Mrs P's Book of Secrets Page 2

  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.

  Chapter 2

  One of the main hazards from living above my own desk was that I hadn’t actually stepped out of doors that Friday until I set off for an evening at my aunt and uncle’s house. It meant that I wasn’t remotely prepared for the force of the wind. Or the darkness that had descended abruptly at about four o’clock and had refused to shift since.

  Moreton-in-Marsh was particularly poorly lit anyway. The main thoroughfare was exceptionally wide so that the shops and hotels opposite were a distant line screened by ranks of bleak pollarded trees. Behind me, the heavy doors that barred the passage to the printworks were rattling ominously against their lock. Very little else was moving, except I caught the distant shrill of a train whistle about five minutes later when I ran up a steep set of steps at the northern end of the High Street to let myself into my old childhood home.

  Aunt Mabel always baked her cake on the first weekend in advent. This was a ritual. She was supposed to follow this by tipping in a teaspoon of brandy weekly until the moment it was iced. Instead, my aunt basically waved the sherry bottle at it whenever she remembered, and Uncle George could drink whatever was left. This was another Christmas ritual.

  Now Aunt Mabel was muttering about eggs while Uncle George skulked in the long passage of the hallway to help me as I struggled out of my coat. I might describe the rows they had at times like these as loving but that would have been a lie. They did love each other very much, it was simply that they forgot when it came to crucial things like the cake.

  The problem this time was that they had miscounted the number of eggs they had accumulated through hoarding their ration and my aunt hated to bake with the powdered stuff. It was fortunate, therefore, that I had thought to save the solitary egg which constituted my own ration this week.

  My aunt was hunting for the baking powder. She was flushing in a happy sort of way as she got me to reach a tin down from the top shelves in the cupboards. Then she was distracted in the midst of giving me my instructions for the margarine.

  She turned her head towards the hallway. ‘Was that the front door?’

  I said with a smile, ‘I think Uncle George is trying to make amends by taking on the job of putting out the empty bottle for the milkman.’

  A murmur carried along the length of the hall as he spoke to someone outside, before the door rattled shut again.

  My attention was firmly drawn back to the task at hand by the sensation of a mixing bowl being placed before me. I knew which duties were mine of course. We had performed this little dance about the kitchen table since I had first moved here aged four.

  Aunt Mabel was frowning at the weighing scales with the bag of flour held ready and asking me, ‘Are you keeping warm enough in that attic of yours? And are you taking that advent calendar? George found
it today when he was looking for the box of decorations and thought you’d like to see it. I haven’t filled it.’

  The item in question was a relic from my childhood. It was made of twenty four small matchboxes set in pairs so that twelve tiny cardboard drawers could be opened on each side. The end of each drawer had been numbered very carefully by hand. In my younger years the drawers had been filled with treats and puzzles but they had been left empty for a long time now.

  In truth, it was the sort of object that inspired that bittersweet sense of all those happy childhood Christmases. That sort of naivety could never be regained. I suppose it really ought to have found a new generation to enthral only there wasn’t one, and yet, somehow, the sight of it wasn’t as melancholy as all that.

  I set the calendar aside for the sake of more practical things such as opening the tin of baking powder for my aunt, and then she asked tentatively, ‘Lucy?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Will you answer my question?’

  ‘I’m snug, thank you. The attic is perfectly warm. Like toast.’

  ‘But?’

  I gave in. ‘All right. But I do have to ask … Did the floor joists always creak?’

  She laughed. ‘Like a sinking ship.’

  My aunt had a fabulous laugh. Her style of loveliness was the homely sort which dressed in neat blue frocks and chose yellow and brown patterned wallpaper for the stairs and hallway to match the lampshades which had little tassels dangling from them.

  The only part of her that was out of place these days was the unhappy curling of those beautiful fingers. They took up the sieve and I watched her with a parody of the fascination that as a child had made me covet this duty, and made her smile.

  She made me smile in my turn when she remarked far too knowingly, ‘If you’re worrying about noises in the attic, I suppose you’ve noticed the bang that goes off like a gunshot on the step at the turn every once in a while? It always caught me unawares when I used to work late there sometimes. I swear it would get worse whenever dusk descended.’