, and then ... puts his family through al that. But Eleanor understands it. She saw plenty of men with their nerves gone. She was a nurse; that's how I met her. Shel-shock, that's what they cal it now, and it didn't seem to matter how strong a man was before the war; it could hit anyone, any time.'

The faintest of smiles flickered. 'Wel, not Sergeant Tucker, obviously. War had its own rewards for his sort.'

Laurence thought of Charles, another man whom war suited very nicely. Charles was an ideal officer: not over-imaginative, unflappable and robust. But what happened to those men who had found some pleasure in the fighting and the routines, once it was al over?

As to what pushed him over the edge,' Wiliam went on, 'who can tel? I've no idea. He came back from convalescence in England once he was patched up but I never saw him again. I'd been injured by then. We were wiped out, or damn nearly, at Lateau Wood. One leg virtualy blown off.' He pointed to the limb, which ended at the knee. 'Other leg went septic. I hovered between life and death—I don't remember a thing—and was nursed by Eleanor, who viewed their having to take off the other leg as a personal insult and wasn't prepared to put up with me dying after al her labours. I don't know exactly what John did when he got back. Seconded to another outfit's my guess.'

'And Tucker?' Laurence asked, not quite knowing why.

'No idea. I expect he survived. His sort tended to. Probably came home with his clap tonic and the Military Medal in his bag.'

Wiliam was starting to look tired. Laurence fired off one last question. 'I don't know if you were told but there were another two bequests besides yours. A Mrs Lovel. That doesn't mean anything to you, does it?'

Bolitho shook his head. 'The solicitor implied there were other beneficiaries, mostly to put my mind at rest about taking the money, but he was far too circumspect to volunteer names and I didn't ask.'

'Not Tucker, anyway,' said Laurence, feeling guilty that he'd been so much less discreet than the legal advisors. 'So there were limits to John's gratitude. And there wasn't any Lovel involved in the rescue?'

'No, I'm pretty sure not. Perkins died. I think it was Smith who was probably buried alive. There was Tucker, and the major's batman and a couple of other Welsh lads whose names escape me, if I ever knew them. But I don't think I remember a Lovel at al. Not there, anyway. Certainly never came across a Mrs Lovel.

What are you thinking: somebody's wife? Mother?'

'I haven't a clue. It's the wildest of wild cards. I hope to speak to her, if she stil lives at the address I have.'

'And could she even have been somebody's sister? A Miss Tucker or Perkins or whatever at one time, I suppose?' Wiliam said. 'Or maybe she was a young widow with hopes of being a Mrs Emmett?'

'Possibly. And a Frenchman—caled Meurice? No bels ringing?'

Wiliam shook his head.

It took Laurence nearly an hour to tel Mary about the afternoon and his impressions. She had not interrupted once although at one point she picked up a biscuit, broke off a piece, dipped it in her tea and carried it to her mouth, al without dropping her eyes from his face. He liked her for it.

'Bolitho was a good man. Perhaps you'l meet him one day. His wife too. If it helps, John's money must have made a big difference to a decent couple. There's a child too: a little boy.'

Mary looked thoughtful. Finaly she spoke. 'Thank you. It means a lot, even these little bits: John's war in mosaic. He never told us how he got injured. We didn't think much of it; we saw it more as a good way of keeping him from the fighting for a while. We didn't know Captain Bolitho had saved his life, only that he'd been in the same regiment. John simply wrote and told us that he'd been in an accident. He didn't mention the sergeant at al, but being trapped would have been helish for him: John hated being in smal spaces or, realy, being constrained in any way. Even rules irked him.'

Laurence nodded. It had been obvious at Marlborough. He wondered again why on earth John had rushed to volunteer, to become part of such a regulation-bound environment. 'But didn't Eleanor Bolitho tel you some of this in her letter?'

She frowned. 'They never bothered to write. None of the beneficiaries wrote,' she said, with a trace of bitterness.

'How odd,' Laurence said.

It didn't sit with what he'd seen of the Bolithos and contradicted what Wiliam had told him.

'Look, we need to push on to catch the concert, but I did wonder whether I should go and see Mrs Lovel soon. Unlike Bolitho, we realy haven't a clue how John knew her but she must know why she was a beneficiary. Although Bolitho was certainly surprised, he wasn't completely at a loss as to why the bequest came to him. One thing I did mean to ask you was where John was when he got in the fight you mentioned? Presumably he was wherever it was for a reason?'

She shrugged.

'Never mind. It's probably nothing but then there's Coburg,' he went on. 'It was written on that list John had.' He could see he had lost her. 'It's just that Coburg's in Germany, in Bavaria. And you said John had been engaged to a girl there, in Munich I think you said, which is also in Bavaria.'

Mary didn't respond.

'I know it's al a bit far-fetched. I just wondered whether he'd had any correspondence with someone there.'

Mary stil didn't answer. She looked down at her lap, turning the clasp on her handbag and finaly raising a solemn face to him. 'He didn't tel me much. Ever.'

She seemed keen to change the subject. 'Look, I ought to give you some money. I do have some. From John. It's not fair that you do al this charging about at your own expense.'

She gazed at him intently. He couldn't help smiling. She was so beautiful and so alive. A long lock of hair had falen forward and curled towards her lips. She blew it away, then tucked it back behind her ear.

He almost let slip that he was enjoying al the 'charging about', but it seemed tactless. 'It's good to be busy, funnily enough,' he said. 'I haven't realy done anything, not since the war.' He paused. 'Not since Louise—died. Not realy. I've only been writing because I had to do something.'

Suddenly, her hand was on his, and stayed there, calm and warm. She said nothing.

They had to hurry to the concert hal. The concert began with Elgar's Salut d'Amour, and then there was some Debussy, which he liked less, though he thought how Louise would have enjoyed it. Next was a Brahms quintet, which drew enthusiastic applause. Mary was rapt. He was aware, al the way through, of her closeness.

From time to time her knee touched his. A couple of times he stole a glance at her in profile. The second time she caught him and returned a smal smile.

As they left the auditorium he left her for a moment while he went to fetch her coat. She was standing behind him as he queued. Reflected in the wal of mirrors above the attendant he saw that a man had stopped to greet her and had even taken her hand in his. Their bodies were very close as they talked, Mary's head bent towards his to catch his words. Then she looked towards Laurence's back and obviously said goodbye. The man was quickly gone. The attendant handed Laurence their belongings and he returned to Mary, expecting her to explain, but as he helped her into her coat she simply said, 'Wasn't that fun!' Her face, however, was serious and pale.

Al the way to the station he wanted to ask her who the man was but could think of no way to raise it that didn't seem clumsy. He told himself that if the meeting had been insignificant, surely she would have explained. As the wish to know loomed larger, the opportunity to do so receded. He could think of nothing else to say.

Mary kept looking at her watch in the dark of the cab. From time to time she gave him a nervous and, he thought, slightly distant smile. She was no longer eager to talk but anyway they made it with just minutes to spare. As she stepped up into the carriage, she placed a hand on his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek. He waited until her train had gone, waving with a joliness that he didn't feel.

He decided to clear his head by walking back. The city was quiet. The monumental architecture of the great financial institutions rose up either side of him, dark and oppressive. He supposed they had fought to protect these as much as they had the idea of vilage greens or royal palaces, had fought to keep things as they were. The dome of St Paul's came into view against the night sky, its silhouette softened by a veil of cloud. The night was cool and slightly damp; autumn was wel on its way now with leaves beginning to fal from the plane trees. He felt indescribably sad.

That night was the first bad one for a while. The banshee scream of shels. The distant crump of other men's catastrophes. The stink of burning and sweat, and al the time his heart pounding. He placed his hand on his chest to steady himself but his heart pulsed loudly through the dream. He put the whistle in his mouth. He was supposed to blow but couldn't get enough breath. Then somehow he was alone in the remains of a traverse, digging as fast and as desperately as he could. It was raining and Louise was there, under the earth. The wet soil made his hands ache with cold. His fingers found first her face and then her nose, entered her open mouth, felt the edges of her teeth. As fast as he dug, earth fel on her from above. Rain pooled in the crater he had dug to let her breathe and slowly, though he held her muddy hair, it filed up and she slipped away from him.

Chapter Eight

Finding a man in France was obviously far beyond his resources, so Laurence mentaly set Monsieur Meurice on one side. Kentish Town was another matter entirely.

He had decided not to write to Mrs Lovel but simply to go to her house on the chance he would find her in.

At four o'clock he arrived at the address given in John's wil. It was a smal, slightly shabby, dark-brick house, one of thousands like it in London. He noticed grass sprouting in the gutter and that a single spindly rose needed deadheading. Rain was pattering on a faded canvas screen hanging over the door and when he knocked, several tiny spiders were dislodged. No one came. He looked up at the grimy windows and thought how Mrs Lovel must have welcomed John's bequest. He knocked again and caled out self-consciously. 'Mrs Lovel.' He waited for a while and then turned away. A woman in a print pinafore was watching him from over a bowing fence.

'They're long gone,' she said. 'Those Lovels. Four—five years? She kept it nice but there's been another lot since and they've gone too. Bad drains.'

'Do you have an address?'

'No, but my daughter might. Used to help with the children. She liked her.'

She turned and went into her own house, leaving the door open. He heard no voices but a few minutes later a skinny younger woman came out with a baby in her arms. She handed him a grubby bit of paper with an address written in capital letters.

'That's where they were, last I heard.'

It was a fifteen-minute walk, through increasingly heavy rain, to a modest street, but one much less drab than the first address. The semi-detached house sat back behind a low hedge where large cobwebs held drops like jewels. The smel of privet after rain was one he always associated with London.

A tiled path led up to a dul black front door. He walked up and puled the bel, hearing it jangle in the rear of the house, and almost immediately he heard swift footsteps inside. The door swung open and a young woman stood there, her fair hair loose on her shoulders. She had a sleeping cat draped over one arm and looked surprised, as if she had expected someone else.

'Can I help you?' She was much younger than he'd imagined, just a girl realy, but her face was quite composed.

'Mrs Lovel?' Laurence began.

' Miss Lovel,' she replied. 'Catherine Maude Lovel.'

Laurence was suddenly and embarrassingly aware of how impulsive his decision to visit had been. In his haste to help Mary he hadn't thought of the effect of his enquiries on those at the receiving end. How the hel could he explain himself to the slender girl in front of him?

'I'm looking for someone caled Lovel who knew one of my friends.'

'Who?' she said.

'A man caled Emmett. Captain John Emmett.'

There was no sign of recognition on her face.

'He died a few months ago.' He was beginning to feel it was hopeless. Rain was starting to fal again.

'My brother was kiled in the war,' the girl said, matter-of-factly. 'But I don't know a John Emmett. Perhaps it's my mother you want? She's out but she should be back soon. I thought you were her, forgetting her key again. You could wait if you want?'

How could he have been so stupid? Of course this girl was too young to have known John. She was what—fifteen? Younger? But he had at least established that the family had a son who had fought. That was the likely connection to John.

He folowed her indoors with some relief; water was now trickling down the back of his neck. A daily woman, by the look of her, emerged from the back of the house. She took his hat and coat, shaking them out as she did so. Catherine Lovel showed him into a smal sitting room. It was neat, respectable, perhaps a little old-fashioned, and decidedly cold, but there were some good books in a glass-fronted case. He looked sideways and read those with larger lettering on their spines: Trolope, Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop, Sir Walter Scott, Tennyson, Wordsworth; it was more or less the sort of colection he had at home. There were even some bound operetta scores. The girl sat opposite him talking to the cat.

Eventualy he heard the door open, and the gasps and protestations of someone retreating from a downpour.

'Martha. Martha, oh thank you—no, I'm not soaked. I had my umbrela. Just take my hat and coat and put them in the sculery, not too near the stove, mind.'

A handsome woman, in her early forties perhaps, came through the door. She was dressed entirely in dark blue and, like the room, her dress was sedate and unremarkable. But she had an alert face, pale, fine skin and hair almost as fair as her daughter's, though fading with middle age.

Catherine jumped up and spoke before either she or Laurence had a chance to do so. 'He's looking for a man caled Captain Emmett.'

'Catherine—' Mrs Lovel looked anxious for a second but then her expression lightened. 'Not now, my love, I don't even know who our visitor is. Mr—?' She had a slight provincial accent.

'Bartram,' he said, 'Laurence Bartram. I'm very sorry to intrude, Mrs Lovel, but your daughter suggested I came in and the rain...'

Although Mrs Lovel had every right to be put out by his uninvited presence, she shook his hand and smiled. 'Quite right too, Mr Bartram,' she said. 'Catherine,'

she nodded in the direction of the door. 'Can you go and ask Martha to make tea? Stay and help her, I think.'

The girl made a face. She was younger than he had guessed. She left the room and the door banged slightly 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 hour earlier, or a day, or a year, or three years. We sat on the grass for hours until it got dark and rather cold, and finaly a woman came out from the houses, and she spoke to us and was kind, and she and her husband walked us home and there it was—the telegram. My neighbour had it. She had told the boy "no reply". She knew, of course.'

The rush of words stopped. She swalowed hard.

'We hadn't been here that long. It had gone to our old address first. It was weeks since he'd actualy died. So, you see, I wasn't even thinking about him when I thought I stil had him, before I knew he was gone. Who knows what I was doing at the moment he died. Peeling an apple? Riding on a tram? Shopping at Swan and Edgar? Who knows what he was doing? I didn't. Was he kiled immediately? Did he linger in pain? I dreamed of it, of course. Not every night but often. As one does.'

Laurence thought how natural she seemed to think dreams of the dead were. He never admitted to anyone that he dreamed of Louise.

'I dreamed of him dying in every imaginable way, but it was worse when I dreamed he was alive. I could smel him, touch him, and then I'd wake up and it was new agony al over again. But you've lost someone yourself?' she ventured, obviously noticing his unease. 'Someone close to you? Not just Captain Emmett?'

Laurence said nothing for a few seconds. Finaly he said, 'A long time ago,' and knew she didn't believe him.

The room was starting to darken but she made no attempt to turn on the light, not even when she went out to the kitchen to send the maid home. When she returned, she seemed to have come to a decision.

'You know, I would very much have liked to know what Captain Emmett had to tel me. He probably knew Harry, possibly had some details about his death.

But I don't think I ever shal know now what he wanted and I don't want to try to find out. For a long time I did but I owe it to Catherine to make a proper life for her, not one overshadowed with grief.' She paused. 'It's different for me, of course. For me life is over.'

Laurence sat forward.

'I'm so very sorry,' he said, and he meant it. 'I wish I could help, I wish I could tel you more about John Emmett; there must be a connection but I've found nothing, yet.'

'No,' she said, 'I'm not asking for that.'

She looked down at her hands. It was obviously time for him to leave and in saying goodbye he was not surprised that she didn't ask him to keep in touch with her.

On the way home, Laurence was cross with himself for not asking her a bit more. However, he had been unnerved by the depths of sorrow behind her dignified exterior and it had seemed to him that she didn't want her daughter to overhear their conversation.

As he left he'd said, 'I don't have a card, but...' He plunged his hand into his coat pocket to find only the Wigmore concert programme. 'I'l give you my name and address in case you want to talk to me.'

He tore off a bit of the back cover and started to write. She didn't offer him anything better to write on and he felt a bit of a fool, but it seemed a courtesy after he'd invaded her afternoon without warning.

'Thank you,' she had said and then added, 'So you like music, Mr Bartram?' She picked up the programme as it lay on the console table.

'Yes, I do,' he replied.

'I was a singer once,' she said almost off-handedly. 'Classical repertoire mostly. I trained for over four years. I sang on the continent but gave it al up when my son was born.'

'The Elgar was wonderful at this concert,' he said after a few seconds. 'It made me feel that things were getting back to normal.'

He cursed himself for not thinking. He was talking to a woman whose life could never be normal again, yet she actualy brightened and nodded in agreement as she skimmed the programme before handing it back. He hovered on the doorstep for a second, made his farewel and walked towards the main road deep in thought.

People didn't just inherit money from strangers. There had to be a link and he would find it. He felt that he had at least established that John had a reason, even one known only to John, for the bequest. One he'd meant to explain, perhaps. But what had made him change his mind?

Chapter Nine

When Laurence got home there were, unusualy, three letters waiting. A plump one was from India and he set it aside for later. The second was from his publishers. The third was in unfamiliar handwriting.

Dear Mr Bartram,

There was something I wanted to ask you but I didn't want to speak in front of Wiliam because he needs to look forward, not back to the war. We al must.

However, you may not have realised, and it didn't seem the time to raise it, but I knew John Emmett for a while. I doubt Wiliam wil have thought to tel you.

I nursed him out in France and of course that's how I met Wiliam, too. I just wondered, for my own peace of mind, whether you were quite certain that John's death was deliberate. You see, although John may have been troubled, he was strong in his way. He had inner resources—talents. He wrote, he could draw marvelously. He had things to live for, however difficult his circumstances.

You do hear of people being careless while cleaning a gun, say (though I'd like to know how he had hidden a gun if he was being treated for melancholia). But I just hope somebody who didn't know him properly hadn't jumped to any conclusion just because he was il after the war. Someone told me that tens of thousands of men are trying to claim pensions for nervous conditions and they are probably the saner ones. Anyway, they are not al kiling themselves. I'm sorry to bother you and to ask you to keep my letter to yourself but hope, in time, you might be able to reassure me that things were properly investigated. John Emmett was an exceptional man.

Yours sincerely,

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 had he got the gun? Plenty of officers had held on to their pistols, although it was officialy frowned upon, yet he imagined any nursing home would have searched their patients' belongings. John could have got one from someone else but that would mean that there was someone out there who knew more about the suicide and yet hadn't come forward. Given John was dead, it had never seemed to matter where the gun had come from.

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 considered pretty? Did you see your father talking to her?' Or, whispered on a bus, 'Did you see the way your father looked at that young lady he gave his seat up to? Did you get the feeling he knew her already?' His sister would rol her eyes.

Who would be interested in that old man? Laurence had thought to himself then.

He wondered who young Wilfred, his eldest nephew, took after. At the end of the year he would find out. When he had eventualy read his sister's latest news, he was alarmed to find that his oldest nephew was being sent to school in England after Christmas. He could tel that his sister wanted him to be Wilfred's guardian. He rather hoped the boy had not inherited too many characteristics of his sister's stout, red-faced husband but he was nonetheless glad his dead parents had living grandchildren.

Now he scanned an account of a vast industrial explosion in Germany and briefly felt compassion for the families of the dead, whatever their nationality. Pity was like blood returning, painfuly, to a leg with cramp. The other lead story concerned the hunt for the kiler of a senior police officer who had been shot dead as he left his office. The policeman had been involved in two high-profile cases with violent foreign gangs. A police spokesman said there were stil no clues but there was an increasing problem with the number of side arms in circulation after the war. Laurence thought, briefly, of John. Would he have kiled himself anyway, even if he hadn't had a gun?

In an opinion piece he discovered that Brinsmead Pianos had opened under new ownership. He read this article in more detail. Louise's piano—his piano—had been a Brinsmead. He thought the firm had been broken by the piano workers' strike of the previous year. Guns. Strikers. Discontent. He found himself wondering how Eleanor Bolitho would see it al. An editorial in his paper viewed Brinsmead's reemergence as a triumph of capitalism over the Bolshevist threat. From what Eleanor had said of her political beliefs, he thought she might rejoice in the workers asserting themselves, even if it did lead to a dearth of music in middle-class parlours.

Next to the pianos was a poor picture of a politician and an ilustrious army commander, speaking together at a public meeting in Birmingham. They were arguing that war, any war but especialy the Great War, was not a matter of heroism but endurance. They had been heckled at first, the article said, but the hecklers had themselves been shouted down. Laurence recognised the men; it was the pair Charles had been so excited to meet at his club: Morrel, the former MP, and the retired general, Somers. He had been wrong in his assumption that the retired officer would be a stickler for the harshest discipline. Perhaps speaking out now was another form of courage.

It was interesting, Laurence mused, reading on, how some people were beginning to feel they could say these things now without their patriotism being caled into question. Charles had told him that another MP—Lambert Ward—whose own recent service with the Royal Naval Reserve had provided him with a shield of valour, had demanded executed deserters be buried in military graves with al the other falen soldiers. Charles himself was surprisingly indifferent.

'Who cares?' he said. 'One way or another, they're al gone.'

Until John Emmett rose from the dead into his life, Laurence had almost convinced himself the war was history but now he saw that its aftershocks rumbled on and on, and that peace had nothing to do with signatures and seals on a paper.

He started to read about the paper poppies they were making for Armistice Day this year. It was a new idea—started in America. He couldn't imagine wearing one; he even disliked fresh poppies—but perhaps some families wanted a visible sign of al they had lost.

The wind had got up and the windows rattled. He tore a strip off the page and wedged the frame fast. He returned to the mutilated newspaper and started on an obituary of a centenarian who had fought under Elphinstone in the First Afghan War and survived the massacre at the Gandamak Pass. His last thought as the paper slipped to the floor was how smal wars used to be.

Over the next week his own eagerness to get going was matched by a lack of any action elsewhere and yet he couldn't settle to writing. Charles had bought a car and had been trying it out by motoring from one friend's house to another across the southern counties. He wouldn't be back for a day or so. There was no further word from Mary. What was she doing, he wondered. How did she pass the weeks in Cambridge?

After a couple of days' reluctant progress on his book, a letter finaly brought good and bad news. Dr Bertram Chilvers, Holmwood Nursing Home, Fairford, Gloucestershire (proprietors Dr B.G.S. Chilvers MD, and G.H. Chilvers) would be delighted to show him round his establishment and discuss possible treatment for Captain Robert Bartram. Trains ran from Paddington to Fairford, changing at Oxford. The station was on the outskirts of town but it was only a ten-to fifteen-minute walk. If Mr Bartram let them know what train he would be catching, a car could be sent to fetch him. If he required accommodation overnight, it could be arranged at the local hotel. It would be helpful, it concluded, if he could obtain a letter from Captain Robert Bartram's doctor to assist in an assessment of his condition.

'Damn,' said Laurence aloud. 'Damn, damn, damn.'

He considered forging a letter of referral but realised almost as soon as he'd hit on the idea that it was hopeless. Doctors al knew each one another and anyway he was sure to get the vocabulary wrong and they'd smel a rat. At the very least he would have to account for the absence of such a letter.

Suddenly he thought of Eleanor Bolitho. Could she help him construct a plausible document? While she had as good as asked him not to disturb Wiliam again, he could, under the guise of answering her letter to him, ask for help. He dashed off a note to her before dining at Charles's club.

When he arrived in Pal Mal, he could tel Charles was eager to talk, but they got dragged into a smal group digging in on their positions on the gold standard.

Finaly, as brandy was brought into the smoking room, Charles, who had been fidgeting with impatience throughout the latter part of their dinner, could describe his attempted pursuit of Mrs Lovel's son.

'Truth is, old chap, he doesn't exist. Bought this new book, fresh off the press—bound to come in handy: Officers Died in the Great War. Five dead Lovels in there. Not a lucky name. But not our man. The first...' He counted off on his fingers: 'Colonel Frederick Lovel: career soldier and far too old from what you've told me.

Number two: Captain M. St J. Lovel RFC—a possibility, but then we have number three: his brother Lieutenant H.B.E. Lovel. He died in 1917, but I think you said our boy's an only son. Four, Captain Bruce Lovel, went down with Kitchener on the Hampshire en route to Archangel in 1916. Best hope,' his finger hovered, 'was five: another subaltern, Royal Fusiliers, enlisted in London, nineteen years old: Richard Ranelagh Lovel. Promising but he's too early: missing in action, Mons, 1914.'

'Missing?' Laurence said.

'Yes, missing, but it's pretty certain what happened to him. I checked. Was seen badly wounded but pressing on. Seen to be shot again and faling, and by his adjutant. Know that man myself, as it happens. Married to a cousin. Third cousin, realy. I'm off to see him for the weekend. Two soldiers in his platoon saw this Lovel's body but they had no chance to bury him. Body gone by the time anyone got back there. Whole place was unrecognisable by then. Him too, no doubt. So it's simple,' he concluded dramaticaly. 'Your Master Lovel didn't die in the Great War.'

Laurence responded slowly, without pointing out that it wasn't his Lovel. 'Perhaps, though I can't think how, he isn't dead, then? Perhaps he survived?'

Charles was beaming before he had finished the sentence. Laurence had gone exactly where he intended.

'No suitable Lovel dead or alive, old chap. Al checked. Friends plus Army List. Of eight surviving Lovels, four left the army: one's a barrister; one lives on an annuity; two returned home north of the border; one went to South Africa; one, a Lovel-Brace, is a Hampshire landowner. One Lovel is stil serving and currently head of the Staff Colege. No dead commissioned Lowels in the right place either. I remembered you weren't sure of the speling the first time you mentioned him, or rather her, the heiress of Parliament Hil. Perhaps the lady's a fraud?'

Laurence thought that Charles was much cleverer than he let on and that he also had a great deal too much time on his hands.

'No,' he said, 'I'm quite certain that she had a son and that he was kiled. She thought John might be a friend of his.' To manufacture grief like hers, he thought, would have required the skils of a consummate actress.

He left late, declining Charles's invitation to bring Mary Emmett to the Savoy next week. He knew Charles would try to pick up the bil, which Laurence would indeed have trouble meeting, but he also wanted to keep Mary to himself for the time being. As he walked home briskly in the cold he realised that his one certainty—

that the deaths of Emmett and Lovel were connected—had been obliterated by Charles's energetic enquiries.

That night he wrote to Mary and remembered to ask whether he could have the photograph of the soldiers in the farmyard. He wanted to see if Wiliam Bolitho could identify any of those in it. He told her that he had not realy advanced his search and he hoped she wouldn't be disappointed. Even so, there were some things he kept to himself.

Chapter Ten

In the morning a letter came from Eleanor Bolitho. She agreed to meet him the next day in a teashop he'd suggested near the British Museum. She would have to leave spot on four to fetch her son, she said.

When he arrived she was already waiting, her elbows on the table, reading a book. He read the spine of it as he struggled for a moment to pul his arm from his coat before sitting down. It was John Galsworthy's The Man of Property.

'Helo,' she said evenly, putting the book to one side.

Eleanor didn't seem a person for light chatter or any degree of deception, so he simply expanded on the explanation in his letter and the need to fabricate a medical history for a mythical brother. But first he told her what he knew of John's deterioration once he got home. It seemed only fair. He explained Mary Emmett's fear that her brother had been mistreated at Holmwood and added some of the ideas he'd had about John's death.

For a few seconds her face showed no discernible emotion. Then she said, simply, 'I don't doubt she's right. There are far too many greedy, amoral people taking advantage of sick men and of their families, who are bankrupting themselves to have their loved ones looked after. Or,' she added darkly, 'so they believe. I've heard about a couple of such places. Something should be done about them. This government should do right by ordinary people. We should have a different sort of politics now that everything's changed so much. We shouldn't be trying to do things the same way, which ended up kiling and mutilating half the men in Europe.'

She paused just long enough for Laurence to signal a waitress. Her pale, creamy skin was flushed.

'Did you ever read any of John Emmett's poetry?' she asked abruptly.

Laurence's heart sank. He didn't want any diversion at this point. 'Not realy. Only the one that was published in the paper.'

'Do you like poetry?'

'Yes. Some of it, anyway,' Laurence said, hoping she wouldn't ask him to explain which bits.

'Wel, John's poems, his early ones, were very much a young man's work: pretty pastoral scenes usualy with a pretty Dresden shepherdess: his little Minna, sitting in them.'

'Minna?'

'His fiancee. He was engaged to be married in about 1912, I think. She was a German girl. She died. When he talked about her I always felt it was Goethe and Schiler and Schubert he'd realy falen in love with.' She was silent for a second. 'Didn't you know about Minna?'

'Mary Emmett told me but I'd forgotten her name.' He was trying to calibrate the extent of Eleanor Bolitho's knowledge of John Emmett. He'd previously assumed a very slight relationship.

'And now you're also wondering how I knew so much about John?' she asked, in a slightly teasing tone and looking him straight in the eye.

'Yes.'

'And about poetry?'

He smiled.

'Wel, the answer to the second question is that before the war broke out I was reading English at Cambridge—at Girton Colege. We couldn't graduate but we could study. I wanted to be a teacher. But circumstances changed,' she paused, 'and I became a nurse. Which has been a more useful skil, as it turned out.'

She breathed in deeply.

'The answer to the first question is that when John came into my field hospital, it was al very quiet; lovely, very early summer weather, I remember. Beds made, bandages roled, shrouds waiting, quarts of iodine and carbolic acid and chloroform, but no patients. Not yet. We had half a dozen soldiers plus two young officers who were il rather than injured. One had jaundice, I think. And a Canadian major who'd been kicked by a horse. We were waiting for the big push. It was uncannily quiet, in fact. Quite eerie in its way. Not far from the hospital Irish soldiers were digging pits, great long graves, for al the dead they were expecting. The other nurses and I kept taking water out to the men; they were in surprisingly good spirits, standing there cracking jokes while up to their knees in earth amid a sweep of grass and wild oats. Anyway, John was brought in from his regimental aid post one afternoon; he'd been injured in an accident. He had various middling injuries. But he seemed quite shocked and had bad flank pain. By the next day he started bleeding quite heavily from a kidney, so we kept him in.'

And your husband was brought in then too?' Laurence added.

'Good heavens, no, this was much earlier than that. I met Wiliam when he was fighting for his life. No, there was just John and the three others. They were the only officers.'

'Can you remember what the major's name was?' asked Laurence.

'No,' she said. 'I haven't a clue. I'm sure they didn't know each other beforehand, if that's what you're thinking, and the major was moved out in a day or so.

The boys were just boys. They ate together and played draughts. Only John was there for any length of time.'

She stopped.

'The MO wondered, though only to me, whether John might be adding blood to his own urine. But we never confronted him.'

Laurence must have looked puzzled, because she added, 'He appeared to be bleeding from his kidneys, but the blood could have come from anywhere.'

'You mean he was faking it?' Despite himself, he was shocked.

'Faking the degree of visible damage? Possibly. But not faking the fact he was hurt or needed care.

'After a couple of weeks things heated up and he was sent back home, lucky man. The injury had saved him. The mass graves were filed and overfiled, but he wasn't there. But when he was there and when nobody else was,' her voice dropped a little, 'I was on night duty and he couldn't sleep. The trench colapse had realy rattled him.'

'Being trapped,' said Laurence.

She nodded. 'In those circumstances you get to know a man quite wel.' She looked sad.

'You were saying about his poetry?' Laurence said, remembering the limits on her time and that he had once seen another poem of John's—when he was in Cambridge with Mary.

'Al I was going to say was that after John was injured, he stopped,' she said briskly. 'Writing poems. He said it had gone. He said he had been a minor poet at best and now not even minor. It wasn't true but it's what he felt.' She hesitated. 'They were al in touch with each other,' she went on after a while, 'the would-be poets

—and there was a sort of magazine he put together, even after he stopped writing himself. It had al kinds of stuff in it. Some was pretty awful, to be honest, but John said it didn't matter if it helped people to stay sane. One or two were marvelous. I remember him reading some to me. It was very late at night and warm. We had the windows wide open and you could smel the countryside. In al that misery, it was a single perfect hour.'

Laurence watched her face. She had been in love with John Emmett, he thought.

'Can you remember any of their names?' he asked.

'Most of the ones I read had pen-names. Some of their subjects were pretty strong, not likely to go down wel with the general staff. And he wasn't supposed to circulate poetry, not poetry like that. You weren't realy even supposed to keep diaries were you? Though I imagine that was honoured more in the breach than the observance, as they say. John said he knew who most of the poets were but nobody else did.'

Laurence suddenly remembered the other poem he'd read from John Emmett's trunk in Cambridge.

'The name Sisyphus doesn't ring any bels, does it?'

'The man in the myth doomed to push a boulder up a hil for ever?'

Laurence nodded.

She paused. 'Yes, there was a Sisyphus. I'd have forgotten except that, much later, John showed me a couple of his and asked what I thought of them. They were realy, realy good. But I've no idea who Sisyphus was in real life.'

'So, how did you come to know that John had other troubles? Neurasthenia?'

'Wel, I saw him a second time. The last winter of the war. He was admitted in a state of colapse: congested lungs, a fever, but more than that. He was a broken man, much worse than before. He scarcely spoke. He couldn't sleep. He had nightmares if he did. He had black moods. Just right at the end he started to improve a little. He came out for walks despite the cold.' A ghost of a smile flickered and was gone. 'But it didn't last. I suppose, looking back on it, the strange business of his paralysed arm was part of it.'

'Paralysed arm?' Laurence was puzzled.

'Yes. Towards the end of this second stay, he began to lose the power of his right arm. He said he'd had pins and needles and weakness since the earlier trench accident and then, suddenly, he couldn't use it at al. He couldn't write properly, do up buttons, cut with a knife: al those kinds of things. Major Fortune tried the usual tests: skin pricks, offering him a glass of water and so on, seeing which hand he used if he was caught by surprise, but he was consistent; his hand hung useless at his side. They decided it didn't matter as he was going home anyway. It was going to be someone else's problem.'

She stopped quite suddenly and then looked at her watch.

'So,' she went on, 'we could use some of that for your fictitious patient. You could say to the Holmwood people that your brother is presenting with hysterical conversion—that's the proper name for John's arm problem—plus insomnia, sudden alteration in mood and feelings of guilt after this head injury; they're classic symptoms.'

Laurence stopped her. 'Would you mind if I wrote this down?' he said. As he scrawled on another piece of paper, he looked up at her; she looked much more cheerful and seemed almost to be enjoying the fiction.

'Say it seems obvious that he'l always be an invalid. They'l like that if they're dishonest: the thought that they might keep him and his pension for ever.' She attempted a scowl. 'You could say he has mostly refused medical help until now. That might help explain the lack of a medical report, and emphasise that he generaly had a bad war. You men like those sort of euphemisms. And you can say that poor Dr Fortune—the MO at our field hospital—died last year.'

Laurence raised his eyebrows.

'Heart attack at work,' she said. 'Unjust after al he'd been through. Though you could make up a few horror stories from your own experience, no doubt.'

'I was quite lucky actualy,' said Laurence, quickly. 'Nothing realy terrible ever happened to me. Nothing especialy bad. Not to me personaly.'

Eleanor looked at him for a long time. He felt uneasy under her gaze.

'Didn't it?' she said finaly.

They sat over the table for another half an hour or so while he scribbled notes. She even suggested that he give her name to Dr Chilvers. She had at least been John's nurse and she was prepared to blur the time and place where she had looked after her patient.

'Anything to make life a bit more difficult for these charlatans,' she said. 'They should be struck off. If they're real doctors to start with,' she added portentously.

Laurence thought that Eleanor made an impressive enemy but he didn't want her to see that he was amused.

At four, just as she had warned she must, Eleanor rose to leave. As she was pushing her chair back, he suddenly thought of something else.

'Do you know whereabouts in Bavaria Minna came from?' he asked. 'Does Coburg ring a bel?'

'Sorry,' she said, shaking her head. 'I don't think I ever knew.'

'Did you know her ful name?'

'No. He didn't talk much about her. Not to me. Though I think her first name was realy Wilhelmina. She had an older brother; I do remember that.'

'Did you see John again?' Laurence asked as he helped her on with her coat. 'After the war?'

'No,' she said. 'No. I married not so long after the war ended. But we kept in touch by letter from time to time. I liked him. He was special. And very alone.'

'I suppose John had a pen-name too?' he said, just as they reached the door. Why the hel hadn't he got his ideas together until she was on the point of leaving?

She thought for a while. 'It was Charon,' she said rather sadly. 'The bearer of the dead.'

Chapter Eleven

There were two letters waiting for him when he returned home. He tore open the one from Mary as he walked upstairs. Out fel two photographs. One was a cheerful portrait of John in a rowing vest, taken at Oxford, he guessed. The other was of the group of soldiers; the picture he'd seen that day in Cambridge. Even alowing for the fact it was of poor quality, there was something grim and defeated about the men. He picked up the letter.

Dear Laurence,

It goes without saying that the happy photograph is precious to me. John never looked so carefree after he returned from France.

I am sorry I've been slow to write—I've been quite busy and my mother has been unwel. It occurred to me that I know so little about you, although talking to you helped me. You have a skil for understanding—maybe because you are a writer.

Perhaps we could meet once you have been to Holmwood? The set-up there is not quite what it seems, I think. But I don't want to influence you.

Yours,

Mary

Laurence was stil sufficiently objective to recognise that she was being disingenuous in the last sentence. Nor was research into Norman architecture likely to fit anyone for insights into the human condition. Stil, he wondered whether he might bring Mary back to his rooms one day. What would she think of it? The rooms were wel proportioned, and she would like the views over London. He opened the piano lid and pressed a key; it reverberated endlessly. God knows when it had last been tuned. It had been Louise's pride and joy; in the end it was the only thing of hers he could not face putting in a sale. The piano stool was covered with a worn tapestry of a horn of plenty, embroidered by his mother.

The bedroom, on the north-east corner of the building, was always colder than the other rooms and tonight the wind was wailing round the corner of the building. He felt suddenly despondent; his reactions were those of a boy, not of a man, a former soldier and a widower. Underneath his romantic fantasies he recognised a much darker physical desire for her. It had first swept over him when Charles had implied that she was not the innocent girl he had taken her to be. Surprised by the knowledge of her passionate affair, he had also been aroused by it, as wel as the fact that, unknown to her, he possessed this piece of her secret self. He lay there in his chily bed, remembering what it felt like to have a woman beside him, her naked legs against his where her nightgown had ridden up, her back curved into him and his arms around her warmth.

He woke feeling sick and shivery. His eiderdown had slipped off and the sheets had bunched down the bed, leaving the rough blankets irritating his skin. His ears were hot and ringing. The usual formless horrors slipped away from him once he switched on the light and straightened his sheets. He lay back. How could he ever explain al this to Mary or to any woman, he wondered, and despaired.

He knew it was useless to stay in bed; sleep would not return. As he walked into the other room he remembered that he had forgotten to open the second letter. There was the large, even handwriting: perfectly straight across the page as if Charles had internalised the ruled lines of the nursery. It took him three sides to communicate that he had been away for the weekend, that the Alvis was a marvel, that a group of friends Laurence had never heard of were on particularly good form, and that he had something quite rum to tel Laurence. It ended firmly: 'We need dinner, old man. Not the Club. Fancy a bit of a change. How about the Café Royal? At seven on Thursday?'

Although he woke up tired, the folowing day was clear. He decided to go over to the Bolithos and show Wiliam the photograph. It crossed his mind that the implicit bargain in exchange for Eleanor's help with Holmwood, was that he didn't bother her husband, but he promised himself that he would not linger.

Eleanor was out when he arrived. Their charwoman opened the door. He felt a degree of relief. Wiliam seemed genuinely pleased to see him. Despite the chil from half-opened windows and a strong smel of paint, the main room had taken on a feel of spring since his last visit.

'Chinese yelow,' Wiliam said, 'Eleanor's work.' He looked down ruefuly at the floor where a couple of yelow drips had hardened. 'She's a rather impulsive handywoman. But sit down. Ethel wil make some tea.'

'Look, I can't stay,' Laurence said, 'and I am awfuly sorry to pester you again but I wondered if I might show you a picture? I'm simply trying to identify the men in it.'

Wiliam seemed perfectly calm when he took the photograph. Though Eleanor had said he needed to move forward, he showed no sign of distress. If he hadn't known otherwise, Laurence would have thought he was a man glad of company and eager for something to do.

Wiliam turned slightly so that natural light fel on the picture. 'Wel, that's John, you may have realised that?'

Laurence nodded; it confirmed his guess.

'And the others, wel, that's odd—it's the MO, Major Fortune. Good man. A volunteer who never even had to be there. Must have been fifty if he was a day: a perfectly good career as a surgeon at St Thomas' Hospital. And, oh, there's Sergeant Tucker—the man I told you about, looking pleased with himself.'

He held the photograph out to Laurence and pointed at the figure leaning back against a log pile. Tucker was a sinewy, almost feral man. The others looked pretty miserable as they puled on cigarettes or gazed down at their feet, but Tucker just looked calm.

'I don't know any of the others; at least—no, the one on the end there, I don't know what he's doing here, but he's the man who helped pul John out of the tunnel colapse. The sapper major's servant. I was thinking about him after we spoke last time and I remembered that he could do the most astonishing tricks with numbers. Give him fifty numbers and he could add them, subtract them, whatever you liked, in seconds, or work out sequences: you know, one—three—five and so on, only much harder ones. The lads used to try to catch him out. He was there while Major Whoever-it-was was bileted with us. He was a prodigy, though he and his officer reminded me a bit of a circus ringmaster and a performing elephant. Wonder what happened to him?'

From the hal, they heard someone come in. The front door closed. Laurence could hear Eleanor talking and the voice of a smal child. The door to the room opened. A smal boy with dark-auburn curls rushed in and climbed on to Wiliam's lap. When he saw Laurence, he buried his face in his father's chest. Eleanor folowed her son, her expression drawn and irritated.

'Mr Bartram,' she said, tightly, as if she'd caught him out in some peccadilo.

'I'm sorry,' he began.

' What a surprise,' she said. 'I'm sorry I wasn't here, although perhaps you'd anticipated that, but as you can see we're quite busy this afternoon. Perhaps you could come back another time? If you let us know beforehand we might arrange an easier day?'

'Eleanor...' Wiliam began, while the boy turned to look shyly at Laurence, but his wife ignored his attempt to head her off.

'I'd like to give Nicky his tea now and Wiliam is tired.'

She looked fixedly at Laurence and under the intensity of her gaze he finaly said 'I'm realy very sorry. I shouldn't have come without warning.'

'But he needed me to identify a photograph,' Wiliam interrupted firmly. 'I wasn't much help, but I got a couple of the men, though I've no idea where it was taken.'

Eleanor put her hand out and he gave it to her. She looked at it briefly. 'John Emmett,' she said. 'Of course. He must be getting more attention dead than he ever did alive.' She handed the picture back.

'Eleanor...' Wiliam began.

'Wel, it's true,' she said, 'when he was alive he was an embarrassment. His moods, his obsessions, his unpredictability: al too difficult. Not a modest hero adding lustre to a county drawing room, but a man who couldn't cope, shut away in some rotten asylum. Now he's dead we can al think about how we wish we could have helped him, or, if we couldn't, how it would have been better if he'd been blown to smithereens with his reputation intact.'

Wiliam said less mildly, 'I don't think that's entirely fair.'

Laurence thought again how wel she knew John Emmett and wondered whether Wiliam noticed or minded her evident loyalty to the dead man. He decided now was not the time to defend Mary.

'No, I'm sorry,' she said. 'Whatever my feelings, I'm being rude. But I realy must go and get Nicholas's tea now.'

She hung back and Laurence realised she was expecting him to go first. He tucked the picture in his walet, said a hasty goodbye to Wiliam, who seemed diplomaticaly unaware of the degree of tension in the room, and he smiled at Nicholas, stil on his father's knee. The little boy smiled back. Eleanor led him out and closed the door behind him.

By the front door she stopped, looked up at him and spoke quietly but fiercely. 'Just because Wiliam's stuck here and can't get out doesn't mean you can just come and go as if he had no life except to assist you. I helped you as much as I could. Wiliam did too but we want to move on. John's dead. We're not. We're very grateful for the money but it doesn't buy you or Miss Emmett a right to our lives.'

***

He got to the Café Royal first that evening. Charles arrived, slightly late, ful of apologies and long technical explanations about the Alvis. He seemed quite good-humoured as if having it break down was al part of the fun. When finaly they were settled, Laurence regaled Charles with his brief and difficult visit to the Bolithos.

Charles seemed hugely amused.

'Oh Mrs Bolitho, that Bolshevik firebrand. She's famous for it. Not a girl to cross. Joly clever. Good person to have on your side, though.' He picked up his glass and held it up to a candle so that its garnet-like depths glowed. 'Ask Mr Lenin.'

'Is she realy?' Laurence asked. 'A Bolshevik, I mean?'

'Wel, she's certainly a fighter. Damn good nurse, I hear, but my mama wouldn't have had her in the house before the war. Suffragette, Fabian, bluestocking: that kind of thing. Not that my mama knew her not to have her, of course. Didn't have her sort in Warwickshire, but Mama read about them in her paper and always said she wouldn't receive anybody who thought females should have the vote.' He sighed. 'Poor Mama. She must be turning in her grave. Stil bending Father's ear in paradise and al that. Not paradise for him realy. Stil, I should think Mrs Bolitho's politics would make even Ramsay MacDonald's hair stand on end.'

'Good Lord.' Laurence found he was ful of admiration rather than shocked. 'And Wiliam?'

'Heaven knows. Never met him. Not likely to now, realy. Suppose he must go along with it if only for a quiet life. But he's probably counting his blessings: Mrs Bolitho was always a bit sought after. Healing hands, that kind of thing. Pretty too. General surprise when she married old Bolitho but then nurses do that: marry their patients and so on, even without legs. There's a child, isn't there? So his wounds haven't stopped him enjoying the benefits.'

He beamed at Laurence. In anyone else such a statement of the obvious would seem prurient but Charles simply seemed happy for his felow officer.

'Lucky man,' he added.

Laurence was just about to ask him more about the circumstances of the Bolithos' marriage when Charles dropped his own thunderbolt.

'Motored down to Lewes last week and guess who I met there?'

He left a pause for Laurence to go through the motions of guessing.

'Surprise me,' Laurence said, slicing into his turbot.

'Wel, I was staying at Frant, you know, Toly Pitt's house. Third cousin. He married a lovely girl—not realy a girl, she must be twenty-eight if she's a day. She was engaged to some cavalry man who got it right at the start, but then she meets Toly, love at second sight, a year or so back and then she inherits Frant off one of those useful aunts these girls have, and it turns out Toly loves her too. We had a spot of dinner and a joly good walk along the coast. You know how these weekends go.'

Charles was momentarily diverted by his pheasant, but after another mouthful he went on.

'Anyway, this Octavia is a lot of fun but keen on church, that kind of thing. So we were off for luncheon in Tunbridge Wels with someone Toly knew from the regiment when Octavia decided we should al go to church there rather than in the vilage. To cut a long story short, halfway through the service Octavia obviously sees someone she knows across the way: lots of looks, little smiles, fingertip wiggling—delight, surprise: that thing they do—and she whispers to me during the interminable sermon that it was a girl she'd known from driving some sort of canteen lorry for returning soldiers at Victoria Station in the war. Steaming tea, fragrant English girls—

welcome back warrior—you know. When we're al peeling out, rather relieved to be swapping the chily sea of faith for a good roast, she's chatting away to her, obviously trying to persuade her to join us or come over the next day.

'"I'm afraid I can't," says our new chum, just as we come within earshot, "I'm staying with a friend. He's not wel enough to travel." Then Octavia sees me and Toly's sister coming over together and introduces us: "This is Mary Emmett. Charles, I think you must have been at Marlborough with her brother, John?"'

Laurence had been folowing his own train of thought while Charles's story slowly circled its way to a conclusion, but Charles's words jerked him back into the conversation.

'Aha,' said Charles triumphantly, spearing a parsnip, 'thought that'd make you sit up. So I said, of course I did and I was sorry to hear the news, terrible thing, etcetera etcetera, and I can see why you're so keen to scout about for her—nice-looking girl, though a bit of fresh air needed to put a blush in those cheeks—and I said al the things you'd expect. So then I said, "And I think you know my great friend Laurence Bartram," and she was completely thrown. The look that crossed her face was not of fondness and grateful admiration at your very name, but nearer to horror, to be honest. Anyway, after that, I regret to say, old chap, she couldn't get away fast enough. Though Octavia had extracted a promise from her to come round—hard person to refuse, Octavia—the next time she was in the area, and got her address in Cambridge, she didn't even stay to meet Toly and nobody could be intimidated by old Toly. But then later I thought Miss Emmett didn't want my friend Laurence to know she was in Tunbridge. But why on earth shouldn't she be? And why should he care?'

'Where did she go?'

'Heaven knows. I wasn't going to follow her. She was quite on her own and she just trotted off down the Pantiles. Almost as if she were scared we'd folow her. Octavia thought she was embarrassed about her brother: suicide, scandal and so on. In fact, I got the distinct impression that Octavia rather thought I was de trop for mentioning it, though it was she who brought up the subject of John in the first place, but I think Miss Emmett was fine with al that. It was me knowing you, I'm certain, that caused al the consternation.'

Finaly he stopped, looking expectantly across the table. As Laurence tried to appear indifferent to what he'd just heard, the silence lengthened until Charles couldn't resist adding, 'What do you think?'

Laurence longed to check whether Charles was certain that Mary had said she was staying with a man, but to do so would be to make himself look a fool. He hadn't been concentrating at the crucial point in the rambling story. Wasn't it her mother who was supposed to be needing her care? He felt irritated by Charles's speculations and, above al, he felt angry with himself.

Eventualy, and it must have been obvious to both men that it was an effort, he said lamely, 'Yes, I seem to remember she had friends down there.' Then to move away from a gratuitous lie to one of his oldest friends, he added, 'Did she look wel?'

Charles looked at him closely for a second. 'Wel, as I said, I thought she looked a bit tired.' Of course he'd said that, Laurence thought, and stopped himself from asking any more questions.

Are you al right?' Charles raised an eyebrow. 'Your fish is getting cold.'

Charles's plate was empty but for a couple of game chips, which he transferred so quickly from plate to mouth with his fingers that the action was almost imperceptible. He wiped his hands and moustache with his napkin.

'Do you know, I think you're a bit keen on the mysterious Miss Emmett, Laurence. Who could blame you? She's a handsome girl and since Louise died you've turned yourself into some kind of recluse, so personaly I'm delighted to see an old friend back in play, but, for what it's worth, whatever she was doing last Sunday, it didn't look as if it was making her particularly happy.'

'I don't know,' said Laurence and stopped.

He realised as he spoke that behind the vague reply was a profound truth. The chasm of what he didn't know was huge. Mary was the least of it. Everything he thought he knew when he was eighteen had been meaningless. Everything he had thought his at twenty-one was gone. That was undoubtedly why he was devising hare-brained schemes to chase dead men and why he was so fond of Charles who had seemed old at thirteen and would seem young at eighty.

For want of anything else to say he blurted out, 'I'm actualy going down to the home, asylum, cal it what you wil, where John Emmett was a patient. Next week. Just to see whether there's anything I can find out for ... Mary.'

'Wasn't that somewhere in the Cotswolds? Oxfordshire? Gloucestershire?' Charles asked.

'Fairford. The nursing home is caled Holmwood, it's in Gloucestershire. It's an hour or so west of Oxford by train.'

'Wel,' Charles said, brightening up, 'no need to go by train. We can both go in the car. Good to try her out after her temperamental fit the other day and I haven't got much on during the next week as it so happens. We could leave early, stay a couple of nights somewhere and come back after you've spied out the land.'

Reading the expression in Laurence's face, he added quickly, 'Unless you're taking your Miss Emmett and want to go a deux, of course?'

When Laurence shook his head, Charles continued, 'Wouldn't get in your way. Have a walk. Take the air. Lovely countryside. Who knows, even pick up a bit of gossip?'

To his surprise Laurence found the thought of going with Charles, even traveling in his car, was a pleasant one. Al the same, he needed to explain more about his enquiry.

'I'm afraid I'm not exactly going as myself,' he started. 'I mean, I am going as myself but I'm not going to represent Mary Emmett. We didn't want the Holmwood people to be aware of my specific interest in John's death. I've sort of invented a brother—Robert—whom we might need to place in the care of a nursing home. Bad experiences in Flanders...' He tailed off.

'Wel, you are a dark horse,' said Charles happily. 'Reminds me of Buldog Drummond. Marvelous read.'

Chapter Twelve

The journey started off more like a voyage. It had been raining al night and it continued to pour as they drove out of London at dawn. There were very few other vehicles on the road. Charles swerved vigorously to avoid standing water on some streets, yet water seeped in round the passenger door. The interior of the car smeled of leather and oil, and the windscreen and side windows were soon misty with condensation. But by the time they reached the country roads beyond Slough the clouds broke up, and when they stopped briefly at an old inn at Hurley at midday it was beginning to get slightly warmer as the sun emerged.

Laurence's back ached as he puled himself upright. It had done so since the war. 'You've got an old man's back,' Charles said as he swung himself nimbly out of his seat.

After a pint of beer, they crunched back through rusty drifts of leaves and bright-green spiked conker cases split open on the steaming path. When they returned to the car, Charles puled back the roof and strapped it down, then took out two woolen scarves, goggles and a map, giving Laurence the less disreputable scarf. Charles set his goggles in place and looked every bit the fearless aviator his driving suggested. Once Laurence got used to the noise and the air rushing past, he relaxed. When they stopped the car a couple of times for Charles to look at the map, he could hear birds and smel the earthiness of the damp countryside. They made little attempt at conversation; Charles occasionaly shouted a brief commentary on the car's performance, which was mostly lost to the wind and the engine, and Laurence made vaguely appreciative gestures with which Charles seemed satisfied.

At one point, where the road was straight and wide, he slowed to ask whether Laurence wanted a go, apparently indifferent to the fact that his friend had never driven a car in his life. Having received a firm refusal, Charles lit his pipe and drove on, occasionaly beating off the sparks which dropped on his coat.

They passed through Maidenhead, Henley, Walingford and Wantage: towns of Georgian brick houses and pale stone bridges with broad and tranquil views of the Thames.

Henley was the only place Laurence had visited before, for the 1911 Regatta. It had been one of the hottest weeks of a blazing summer. He'd stayed with an aristocratic Oxford companion: Richard Standish. The house stood a little way from the town, its park slightly raised above the river. The first morning he had got up early. The air was warm even before the sun rose and as it came up a veil of mist lingered over the water. It was silent at the river's edge, the surface dark and unbroken between the reeds. Standish's people had a large house party. He and Richard and a cousin of Richard's, al unexpected guests, had to share a long attic room in the servants' quarters, under the eaves where they could hear doves cooing while they lay on top of the bedclothes in the stifling heat. It was the week Laurence had met Louise.

Louise, then seventeen, was also staying with friends: a large, noisy family with five daughters. He had sometimes wondered whether their meeting and subsequent attraction had al been based on the fantasy that was that regatta week. Louise was being pushed by her mother to set her sights beyond her mercantile roots. He was lonely and without any family. That week he was ensconced with his titled friend while Louise was nestled at the heart of her ebulient hosts. In those contexts they both seemed to offer what the other most wanted. In fact, when he tried to remember when he first saw Louise—surely this was a crucial moment in any tale of love—he was hard put to separate the pale blur of cream and blue dresses, spinning parasols and straw hats, the chattering and the giggles, into separate young women.

John Emmett was there too, he suddenly recaled, though where he was staying he was not sure. He had forgotten that fact completely but now it occurred to him that was actualy the last time he'd seen him. Into his mind came a picture of John standing barefoot on a slip in a rowing vest and shorts, slender but wel muscled. It had slipped his mind that John was such a good oarsman. He was not a dedicated one; although he could have been first class, he always maintained a position of ultimate disengagement. Was that just the pose of a very young man, he wondered? But John had rowed for his colege, which must have required some commitment.

Was there a girl beside him? He rather thought there was, smiling and laughing with an easy familiarity under a ridiculous hat. Was that his fiancée, the Bavarian girl? Had she ever come to England?

Just as Laurence was basking, content and almost hypnotised by the vibrations of the car, luled by memories of summer and cool water, a bump in the road and a mutter from Charles startled him and instantly his mood plummeted. Of al of them, excited and noisy, it seemed that only he was left. That June, eating strawberries in the shade of pavilions or watching the dripping boats lifted from the river, such a thing would have seemed impossible. They were al so much there, so permanent in their world. He had occasionaly wondered if it was actualy he who was dead and excluded, while the others continued together, missing him from time to time, but busy somewhere else. Suddenly, surprisingly, his eyes stung and a desperate fear swept over him that he would weep, sitting in the front seat of Charles's car, traveling along autumn roads in England, and that if he did so he would be crying not for the dead but in terrible self-pity that things he'd enjoyed had been taken away.

He lifted his head to the oncoming wind, glad that his smarting eyes were hidden.

They passed a flock of children coming out of a vilage school. Several girls in pinafores waved, while smal boys in short trousers and boots shouted at the sight of the car. Charles hooted twice. Smoke rose from cottage chimneys. A dog ran out at them yapping and in danger of hurling itself under the wheels in its fury.

They came through Wolvescot, right on the border between Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire according to their map, and gathered speed going downhil between an avenue of trees. Charles jabbed his finger vigorously out of the side window and, leaning forward, Laurence could see some sort of tal, dark tower emerging from a dense copse on a nearby hil. There was something Gothic about it, isolated in the English countryside.

'The Foly,' Charles shouted. Laurence remembered it from an outing at school; they must be nearer than he thought to the Wiltshire border.

The countryside became more undulating; the sun was almost directly in their faces, yet it was getting colder. Laurence puled up his greatcoat colar around the scarf and sank lower in his seat. Charles had come up with the name of both an inn and a smal hotel, suggested to him by friends.

They finaly roled into Fairford along a narrow street of honey-coloured, terraced houses. They passed the hotel, a tidy Georgian house, just as they came into a large market place and stopped. An inn, the Bul, occupied almost one ful side of the square. Its low, mossy roof and smal windows gave it an appearance of great age.

Charles stood by the car, looking from one establishment to the other. He puled off his goggles; each eye was surrounded by a disc of white in his grimy face.

'Shal we try the inn first?' he asked, to Laurence's surprise. 'Vilage hostelry by the look of it; sort of place one might find oneself buying a drink for a local and picking up a bit of gossip. Hotels only have guests, strangers like us, nothing to be gained there.'

Not for the first time, Laurence looked at him in admiration.

As they walked into the dark, low interior of the inn, the landlord appeared, looking surprised, wiping his hands on his apron. Charles took a large, plain room with double windows overlooking the market square, while Laurence chose a much smaler bedroom with a beamed ceiling and a tiny fireplace, but a view towards the spire of Fairford church. A boy brought in their bags and they agreed to meet in half an hour.

After a while there was a knock on Laurence's door and a plump girl stood with a large jug of steaming water. 'D'you want the fire lighted?' she asked.

Laurence shook his head and took the jug from her. He heard the squeak of floorboards as she went downstairs. He hung his coat in a wardrobe that smeled strongly of camphor, then, stripping off his jacket, shirt and vest, poured the contents of the jug into the bowl on the washstand and leaned forward, steeping his arms halfway to his elbows. His skin tingled with the sudden heat.

Peering into the speckled glass over the basin, he realised that his face was as creased and filthy as Charles's—no wonder the landlord had looked surprised.

He was quite stiff and weary, as if he'd had a day's exercise rather than a ride in a motor car. When he'd washed he lay down on the bed and puled the eiderdown up over him for warmth. The bed sank deeply beneath him, softened by age; it reminded him of school where generations of boys had shaped the mattresses into hammocks. Under the feather pilow was a horsehair bolster.

He lay on his back, looking at a ceiling yelowed with age. With his ankles crossed and his hands on his chest, he was as stil as an alabaster knight. Al he needed was a smal dog under his heels, he thought. He was drifting. The eiderdown became an ancient flag over the catafalque. He remembered a cathedral where his father had taken him as a child. Military colours and standards hung high in a side chapel, flag after flag, generation after generation: stained, torn, repaired and decayed.

The lower ones were stil dyed deep red and blue, and retained threads of tarnished gold; the highest had faded into soft, bone-coloured gauze, the distant regiments and battle honours that they represented as invisible as their mottoes had become. He must have been very smal because his father had been holding his hand.

***

An insistent rapping at the door woke him.

'Laurence. Are you coming down?'

Laurence looked at his watch but had to strike a match to read it. He'd been asleep for nearly two hours. He swung his feet out of bed and puled on his discarded jacket.

'God, Charles, I'm sorry. I must have just dropped off' he said as he opened the door.

'Not a problem. I've been having a little look around, spoken to our landlord: font of wisdom, and he's happy to serve a simple dinner in the parlour. You dress and I'l see you downstairs in a quarter of an hour, say?'

'Yes. Of course. Sorry, just went out like a light,' Laurence said.

When the door closed he lit the lamp then scrabbled to find a clean shirt and socks. He peered in the glass again, damped down his hair and combed it through with his fingers. He hardly recognised the man with the deep lines round his eyes and a few first grey hairs. When had he got so old?

Chapter Thirteen

Downstairs a coal fire burned in a back room which smeled of smoke and tar. Plates of cold tongue, chunks of fresh bread and some cheese had been set out on a table next to a stoneware jar of pickles.

'I hope the beer suits you,' Charles said. 'Local brew but the landlord assures me it's good.'

Laurence was ravenous and the food was much better than he'd expected. There was occasional laughter from elsewhere in the building but muffled by thick wals, and from time to time a heavy door slammed shut. Otherwise the only sound was of their knives scraping on the plates. The beer was as good as Charles promised and when the girl he'd seen earlier came in to take their plates and refil their tankards, he sat back, content.

'Nervous about tomorrow?' Charles asked.

'I expect I should be but in truth I'm quite curious.'

'See what you can extract for Miss Emmett?' Charles looked amused as he puled out his tobacco pouch.

'Actualy, it feels more as if I'm doing it for John himself and, less creditably, my own curiosity. But it's certainly because of Mary's suspicions about how the place was run. Eleanor Bolitho, too—she was pretty damning about these set-ups. Not that I can do a thing about it anyway.'

Charles was concentrating on tamping his pipe.

Laurence went on, 'It sounds terribly worthy, doesn't it? I realy just want to get a look at these people.'

'You need to keep an open mind, that's al,' Charles said, slowly. 'Not because I personaly doubt for a minute that things go on that would make your hair stand on end. In fact, from what I've heard, quite literaly there's electric stuff and so on. Wouldn't be alowed on a chap in Wormwood Scrubs, yet their families empty their coffers for it.' He reached for the pickle jar. 'But what realy bothers me is that you're not a very good actor. Never were. Seriously, old chap. Think you're so British, sang-froid and so on, when realy your face is an open book. When you go in and meet Dr Caligari, you've got to be believing they might help Reginald.'

'Robert.'

'Just testing you.' Charles continued, unperturbed, 'Take the embarrassment of the unhinged Bertie Bartram off your hands. Possibly even make him better.

Return him to the bosom of his relieved family. Or keep him safely out of it. You've got to look as if you hope they can work miracles, not as if you suspect them of negligence at best and atrocities at worst. You've got to forget everything those girls told you. I mean you're dealing with mind doctors. They'l be on to you in a minute.

Wel, half an hour, certainly. Probably charge you two guineas to boot.'

'Thank you,' Laurence said simply.

'Stil,' Charles said after a moment's pause while he sawed an inch-thick slice of bread off the loaf, 'they're not entirely popular in Fairford by al accounts.'

'The landlord?' Laurence guessed.

'Wel, I only had a brief chat. Explained we were down here to find a place for your brother, stricken war hero and al that. Turns out he—our landlord—was at Mons same time as my lot, and lost a nephew in the Glosters. Main gripe seems to be that Master Caligari—what is the man's name?'

'If you mean the son, it's George Chilvers.'

'Yes, wel, young Chilvers didn't fight. He had been a keen cricketer, so was apparently healthy, and he's not a medic himself, so no reserved status. Bad feeling al round especialy as most of the lads in these parts fought together and took a drubbing in '17.'

'But that doesn't mean that Holmwood itself is suspect,' Laurence said.

'No,' Charles conceded. 'Apparently one of the older attendants who made it back lost an arm. Worked at Holmwood before the war, when it was a place for mad gentlefolk—men and women. Came home, hero's welcome, medal, expected to get his place back as Dr C had promised, but young Chilvers laid him off three months later while Pa was away. Said he couldn't pul his weight. He—the ex-employee—believes he was got rid of because he didn't approve of young Chilvers'

marriage.'

'But why on earth should a warder have an opinion, or anyone care if he did, about his employer's marriage plans?'

'Because, old chap, it seems that Chilvers married a wealthy heiress.'

And so?' There was obviously more to come.

And she had been a patient at Holmwood. That's how Chilvers Junior met her. She'd tried to kil herself.' Charles couldn't keep a triumphant note out of his voice. Laurence was astonished that he'd managed to keep this juicy morsel of gossip to himself for so long.

'Wel, you were obviously a lot more alert after our drive than I was.'

'I'm hoping to find out more tomorrow. Our man, the disgruntled warder, usualy comes in for a drink on Wednesday lunchtime. He's bringing a friend who stil works there. So I plan to be in the bar with a generous walet while you are interrogating the Chilverses.'

Despite sleeping so deeply before dinner, Laurence was pleasantly tired when he got back to his room. A smal fire was burning and the thin curtains had been drawn, the water bowl emptied and his bed straightened. He opened the window a little, slipped between the cold sheets and slept until morning when he woke with an aching bladder and, loath to use the chamber pot, went briskly downstairs, the linoleum cold under his feet. On the way back up he crossed with Charles going downstairs with equal urgency.

Half an hour later after a agreeably silent meal of thick bacon, dark-yolked eggs and blood-pudding, they planned Laurence's day.

'Got the wind up yet?' asked Charles hopefuly.

'Not realy. Either I get some information or at least a general feel for the place or I make a complete fool of myself, get away quickly and never have to see them again.'

'Or they could take you for a maniac and strap you into a straitjacket,' Charles said benignly. 'But although the locals may grumble, the place is quite wel thought of by the nobs. Landlord, the wonderfuly named Cyril Trusty, by the way, tels me that they've had various scions of the great and good tucked up in there.

Lord Verey's heir for a start, and the son of a bishop, though Trusty can't remember which one. Not much of a man for matters theological, our landlord.'

'And where do al these pilars of the establishment stand on shel-shock, then?'

'Wel, I don't think Verey's been giving speeches in the Lords,' Charles said. 'Probably not too keen for the world to know the heir's of unsound mind.'

Laurence decided to walk up to Holmwood. It lay on the edge of the smal town, the landlord had told them, sketching out a pencil map.

'You'l know it when you see it,' said Cyril Trusty. 'High wals and spikes on top. To stop them scarpering. Impale 'em instead. Doesn't look as old as it is. Bits added on. Solid. Paid a fortune to instal proper asylum locks just before the war. Had to get a man from London. Ordinary locks won't do for lunatics. Ingenious type, your madman, they say.'

Chapter Fourteen

Laurence's appointment was at eleven and he set off along the riverbank with a quarter of an hour to spare. Where the path reached some water meadows he looked back to see the fine church standing on higher ground. It reminded him that the churchyard at Fairford was the last place anyone had admitted to seeing John Emmett.

Which way had he gone then, Laurence wondered? Not across the meadows, obviously, as that would have led him straight back towards Holmwood, the direction he was taking now. Not due east, as he could see a wide river and no sign of a bridge. And if he'd turned down into the market place, along the main road and towards the station, surely he would have been identified, if not as himself, certainly as an outsider: a patient. Beyond the church lay farmland as far as Laurence could see, with a few stands of beech and a Dutch barn right on the horizon. John must have headed that way.

Presumably the main service on Christmas Day was Matins. John's disappearance could have been discovered no later than midday, once the church party got back to Holmwood at the latest, though the youth he'd stunned in order to escape must surely have raised the alert before then. That left three to four hours or so of decent daylight to look for him. But it also meant that John would soon have needed shelter.

Could he have known anyone in the area? Could someone have come to fetch him? It would have needed a car. Branch-line trains ran a reduced service on Christmas Day and, anyway, he was sure the police and Holmwood people would have checked at the station. But in concentrating on how, he was no nearer knowing why. Where was John going so determinedly and who could he have persuaded to help him if that was what he'd done? And why hadn't that person come forward?