Mrs P's Book of Secrets

by Lorna Gray

  Then his answer came, and it was given so crisply that it released me once again, even to the extent of giving me a reproof. The doctor told me with absolute decision, ‘I’m bound by certain rules of privacy, Mrs P. I can’t discuss my patients, not even with you.’

  The bus stopped. I sat back in my seat, disappointed and absurdly conscious of just how much I was worrying about them.

  He must have seen. I thought he had stepped away down the bus but then I felt his gaze upon my face. Without straying back into that peculiar territory of obligation, the man beneath the smartly brimmed hat somehow drew my eye and said steadily above the clatter from the departing passengers, ‘I can suggest that there are no serious conversations you need to be having with your aunt and uncle on that score, in the immediate future. Will that do?’

  My heart jerked once in my chest.

  I gave a nod. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And we might meet sometime to discuss the rest, if you like?’ He wasn’t offering a trade. And it wasn’t only a remark on our respective cares for aging people – or the way his concern for his landlady and mine for my aunt and uncle might unite us after all.

  But before I could flounder into deciphering what he was offering, he’d allowed himself to be swept at last into the tide of descending passengers.

  As he went, his final words were, ‘In the meantime, you will tell him about Nuneham’s, won’t you? Good. Goodbye Mrs P.’

  As I say, he didn’t really give me time in those last moments to react to the fact that I might have just been courted a little. Realisation would come later, with a useless little flustered bolt of recollection at about half past four in the afternoon as I caught the second of three buses homewards.

  Instead, at this moment, while the present bus was pulling away from the stop and rattling on towards Cirencester, I was mainly preoccupied with the other strange things he had said. I was thinking about his parting request to pass on the news about the rival publisher to Robert. And I was thinking about the less obvious detail which had come a few seconds before, when the doctor had made it thoroughly clear that he was duty-bound to safeguard his patients’ private records.

  He couldn’t tell me about my aunt and uncle’s health because, as a doctor, he would never discuss his patients.

  It was a contradiction of the memory I had of yesterday, when the doctor had felt free enough to hint an awful lot about his views on the health of another man; my uncle’s war-damaged second-in-command.

  Now I was supposed help the doctor while he negotiated a better offer for his aging landlady. But I thought the doctor’s remarks about Nuneham’s were more specific than that. He really wanted Robert to hear our rival’s name.

  Chapter 6

  Christmas in Jacqueline Dunn’s house was edging its way in more swiftly than it was at my aunt’s home. Or in my attic, for that matter. I suppose it was because there were school children here. The window ledges and any high shelves were lined with fir cones and handmade characters from a nativity scene crafted out of old newspaper.

  The book was, I understood, meant to fill the main part of Jacqueline’s Christmas present list. There was none of the tiptoeing around Mrs Peuse or Mrs P with this woman. She called me Lucy from the start. She was slender, aged about forty-five and swathed in a woollen jumper and slacks as only the terrifically elegant can be. She was living in the solitary gatehouse to an old park estate.

  Finding it had been a simple case of deciding which of the innumerable villages on the Fairford road by the name of Ampney something-or-other was the stop I needed. The bus had set me down in a sleety shower by a river bordering the graveyard for a tiny, sinking church. The church had no tower because quite simply it would have capsized into the sodden ground. From there I had to trace the footpath across a narrow bridge and find the ridgetop drive that would have saved me a deal of trouble if only I’d had access to a car. At the tip of this drive was the lodge that housed Jacqueline.

  ‘I have to tell you,’ she said brightly, ‘that before I can allow you to discuss the edits in my book, you absolutely have to join the ranks of the initiates who appreciate the full truth behind my giraffe story.’

  ‘I do?’

  Apparently, I did. These were the parts of her tale that hadn’t been deemed suitable for a light children’s history and it was hard to get her to even consider how little it mattered what I believed just so long as we got the book finished. She kept getting side-tracked into showing me old photographs of the way the park had been, before the last Ashbrook had been lost to the trenches of the Great War.

  Finally, I gave in and asked, ‘The name is Ashbrook, then?’

  I was sitting at her kitchen table and peering at a small black and white print of people in Victorian dress. They were standing on the front steps of a small country house that had been bleached to white by the glare of sunlight. The building was square to afford a good view over the surrounding parkland and its core was probably Tudor, but the house in the photograph consisted of three storeys of tall windows with various trimmings added on through time. The most impressive of these additions was the sweep of pillared and shaded steps to the broad front door.

  She was tapping the centre of the image where a few men ranged between fine columns in tall hats and impressive beards. ‘That’s Walter John Ashbrook. He’s the son of Graham Hanley Ashbrook, the man who wrote “Fevers of Africa”. Do you know it?’

  It was a common misconception that those of us who work with books must have devoured every work ever written. I was not, however, and never will be sufficiently well read to ever answer a question like that in the affirmative. I shook my head.

  Jacqueline wasn’t impressed by my ignorance. She told me in an authoritative sort of way, ‘Graham Hanley Ashbrook inherited the most enormous Kenya estate. That’s where he nearly lost his assistant and closest friend to yellow fever. After the fellow’s recovery – which must in itself have been pretty remarkable – our man Graham was inspired to study the survival rate in the local population. He observed that travelling Englishmen tended to succumb almost instantly, whereas born and bred Kenyans had a better chance of pulling through. The study made for some pretty pioneering research into disease resistance. He published his book about it in 1865. These photographs were taken around that time, after Graham Hanley Ashbrook had retired to his English country estate. He was pretty frail by then so it was left to his son Walter John Ashbrook to try to preserve the family’s other great legacy.’

  She left a suitable pause. Then she added, ‘A study of the management and care of the Ashbrook giraffes. This was the park where Graham kept them, naturally.’

  ‘Oh, naturally.’

  I was studying the other characters in the photograph. There were three other men, all equally bearded and all of the calibre of clerks or estate managers with a few urchin-like children ranging about in the foreground. It looked like harvest time in a standard English summer and there were no giraffes in sight.

  I asked, ‘How did you get this information? Your book doesn’t make that clear.’

  Jacqueline beamed as though I had asked something particularly delightful. ‘Shall we walk up to the house? I’ll just go and pull on my boots.’

  She left me blinking in the sudden peace of her kitchen. It was an angular room of the sort with a low ceiling where no two windows quite faced the same way. There was a short run of steps up to the living room which was narrow and hung with photographs – two boys in the uniform of the very smartest school in Cirencester and a father, who made me wonder suddenly if I’d blundered when I’d asked about her access to the details of the Ashbrook family. They might have come to her through her husband’s family.

  There was not, I couldn’t help observing with a sense of doubt that was at odds with the simple homely clutter of family life, a photograph of the daughter Harriet Clare.

  Jacqueline bustled me along the length of the ridgetop drive in what turned into a fierce rainstorm. Great pollarded
lime trees towered leafless overhead.

  She was wrapped in one of those enormous country jackets that made her look stylish even in a wintry squall. An oilskin hat drooped low over her loose hair. My own hair was twisted up under my hat. It had the sort of stiff brim that cut a deep slant across the eyes and it was a beloved remnant of my Bristol life, but kept irritating me today because it was threatening to fly off if I didn’t keep a hand on it. As we walked, my guide was shouting out between breath-stealing gusts the more recent history of the house.

  ‘The last Ashbrook,’ she told me, ‘met his end in 1916, unmarried and childless. Afterwards the house was passed about between distant heirs male, to stand empty for a few sad, lonely years. Then it was requisitioned at the outbreak of our recent war to house the patients of a London children’s hospital.’

  ‘I imagine, then,’ I shouted above the wind, ‘that it’s in a terrible state of repair, now that it’s been emptied of evacuees and returned to public ownership. Was that when you bought it?’

  ‘Absolutely. Do you recognise these steps from the photograph?’

  We had reached that same flight of white stone steps between pillars from the photograph. I was met by dirty stonework and windows that stared with that blank coldness of decay.

  But Jacqueline didn’t really care about the appearance of the place. She was interested in the stables which ranged behind.

  The yard mirrored the house, in that it was arranged as a square and everything that was older had been retouched to suit Victorian tastes. It was entered by passing beneath a staggeringly grand arch that united the two wings of a coach house. The boundary was set by a sweeping run of roofs with masonry scrolls and small oval windows in delicate brickwork. It was utterly lovely. And private.

  She observed reverently, ‘It would have been the perfect place to house the secret of a herd of giraffes, wouldn’t you say?’

  I suspected that it had simply been designed as a means of saving the farm horses from draughts.

  Jacqueline made it seem as though we were entering a cathedral when she hauled on a vast sliding door and led me into the coach house. She cautioned on a whisper, ‘This is where the workmen are storing their tools, so take care.’

  This space was more than a simple chaos of tools. There was rubbish from the house that had been preserved because it was saleable for scrap. There was a shrouded old car acting as a relic from the last time the coach house had been put to its proper use. Beyond this was an impression that here was a tall building that was dry, with excellent light. But it didn’t smell of animals.

  I had been braced, I think, to scent that strong musty smell that zoos and circuses have. This place smelled only of cold air made acidic by a few tins of paint.

  ‘Here,’ said Jacqueline, probing into a corner behind a stack of broken bedsteads. They looked like hospital bedsteads, of the sort that had sturdy cleanable frames for hygienic treatment wards.

  Jacqueline was saying, ‘They chose this building for the giraffes because it was the only one tall enough. The coaches had to go elsewhere. I think that contraption in the corner there is an automatic watering trough. And those pipes running along the wall up there – they’re like hothouse pipes, aren’t they? They were installed to keep the giraffes warm in winter. Did I tell you that it was Graham Hanley Ashbrook’s ambition to breed small giraffes?’

  ‘Of course. In your book.’ My reply was clipped. I didn’t know why I was resisting her need to be believed. Normally I considered myself to be a relatively unassuming sort of person, easily inspired. Today, I was ready to defend myself, or defend my uncle’s integrity, or Robert or someone, until I shook myself out of the distracting memory of that bus ride, and worked a little harder at being nice.

  I became the person I was meant to be. I asked in a better tone, ‘Did Mr Ashbrook manage it?’

  Jacqueline beamed. She was the sort of woman whose happier emotions dominated her face. She had extraordinary cheekbones and her eyebrows were arched and set very high, and they rose whenever she engaged with her obsession.

  Then she dampened it all by admitting ruefully, ‘I think Graham Hanley Ashbrook was dreaming of the day when he could let loose a domestic herd of giraffes to roam upon the lawn outside his library window with their heads about the height of the rosebushes. But in truth it takes many generations to breed a miniature version of a species.’

  Her gaze swept about the coach house. I knew she was imagining better proof than a few nameless pipes on the wall. Then she remarked briskly, ‘Breeders of miniature animals aren’t seeking dwarfism, you understand? Graham picked his stud giraffes carefully from the Kenyan stock. They were small for their kind, but it takes a lot of selective breeding to create a truly miniature one, and then it has to have other small animals to breed with to make it genetically secure.’

  ‘And are they slow to mature?’

  She nodded. ‘Normal sized giraffes don’t breed until they are about six years old.’

  ‘So how many giraffes did he have?’

  I could see that she approved of the question. She told me, ‘At its peak, Graham’s herd had four males and eleven females but he’d died before half of them had calved even once here. Walter John Ashbrook carried on with the herd until his own death in 1895. He must have had at least some success because that year his son sold two males to a zoo where they promptly died. We know the family still had three females in 1914 because a private park in Bedfordshire wrote to ask about them.’

  ‘Perhaps they had an inkling of what would happen to the herd if Graham’s great-grandson met his end leading a charge from the trenches?’ I supplied gently.

  ‘Which he promptly did. We don’t know whether this park took them or not.’ She paused while she turned to me.

  ‘And,’ she added with relish, ‘we don’t know how tall they were.’

  I could hear the whisper of the wind upon the roof tiles. For the first time I could feel a sense of the legacy her beloved Ashbrook might have left. Not just this tale of giant animals gradually shrinking. But all those generations of Ashbrooks who had come after him to leave their own traces behind in this house. They were all here, even if only in the alterations to a few windows here and there on the façade of the house.

  Jacqueline’s passion was infectious. Deliberately so, I thought. She knew what effect her little tour was having and she knew what she was doing when she examined her watch. ‘I’ll give you a quick walk through the house, shall I? Then we’ll hurry back while it’s dry to look at those edits.’

  She led me out of the coach house and across the yard to a small door that opened into what appeared to have originally been the kitchen cold store. There were stone shelves and the walls were rather green.

  She was saying, ‘You can see why I had to write about Graham Hanley Ashbrook’s work, can’t you? His story is bound to be “discovered” when this house is finally restored to some of its former glory, and it’s just begging for me to do it first. The son Walter John Ashbrook always meant to write it himself but between you and me, he wasn’t a terribly communicative fellow. This hall and the stairwell are the oldest parts of the house. As you can see, the young patients of the wartime hospital weren’t vandals but still they couldn’t help but leave their mark. It’ll come though, I’m sure.’

  Now I truly was awestruck. In the sense that for Jacqueline there was no pause in her commitment to the Ashbrook legacy. She didn’t see the death of this space in quite the same final way I did. To me it looked awfully like this house’s soul had been cut out.

  Inside was bare. Like a whitewashed prison rather than a place dedicated to health. This wintery day was never going to show this place at its best, but I couldn’t imagine the poor invalided children ever being warm here. Every painting, every wall panel and detail had been removed, brutally in some places, presumably for their own protection.

  I asked, ‘Where did you find this history and the photographs? They certainly can’t have been convenie
ntly left lying about for you to discover when you arrived?’

  ‘The local historical society. The village took custody of the family’s personal archive shortly after the last Ashbrook died in the Great War. The papers are very fragmentary because I gather all the really important documents from Graham’s research were given to a London college years before. But the archive does include a portrait of Graham Hanley Ashbrook as a young man. He had wonderful curling hair.’

  She didn’t take me upstairs. The rise to the first floor was damaged and the few doors I could see up there hung open onto rooms that were empty of everything except the occasional workman’s ladder. She was adding, ‘My husband says—’

  ‘Your husband?’

  ‘Well, yes. Andrew did the latest read through of the book. He found all those last minute errors.’

  She cast me a slanting look as if she had just unwittingly given away a secret. But not, it must be said, the secret I was thinking of. She had no idea we’d suspected her of being a victim of a wartime tragedy.

  She swept across the foot of the stairs and in through a set of narrow folding doors. This room was as empty as all the rest but it had a splendid view across a lawn to the faint line of a ha-ha.

  ‘This was the library,’ she said with emphasis, because I think she was a little bit in love with this Graham Hanley Ashbrook, and this would have been his domain. There were no rosebushes outside the window for his giraffes to graze now. Jacqueline was adding, ‘Andrew’s gone back to help his father in our Blaze Hotel today, but the renovations here are our project. His father’s leaving this one to Andrew completely.’

  Standing in this room that carried no real hint of warmth or old charm for me, I suddenly knew where the secret lay. ‘Oh,’ I said on a warmer note of dawning understanding, ‘This place is going to be a hotel.’

  This was the detail she had omitted to share before. It made her unflinching commitment to the expense of her book make better sense.