Читать книгу Mrs P’s Book of Secrets - Lorna Gray - Страница 6

My grandmother and mother performed a rather unusual war service. Through the medium of regular séances, they worked – and still do work – to guide the wandering souls of poor lost soldiers out of the filthy quagmire of war.

There were some, they say, who found the shock of their violent end so sudden and so disorientating that it bewildered their soul. The living senses might have made the switch from the roar of bombs to the silence of the hereafter, but the shadow of the men they had been would sometimes remain there still. Detached from the nightmare of the battlefield, but bound to it; staggered and confused.

The process of reaching them called for no miasma, no rattling tables. My grandmother and her little gathering of fellow spiritualists simply treasured the serious belief that they were extending a kindly hand to those rudderless souls, before steering them first towards acceptance, and secondly into peace.

When my husband was killed, I refused flatly to let them do it.

I couldn’t bear to think of his soul being stranded in those dismal terms. And not because I was selfish, or enjoyed the kind of superior cynicism that masquerades as lucid reason. Everyone has their own way of dealing with loss. But for me it felt as if real selfishness would dwell in that sort of calling out of his name. I would never stand by while they did it without me, but if I joined them and some part of it worked, my husband might learn the truth from me – that I didn’t want to let him go.

Because, real or not, it would never feel like whispering a tender farewell to him across the divide. It would be like calling him back.

It would feel like I was telling him flatly that I can grasp him wherever he is, and that I mean to shackle him to me, when surely, of all things, I have to trust in the deeper workings of my heart and believe he has already found his release.

So, for now, I keep to life and leave my husband well alone.

I was first carried home to this place by that feeling eight weeks ago. This was the time, after all, when our newfound peace was stumbling towards its second Christmas in all the monotony of rationing. And in the spirit of the year’s end and the time of darkness and so on, it has lately seemed to me that nowhere was a better light shining for me than in my uncle’s little book printing business in the north Cotswolds town of Moreton-in-Marsh.

I was enjoying the process of reacquainting myself with his busy little first floor office, above the street front shop and the narrow printworks in the outbuildings behind. My uncle wasn’t staid, but his building was.

The rooms for Kershaw and Kathay Book Press Ltd ought to have belonged to a legal office or an academic’s study. Every surface was made of dark wood, and quiet studiousness had taken root in the dry corners behind the cabinets.

There were three of us working up here on the first floor. Robert Underhill was my uncle’s second-in-command, and he had the office that ran in a narrow line along the end wall from front to back. He also had possession of one of the fireplaces and the first of the windows that overlooked the street. For the few hours when the winter’s day outside grew bright enough to have any effect, white lines showed in the warped gaps between the wooden panels that divided his space from mine.

My uncle’s office occupied the other two windows at the front of the building. My desk was set in the square area behind. My view was of those closed office doors and the thin glass of the screen that stopped the draught from the stairs.

At present this small reception area also contained a member of the public by the name of Miss Prichard who was beaming at me through the unflattering glare of my electric lamp.

Miss Prichard hadn’t come to see me. She had come to thrust her manuscript under the nose of Mr Underhill, only he was out – as he had often been during this last week or so – and my uncle was shut up in his office muttering vagaries on the telephone.

She and her felt hat were sitting in my guest chair, looking every inch the aged housekeeper she was claiming to be with a story to tell about an old doctor who had employed her to keep house for him in the 1920s. I believe she took it as a sign of our seriousness as a publisher that she was being interviewed by the woman who answered the telephone and wrote Uncle George’s letters.

‘It’s very thrilling,’ she confessed, ‘to be in here at last. I suppose the editors are terribly busy.’ She kept running her eyes across the closed doors as though waiting for someone important to bustle out, proving that only by sheer luck and cunning had a small author such as her found a way in.

I thought that it was at times like these that my real job began.

I had been taken on because my aunt had retired. Aunt Mabel’s hands had grown too arthritic and I was stepping in to fill the gap. I had been told that my aunt was the chief tea-maker – to ensure I understood the limitations of what the family company could do for me, presumably – but I was already learning that I was performing a fundamentally larger role in this business.

I was lending prestige to our two editors, Uncle George and Robert Underhill, because it transpired that new authors of the sort who would pay for the services of Kershaw and Kathay Book Press Ltd really liked to feel the weight of the towering intellects couched behind those enticingly unwelcome closed doors.

There was a sort of tradition in it, I suppose. I imagine it matched their general idea of the marvellously grand publishing houses of the capital city, only on a more intimate, old-time scale.

Those London publishing houses weren’t very like us really, though. Uncle George didn’t have their degree of clout with the government agency in charge of paper supplies. Instead, he worked to produce the smaller treasures of the literary world – the unusual memoirs, the local histories and the unsung gem of a novel – all bound in sturdy little hardbacks about the size of a Victorian pocket book. Needless to say, there wasn’t a lot of money in it.

And also needless to say, the process of submitting a manuscript to us was actually managed without anyone being required to negotiate their way past me; when I wasn’t the gatekeeper, and rudeness was hardly my uncle’s forte, and Mr Underhill barely spoke at all.

Miss Prichard was smiling at me again as she set down her teacup on its saucer. ‘I did catch your name correctly, didn’t I? Mrs Peuse?’

‘You did. Mrs Lucinda Peuse. It isn’t a terribly nice name, is it? The staff here call me Mrs P. The lady who runs the shop downstairs started it, and then the abbreviation caught on like wildfire.’

‘Well,’ Miss Prichard replied comfortably, ‘I suppose it’s easier than a surname which might stray close to sounding like “peas” in the local accent, or “puce”, when I gather it simply ought to sound like “pews”?’

‘Precisely.’

My family called me Lucy.

My visitor was getting up to leave. Then the door from the stairs opened with a waft of damp air as a man of about thirty stepped in and moved quietly past us with only an idle eye for my visitor. The door for Mr Underhill’s office was pressed shut behind him. Miss Prichard turned back to me. Her eyes briefly widened to silently enquire whether this pleasantly built stranger had indeed been the great editor himself. I smiled and tipped my head. It created the right impression.

I told her, ‘Thank you for coming. I’ll pass on my notes and your papers to Mr Underhill or Mr Kathay later today. Either way, I’m sure you’ll hear from us soon.’

She let herself out. And I, in the moment of hearing her footfalls creak down to the turn and away into the small shop below, felt again the odd stillness that sometimes followed in the wake of any bustle in this building.

Anything that happened here by day passed away behind a closed door or into another room, and always the tired wooden floorboards added their solemn voices to the distant tale. They stayed with me at night too because there was another door in the wall between the stairs and my uncle’s office. It led to the attic where my bedroom lay.

My night-times were spent nestling in the space beyond the office kitchen and a storeroom that housed an awful lot of unsold books.

‘That was Doctor Bates’ landlady, wasn’t it?’

Mr Underhill’s question made me jump.

I found that I had left my seat but paused in the act of moving past my desk. I had hesitated with my fingertips just touching the base of my lamp. It was as if the severe pool of light had become my anchor in the midst of that curious sense of being very much alone after the woman had left.

I turned my head. He couldn’t have been aware of the silence of this place because it didn’t dwell behind his office door. Clouds were streaking across the sky outside his window but, even so, daylight was streaming in and brightening the floor beside his desk.

I told him, smiling, ‘Landlady to a doctor may be a fair description of her business, but appearances are deceptive. I vaguely remember the doctor who had the practice before the fellow who sold it to Doctor Bates. About twenty years ago he was the town’s greatest claim to fame. I think he found his way to developing a new vaccine. By the time I knew him he was a crabbed old man and adored her, so if the lady’s book even begins to stray into their little tale of rich and poor, it’ll be pretty inflammatory stuff.’

I was speaking with one of those cheery undertones that didn’t really mean to convey anything except perhaps my relief at being interrupted. Only then his mouth merely mustered something far short of his usual brief smile, before he asked me to join him in his office.

His reaction surprised me, actually. It wasn’t normal for him to embarrass me by making it seem as if I had been attempting to gossip about the lady’s unmarried state, and it wasn’t normal either for him to summon me to his desk.

Over the past two months since I had joined this office, we’d exchanged pleasantries about the weather or some future publication or other that he was editing, but very little more. My unbound cheeriness shocked him sometimes, I knew, but I could usually tell when that had happened because he’d retreat to his desk – which was, admittedly, just as he was doing at present – and I’d settle into collecting up whatever papers I had for him before moving to follow.

Usually, I was glad of it. Quiet reserve was what I was used to from him. It kept us safely clear of that other extreme of the office workplace – the one where my little slips into unchained friendliness would have been exploited as an excuse to be over familiar, as only a higher ranking male in business might. But he had never preyed on any mistakes of mine.

So I suppose what I’m trying to say is that in the main I found his uncomplicated style of company wonderfully restful. Whereas this moment was different, because it was unlike him to make me uncomfortable.

None of this was remotely exciting enough for Amy Briar who ran the bookshop below us. She couldn’t understand him at all.

She had told me that he had been one of those poor unfortunate men who had gone over in the first wave and been captured almost on the spot. He’d been a prisoner of war until the cessation of hostilities in ’45. Amy couldn’t comprehend why any man would choose, after all those years of incarceration, to settle in this small town business when he might have seized freedom with both hands and claimed every excitement with it.

I remember thinking simply: what a waste war had made of five years of life.

Today, as I handed Miss Prichard’s manuscript to him across his desk, I was realising that at least part of the embarrassment I was feeling came from knowing that it was eleven o’clock and my uncle’s second-in-command had barely stepped into the office. And he had immediately approached me with a question about our work, only to catch me staring into the shadows when I ought to have been busy too.

There had been a subtle touch of hesitation in his interruption, like concern when I didn’t want it. Now he made everything worse by accepting the manuscript from my hand and remarking, ‘Hearing you say all that about Miss Prichard’s memoir, it seems to me as if you and I ought to be trading jobs. My experience in publishing only runs to about nine months, whereas yours runs to years. Don’t you mind settling for taking the messages?’

His eyes briefly lifted from the manuscript in his hand. He really was different today.

This was the change that had been brewing over the course of all his little absences of late – a harder energy which ran itself back into stillness through a pattern of asking me more about myself than was the norm.

I thought he did it whenever something had unsettled his peace of mind. This time, though, I couldn’t help stiffening to say in a clipped sort of voice, ‘That’s an oddly challenging question, Mr Underhill.’

Then I caught the sound of my own defensiveness. It made me add more cheerfully, ‘It isn’t that I mind, exactly, that you might occasionally require more from me than a harmless chat about the weather. But didn’t you know that you aren’t supposed to draw attention to the smallness of my role?’

Because he was right in a way – I was an experienced editor. I’d spent a good portion of my own war years working on the staff of the regional ministry office. I'd won one of those under-reported roles that basically required me to ensure that all information leaflets and posters and National Savings campaigns were adjusted to be relevant to the local population. So, thanks to me, a Mrs Whatsit from Ham Cottage had known that in the event of invasion, her emergency food distribution point would be the such-and-such building in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Then, as it happened, the German tanks hadn’t invaded. The leaflets had been made redundant and so had I. And, with that in mind, this unsolicited comment on my new role here was a bit like that question mark which hangs over the way people talk about the cleaning ladies and the servers. Dignity was a very delicate thing.

In my case, and the case of an awful lot of women like me, everyone knew how much we’d slaved for the great machine of war when we’d filled the void left by the departing men. They knew too how we were being cheerfully relegated once more to the role of underling now that peace had brought the survivors home again. And yet absolutely no one except a few restless youths ever dared to actually comment on it. Because who amongst us knew what complaint to make, when we were all poor and those war-shaken men had to have the chance to feel that normality was re-emerging somehow?

So, I suppose the real issue here was that I had already grasped that there was a considerable difference between Robert’s career prospects and mine. I even had a plan for what I would do if it ran into my future. I just never would have expected this particular demobbed soldier to humble me by asking me about it.

Particularly when we both knew that Uncle George didn’t have the work for three editors. Or the money. And it had been an act of generosity that my uncle had even been able to do this much for me.

With a head full of concerns of my own about what was the matter with this man today, I couldn’t help retorting then with uncharacteristic coolness, ‘Anyway, it isn’t so much a case of whether or not I mind noting down the messages for you, Mr Underhill. It’s simply that I set quite a high value on having the funds to buy food this side of Christmas, that’s all.’

I shouldn’t have said that. It turned out that not only was I struggling to deal with the sudden sense of my inequality here, but I also knew even less about his present mood than I thought. Because his head lifted from the manuscript again and I found that I had surprised him.

He hadn’t expected to offend me. And his expression didn’t match the usual blankness that came in whenever I said something unguarded in this quiet office. This way of studying me was steadier. Aside from his reaction to the barb in my words, I thought it pretty clear that he had noticed that my mercenary summary of my motives was a lie. Normally I spoke by smiling.

I didn’t even have the chance to answer that look by telling him something truthful, because there was a clatter of the other office door opening and then Uncle George was there in the doorway.

The older man bustled in with a question for his second-in-command. He didn’t notice the closeness of my position to the corner of Robert’s desk, with the editor himself standing in the small space just beyond.

Uncle George didn’t notice the speed of my self-conscious retreat to the cabinet by the door either. He was about as opposite a stamp of man to Robert as possible. George Kathay was the intellectual who fitted books and these quiet rooms but was also jolly and comfortable and long overdue for retirement. He had looked the same in all the years I had known him: willowy and wispy-haired and amiable, dressed in neat but old-fashioned brown suits made of wool.

‘Good morning, Mr Kathay,’ said Robert. He had moved when I had moved, but more smoothly.

He had passed further behind his desk to set the manuscript down, and now he was checking his watch to confirm that it was indeed still morning. Just.

My uncle didn’t have time for the preliminaries today. ‘Morning, Lucy. Rob. I’d hoped you’d be back sooner than this. What news have you got for me?’

Robert’s reply was brief. ‘Mixed’

‘Ah.’

There was an odd little pause in the wake of that when it struck me that they were speaking in code. Then my uncle seemed to suddenly consider my presence more seriously. In fact, he began to look like a man who was about to ask me to go and make the tea.

And that part really surprised me, because I was already making my discreet exit from the room. I mean to say that I always made the tea; it’s just that it was unlike my uncle to use it as a means of bustling me out of the way.

Today, however, Uncle George gave me the strange experience of learning that after weeks of complacently enjoying the process of finding my feet, I might have been wrong for imagining that we were all friends here, each bearing a different share of the work. Because the rank of editors above the lower staff really did exist. And these two men had private business to discuss.

It gave me a very peculiar feeling then to slip away to my desk.

My dim corner was screened from Robert’s desk by the partition between us, so he couldn’t have seen my flush. I thought they might simply shut the door and exclude me that way. But then the younger man made the span of the floorboards between my seat and that open threshold so much narrower when he said with unexpected mildness, ‘Can you give me five minutes to gather together a few things, Mr Kathay, and then I’ll come along to your office?’

He made it seem as if they were merely about to have one of their ordinary weekly consultations. But it was too late. Uncle George was fidgeting into the open doorway, and then he announced as if it were news the other editor needed to hear, ‘Lucy is our borrowed daughter, you know.’

Now I truly was concerned. Because I thought I knew what my uncle was about to say next, and yet I was certain that if Robert had managed to grasp my professional qualifications, he must surely have gleaned this little detail.

All the same, my uncle made it worse by rushing into saying, ‘Lucy is a farmer’s daughter who dislikes the mess of a farmyard. My brother-in-law’s family have a place beyond Worcester with an awful lot of sheep. And cows. Or crops. Actually, I think it’s just sheep and crops, isn’t it Lucy? She’s agreeing.’

He added that last part for Robert’s benefit since the younger man couldn’t see my uncertain nod.

I was staring. Because these rapid words were designed to convey affection and an awful lot of care. Uncle George was acting as if I had stalked out and he needed to make amends, only I hadn’t stalked anywhere. And now he was gripping that doorframe and earnestly explaining to the younger man by the desk, ‘My wife and I were childless and growing old before our time, and Lucy wasn’t keen on farming. So when Lucy was about four, her parents sort of loaned the girl to us. And then—’

‘And then it just sort of stuck, Mr Underhill.’ I raised my voice so that it carried into the other room.

I had to stop this. It was all wrong that I should discover the tension I’d noted in Robert present in my uncle too. And I certainly couldn’t bear to hear this story of my childhood being told on these terms; as if my uncle needed to worry himself into an apology, when I didn’t need to be offended by this.

So perhaps I even intervened for Robert’s sake, because he had been a part of this too, and I thought he might recognise the gesture behind my abrupt return to plain honesty.

I added in that same clear voice, ‘This life stuck so completely, Mr Underhill, that some twenty-two years later when my job dried up and things got a little frayed about the edges, my idea of running for home carried me here.’

My uncle beamed at me.

Then he shuffled away to his office. He didn’t hear the way I felt compelled to add my own small aside to the secrets of this place by murmuring to myself, ‘Of course my real motive was that Aunt Mabel bakes like a dream and we are four weeks from Christmas …’

‘Mrs P?’

Robert was calling me back into his room. He hadn’t heard that last part either. He was being distracted by the effort of remembering whatever it was that he and I had been speaking about before my uncle had begun to lecture him on my origins.

At least his voice was closer to his usual harmless tone. He was searching through the papers on his desk when I approached near enough for him to say, ‘Did she ask any particular questions, by the way?’

‘Who?’ I asked blankly.

‘Miss Prichard. What were you talking about as I climbed the stairs?’

It turned out that his idea of what had passed between us was different from mine. He wanted to discuss Miss Prichard and the submission of her manuscript.

While he eased a pen out from beneath a stack of notes, I told him, ‘She wanted me to give her some examples of similar titles we’d produced. She had heard about the Willerson archive, naturally. Everybody has. She asked how soon she might expect to be able to get her hands on a copy. She wondered if it might be out for Christmas.’

On any other day, a comment like that would have been guaranteed to draw a laugh.

The Willerson archive was a collection of photographs belonging to the family of a dead airman by the name of Gilbert Willerson. He had documented his non-operational life, his happy days spent on leave, the dances, the encounters with people in the town and his friends. Now his family wanted to publish the collection as a memorial to his death and, to be honest, the whole project was one big complication for us.

Gilbert Willerson’s fearsome last act with one of the training planes from our very own airfield had enthralled the national press. This was a man who, not to put too fine a point on it, had long been exploited for the purposes of propaganda. For my uncle, any attempt to publish even our small portion of the man’s private photographs was a tricky dance around the Official Secrets Act. It meant that Uncle George was having to negotiate with the various Ministry departments which might have an opinion on whether we should be prohibited from publishing at all. Robert had the unenviable job of pulling the pictures into some kind of logical order to give a sense of narrative. It was safe to say we were months away from making the print run that would be our largest title yet.

Today, however, Robert neither shuddered nor gave the customary rueful smile.

He merely paused in the midst of testing whether his pen worked while the distant sound of a rather wet sneeze carried through the floorboards from the shop beneath our feet. I saw him give an unconscious grimace, then he asked, ‘And was that the moment when she decided her manuscript should be submitted to me?’

‘She didn’t decide that. I did.’ I couldn’t help the impatience that was beginning to creep in. I wasn’t so nervous of his questions any more; just bemused.

‘So she wasn’t sent to us by her tenant, Doctor Bates?’

‘Not that she told me. And I should say,’ I couldn’t help adding, ‘that if you could hear our conversation as you climbed the stairs, you already know this.’

Suddenly, he proved he could still smile after all. ‘I couldn’t really hear a word,’ he said, ‘but it’s a fair point.’

Then he changed the subject.

He tipped his head towards his desk and said in a lighter tone, ‘I saw your note about the Jacqueline Dunn book, by the way.’

Oh heavens, I thought. At last I understood why I was finding that every fresh turn today seemed designed to remind me of my place – because here was proof of my absolute inability to keep within the bounds of my job.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said in a very different spirit of sincerity. ‘I thought I was doing the right thing. I sent out the proof copy on Monday.’

I added shamefacedly, ‘You weren’t here, but you and I had discussed last week how the author had to approve it in a matter of days if the print room people were going to have even half a chance of binding the books before Christmas. Uncle George couldn’t say where you were; I didn’t know when you would be back, and I thought that if you were going to be keeping the same uncertain hours this week as you had at the end of last week, you might not come in to the office in time to get it into the post. Today is Wednesday, so she must have it by now. I really am so sorry. I suppose you needed to check it before it went. Should I—?’

While I worked myself into a tangle, he seized the opportunity to say, ‘Why should you apologise? Under the circumstances, I don’t think you could have done anything else. I was simply going to say thank you.’

He implied that I’d misunderstood him completely this time.

He made my hands still, where previously my fingers had been tying themselves in knots. I heard myself ask with a rather too eager quickening into confidence, ‘Do you really think so? Are you sure? Because it’s a marvellous story and we don’t publish much in the line of children’s histories so I couldn’t help taking a quick look, only …’

I made the mistake of forgetting every one of the difficulties of the past minutes. I leaned in to confide with a brief twist of a teasing smile, ‘Only, do you know if she really means to spell Ashbrook with only one “o”?’

Of course it was a really terrible moment to make a joke out of the quality of his author’s spelling. I saw his expression change in the way that it always did whenever I slipped into revealing my usual unguarded self, and it was worse today because of the shadow that had come in with his late arrival.

Instantly, I was apologising and retreating back a step to the doorway.

‘I’m sorry,’ I was saying more formally. ‘I’m talking when I ought to be serious, and I know you don’t like it. I should let you get to your meeting with my uncle, with Mr Kathay, I mean, and—’

‘Mrs P.’ He said it flatly to interrupt the flow.

He waited until I stalled and turned my head to look at him. Then he asked with absolute incredulity, ‘Why on earth should you think that I mind the way that you talk?’

I floundered on the threshold. I was dumbstruck, really.

This was like that moment earlier when he had caught me staring by my desk. He tripped me headlong out of worrying about the people of this office, into acknowledging the reality that sometimes they cared for me in my turn.

He stated firmly into the silence I left, ‘I don’t mind.’

I believe the full depth of my stupefaction embarrassed him.

The turn of his head towards the papers in his hand was a means of curbing the feeling.

And yet, even though this was finally closer to what I considered normal for him, he also proved that something really was wrong here. Because the act was also my dismissal.

After that, it was with very mixed feelings of my own that I returned to my desk for the final time that morning. Robert wasn’t merely the man who had pipped me by a matter of months to the editor’s job. He was also the reason why I was making a home in the creaking attic above the office.

My aunt and uncle’s house stood on the other end of the High Street. They had a room to let in the outbuilding behind their kitchen. In days of old, the room had been home to a pair of junior clerks from the town gasworks. They had been a harmless addition to the household when I had been a small girl. These days, the tenant was Robert and Aunt Mabel didn’t think it would be terribly seemly for me to return to my childhood roost in their second floor bedroom, when I was a widow of only twenty-six and they had an unmarried man living on the property.

My aunt didn’t, however, need to worry too much about the impropriety of crowding both me and Robert into the small space of her home for the next couple of days. Her houseguest left the office after lunch on Thursday, and on Friday, when I received the call to go and help her bake the Christmas cake, he wasn’t at home at all.