Mrs P's Book of Secrets

by Lorna Gray

  Then she spoke and made me jump. Her question was a husky breath of incomprehension and yet character burned within. ‘What are you?’

  She truly meant ‘what’, not who. And she had spoken with defiance in the face of fear.

  The reason went through me with a shiver, even as I gave our names. We were crusted grey like ghosts, and then she admitted, ‘My husband is ill.’

  She’d thought we were death come to collect him.

  Robert was already moving. Decisiveness had set the line of his mouth in a way that matched the depth that had come into his voice. His grim purpose was also a match for the smell of poor toileting that met us in the bedroom.

  Mr Murray had the dark skin of the old man Jacqueline had encountered on a walk in the woods behind the Ashbrook house, but he was ashen to the point of seeming grey all over. He was lying in bed with one foot bruised and swollen, and an awful cough. I saw Robert touch his fingertips to the old man’s hand. I could tell from the way Robert’s fingers contracted that Mr Murray was utterly frozen.

  This house was bringing Mrs Murray to the brink too. There were no stairs here, just a few doors opening off the passage to left and right into three rooms that did service as kitchen, sitting-room and bedroom. There were no fires in any of the grates, and not much light either, expect the faint cast from the lamp in the hallway.

  Robert’s voice broke into the gloom and this time it held a note I knew. I had encountered this part of him before, when he had instructed me how to test for a break in my hand.

  He asked, ‘What has happened here?’

  There was a depth to his concentration that transfixed – I honestly wouldn’t be able to find another word to describe that level of intense attention, or the kick of the heart it gave. Particularly when, today, I could see that he really had told the truth when he had said that I made things generally harmless.

  When he had assessed my injury all those days ago, I had been puzzled by the ease with which he had overcome his supposed aversion to practising medicine. This time, he wasn’t treating me and there was no doubt about how deep the memories ran.

  I could sense that Robert’s pulse was racing terribly when Mrs Murray replied to say, ‘Influenza. And then he had a fall by the wardrobe five days ago.’

  Mrs Murray spoke for her husband. He was lying under blankets and she was shuffling to the other side of the bed. Her voice was a dusty whisper when she added, ‘David was managing quite well until then. He was getting better.’

  I didn’t believe her.

  Robert had the handkerchief pressed to his forehead again. I saw the faintest of tremors there, quickly suppressed, as he asked, ‘Mr Murray tends to do the bulk of the outdoor work?’

  He meant things like chopping logs. Mrs Murray fidgeted in a way that drew attention to the walking stick in either hand. She admitted, ‘I couldn’t walk far enough to feed the cattle.’

  Harriet Clare had survived childhood to become Clare Ashbrook, and now she was Clare Murray and living with her husband in a hovel which might as well have been an icehouse. I didn’t know at what point they had surrendered the old farmhouse to the cattle. Probably when she had grown too frail to mount the farmhouse stairs. Regardless, this small woodsman’s cottage was in a sorry state now and she couldn’t even, with those hands, have taken up the job of wielding the heavy maul upon their woodpile.

  Robert put the handkerchief away. It had come away dry from his cut this time. I saw him nod as he absorbed the conditions here. Then his eyes move to the open door into the hall like a man eyeing escape.

  His body followed it. He slipped through the narrow gap between me and the wall without even a word.

  Robert wasn’t abandoning us.

  While I turned my mind to practical things such as reaching for the unlit lamp on the bedside table, he went into the kitchen to wash his hands and face clear of the grime. Now he came back to drop his coat over the foot of the bed and moved to press his fingers to Mr Murray’s wrist for a pulse.

  He approached his patient in the manner of a man squaring his shoulders to face the inevitable. This was a routine he must have performed many times before and he was hating it, but he would do his duty anyway.

  On the other side of the bed, Mrs Murray eased herself down into the old-fashioned armchair by the empty hearth, and told us both, ‘There’s no fire set because I burnt the last of the combustible stuff within reach yesterday. The picture frames, and so on.’

  Then her eyes took in the state of my skirt and she asked me, ‘Did the dog get you?’

  I gave a firm negative. The beast had gone more for Robert than me, and at the time I had taken it as a sign of the terrible danger that had passed from me to him. Now I was able to slip behind Robert and past the foot of the bed towards the hallway, and ask more reasonably, ‘The dog doesn’t like strange men, does he?’

  Mrs Murray’s hands stirred in her lap. ‘We don’t often get visitors. The poor dog doesn’t get many opportunities to practice.’

  I carried the lamp out into the hall, lit it from the lamp out there and then carried it back in again. I asked, ‘Doesn’t anybody do your shopping? Would nobody call at all?’

  ‘No, no one. The postman brings us a few bits and pieces by way of groceries now and then.’ Mrs Murray’s eyes were following the new light. She added, ‘We don’t need much beyond what the animals and the garden give us.’

  ‘And how often does the postman come?’

  ‘The postman comes roughly once a month when our grandson writes. We have a daughter but when you’re as old as we are, your children can be pretty infirm as well.’

  ‘Your daughter doesn’t live locally?’

  ‘No,’ replied Mrs Murray. ‘Well, in Weston-super-Mare. What I mean is that we’re all waiting for the news to come in the post that our grandson has been demobbed. When he comes home, everything will be put to rights. We’ve just got to hold out.’

  She was aware, I think, that I was only asking questions for the sake of introducing a little touch of normal conversation into this stark sickroom, and she was trying to help me. It certainly didn’t seem to occur to her to be anything but open to these two strangers who had broken in with the dusk.

  I reached behind Robert to return the lamp to its place and saw Mr Murray’s face clearly for the first time. He must have been in his late eighties. He still looked grey.

  He could speak, though, just. I heard the old man hoarsely mouth the word ‘Doctor’ as Robert bent over him. The old man said it with relief I thought. The pitch of hope in his voice alone spoke volumes about how desperate things were here.

  I saw the slight turn of Robert’s head as I retreated to the foot of the bed to give him room. The light seemed to help him too – more than the simple illumination of his work, I mean. I thought he was noticing, as I had, that the lack of a fire must have meant that these people had spent the past winter’s night and day without a hot drink or a cooked meal in their stomachs. Equally, no one here would have been able to walk as far as the cattle shed since Mr Murray’s fall. No wonder the cattle had looked ill. Everyone here looked ill.

  But then, in the pause while Mr and Mrs Murray busied themselves with trying to calculate certain details about the illness, Robert took the chance to turn his head me properly. And briefly claimed every thought from my mind in one powerful wrench.

  He knew I was regretting bringing him here even more now. This place embodied his own shadow. I had been bracing to discover that the set of his mouth was that of a man who was learning that there was no freedom for him, even in a new life in a small country publishing house. Because how could there be, when it could still confront him with the past like this?

  And perhaps he really had been feeling that, because his forehead was warm with sweat in this icy room.

  But then, suddenly, he turned his head and looked at me. Afterwards, his serious way of dealing with old Mr Murray didn’t seem so much like the manner a man might have if he were braving a
return to that old life. Perhaps, in truth, he never had been. There really was a difference here.

  When he had looked at me, he had found a young woman with her hands gripping the cold rail of the bedstead, acting as though she might start trying to save him again – which probably both alarmed and touched him in equal measures just as much as before.

  And I, in that single glance, I saw the way he was sharing this hard responsibility with me; and found we had exchanged something vital and reassuring.

  In the minutes that followed, my pulse grew oddly forceful but steady. Mr Murray’s prone form was laid within a mess of sheets, but the bold light from the bedside table was also showing a man in homely flannel pyjamas. He had grey stubble on his chin. I could hear the precision as Robert asked Mr Murray to sit up and lift his shirt so that he might listen to the man’s chest. Robert had no equipment, but a tin mug waiting beside the lamp-stand would suffice for a stethoscope.

  I was ready to slip away myself now. I was accompanied across the passage into the kitchen by the light clack of dog claws on tiles. This room was a fresh shock. There was no mess because the poor dog got whatever was spare. But most of what was left in these cupboards was dried pulses or raw root vegetables and, to be honest, without heat, I doubted these people would have managed to find even one more digestible meal.

  Most miserable of all, there was a can of something unappetising on the sideboard; only partially opened because Mrs Murray’s hands couldn’t work the tin opener.

  I washed my face clear of the grime. It was odd to follow this simple act by stepping out through the kitchen door into the woodshed. It took some courage to go out into the dark, but nothing waited for me. And yet nothing was different either.

  I kept expecting to feel the recent storm dissipating, in that way I imagined my mother and grandmother might sense the departure of a soul during one of their séances. I expected to feel the lurch, as if Walter – or the echo of his life – had really been guiding our steps; but now he felt his work here was done.

  But this dark, unfamiliar woodshed didn’t feel empty. It didn’t bring comfort. And it didn’t feel as if I had imagined the whole thing either.

  This place was desolate and silent and great logs needed hewing in two. And, all the while, the hush of night-time kept me company like a memory of the subtle undertone that had met me as I had first stepped into Walter’s bedroom at the Ashrbook house, before a greater violence had chased me down the stairs.

  When I reappeared in the bedroom, Robert was examining the swollen ankle and Mrs Murray was still sitting in the armchair by her husband’s bed. Her hoarse repetition of an earlier question was stronger now and addressed to me as soon as I moved into the room. She asked, ‘Who are you?’

  She had our names already, of course. She watched me as I approached her chair and knelt in the space before the vacant hearth. I began laying out split logs, a hatchet and a few strips of paper as I said to her, ‘A friend of ours is writing a book about your old family home. We found you because she wanted to dedicate it to a girl named Harriet.’

  ‘Harriet?’

  The name went across her face like a ripple on a pond. Her face was lit by the distant oil lamp. She was, as I have said, a shrunken old woman, but it was possible at that moment to trace the features of the dark-haired girl in Jacqueline’s photograph.

  I had begun knocking slivers of kindling off a length of wood by tapping it against the hearth with the hatchet before she murmured, ‘It’s a long time since I’ve been called Harriet.’

  ‘Well,’ I remarked flatly, hesitating with the hatchet hanging from my hand, ‘what did your uncle call you?’

  ‘Love, usually,’ she replied with a sudden smile.

  She didn’t seem to find it odd that I should immediately ask about Walter John Ashbrook. Whereas I was suddenly feeling that nervousness I had felt a long time ago, when I had first rediscovered the courage to speak my husband’s name. But, truly, nothing moved here to answer me.

  Only the living were being cast into vivid perspective by the hard lamplight; Robert, his patient and Mrs Murray, who was adding, ‘What is this book? And why should someone I’ve never met dedicate it to me?’

  ‘The author is Mrs Jacqueline Dunn. Your husband probably bumped into her about nine months ago in the woods nearby. She has written a children’s history of the house, and is particularly interested in Graham Hanley Ashbrook’s life there. Whereas you’re—’ I stopped while I laid out the kindling in a little stack on the grate.

  I took a breath, then added in a rush, ‘You see, the book is dedicated to you because we couldn’t find any trace of you in the housekeeper’s diaries after you reached the age of about thirteen, and Jacqueline found that distressing. We, well … we thought you’d caught diphtheria as a child and you’d died.’

  ‘I’d died?’ Mrs Murray seemed perplexed. Her hands were fidgeting in her lap again and she was tilting her head like it was an alien question. Perhaps she hadn’t caught anything at all.

  Or perhaps the reference to illness and death was just a touch too close to the bone here. I said swiftly, ‘Out of interest, what were you doing when you were thirteen?’

  ‘Travelling with Uncle Walter? Glowering at my governess?’ She happily accepted my change of tack. She told me, ‘I couldn’t say without a bit of time to think, because the possibilities are endless. But I didn’t get ill. Surely you’ve noticed that my name isn’t on the monument in the church?’

  ‘Just your flowers laid at the base?’ I asked with a slight smile.

  ‘Oh? Are they still there? They must be very dry. They’ve been there for the whole winter. The postman took them from my garden last summer, since I can’t get there myself.’ She showed me her slippered feet, as if I needed proof.

  ‘And the inscription?’ I asked. ‘“A man dies not while his world, his monument remains”? We found the line in that popular novel. Am I to understand that you’re Walter’s world? Or was it for the giraffes?’

  I don’t know why the reference to the giraffes slipped out. This was Jacqueline’s influence. Her passion for Graham Hanley Ashbrook’s supposed obsession had worked its way into my brain. But I saw Mrs Murray blink as I struck a match.

  Then an inward kind of amusement followed. I heard her say thoughtfully, ‘I like your summary of my relationship with my uncle. His world, indeed.’

  In her smile was the sudden unshakeable evidence that we’d all been beyond wrong about Walter.

  I glanced at her as flames began licking at the twist of paper in the hearth. Her eyes had glazed a little upon the increasing glow. In her face, I could see that his legacy wasn’t built in cold stone and old houses. His lasting influence dwelled here in the memory of the upbringing he had given to a little girl called Harriet.

  I got the impression that she was revisiting those memories now. The feeling was so strong, I was almost walking with her through the corridors and bright, sunny rooms of the Ashrbook house.

  If I was, she didn’t wish me to trespass there.

  With a little inward shake, the grown woman before me abruptly returned to the present day. She said with startlingly energy, ‘We wrote his inscription – his children and I, I mean – because it symbolised his unceasing drive. He swept us along. Bore us up. We planned it for years before I finally installed it. And the quotation from that book allowed us to privately reference Africa.’

  ‘For the giraffes?’ I repeated stupidly. I know I was looking doubtful. ‘We saw your photograph.’

  ‘Which photograph?’ Mrs Murray was nonplussed. ‘Was it taken at London Zoo?’

  Then, while I reached for an answer, she leaned in to confide, ‘By the way, you have noticed, haven’t you dear, while you’re searching for meaning behind our affection for Africa, that my husband is descended from a Kenyan man?’

  Unexpectedly, we made Mr Murray laugh.

  I thought the old man was reviving purely from the relief of being tended. When I turned, Robert
had straightened to watch us. They both had. I had the sense that this time it was my features that were being cast into living warmth as the fire grew in the hearth beside me.

  I could feel it flickering against my skin while Mr Murray drew breath to say, ‘Did you know that my father came here to manage the farm when old Mr Graham Ashbrook retired and gave up his foreign life?’

  I nodded. I told him gently, ‘We found your father’s grave. I thought he would have been buried with the family in the village church.’

  Mrs Murray laughed. ‘Did you think he was segregated? The boundary of the smaller parish runs very close to Bramblemead, and David’s father particularly asked us to bury him near the home he loved. He said it would be like being amongst friends again, being in the churchyard where most of the farmhands were laid.’

  I suppose it should have occurred to me to realise that it didn’t actually mean anything that I hadn’t recognised the names on the other gravestones, when the old estate manager might have known them.

  It was with a slightly humbled air that I turned to Mr Murray when he spoke. The old man had the wonderfully indistinct intonation of the South Cotswolds as he told me, ‘I was very small when we came here, just a baby, really. My mother had died of the yellow fever, and so did my father, very nearly. But he recovered.’

  I said on a soft note of realisation, ‘Was your father working closely with Graham Hanley Ashbrook in Kenya? I mean, was he involved in the old man’s research?’

  Mr Murray nodded.

  I added more precisely, ‘They were friends?’

  He told me, ‘My parents assisted old Mr Graham in everything. Mr Graham was devastated when my mother died and my father was ill. He always gave my father the credit for inspiring him to push on with his research. And when we came here and Mr Graham grew too old, the friendship and the work passed down the generations to Walter. That’s what the memorial is for. It’s for all us.’

  The fire cackled beside me while he added hoarsely, ‘No one will remember our names – not my father’s, nor Uncle Walter’s, nor even Graham Hanley Ashbrook, because they were all far too quiet in their work – but what does that matter? Science has its own memory. And for me, my wife, the life of this farm and all of Walter’s children – we remember that Old Graham Ashbrook brought us all together, and that Uncle Walter’s unswerving purpose kept us close.’