Mrs P's Book of Secrets

by Lorna Gray

  She said, coiling it around my neck, ‘You didn’t mind having Rob here tonight, did you?’

  She was patting my hand where it had paused in helping her to smooth the bulky fabric. For a moment, this was all too close to sounding like a continuation of the conversation I’d had with the doctor, where people misunderstood the things I said.

  Then my aunt betrayed that she hadn’t really meant to ask me that anyway. She asked instead, ‘It wasn’t too much for him, was it?’

  I experienced a sensation that was like a cold breeze passing over the skin on the back of my neck.

  Because she was nervous, seeking reassurance, and then her attention returned to me in time to catch the dismay on my face. ‘Aunt Mabel?’

  I didn’t think that such instant sympathy was the reaction my aunt expected. ‘Oh,’ she said, blinking as if she’d made a mistake. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. I’m not trying to complicate things. I was just thinking out loud, so don’t mind me. Anyway,’ she added brightly, sweeping onwards, ‘it was nice getting the decorations up, wasn’t it? I must ask Rob whether this means he’ll join us now for Christmas dinner. We’ll have one of the chickens from next-door’s garden, as always. You know the form, don’t you? There’s a reason why we give them all our scraps.’

  It was her chatter that made me brave. I found that I was folding my fingers gently around the worried knot of her hand. I pitched my voice to fall below the murmur of the wireless next door to say on a very odd note, ‘You believe that Robert’s leaving too, don’t you?’

  Aunt Mabel froze.

  I added in that same undertone, ‘I thought it strange that Uncle George was happy to sit by while Robert dashed about visiting Nuneham’s. All this business of hiding the paper from me and keeping Robert at home while I took the attic; it wasn’t about protecting me, it was about him. You’ve been keeping Robert busy until he can’t help but forget his urge to wander. And now I’ve thrust my way in, and you’re terribly afraid that I’ve made him notice that you’ve been working hard all this time to keep him here.’

  ‘Yes,’ she confessed desperately.

  My aunt wasn’t frozen any more. She had been returning the pressure of my hand. Now she was clasping my hand between both of hers and adding equally desperately, ‘And yet no.’

  Her voice was an urgent whisper, ‘We won’t blame you if he goes away. I mean, you’re right about the attic and our desperate wish that he’ll stay. But the rest … you’ve got it all the wrong way round. Your uncle and I aren’t keeping him tied down with work. We’re so afraid that we’ve been asking too much of him.’

  She was staring at her old hands as they enclosed mine. She was tilting her head as though the thought hurt as she told the tangled grip, ‘The wretched purchase of that paper is only the end of it. Without that young man’s help, we’d have been ruined months ago. Rob’s arrival in the spring came at just the right moment to help your uncle. I was in a very bad way back then. It was all falling apart. Deadlines were being missed catastrophically.’

  Her hands were moving ceaselessly, wringing mine as she admitted, ‘We were going to have to tell you about it and beg you to come back from Bristol, only we didn’t want to do it because it wasn’t fair. But then Rob landed in a heap at our feet.’

  She drew breath and added on a courageous note, ‘Your uncle picked him up and gave him a job and he was good at it. We knew we shouldn’t learn to lean on him, but he turned out to be so reliable. We should never have allowed it to get to the point of letting him take over the job of chasing about after that ridiculous paper.’

  Her hands stilled. ‘But your uncle couldn’t manage it. He was just getting cheated. And you know why we didn’t tell you. You had enough to deal with. Rob made us believe that this was what he wanted.’

  I couldn’t help the way my mouth tightened to a line. This was a fresh brush with the wrench of the many heartfelt discussions I’d shared with Robert, where he had acknowledged the strain he’d been under, and yet still he’d been very clear that he was willing to do it anyway.

  Eventually, I said, ‘Has he ever explained why he’s been so ready to help?’

  She didn’t fully understand my question. She only confided sadly, ‘I’ve realised that Rob’s dependable quality is the part of him that his wretchedly unbending parents try to prey on. You won’t know this but he went abroad with some of his young friends from his university. He was captured with one of them. And then the lad ended up on the floor of the camp with a bullet in his lung.’

  ‘I know,’ I admitted with a cautious glance towards the wall between us and the other room. The wireless was masking anything we said. ‘Robert told me about it. At least, in part.’

  I saw her blink, and her surprise. ‘Did he?’

  And then I saw acceptance and the gradual change to her thoughts. Her next words were deeper, harder and pitched perfectly to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. ‘In that case I think I’m free to tell you that I have no doubt the prison guard very nearly put a bullet in Rob for it too. But by far the worst part it for me is the way his family must have seized upon it as soon as he came home. They harped on about it as if he’d led those boys there – as if those bright young men didn’t all go in for the adventure together.’

  She faltered for a moment.

  Then the rage bubbled. ‘Rob doesn’t say it, but between you and me, I think his parents believe they have a duty to make him admit the mistake he made. They actually lectured him on getting down to work in his medical career and bearing up a little better in the face of his responsibilities.’

  My hand was almost being crushed by hers but I was hardly going to mention it. I didn’t want disturb her as she remarked fiercely, ‘Personally, I’ve always admired how Rob seems quietly purposeful in his way.’

  I saw her chin lift with a certain degree of defiance. But then she had to blink very rapidly as she added, ‘Recently, though, I’ve begun to be afraid that he really might be pushed into leaving us. I’ve had to consider whether or not we’re behaving as his parents do. I’m afraid that we’re exploiting him too.’

  ‘Surely not. I—’

  But she was already plunging into admitting, ‘You see, I know we’ve been asking too much, just like they did. He’s been so wearied sometimes after he’s come back from one of his trips, but still we’ve let him go again.’

  Her voice fractured. ‘We need him and we love having him here … But we aren’t noticing that we’re hurting him.’

  Through the wall, I could hear that Uncle George had turned his attention to the wireless and was cheerfully disagreeing with everything the newsreader said. In this hallway, the yellow and brown wallpaper was clashing horribly with my aunt’s vivid blue frock.

  I heard my voice in the midst of this flood to the senses like it was something remote saying, ‘But, surely, Robert must have told you how he feels about staying here?’

  ‘He says everything is fine.’

  ‘Well then.’

  My practical note only went skin-deep, but I wasn’t expecting it to make her react in the way that it did. She extricated one of her hands to give a very motherly pat to my cheek.

  She said gently, ‘Bless you, Lucy. But don’t you know you say that all the time too?’

  She actually made me laugh.

  No sooner had I been shocked back into the fullest sense of being the child of this house, than she abandoned her concerns about Robert for the sake of turning her mind to me.

  Suddenly, she was my strong, indomitable aunt. I knew she was going dig deeper into that idea she and my uncle had that I hadn’t been fit to bear their troubles when I had first returned home. She was going to ask me about Archie.

  It had, after all, happened often enough lately that I thought I ought to be able to recognise the signs.

  She was already saying, ‘It really was all right, wasn’t it, having Rob here tonight?’

  I’d been wrong. The turn of her care wasn’t what I had th
ought. I felt half a bewildered smile form upon my lips. Because we were back to this question again and I wasn’t sure how deep it ran.

  I said cautiously, ‘Of course?’

  My aunt was flushing. She was beaming at me like she was sure we understood each other. She was saying earnestly, ‘I mean, you mustn’t mind him, must you? Not if you already know him well enough that he could share all that about his past? I wasn’t sure. I’m so relieved. I couldn’t be certain you’d let us know if you were feeling uncomfortable. And I could hardly ask, could I, because I wasn’t confident that you were ready to think like that about anyone, and what if your uncle and I made everything complicated just by putting the thought in your mind?’

  ‘Put what in my mind?’ I blundered, stupefied, and yet at the same time I was feeling the headlong dive into something appallingly like fear just because of the lurch of daring to guess.

  As it was though, I didn’t get to define what I was guessing at. She must have thought she had made another mistake. The change came with the same swiftness she had used before, when she had veered into speaking about Christmas chickens.

  In the next moment I found that she was asking briskly, ‘Where would you have lived, do you think, if he’d come home?’

  ‘Archie?’

  It was impossible to leap from one man to the other. She did it like this was an easier turn. Whereas I was crashing into admitting clumsily, ‘I have absolutely no idea where I would have lived. I suppose if I had ever dared to think that far ahead, I must have assumed that Archie’s passion for steam would sweep me along with him to somewhere busy and industrial. It would have been an adventure.’

  My aunt was nodding. We all knew he would never have picked the quiet country town of Moreton. She was saying cheerfully, ‘I always told myself that at least we had the comfort of knowing you hadn’t married a man who would fix you in some rustic idyll.’

  This was a return to that old joke about my dislike of farming. And it changed my understanding of every giddy current in this conversation.

  Because the truly important detail I should share here, is that the entire joke was founded upon a lie.

  I had never hated farming. I had no particular aversion to sheep or mud or country things. And if I bore any scars at all from that childhood move from my parents’ house, it was probably the weight of this endless charade.

  I had been brought up to feel loved by both places, the farmhouse and this printworks, but I hated the urge everyone had to explain away my move as if it had somehow been my choice. They made me suspect that they were doing it to hide something cruel. They made it impossible to ever fully escape the belief that at some point I was going to have to accept the simple truth that none of these people had ever wanted me, and it was just convenient to pretend that I had brought it upon myself.

  That wasn’t true either, though. The charade was another mark of care. How could anyone explain to a child that she had been considered surplus to requirements at the age of four? My parents couldn’t, and Aunt Mabel certainly couldn’t.

  If I had forced the issue, my aunt would probably have admitted the ugly, unhealthy part; that if she blamed Robert’s parents for working to keep him close, she also could never quite forgive my parents for being willing to let me go. And that sort of truth would have injured all of us – me, my parents and everyone – because at some point the rift would have cut too deep.

  So we maintained the falsehood. And tonight, in this hallway, my aunt used the same joke to conceal a different emotional pitfall.

  I thought that in the midst of all those disjointed questions, she had been asking if I would mind sharing her Christmas dinner with Robert.

  So, first of all, I told her as if it didn’t hurt me, ‘I’d like to do this again. With the four of us, I mean. I don’t want him to go either.’

  Then I reached out a hand to lift a stray fragment of crepe paper from Aunt Mabel’s hair, handed it to her and said seriously, ‘I love you.’

  ‘We know, dear,’ she replied calmly. ‘But after all you’ve said this evening about the survival of our business, please don’t do anything reckless like work too hard, or try to make up your uncle’s losses by working for a pittance, or anything silly like that, would you? We need to improve your wages as it is, and, besides, I may not be at the office any more but I still check the accounts each month. So don’t imagine we wouldn’t notice anything untoward.’

  I asked, aghast, before I had thought, ‘Did Robert tell you that I planned to do that?’

  ‘No, dear,’ she said gently. I had surprised her again but this time she chose not to remark on the news that the second editor and I had confided in each other. She merely told me kindly, ‘I just guessed.’

  Then she sent me home.

  Chapter 20

  The street outside was practically black. In the distance, the distinctive shape of the Curfew Tower was a single block of whitened stone near a streetlamp. A few shops and hotels showed light behind their curtains, and that was all the glimpse I had of this old familiar town.

  I had gone away from this life because of the war. And stayed away afterwards because I hadn’t been quite ready to think of what else to do.

  Now the adjustment in my mind came gently like the settling of a cloud of dust. I had been wondering for a while if I had to remember I was a woman. At last I could see that the change was more magnificent and yet more solitary than that. It was a new sense of being fixed in this body, and walking with these two feet through this darkened night towards my own future here.

  Which was why it was such a powerful endnote to the thought when I was stopped about twenty yards beyond my aunt’s front door by a call of my name.

  He called the name that was solely me, I mean – the one that spanned all the years of my life.

  ‘Lucy.’

  Robert had barely taken the time to snatch his coat from its hook. He was sliding his arms into its sleeves. I had turned in the middle of the wintered line of trees that marched down towards the market hall. He was nothing more than a faint shape of a man in this freezing night, moving closer amongst the black sky, the road and the town. I could barely see the shadow of his eyes.

  I faltered there in the midst of experiencing a peculiar urge to forget all those wise thoughts about walking my own path through life, and repeated instead that old test of whether this was real or fantasy. He drew nearer. I said foolishly through a fog of my racing heartbeat, ‘Do you know, I don’t think my uncle has any idea at all of retiring.’

  ‘No,’ Robert’s shadow agreed. His hands were straightening the collar behind his neck. ‘I suspect Mr Kathay just wanted some assurances that he isn’t facing this alone. And got them, I think, along with a few surprises.’

  ‘Such as hearing my ambitious plans for stepping into his shoes, you mean? He must believe he raised a shark.’

  Robert had come to a halt before me. He was taller than I was, and close enough that I could just make out the features of his face, but I couldn’t quite recognise the expression I found there. There was a steadiness to it that was nothing like that former barrier of reserve, because I think the seriousness was in me rather than him. He was merely finishing tiding his collar.

  His hands dropped. The movement was a marker of the end of one conversation and the beginning of the next.

  All of a sudden I wasn’t quite ready to hear the opening line, or give it myself.

  I said impulsively before he could speak, ‘I saw Doctor Bates today, by the way. He was convinced that he had to break the news to me that we’re losing Amy Briar. They’re getting married.’

  I sensed the change in him.

  Robert’s body stiffened. So did his voice to match when he asked, ‘Why would you tell me that now? And in that way – as if we’re only speaking about trivial matters?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ It was another hasty lie. Because I knew perfectly well why I had told him.

  It was because every other thought in my h
ead was rattling around that feeling of being very alive in this body. I could feel the tightness of the belt about my waist and the depth of the pockets that held my hands. I could definitely feel the ground beneath the soles of my shoes. He was making me nervous and I was betraying every unhappy doubt in my head.

  I admitted sheepishly, ‘Doctor Bates came to see me today and quizzed me about your plans. I didn’t want it to be a secret that I’d met him, so I told you. Are you planning to leave us?’

  There was something very raw for me in the way he took a moment to answer the question. The slight movement of his head gave a negative. He said, ‘You’ve asked that before and the answer’s still no. Not that I’m aware of.’

  The pavement behind him was being touched by the marbled gleam from a nearby inn. Its shutters were slightly parted so that it was possible to see the empty bar inside.

  And now my mouth was moving on rapidly – to say what, I have no idea. Some mindless nothing, I imagine, directed at that thin chink of light because I could feel the tug of the cheery part I usually played at the office.

  But he was already saying, ‘Lucy, please. Be clear. Don’t make this an endless dance around the edge of misunderstanding. Just tell me – after everything you said tonight about working with me, are you trying to explain that you don’t want more from me after all? You don’t even want me as a friend? Just as a colleague?’

  ‘What? No! Of course not.’

  My bewilderment shattered the night.

  I blundered into life; into touching a hand to him. I suppose it conveyed my disbelief. It showed him that I had thought the reverse – that he didn’t want me.

  My body felt almost feverish. I was moving like I was still expecting him to recoil, even when the moment of contact from my reaching fingertips acted upon him like a firebrand.

  Because my hand was met. Gripped. He drew me sharply closer. The hard crush of the way he took hold of me rivalled the way the night air closed around us in the lull between fierce gusts.