Читать книгу Mrs P’s Book of Secrets - Lorna Gray - Страница 8

I had, naturally, been back to this house many times since I had left at the bright age of nineteen for my wartime employment. I had also been here many times in the past two months for various dinners and Sunday lunch, so it was uncanny really that it had never before occurred to me to notice how hard it had been to establish whether they ever shared their other mealtimes with Robert.

Or why, when my aunt’s murmurings about propriety could hardly have applied to dinner, he never joined them when I was there.

The thought accompanied me upstairs. It followed me into the room that had become my haven after exchanging life on the family farm for an aunt and uncle I had barely even known.

This evening, I had come up here to rediscover the oddments and trinkets I had treasured in the years since, which might now make excellent fillings for the drawers of that old advent calendar. Only, when it came to the point of finding all these bits and pieces, I didn’t even have the exercise of rummaging under my old bed frame.

Most of the larger furniture had gone and it wasn’t because, as might be inferred from the pattern of my homecoming, my aunt had also given Robert the contents of my room.

My bedroom was largely empty because the ironwork of my bedstead had been turned into a Spitfire sometime in ’41 and the mattress was in my new attic hideaway. I thought I could guess too who had helped my uncle to move it from one house to the other. I deduced this solely on the basis that my uncle couldn’t have done it alone and yet no one had mentioned the part played by the man who was presently occupying my aunt’s garden room.

I wondered what Robert had thought when he had seen the bare attic floorboards of my current sleeping quarters above the office, with the storeroom of books and a mattress denuded of its bed frame. And how much it related to what he thought he knew about me.

Disconcertingly, I believe I caught the same thought there on his face when I tripped down the last of the stairs to the floor below to abruptly encounter him as he came out of the short passage from the bathroom.

He knew where I had been. I was looking thoroughly at home by now and flushing slightly pink because it had been strenuous searching through the boxes of my things and I had some of those childhood treasures piled into the crook of one arm. They spoke loudly of belonging to this house, both in the past and in the present.

He had been washing the grime of a winter’s day from his face and had found that my aunt had whisked his towel away to the laundry. He had shed his suit jacket, and was stumbling in rolled shirtsleeves to the linen cupboard when I stepped down onto the narrow landing and saved him the job.

His hair was wet and so was his skin when I handed him the towel. The space here was tiny. My aunt was quite right to keep me in the attic above the office. There truly wouldn’t have been room here for us both.

‘Thank you,’ he said as I slid away along the wall.

He made me pause in the midst of making for the next flight of stairs. I turned my head. ‘It’s nothing,’ I said.

His voice had held a firmer hint of certainty than I was used to when compared to the man who often looked taken aback if I surprised him in the office.

It was, in fact, like a continuation of that moment when he had corrected me for saying that he didn’t like me to talk – unexpectedly decisive.

And I was flushing because it really had been a rapid search through drawers and boxes upstairs, and his few words of thanks cut a little deeper when I lingered before making for the next set of stairs. There was a different kind of steadiness in the way he met my eye. Quite simply, he was at home here too.

And now that I had finally been permitted to meet the man out of hours, I could see that my aunt had been right to fuss and worry about his supper. Not even weariness could alter the posture this man had, or the way that he moved, but he certainly was tired. And for him I believe this quiet exchange was one of those gentler moments that are seized like an intense release after a test.

Wherever he had been on that train, it hadn’t been pleasant for him. Whereas this; in these few peaceful seconds, this was better.

I didn’t tell any of this to Amy Briar. It was Monday and we were in her shop and she had a theory about our Mr Underhill. It was fuelled, I might say, by the doctor who was Miss Prichard’s tenant and Amy’s friend and here with us in time for the morning cup of tea.

She was saying regretfully, ‘I had a cold last week.’

Doctor Bates understood her point even if I didn’t. He was nodding seriously from the other side of the counter that kept customers away from the foot of the stairs.

Beside me, the curve of Amy’s mouth moved as she added with a meaningful nod, ‘I was ill last week and he was barely here. I’m better today and he’s upstairs.’

‘Don’t be silly.’ My retort came swiftly.

I surprised the doctor. He often stopped in during the brief respite between his round of home visits and his lunchtime surgery. Today, his grave tones ought to have befitted a man who was old and wispy-haired. In fact, the doctor was in his late thirties and his hair was sandy and he was one of those thoroughly self-assured people who had been demobbed from his military service and seamlessly bought his stake in the town practice as if he had never spent time away.

Now he asked me with mock seriousness, ‘You don’t believe that our Mr Underhill was afraid of catching the office cold and put himself into quarantine? So what’s your explanation?’

Ignoring my memory of the way Robert had grimaced when Amy had sneezed last week, I protested rather too keenly, ‘I’m certain that Mr Underhill wasn’t hiding in his bedroom, at the very least. He went away overnight. And my uncle – Mr Kathay I mean – knew about it, so he must have been working on a job, mustn’t he?’

And that was when I realised that I’d just shared the way my aunt and uncle were guarding Robert’s absences, and I must have done it to prod Amy into showing that she knew where he was going.

Only of course she couldn’t tell me anything, and I was thoroughly ashamed of myself because the morning was running on and I shouldn’t be down here speaking about Robert like this when my mind was still swimming with the vividly living memory of the way the man had looked on Friday night.

That had been an abrupt encounter with thought laid bare, and now he was upstairs and working quietly in his office, while we were skulking down here and discussing a different kind of man who might have spent weeks creeping away from his desk because my uncle’s shopkeeper had shown the merest hint of ill health.

I didn’t want this conversation. I tried to curb it. ‘Anyway,’ I said brightly, ‘What about my advent calendar? I only really came down just now because today is the second day of December and I spent the weekend filling these drawers. I had imagined that Miss Briar would like to be the first person to bring our advent calendar up to speed.’

As it was, this was another decision I would rapidly come to regret. Amy obediently drew out a drawer, discovered a neatly rolled length of very pretty ribbon and set it to one side without really looking at it. Then she seamlessly resumed the discussion about her concern for Mr Underhill.

And it really was concern. She was a universally caring woman who seemed as if she and her country tweeds had worked for my uncle since the dawn of time. She hadn’t. Amy was like the doctor and only about ten years old than me. I hadn’t known either of them as a child.

‘Watch him,’ she told me seriously. ‘Next time someone sneezes, you watch him. I have a theory about our Mr Underhill. You know he trained as a doctor, don’t you? Before the war, I mean?’

‘He never qualified,’ corrected Doctor Bates. ‘He and some of his fellow students got caught up in all that excited talk about duty and service, and abandoned their medical college when the first call went out for volunteers.’

He didn’t mean that as a compliment. He meant to imply that the decision counted as lunatic when Robert might have qualified and postponed his war duty, or might even have never served abroad at all.

Amy added thoughtfully, ‘Actually, it must drive the man mad, really, mustn’t it, to think that after all that enthusiasm and training, he had one brief battle in northern France and was a prisoner for the rest anyway.’

‘I served in the European War too, you know,’ remarked the doctor a shade plaintively when he realised how his comments had been interpreted. ‘I’m not suggesting that qualified doctors didn’t serve at all. I staffed a field hospital behind the front line, wherever that line should have been at the time.’

‘You were already qualified?’ I hadn’t meant to say that. I had meant to slip away to resume my work. Then I realised what I’d asked. I drew back and added quickly, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry into your war service.’

Just as I had never asked Robert about his life as a POW, it wasn’t really the done thing to push returning soldiers into speaking about their experiences, any more than anyone dared ask me about my husband. People offered whatever they were willing to share and we were all content to leave it at that.

Doctor Bates, to do him credit, though, didn’t look remotely shaken by my question. He didn’t look proud either. He simply looked tougher all of a sudden. Less like a Cotswold teddy bear and more like a man who had experienced some of the harder corners of the world when he said, ‘I qualified in ’36. I got my name on a brass plate the year Mr Underhill began his training. In fact, he and I both studied at the same university hospital in Birmingham, although I’d already left by the time Underhill joined my old college.’

Amy leaned in to rest her folded arms upon the glass countertop. Beneath her, ranks of pens and other writing tools glittered as a shining island in a sea of yet more old and blackened wood. ‘You knew him back then?’

The doctor shook his head, ‘He wasn’t a native of this town. There was no earthly reason for our paths to cross either before or after his studies, until Underhill moved here and took up his job with Mr Kathay. But you might be interested to know that these days I’m still very much in contact with my old lecturer, and he mentioned Underhill’s name only last week. In fact, the story the old fellow told was quite enlightening. Mrs P, has your uncle ever mentioned—’

‘Mr Underhill,’ Amy interrupted with renewed energy, ‘was drafted as a medic.’

She didn’t notice the way Doctor Bates was staring at her. I didn’t think he was used to being interrupted. Which was silly really because she did it to the rest of us all of the time.

Amy added, ‘Mr Underhill spent his war begging the guards for plasters and aspirin so that he might treat the many ailments of his fellow inmates. I believe that these days the poor man feels he’s seen enough sickness and runs away.’

‘Do you know this? Or are you surmising?’ This was said sharply, by Doctor Bates.

Suddenly, he wasn’t looking so much like a man who had been offended by her lack of interest in his university life. Instead, he was paying far more attention than he had before.

Amy’s bracelet clattered on the glass countertop as she moved. Beneath the cuffs of jacket and blouse, a thin gleam caught the dim light. She closed her hand over it, muffling it as she told her friend, ‘It’s just a guess, but the evidence is there in the way he kept away from me last week, wouldn’t you say? You must have seen plenty of signs of mental damage in the returning men.’

They didn’t notice my quiet movement as I slid my advent calendar from the counter and retreated for the stairs. She was telling the doctor earnestly, ‘I don’t mean to blame Mr Underhill if he can’t bear to see people with winter colds. I mean he might justifiably have a real horror of illness now. That might be what brought him to us.’

‘Really?’ The light from the wall lamp caught the side of the doctor’s face as he stirred. He was being framed by the dark ranks of every title we had ever published, while the golden lettering of each book’s embossed spine ran away like fine threads into the gloom of the shop. He asked, ‘What do you know about Underhill’s arrival here?’

Amy replied, ‘The first time I set eyes on him was when he wandered in one morning in the early spring with Mr Kathay, who took him upstairs and sat him down with a cup of tea. I can’t help wondering whether we’d find it was illness he was running away from that time too. The war can take people like that you know. It can leave them rootless. It can make them fragile.’

She added softly, ‘And Mr Underhill’s got that handsome look that goes a bit drawn down to a fine art, if you know what I mean? He looks like a man who ought to have gone back to doctoring and finished his studies. The trouble is, he definitely doesn’t fit that life any more. For all we know, he mightn’t quite fit this one either.’

I saw her fidget as she confided with renewed energy, ‘He might be going away for days on end because he’s building up the courage to escape us. One of these days I think we might find he’s gone and he won’t come back.’

‘And yet,’ the doctor added like it was his job to be the voice of reason, ‘let’s not get too carried away with this dire portrait of a man shaken by war.’

I thought I caught a sideways glance from him. I didn’t think that he was saying this for her sake. He was saying it for mine. He was a man who liked everything to be orderly and he must have abruptly noticed that I was retreating step by step up the stairs.

I don’t know what my expression was showing, but it was as if Doctor Bates didn’t want me to leave like this when he observed calmly, ‘If Mr Underhill is truly afraid of illness, he might simply be aware that the slightest hint of a temperature is enough to bring out his more difficult memories in the form of some awfully vivid dreams.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, puzzled.

The doctor replied kindly, ‘Mr Underhill may simply be a man for whom a short illness will mean a hard battle with some utterly troubled nights. It’s a common enough problem, believe me, for men who have experienced war. And if the man actually caught an illness of some kind, the ensuing mental fatigue might certainly be enough to keep him away from his work for a few days. But,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘I believe, Mrs P, you said that he went away on a job last week?’

He seemed to be expecting me to answer this. He barely even blinked.

But Amy had noticed a detail that I had missed. I saw her head turn on its neck and her remark was a quick, ‘You’re speaking with a remarkable degree of authority there. Do you mean to say that Mr Underhill is your patient?’

Outside the shop door, a car went past with its headlights blazing. In here, the amber cast on our faces made us all look rather too eager to learn how a man might have recently visited his doctor to talk about the influence of illness upon his state of mind.

And now I was angry with them. And with myself too, because I had let them follow this course and I knew that the doctor’s tactful refusal to answer Amy’s question would change how I saw Robert now. It merged with my uncle’s troubled looks and my aunt’s eagerness to settle their houseguest down to his supper last week.

I knew that when Robert and I spoke next, I wouldn’t be able to avoid searching his face for signs of disturbed sleep.

In the next moment, Doctor Bates abruptly moved on from dissecting Robert’s health to remark in quite a different tone, ‘I understand it was you, Mrs P, who saw my esteemed landlady the other day. What did you think of her book?’

I couldn’t help remembering the expression I’d found on Robert’s face on that day too. I lingered on the staircase and said quite shortly, ‘I haven’t read it, Doctor. I handed it on to the editor and he’ll write back to her in due course with his thoughts.’

I was standing on the stairs, clutching the advent calendar and suddenly thinking how utterly trivial this little relic from my childhood history was in the face of a stiff discussion of the consequences from our recent past. I didn’t know whether either of my companions had noticed how reluctant I was to add the information that I’d given the manuscript to Robert. I asked instead, ‘Has Miss Prichard been worrying about it?’

‘No, no.’ There was a quick glimmer of a smile. ‘Consider this just the idle questions of a busybody who is wondering what kind of offer you intend to make his vulnerable old landlady.’

He left a silence that was clearly meant as another invitation to fill the void. And perhaps it was just a reflection of the way I was feeling now but I vaguely resented the implication in his tone. I was suddenly very conscious that he wasn’t just the visiting friend of our shopkeeper, but a customer; or the tenant of one.

I was representing my uncle’s business when I said carefully, ‘I can’t really discuss the terms we might offer Miss Prichard. But rest assured, Kershaw and Kathay Book Press works very hard to make sure every one of our authors feels that it is money well-spent.’

‘So you do intend to make her contribute to the costs then? I was hoping for the opposite. I thought I might claim the triumph of negotiating her first advance.’

His mouth dipped in a manner I believe he took to be charmingly daring. It worked on Amy. She giggled at the care he was showing for his aged landlady.

Whereas I was suddenly thinking very intensely about every word I said. It was conversations such as these that could create an awful lot of trouble if they could be quoted along the lines of, ‘Ah, but Mrs P said that the fee was negotiable …’

And it was always at times like these that I ended by feeling hopelessly small. Particularly when I had to say quite plainly that it would be up to my uncle to set the terms we would offer, and the doctor followed the discovery by remarking airily, ‘Not to worry. I imagine my landlady is looking at the wider options, anyway. I believe she may have had interest from another publisher. The one at Abingdon, you know? Nuneham’s.’

He said the name like it ought to mean something to me. It didn’t. Then I made my excuses and slid away up the darkened stairs.

I was back at my desk when I was joined by my uncle who benignly opened the second drawer on my advent calendar. He found it was a boiled sweet, which he never eats, and then handed me the returned proof copy of the Jacqueline Dunn book.

‘Rob asked me to ask whether you would mind lending a hand.’

The door into the other office was firmly shut and the only light coming through the gaps between the panels that divided us from Robert came in thin lines from the electric lamp that stood upon his desk. I was suddenly flushing because it was very quiet up here and I knew from experience that the whispering floorboards in this place liked to tell their own stories.

Uncle George noted the involuntary stray of my eyes to that closed office door and misunderstood, which made it worse.

He was suddenly an angular and kindly man saying anxiously, ‘I’m sorry. It’s what we said would never happen, isn’t it, when we said we could only afford to take you on to manage the correspondence side of things? It’s absolutely vital that you don’t end up doing Rob’s job while being paid for your own. That’s why Rob asked me first. He just needs you to read through the comments that the author has pencilled into the margin and then take the lot down to the print room. Will you do that? Please? He’s a bit overawed with things today and he’s out again tomorrow.’

My uncle gave me a swift apologetic smile that swept everything else away. I knew then that he wasn’t purely being made anxious by the difficulty of asking for my help. He was older than my parents by about fifteen years and today he looked it. The flecked browns of his ancient suit and waistcoat weren’t easing the effect.

I found myself suddenly concentrating intently upon his face and asking on an impulse, ‘Uncle George. Mr Underhill is all right, isn’t he? I mean, he isn’t ill?’

Surprise checked the nervous juggling of that boiled sweet in my uncle’s hand. His mouth twitched into a bland smile. ‘No, of course not. Why ever would you ask?’

The reply was a disguise. But not, I thought, entirely dishonest for all that.

It relieved me but left me with a very different kind of worry. I asked with equal earnestness, ‘And you’re all right, are you?’

There was an infinitesimal pause before he turned this into a real lie. ‘It’s just the Willerson job. It’s putting us all under a lot of strain. I spend half my time terrified these days that at some point we’ll overwork Rob so much, he’ll take the opportunity to go away on one of his trips and never come back.’ He gave a silly titter.

Then he collected himself, and said, ‘So work your usual magic, would you, Lucy, and brighten our day? There’s a dear.’

He left me to quietly open the neatly bound little book to find the first of many edits.

At this moment, though, I wasn’t concentrating very well. I was being distracted by the shock of hearing my uncle repeat Amy’s idea that Robert might be about to leave us.

He’d said it as a joke, but I had never been allowed to glimpse before the full burden of work being carried by his second-in-command. And now I was having to consider whether Uncle George had also just revealed that the greatest secret of all here was, in fact, the worry the older man was bearing himself.