Mrs P's Book of Secrets

by Lorna Gray

  I was gripping the rim of my seat with my other hand when I tripped into saying with rather too much feeling, ‘I meant that kindly. I meant that I might have helped. You needn’t have felt remotely guilty about asking me, would you? After all, I’ve taken enough care from you over the years. Surely it might have been fair to let me pay something back.’

  Beyond his desk, my uncle only smiled in a watery sort of way. ‘We couldn’t ask you, Lucy.’

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  I looked from man to man and caught the last seconds of another silent exchange between them. And then the sympathy of my previous thoughts evaporated.

  The sense of collusion between them made my mouth tighten with a sharp pang. Here, despite every swing in my emotions, was proof that everything was being said, more or less, to an agreed script. And Robert was driving it.

  With that man’s silent insistence, my uncle added reluctantly, ‘Your aunt and I think you’ve had enough to worry about in recent times. We decided we shouldn’t add to your burdens.’

  Archie. He meant Archie.

  After all this worry about motives and the personal cost to these people, I found I had been blind. Everyone had been involved except me, and for one very specific reason.

  I felt my voice grow small and disbelieving. ‘You couldn’t ask for my help because I was widowed five years ago?’

  Somehow, I hadn’t prepared for this. It felt like a trap. It had to be. And it had to be Robert’s because he had orchestrated this meeting, and yet I felt his sideways glance that took in my bewilderment as I shook away Uncle George’s explanation with a brief turn of my head. It made no sense because these people knew me. They knew I was fine.

  Whereas I had never seen my uncle like this. There was no mask here. No fresh concealment. He was alive; he was the same man I had always known when he adjusted his position in his chair, and yet he was utterly aged.

  It burned my spirit when my uncle asked gently, ‘Lucy, what would you have done if I had asked you to go to Nuneham’s?’

  ‘I’d have tried to find another way.’

  His expression made it clear that this wasn’t enough of an answer, so I added, ‘I’d probably have saved the money you spent on the paper and attempted instead to buy the assistance of one of the other struggling printworks. It would have cost us fractionally more to produce each book by sending the work outside these walls, and we might have had to explain why we weren’t fulfilling the contract ourselves. But surely people can appreciate the toll the war has taken? And at least you wouldn’t have had to worry about all this secrecy.’

  And while I heard the seriousness of my reply and began to feel the smallness of defeat, my uncle nodded and sat back in his chair as if I had just confirmed something for him. Presumably that my stubbornness was why they hadn’t told me.

  I asked rather too sharply, ‘Who really decided that you would do this? And when?’

  My uncle looked bewildered again. ‘Your aunt and I decided in the midst of last winter. We realised that the business was going to fail at about the same time when it became clear your aunt was going to have to retire. I took steps to halt the decay very early this year. Rob was drawn in some time later through the course of general conversation over dinner.’

  The routine of their quiet family dinners made my heart ache. For a moment I thought the feeling was resentment again. Then I realised it was protectiveness.

  Because Robert had taken a seat at that warm kitchen table in their cosy little house, and had agreed to do this for them even when it had turned him into the man who had met me from the bus in Bourton: the uneasy male who had told me as much of my uncle’s business as he could within the scope of his promise, before hinting at all the rest.

  The doctor’s theories about Robert’s influence in this business were wrong. This was where the shadow of Robert’s wartime incarceration lay. It lay, as Robert had said, in the difficulty of feeling he had the responsibility to act where he was needed. I only had to look at the age that had etched itself upon the old man’s face today to understand why my uncle had felt unequal to the task of managing this alone.

  Now I thought I understood that Robert wasn’t any more pleased with my uncle’s idea of a solution than I was. But he’d possessed the grit to do it for them all the same.

  My uncle had moved on. He was giving room to his real preoccupation – that dread of wasting all this by letting his business collapse – and saying crisply, ‘Rob, did you say that Doctor Bates’ information about the trip to Nuneham’s was limited to the paper?’

  ‘Lucy said as much just now, yes.’

  As Robert glanced at me, the fingers of my bandaged hand spread sensitively against the chair behind my back. I could feel every grain in the wood.

  My uncle added, ‘Someone will have to talk to the man.’

  Meaning, presumably, that Robert would have to talk to him.

  I woke abruptly from my trance. After everything I had just said, my uncle still meant to turn to Robert rather than me.

  I straightened in my seat and said quickly, ‘Honestly, I don’t think it’s necessary. When Doctor Bates and I spoke just now, he didn’t give the impression that he was going to do anything.’

  I said that with some certainty. I couldn’t bear to imagine what damage would be done if Doctor Bates were to be confronted about what had happened last night and today.

  I could guess how my uncle might feel if he discovered that the risk with the paper had lately extended to include physical harm to me, and that alone would be bad enough. But I very definitely did not want Robert to be thrust into the responsibility of dealing with all those layers of blame.

  I knew that Robert had noticed the change in my sense of urgency. I could feel the intensity of his attention upon the side of my face when I told my uncle again, ‘You really don’t need to worry about Doctor Bates. I’ve already talked to him. He hasn’t any reason to say anything.’

  Uncle George didn’t believe me. He was insisting with sudden weariness, ‘We have to be sure. If you truly object to Rob doing it, I’ll go. But perhaps, Lucy, if you’re already on terms with the man, you might pay him this little visit? Would you do that?’

  My mouth moved to frame speech; meaning to say, I don’t know what. I was shuddering at the idea of going in person. But I hated the way my objections had been interpreted by my uncle; where he had linked my name to Doctor Bates in a manner that might give Robert a very specific gloss to the knowledge I had of the man’s intentions.

  Now, presumably, I was going to pay this visit, purely because it was fractionally safer than admitting the truth of the injury, the suspicions, the mistaken intimacy, everything.

  But I was interrupted before I could even really make a sound.

  ‘No,’ said Robert quite tersely from his seat near my side. ‘I’ll talk to him.’

  He didn’t leave room for debate. He didn’t look at me either. He kept his eyes fixed upon my uncle’s careworn face.

  In fact, I thought the set to Robert’s jaw was even tougher than the way he had made me let him test the health of my hand. This decisiveness was a shelving of personal concerns; it was a glimpse of the hard resolve that must have carried him through all those unhappy visits to other failing publishers.

  This was a man bracing to meet a difficult scene and, shamefully, I didn’t argue because I was too relieved that this particular decision was being taken out of my hands.

  Robert made my sense of shame even grimmer when he caught me as I climbed the stairs to the kitchen. We’d been sent out of my uncle’s office after a few more quick instructions had been passed between business owner and second-in-command. Despite everything that had been said, there really was fresh exclusion here.

  And even if I could pretend to understand why my uncle might still value the support of his friend and colleague more than any help I could give, I thought that I, in my turn, must surely have earned the right by now to claim the attic kitchen as my o
wn while I made the morning round of tea.

  But Robert was lingering there in the open doorway at the foot of the stairs while I turned to face him several steps higher up. He was in the light cast by the lamps on the first floor. I was in shade where the light failed halfway to the top. I had imagined he was following me to prolong the discussion.

  But, in fact, I got the impression he was at a loss himself as to why he was standing there.

  He covered it by allowing the door to close slightly until it was propped open by his shoulder, then he asked me, ‘Are you bearing up all right?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ I said. ‘I ought to be asking you the same thing.’

  I could feel the drama of my place in the dark of these narrow stairs. I felt its power too. I had turned to face him with my hand outstretched to grip the rail. In my mind was the shadow of those terms he and Doctor Bates had used to define me – formidable and ethereal. For a moment – a very fearsomely triumphant moment – my jaw lifted to match the pulse in my veins, and I was tempted to test this man.

  Then I reverted to myself with a rush. The harsh angles of my body and the stairs softened as I sagged back against the solid wall.

  I confessed, ‘I still don’t fully understand why I wasn’t to be told.’

  ‘I know. Mr Kathay surprised me too when he sidestepped that point. I thought he had decided to explain. But the clue was in the way you answered your uncle’s question about the shortfall of resources. You described how you would set about forging links with our neighbouring publishing companies.’

  ‘I’m irresponsibly naïve, you mean?’

  I turned my head and found that a dry idea of amusement had touched the presence at the foot of the stairs. He shook his head. ‘Too predictable. They knew perfectly well that you’d never have taken the job if you’d found out they couldn’t afford your wages.’

  ‘Really?’

  That jerked me out into the middle of my step once more. Then the soft release of something like affection came out on a slow breath.

  His voice drifted up the stairs to meet me. ‘As it is, long before you telephoned your aunt to say that you were thinking of moving back here, they gave me to understand that you, Lucy, are the one aspect of their life they absolutely never meant to risk.’

  The smallest of hesitations, then, ‘They’ve waited a long time to have you back.’

  Later, when I took the opportunity at lunchtime of slipping away to my aunt’s house, I discovered just how long that wait had been.

  My uncle’s reference to Archie hadn’t been an accident. It hadn’t been designed to bewilder my questions about his ongoing determination to lean on Robert. I learned from Aunt Mabel that ever since I had moved away to Bristol, she had lived with a terror of being too far away to help.

  She had never met Archie; there hadn’t been time in the brief few weeks that had remained of his training to make the long run by train out of the city to here. But she and my uncle had seen the photograph of our wedding and experienced all the grief of guessing what war might mean for me. And they’d endured the distance of hearing that final news and the years that had passed since, which had never, until these past few months, drawn me back to them for longer than a routine visit.

  Now, though, as I stood on my step at the midpoint of this gloomy stairwell, I hadn’t yet had that conversation. I was still standing here and thinking that all the time that Robert had been squandering his good name for the sake of helping them with their financial disaster, he must have also been working quite seriously for me.

  It was a peculiar feeling, knowing that this man had quietly, steadily, been a fundamental part of this conspiracy to smooth my pathway home.

  ‘Robert,’ I felt compelled to say as he turned to go.

  He paused with the door open in his hand.

  I said simply, ‘Thank you.’

  Chapter 13

  Thursday was a day for sharp gusts and sunshine between low grey skies. It gave a cold beauty to the final stage of our journey to that overdue meeting with Jacqueline Dunn – and I say it was ours because Robert had shed another day from his busy programme and was beside me.

  I could really have come alone because the trepidation of a second meeting with Jacqueline felt entirely distant after the emotional marathon of yesterday. But he was here and there was shyness but no acrimony as we walked along the drive between Jacqueline’s gatehouse and the main house.

  She had left a note pinned to her door telling us that she was wrestling with workmen and to come and find her. Robert was asking me about that move I had made from my farming home to Moreton to live with my aunt and uncle. Previously, I had felt that he was asking personal questions of me as a means of distracting himself from some deep internal tension. This wasn’t like that.

  He was probing the connection between my aunt and uncle and my parents.

  I told him, ‘Uncle George is the blood relative. He’s my mother’s vastly older half-brother. My grandfather’s first wife died and when he remarried, her son – Uncle George – was sent away to be apprenticed to The Kershaw Book Press.’

  ‘Not the Kershaw and Kathay Book Press?’

  ‘Not at that stage, no. So you can hazard a fair guess that the apprenticeship worked out pretty well for him. Mr Kershaw was Aunt Mabel’s father. Uncle George married her, and the company became Kershaw and Kathay. It’s all so wonderfully dynastic.’

  I didn’t add that I had been quietly wondering lately if the name were set to move on again into Kathay and Peuse. Because that would mean admitting that I suspected that there was a far greater chance it would become Kathay and Underhill instead.

  I said inconsequentially, ‘The view from here is spectacular, isn’t it?’

  The drive was on the high ground and rolling clouds and bleak farmland competed with each other to form the most unforgiving horizon. I was holding the collar of my coat closed at my neck in that way a person does to keep the draughts out – futilely, I might add. I hadn’t bothered with the wind-shy hat this time so my hair was running in curling wisps past my face.

  I risked a glance at him. He had the collar of his raincoat turned up. The coat was well made and it gave me a hint of the life he must have fitted at his medical college. I knew his absence from the office yesterday afternoon had been for the sake of talking to Doctor Bates, but there was no new shadow in this man’s face to tell me what had been said. I didn’t dare ask. If we spoke about that again now, it would feel raw, exposing, like forgetting the value of what he had done for me yesterday in the course of that small exchange on the stairs.

  ‘Do you know,’ I was saying instead, ‘I’m not surprised that my uncle’s business is struggling. Look at us both; taking a day to visit one author about a book she’s already had us edit twice.’

  I made him laugh. Overhead, the pollarded limes which lined the high point of the drive were rattling their thin fingers.

  Beneath their reach, Robert remarked seriously, ‘Brace yourself. Now you know the truth and you’ve promised to help Mr Kathay chart his path through this mess, he’ll have you working all hours.’

  ‘Well in that case, he’ll be getting very good value out of me, because I’ve already decided to work for the smallest remuneration I can afford, for the time being.’

  I saw his disapproval. ‘They’d never let you.’

  ‘They won’t have a choice,’ I said a shade tartly before easing the tone to something more wry. ‘They don’t know what power they’ve given me by making me the woman who types up the letters and answers the telephone. I deal with the bank as well and write out all the payslips at the end of each month. So please don’t tell them.’

  His promise came in the form of a single shake of his head.

  ‘That’s the little church near the bus stop, isn’t it?’ I was looking at the curling line of the distant river where it passed into a smear of trees.

  A small farmstead was crumbling in the wintery light nearby, but there were no ot
her signs of life. Even so, I could remember seeing a notice that had been pasted up by the bus stop there, advertising a carol service. I couldn’t imagine how this desolate landscape had enough people in it to even make up a congregation.

  His thoughts must have been running along similar lines because he asked, ‘Do you go home for Christmas? To your parents, I mean?’

  ‘No, I’ll go in the new year. What about you?’

  ‘No. That visit I paid to my family last week will do for a while. My relationship with my own parents has never been as smooth as yours.’

  It was the brief silence that followed that made me remember where comments like that usually led. I pre-empted it by telling him freely, ‘I’m not estranged from my parents, you know. They’re still Mum and Dad. It’s just that their house tends to be very full at this time of year. When I was a small child, it always seemed to me that there were so many of us that we barely bothered to see anyone else – and I was only the middle child of an eventual seven. It’s no wonder, when you think about it, that my life with my aunt and uncle seemed so much simpler. I suppose this’ll be your first Christmas with us? Kershaw and Kathay really does collect people, doesn’t it? First my uncle, then me, and now you?’

  It was then that I realised that I was rambling and he hadn’t been asking about my background anyway since the evidence was there that he already knew. To make matters worse, I suspected that I was the one who was prying here, and I was in danger of breaching that personal line I had drawn about asking and being asked about things that had grown from the war.

  He made the feeling stronger when he said, ‘Is that a very circumspect way of asking me how I met your aunt and uncle?’

  His head had turned towards me. He didn’t mind. The faint teasing note made my heart give a sudden tilt as I gripped the collar of my coat and gave the smallest of consenting nods.

  He told me, ‘Your uncle met me at the end of a drizzly day in March after he’d stepped down from the train in Moreton. He’d been in Warwick all day, talking to other publishers.’