Also by Elizabeth Speller

Biography

Following Hadrian:

A Second Century Journey Through

the Roman Empire

Memoir

The Sunlight on the Garden:

A Family in Love, War and Madness

COPYRIGHT

Published by Hachette Digital

ISBN: 978-0-74812-697-2

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © Elizabeth Speller 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

Hachette Digital

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DY

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For my brother, Richard, and for my nephews Dominic, Tristan, William, Barnaby and Charlie, who, had they been born exactly one hundred years earlier, might all 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 small 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.

Occasionally 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. Still 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, followed by a more audible hum and finally a crescendo of noise as the train, pulled 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 brilliantly illuminated, 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 really 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 all 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 still 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 finally 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 smell the damp earth but there was nothing of her here. Later, he chose the granite and spelled 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 still 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 small chest to find a soft whiteness of matinée jackets, bootees, embroidered baby gowns and tiny bonnets, all carefully 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 follow a new career. It did not make him a man of substantial means, but it was enough for him to tell 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 selling 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 recall 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 smell 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 small hopes and plans that went with her, were simply part of these everyday losses.

He’d rented a small 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 small rooms were filled with light. There he could lie in bed listening to the wind and the pigeons cooing on the roof. He rarely went out socially these days but when he did it was usually 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 All Hallows 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: billet 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, Millicent, 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 still 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 Millicent, 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 College 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, Sally, 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 conventionally 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 followed 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 smells 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 hopefully.

‘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 carefully 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 appalled. 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-mâché 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 smell 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 finally went to bed on these humid August nights he would find it hard to sleep. bells 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 hall table. Later he came to think of it as the letter. It had been forwarded twice: first from his old Oxford college, then from his former marital home; it was a miracle it had got to him at all.

He sat down by the largest window, slipped a finger under the flap and tore it open. Late-afternoon sunlight fell 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 especially as you once wrote to me and I never answered. My life was difficult then. I hope you still remember me.

I heard that you lost your wife and I am dreadfully 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 tell 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. Finally 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 following 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 all 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 will 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 all 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 recalled meeting eyes that were full 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 kill 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 small 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 usually hungered for. Although good at most games, especially rowing, he was unimpressed by being selected for teams; he drilled 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 skill 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 called 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, swallowing 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 filled 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 all about the stars. He would use his father’s opinion to settle arguments decisively; Laurence could still hear his solemn tone of voice: ‘My father says …’When Laurence finally 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 small terrier called 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 actually 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 balls 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 all but the most skilful players eventually relinquished their balls to the small stream that ran below it. Mary, very much the little sister then, went in barefoot to retrieve them and tried to sell them back. She was always paddling in the stream, her legs were invariably muddy, he recalled, and she had a ferret she took for walks on a lead. Was it called Kitchener? The following 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 equally 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 all have become stout solicitors and brewers, doctors and cattle-breeders, with tolerant wives and children, most of them living in the same villages, 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 small 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 tell 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 college; his circle were clever men: writers, debaters, thinkers. Laurence had fallen 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 usually cameo pieces: Bavarian farmers struggling to make ends meet, the chocolate-smelling girls in a Berne factory or a veteran who had been Bismarck’s footman. As tensions rose in Europe, he supposed John’s small 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 all 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 hell didn’t you tell 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 still-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 really 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 illness for three gruelling years and had been mentioned in despatches twice by the time the war ended.

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

‘Look, I’m sorry I didn’t fill you in about Emmett. I know he was a jolly 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 called – with the terrible temper. The one who joined the RFC? It’s not as if we’d all 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 all 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 really. 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 follow 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 intelligent 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.

‘Well, 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 Morrell. 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 Morrells 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.