by Lorna Gray
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.
Robert must be suspecting that I was only speaking like this at all because I’d taken his small gesture as a clumsy bit of courtship to a woman whose marriage had been terminated, but my heart was not free.
The tug between the two rival waves of shame was excruciating. It was like standing alone in an abyss.
Then Robert’s voice came very quietly out of the dark beside me. ‘Your trip to that house has really spooked you, hasn’t it?’
And his quick understanding dragged my gaze sharply to the shadow that was his face. He was noticing that absence of a smile again.
I found I had put up my hand to grip my collar once more. The clouds were really breaking to a clear night sky and my breath was misting in the crisp air as I told him matter-of-factly, ‘There has been an awful lot of talk today about legacies and dead Ashbrooks, and Jacqueline is determined to keep those people alive in her book and in her mind. I suppose that somewhere in the midst of hearing her theory about the dead girl, I realised all of a sudden that I have a responsibility too.’
‘Which is?’
‘Of all people, as his widow – as Archie’s widow – I have to be brave enough to speak of him, haven’t I?’
Only I wasn’t brave really. Not even now having done it and realising that in truth I had never been afraid that a séance would conjure an answer from the silence. I had been afraid to admit that I had always known it wouldn’t.
For Archie was gone, and speaking his name meant acknowledging the wholesale absence of a reply in a moment that was passed in a blink of an eye.
‘What dead girl?’ was all Robert asked after a time. I suppose this was a peculiar conversation for him too.
‘Harriet Clare. She isn’t Jacqueline’s child. About seventy years ago Harriet Clare was a ward of that house, but she died.’
‘Good grief.’
‘Indeed,’ I agreed. Then I said quite calmly, ‘But at least you can feel vindicated for cautioning me about going. Because actually, it wasn’t remotely nice to discover that the jolly exchange I’d expected to have with a mother and daughter about their plan to release their book in time for Christmas was in fact only a confrontation with what amounted to a macabre list of dead people.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
A single shake of my head set aside the apology. Then I added more decisively. ‘Jacqueline meant well enough I think. And how could she have known that my mind’s defences had already been weakened to her sense of drama by a difficult night’s sleep? Her story about a young orphan girl felt, I don’t know, personal I suppose. Particularly coming as it did at this time of year when the long nights are full of family and memories and old traditions in the run up to Christmas.’
This was the moment I stopped pretending that this man was acting as the divide between me and my family.
I admitted that this wasn’t just about Jacqueline’s story, or even the memory of Archie. It was about me. I drew a steadying breath and told him, ‘I don’t know fully how to describe what happened today. It was as if the silence of that dead house was scratching holes in the stiff veil between me and the departed, or was making it move a little closer, or something. I already feel sometimes as though I’m living on the periphery of life, as if the war has cut me off from the people I care about. For a while, it was stronger today. It felt as though I might find myself straining to listen to the wrong voices if someone didn’t step up quickly and make an awfully big noise. Just as you did appearing out of the rain by that bus stop. And as my aunt and uncle do at regular intervals, thank heavens. Did my aunt tell you that my mother and grandmother and all the rest of that side of the family are spiritualists?’
If he noticed this change of tack, he didn’t interrupt it. He inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘I gathered as much when you mentioned séances just now. And Mrs Kathay said something about it. Mainly that your grandmother threatens her with a tarot reading every once in a while – and, before you ask, those were your aunt’s exact words. Are you trying to tell me that you’re a little bit fey yourself?’
The question was posed lightly and it made me smile unexpectedly. ‘Doesn’t everybody believe that they have secret talents that they haven’t yet had a chance to discover?’ Then I added on a more serious note, ‘I can read tea leaves.’
I caught a hint of answering warmth in the dark. I felt bolder all of a sudden. I had been angry with this man all day for pushing me into thinking about things I had long since decided were best left well alone. And here I was discussing them for what felt like the first time in years. And now he was asking in that reliably businesslike tone of his, ‘When you go back tomorrow, do you want me to come along with you?’
I tilted my head at him. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Are you afraid I’ll reveal some of this nonsense to Jacqueline and make her threaten us with the name of a rival book press too?’
‘You know that I think you’re good at your job.’
His quick retort was a surprise. I had no idea this man was capable of easy charm. He made me laugh.
‘Actually,’ I couldn’t help remarking, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you think of me. You never tell me anything unless I ask you a direct question. And I certainly wouldn’t ask you that, because the answer might explain why you always retreat into your office.’
I shouldn’t have said that. It was what I always did to him – I relaxed and then I startled him by being too honest. For a moment he looked completely taken aback.
He repeated blankly, ‘I retreat into my office?’
He really had no idea that he ran away from me. I decided there and then not to repeat the point. Only he must have at least known that he wasn’t following the usual pattern of swiftly turning this conversation to something less personal, because I heard him say a shade wryly, ‘Well, since I’m here, I might as well tell you that I don’t believe your aunt and uncle described you terribly accurately.’
I saw him note the way my eyebrows rose. Then he said, ‘They led me to expect a sad and feeble young woman on the retreat. But you? You’re formidable. In fact, I find it insane to hear you say that you need other people to show you how to cling to life. Because you didn’t bolt for home when things got a little frayed about the edges in Bristol as you said, did you? If you’d done that, you’d have come home months ago when you were first released from your war service. That happened in the spring, I know.’
He left a probing silence as a question. I had always thought that his type of steadiness concealed a deeply thinking mind. I never expected him to turn that mind towards me quite so decisively as this.
I filled the pause unwillingly. ‘I came back because I thought my aunt needed a helping hand.’
‘And instead you found her managing perfectly well despite the rheumatism, and a lodger already installed in your old family home. I�
��m sorry.’
It was said dryly, without meaning to offend, but perhaps it betrayed again just a shade of that raw measure he seemed to place on his own self-worth. Then, while I digested that, he added on a note that was so ordinary and practical that it almost came close to relief, ‘What time is the bus tomorrow?’
‘Twenty-five minutes past seven,’ I told him, without being entirely sure what I was admitting.
He watched me unlock the shop door. My hand found the light switch on the wall. In the sudden blaze of yellow, I heard him mention my name again and turned to see him squinting on the threshold.
In that same warmer voice that was like his own, and yet new to me, he asked, ‘Lucy? What would you do if your uncle’s business folded as Nuneham’s did? Do you have reserves?’
It was asked so naturally, it felt as if he were merely extending the question about the time for tomorrow’s bus. And yet I was suddenly acutely aware of the two yards or more of wintry air that lay between us now because he hadn’t followed me inside. He quite patently did not consider the office his territory by night.
I lingered between shelves of books and told him, ‘My parents-in-law are still living, so all Archie and I had was what we could earn. And he left me a signet ring, but I put that into trust for his nephew. It seemed the right thing.’ I don’t know why I told him that. I ought to have just said I was poor.
‘And?’
This truly was turning into a very odd farewell. My reply was instinctive because I had already thought about the future. It was just very unusual to be giving it the solid form of a declared ambition.
I told him, ‘If Kershaw and Kathay folded, I’d begin my own book press by buying a few favours with the little I have. Then I’d absolutely beg Miss Prichard to let me publish her.’
I didn’t expect my answer to make him laugh, but it did.
All the same, it wasn’t ridicule that came and went in the night. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Well, if you do, will you do me a favour?’
‘Which is …?’
I had a sense that this conversation wasn’t quite going as he had meant it to. I saw him frame his words carefully in the form of one last remark before he left me.
He asked with such humility that it rocked me, ‘Would you take me with you?’
He meant as a fellow editor. He meant as my assistant. Now it was my turn to laugh.
I didn’t reply but it was very certain that the slow manner of my shutting of the door was an answer all the same. There was the warmth of companionableness in the act and the prospect of further talk tomorrow, instead of exclusion.
Chapter 8
If my urge to tell Robert Underhill my husband’s name had grown from a heartfelt wish to break away at last from my terror of the séance and the proof it carried of my absolute loneliness, imagine my pulse when I woke sometime after two o’clock to feel Archie’s presence in my room.
The dream had been a pursuit of those ridiculous heating pipes in the Ashbrook coach house. They mattered because hot water and steam were Archie’s field of expertise. He had been training for a career as a railway engineer – of the scientific sort who moulded their talents at university. He had graduated and been immediately snapped up by the Royal Navy for rigorous instruction in Bristol. We’d met at a dance there two wild weeks later – and the whole rush had suited him because he had been one of those nice capable men for whom amiableness was a marker of his wonderfully energetic grip on life.
By contrast, when I woke these five years later, I was flustered and my attic room was an unmoving box filled with cold air.
The light switch on the wall above my mattress was found with a fumbling hand and went on with a brief blue shock of an electrical spark. The chairs, the bookcase and the door were all as they had been, standing upright or shut depending on the need. The small fire in the hearth was out but still giving off that pungent smell of coal. The only real difference was that my small, brown handbag had fallen from the table to the floor.
I slid out of bed in the glaring light of the rose at the centre of the ceiling. The leather bag seemed an alien object, somehow. The contents were in danger of tumbling out because the flap had been left open and now it had landed face-down.
I righted the handbag and returned it to its place on the tabletop. Then I heard the board pop on the stairs.
It wasn’t the step that tended to groan in the night. The sound was the crack of old wood finding release after bearing weight.
By rights, I ought to have barricaded myself in and stayed put to talk sense into myself until morning. I’d had dreams like this before, of course, where ghosts and memories muddled my reason.
As it was, I was already dragging open the door in my nightgown – a stiff floor length affair because it was winter and the world beyond the heavy blankets of my bed was utterly freezing. I passed in one barefooted stride across the silent space of the landing.
Closed doors stood inoffensively to my left and to my back. They barred the kitchen and the storeroom. The staircase below was a steep narrow descent into utter blackness.
I arrived at the bottom in a blind slither and dragged heavily upon the grip I threw out to the banister rail. My shoulder met the door that rested upon the bottom step. It swung. I was out into the space beside the box of the main stairs. I could hear my footfalls and the rustle of my nightdress. There was light here because a distant streetlamp was able to penetrate the dark through the open door of my uncle’s office. My desk showed ghost-like in the far corner. A second glow from that streetlamp spread from Robert’s office. His door was open too, only that was wrong because all these doors were usually shut.
A short rush across bare floorboards towards that vacant doorway was all I managed. My pulse was rapid, but not pounding enough to smother the sudden whisper of movement behind.
I span. My heart lurched. The door to the main stairs was open. It was swinging shut. I lunged and got my right hand onto the door’s rim just as it neared the end of its final arc. There was a gap still between the door and the frame. There was glass in the door itself. But no face shone white out there beyond, and that was worse. There was nobody there at all. Not even the ghostly form of a departing figure.
And in that single wild moment of seeing that no one was leaving, I felt the cringing sensation at the back of my skull as my senses began to wonder if the door had been opened to let someone in. I forgot that I was still gripping the rim of the door. And then I remembered. Because the door slammed like it had been caught in a sudden gust of wind and it carried my hand with it to meet the frame.
I remember even now the sound I made.
It was a product of that awful cringing anticipation of knowing that my hand was trapped and imagining what I would see when the door eased a little. And what it would mean for my hand if it didn’t ease at all.
Then the prison of that wooden trap opened for long enough that instinct was able to snatch my hand away.
There was a line across the bones. I was clutching at the limb and barely even clear when the suck of cold air jerked a second time and slammed the door onto its catch.
I tottered. I remember finding enough room within the fierce inrush of pain to know that if a person were truly here, he cannot have been deaf to the sound he’d dragged from me. But the door closed and stayed closed.
And I reeled and shook my hand as if to drive the pain away and gibbered because it just wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t broken because the fingers still worked, and yet the pain wouldn’t stop. And then I was suddenly intensely afraid of more pain, or to be accurate, the first real violence, because there was no thought in my head of ghosts now, but still nothing was moving out there. No telltale shadow was fading away behind the glass into the dark below. No footsteps were beating a reassuring retreat. I couldn’t even be sure that the glass window wasn’t about to darken with his shape before the door opened once more to let this madness back in.
I called it ‘him’ because it was the o
nly way I could frame the strength of this night. In the seconds that followed I was kicking the guest chair across the floor to jam under the door handle. And cringing even as I dropped into the seat to add my weight to the barrier, and sobbing a little now as I nursed my injured hand.
It was a while before I felt the decidedly unpleasant draught of cold air that wafted through the gap under the door. And it was later still that I discovered that the breeze had come from the opening of the shop door. The force that had dragged upon my hand really was made of flesh and blood, and his exit had been secret to the last. I didn’t, needless to say, have the presence of mind to run to the window to spy upon his departing form.
I only had the mind to give up the chase, to stay bound to that securing chair where the telephone was within my sight and to twist back against the office door with my leg braced; while my skin crawled from the bitter cold of the painted wood through my nightdress until the shock eased.
It was in the last few hours before dawn that I stopped cradling that injured limb and went upstairs and dressed.
I had to do it gingerly with my left hand only. The waistband of my skirt was hard to fasten like that. Then I bound up the increasingly swollen right hand with a bandage. It wasn’t broken. I was certain it wasn’t broken, but it still benefitted from the relief of being bound. I think it was terrified of being touched.
I hadn’t even probed the bruise. The skin was too frightened to bear the idea of any more contact after the brutal line of that doorframe. And I was treating it as if it had an opinion of its own because, to be honest, it did. The bandage gave it comfort and a shield to hide behind, and then I could function again as me.
When six o’clock came and the first car drifted past in a wash of headlights, I slipped downstairs into the shop. It was still and calm and the only thing out of place was my set of keys lying on the mat before the door. The door was locked as though it had never been opened. There was a letterbox in the door to explain the arrangement, and there was no ambush waiting within the utterly black ranks of bookshelves. He hadn’t laid a lure for me. He truly had gone.