The Return of Captain John Emmett by Elizabeth Speller Page B

pretty pastoral scenes usually 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 Schiller and Schubert he'd really fallen 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.
    'Well, the answer to the second question is that before the war broke out I was reading English at Cambridge—at Girton College. 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 skill, 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 all very quiet; lovely, very early summer weather, I remember. Beds made, bandages rolled, 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 ill 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 all 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 William 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 filled and overfilled, 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 collapse had really rattled him.'
    'Being trapped,' said Laurence.
    She nodded. 'In those circumstances you get to know a man quite well.' 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.
    'All 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