The Return of Captain John Emmett Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 stalls 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, pencilled 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 all the nicknames they gave to trenches in France, a stagnant pit called Piccadilly and a sand-bagged Dover Way. As he thought, he was fiddling with the metal comb, a small, 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-yellow 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 well-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 small 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 collection 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 pulled 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 smaller and the writing in it more cramped; following 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 awfully 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 following 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