Mrs P's Book of Secrets

by Lorna Gray

  ‘Thank you,’ he said after a moment, ‘for not making me break my promise to your uncle.’

  I met his gaze steadily. ‘So what’s suddenly changed? Did you succeed?’

  ‘Take a look at the racks in the printworks and answer that one for yourself.’

  It was a strange moment for me because there was something disconcerting about learning that this conversation wasn’t so very different from the recent encounters with Doctor Bates and Jacqueline. Here at last was an urge to assume an air of being wise to the ways of the world and be calm – and, in this instance, to refrain from passing judgement about the mild criminality of this act.

  Only I wasn’t wise and I wasn’t even sure if that was what he wanted from me. The single judgement I had was that I understood that my uncle’s allowance of paper had been determined at the outbreak of war. It had been calculated by the volume of titles he and my aunt had published that first year. Luckily for Kershaw and Kathay, they’d published a decent handful, but even so the allowance of paper was never enough. So it had fallen to this man to do something to salvage the mess and I wondered how willing he had been.

  I said with sudden sympathy, ‘You must have found it difficult.’

  In truth, I was thinking about this man’s self-evident strain in recent weeks and wondering if this had been the source of the worry for my aunt and uncle. Because this task must have been very difficult, otherwise my uncle would have done it.

  I suppose they’d decided that my uncle had grown too old to be chasing about the countryside after reams of paper. The doubt lingered, though, that they might have delegated the responsibility to someone else. My aunt was utterly out of the running for obvious reasons, but still they might have thought of asking me to bear the burden instead.

  The doubt was echoed in the next moment when, instead of smoothly passing onto an easier subject, the man opposite me added as if there was still more for me to understand, ‘Your uncle will be as glad as I am that it’s finished with. I’ve spent quite a few weeks now visiting another ailing business to pick through their stock, but the last lot subjected me to a bit of a run-around. It transpired that they were holding out for a ransom we couldn’t pay. Luckily, Nuneham’s were prepared to be more reasonable.’

  I saw him set his bowl to one side. I felt like I was staring. I probably was. He loosely clasped his hands together on the tabletop and seemed to be waiting for me to ask something.

  Only then he told me briskly instead, ‘Anyway, even today things didn’t go entirely smoothly. Mr Lock and I had a run-in with the bullyboys from one of the Oxford printworks. They were there on a similar mission and I’m afraid they saw the place as their territory.’

  ‘There was a bit of a squaring off?’

  ‘Yes, and an awful lot to do afterwards. And I’m not, I afraid, a man with the patience for a rough scene.’

  He wasn’t speaking about the questionable legality of buying up redundant stock any more. It sounded like he was describing a blaze of temper; a raising of fists. Some men, I knew, wore their easy fury like a badge of honour, polished up and presented every once in a while to impress.

  Suddenly, I was sitting back in my seat and turning my head aside. ‘You had to make a stand? How unfortunate.’

  I returned my attention to him. It was a false sympathy. I had to wonder now how much Uncle George’s concern had been because he had been helpless to say that the paper wasn’t needed if it meant tiptoeing around a man’s rare but harsh tendency for anger. Perhaps this was why Robert had told me about it now. Perhaps he was one of the men Doctor Bates had described, who had been welcomed home from the war only to prove that they were wracked with rage for all the terrible things they had seen.

  Only Robert didn’t quite conform to that bleak view. He allowed the waitress to exchange his bowl for his dinner dish and then corrected my mistake with such wry amusement that it was like meeting the man anew.

  I watched his mouth as he told me, ‘I didn’t hit anyone. Heavens, I’m not trying to confess a guilty secret like that. I’m answering your question about whether it was difficult. It was. I’m not fit to cope with the strain of putting my head down and getting on with the real work after a sudden confrontation. Scenes like today shake me. I’m sorry.’

  He said it like he knew I must think him weak.

  My brows furrowed. I asked quickly, ‘You’re feeling shaken? You’re injured?’

  He wasn’t moving like he was injured.

  I added, ‘Perhaps you have a cold on its way. Amy was worried she’d given you the one she had, and Doctor Bates said that sometimes a temperature can muddle things a bit in your mind – in anybody’s mind, I mean.’

  I bit my lip to suppress the guilty memory of that rotten spell of gossiping in the shop. I certainly deserved the slight sharpness of Robert’s reply.

  He retorted shortly, ‘Doctor Bates again?’

  There was something in the way he said the name that struck me. I heard myself saying, ‘He isn’t your doctor, is he? You barely know him at all.’

  Robert contradicted me quite gently. ‘Actually, I know the man well enough to be aware that he graduated from the same medical college that taught me, and that he uses it as the excuse to take a slightly tactless interest in the whys and wherefores behind my move away from medicine into publishing – which was why I interrogated you quite so unnecessarily about Miss Prichard’s motive for paying you a visit, I’m sorry. I wondered if I needed to worry that he was prying.’

  Then he set down his knife to say bluntly, ‘But whatever the man’s been telling you, he certainly needn’t trouble himself with my health. I don’t think I’m coming down with anything.’

  There was a pause that was accompanied by another turn of his head; as if he knew he hadn’t yet quite reached the truth. Then in the next breath he was telling me, ‘Today’s encounter with the men from the Oxford printworks was really just a few tough words while they tested to see what they could get away with. But I’ve had enough of mediating between men with an overblown idea of their rights. I learned that during the years I spent being pushed to the fore as a doctor in a camp of POWs.’

  This, suddenly, was something I never would have expected him to tell me.

  I said carefully, ‘You enlisted as a medic, I know.’

  He gave a small nod. ‘I did.’

  Then he added, ‘There wasn’t, however, a qualified doctor amongst us, so I was roughly promoted to the rank of resident medical officer. It was my job to warily negotiate better care from the guards, always with one eye on their faces in case that slight look of irritation meant I was letting us in for another run of punishment, consisting of sheer mind-numbing boredom and insanely reduced rations.’

  I watched as his mouth formed a rueful curve. ‘Needless to say, it was always a weak negotiating platform when I was a prisoner too. And, as it was, half the time I wasn’t patching up sores and injuries anyway. I was stepping blind into the sort of incidents where tempers might flare up from nothing in a moment and a man could get himself shot in a nasty little altercation with a guard. That particular time, the man on the ground was a friend and I was crouching over him with every word working to fend off that decisive second bullet.’

  There was a momentary hesitation before he said simply, ‘The guards remembered to be humane, for what it’s worth.’

  And then, having confessed something vivid like that, he added on a far more ordinary note, ‘These days, I consider myself to be significantly more at liberty to speak my mind. And I expect I bear up to the work that follows well enough. But afterwards, as has happened today after the little spat over the paper, I suppose I start to feel the need to remind myself that I’m not confined any more. And, to be quite frank, the familiar urge to go away on an extremely long journey has only really gone since talking to you.’

  For a moment, a very odd feeling rang in the wake of that.

  I sat frozen, staring again with my mouth numbed to stillness. Be
cause he was sitting very still himself and it was shocking to finally comprehend the mixture of pressures that were working upon this man. I couldn’t imagine how it must have felt to be made responsible for his fellows, all the while knowing the inevitability of failure because his half-trained skills could only go so far, and he was just another prisoner anyway.

  I wondered how long this man had taken to regain some idea of what freedom meant upon his return home after the war. And how much he thought he had found it in his work for my uncle’s business. I wondered if Amy really was wrong to say that he might be about to leave us, because I suspected that above all things, he was trying to prove to himself that the only responsibilities he had to bear these days were small and within his reach.

  I didn’t dare to ask him whether the trouble he had met at Nuneham’s fell safely within that plan. But still I ought to have spoken. I ought to have found some reply.

  In the next blink, the certainty that had fixed his attention so firmly upon me was fading and that old urge to retreat was back in evidence again and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all.

  I had to lean in and find my voice after all to say quietly, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to push excuses and explanations upon you as though it were necessary for there to be some temporary influence upon how you’ve been feeling.’

  ‘No. Of course not.’ Then, quite as if it didn’t matter that the odd business of the paper had forced him to tell me something utterly private, he united his fork with the knife upon the plate, set the lot aside and asked lightly, ‘So what did Doctor Bates really say about me today?’

  That trace of shame had gone in him. In fact, my expression made him smile.

  ‘All right,’ I conceded while the waitress sidled across with the bill. We slid out of our seats and began shrugging our way into our dampened coats.

  I saw my companion sigh at the state of his hat and then I told him, ‘Doctor Bates was asking about the fee we would charge to publish Miss Prichard’s manuscript.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, buttoning up my coat. ‘He wanted to know what proportion of her payment would go towards my salary. So I gave the doctor a long and entirely uninformative lecture on how fabulously knowledgeable Miss Prichard is. Her old doctor was her peer, not her patron, and I have every faith that her name deserves to become equally established as a figure of respect. And in a way, it means that I’m with Doctor Bates on the question of whether we’re a good enough publisher for her. Only, she’s so utterly unassuming that I don’t quite believe any of the academic publishers would take her seriously. I think she’s wonderfully steadfast in her own quiet way.’

  And then my flush cooled abruptly because it was at that moment that I remembered the brief encouragement this man had given me when he had passed me the pages and asked me to read them. He had said she was a woman after my own heart.

  ‘Mr Underhill,’ I began as a kind of caution. I was conscious now of the other compliment I had received today on the subject of Miss Prichard’s work – the one from Doctor Bates. It felt truly offensive to endlessly reduce that woman’s endeavours to the level of a fresh form of flattery for me. Particularly when I wasn’t in her league in the first place, because I wasn’t even quiet.

  Robert ignored me anyway. He was dragging open the door to the dark outside. At least the rain had stopped.

  Then he remarked gently, ‘That was a long lecture you delivered to me just now as well, wasn’t it? Presumably because you’re trying to hide what he said to you. Only it’s too late because you know I can guess what’s troubling him. The world of medicine is a small one, and I think it’s fair to imagine that he’s been able to establish that our old university professor kept a space for me so that I could resume my studies when I came home.’

  ‘You went back to your medical college? I didn’t know that.’

  ‘I did. But, as it turned out, I only picked up the old thread of my university life for about three months and then I abruptly left. All of which means that our good Doctor Bates has now got to face the fact that, for no sensible reason, I’ve pitched up here in a small and struggling publishing company, and I’m suddenly responsible for safeguarding his ageing landlady’s dreams. In that light, I think he’s right to be concerned. But not,’ the man beside me added, ‘to the point of harassing you about it too.’

  It was said quite coolly. I wasn’t entirely sure this wasn’t my cue to level my own questions about his inexperience. In a way, it would have been a fair exchange since I could remember perfectly well how this man had recently challenged me about my own skills and ambitions within the scope of my uncle’s business.

  The bus drew in as we crossed the river and once we were settled in our seats, I remarked rather defensively, ‘You know you’re good at your job, Mr Underhill.’

  My compliment amused him. At least I thought that was the feeling that briefly touched his mouth. He turned his attention to the route ahead where it gleamed in the narrow beam of the bus’s headlights. I heard him retort mildly, ‘I spent a little over five years in a prison camp, Lucy. My idea of my self-worth is a touch confused.’

  We stepped down from the bus in Moreton in a jostling crowd of about twenty people. It was very black in the stiff breeze of the wide market place. The garage where Robert had hired the van was dark and shut up for the night, and the dim face on the clock tower – called the Curfew Tower – showed that it was seven o’clock.

  ‘Lucy?’ His voice recalled me as I began to move to cross the road.

  I turned my head. ‘Mr Underhill?’

  He was intending to walk me to my door, it seemed. He joined me and told me, ‘I didn’t realise I needed to tell you that you can use my name too.’

  He didn’t mean it too but his utterly gentle concession sent a shiver of recollection through me that came from a very different place from our recent discussion of his past.

  To avoid showing this man my sudden chill, I glanced quickly left and right for traffic while tightening my grip upon my coat for the sake of warmth, and said quickly, ‘Oh? Well, do you prefer Rob or Robert? My aunt calls you Rob, I know.’

  ‘Either. Whichever you like.’

  A simple remark about making me free with his name shouldn’t have unsettled me. But it was a nudge back into my memory of today, and it was in that same uneasy frame of mind that I found myself stilling on the approach to the shop door with my head bent while I rummaged in my handbag for my key.

  The distant light from a solitary street lamp was casting long shadows. We might as well have stepped back a few years into the blackout.

  And it was from that darkness that his voice came with a sudden touch of bemusement beside me. ‘What is it? Are you waiting for something? Or are you listening and mapping the sounds of that house again, ready for the night ahead?’

  It gave me a second lurch of the heart to realise he was remarking on the intimate bit of chatter he had overheard passing between me and my aunt. For my part, I was finding it even more unnerving to be meeting friendly sympathy in this man. It was as if he could see into my mind and read the echoes there. Then the illusion abruptly passed. This question about the root of my unease wasn’t a lucky guess. This was a product of my unhappy habit of ducking my head and forgetting to smile whenever I tried to hide.

  I found my key. ‘It’s nothing. I’m not afraid up there, you know. I don’t need you to fuss about that.’

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ he agreed. ‘And I am sorry, by the way, that I upset you yesterday with my overbearing comments about meeting Jacqueline. I thought I was only showing concern, where I believe your family in the main tends to presume you’ll manage everything perfectly well on your own. But I can see that under the circumstances my interference wasn’t quite as kind as all that.’

  His sudden apology left behind an odd twist of something deep inside that moved halfway between the memory of our first misunderstanding over his view of my role in my uncle’s office, a
nd realising once again that all along he had wanted to give me this feeling of being cared for.

  I found I had abruptly begun to say, ‘I have to tell you something that will sound a little strange. But in a way it has come out of my visit today and you’re just the unlucky person who has to bear the brunt of it. My husband was called Archie and I loved him very much.’

  Robert became very still.

  I found I was rushing into explaining myself. I added, ‘I’m sorry. This is Jacqueline’s fault. It’s an extension of a guilty realisation that first dawned on me in the midst of talking to her today about her Ashbrooks.’

  ‘Why? What did she say?’ It took him a moment to find his voice.

  ‘She flung me blind into acknowledging the enduring legacy we can give to the dead simply by remembering them. And at that moment,’ I admitted, ‘it struck me that it has been a terribly long time since I have fallen out of the habit of calling my husband by his name.’

  I was suddenly a step closer to the door of the shop. I turned my back to the mixture of glass and wood to tell him foolishly, ‘So, I’m ashamed to say I’ve just corrected the error with you. And now every nerve is on edge because you’re right; half my mind is indeed listening intently to the silence behind the gusts of wind. My grandmother has been desperate to call out to my husband through the medium of her séances, but I’ve never let her do it; and this is why. I suppose it has become a kind of superstition with me that I might undo my efforts to let Archie go if I give his name the real form of sound.’

  But, needless to say, nothing was happening here with each new utterance of his name. A person’s name was not a siren call. It was as Jacqueline used it – like a marker on a gravestone; a means of ensuring that the departed soul survived in memory.

  Only, unlike her, I didn’t feel compelled to say his name in full.

  I was, in fact, achingly conscious of the mistake I was making in saying anything at all. I was suddenly terribly aware that the real living man before me must be thinking of the timing of this sudden impulse to speak of Archie after the liberty he had given me with his own name.