by Lorna Gray
At first, the lift of my mouth to meet his was clumsy. There was so much of my need in it. And I didn’t know why any of us had been so afraid we were hurting him. He didn’t believe either I or my aunt or uncle had ever caused harm by leaning on him. Now I felt the tide-rush in my mind as I glimpsed the truth.
It was some time later that Robert drew back enough to permit a dizzying descent into release; into the madness of racing to catch my breath. He turned his head aside a little. I plunged headlong into breathing in the scent of him only to find that every nerve was aching. I hadn’t prepared for this.
‘Don’t be afraid.’ I felt his whisper against my forehead. There was the faintest hint of a laugh. His arms still crushed me.
He added softly, ‘I think I understand at last why you keep accusing me of being about to go away.’
It took me a moment to find my voice. ‘Do you?’
‘I think so. But believe me when I say there is, at the very least, no present state of war that could carry me from this place.’
I didn’t know at what point in the past minutes he had discovered his confidence, because I was more shaken than ever.
Now my pulse began to run in a lighter race. I kept my eyes closed to feel the gentle drift of his jaw against my temple while I tried to find an explanation for my nervousness that didn’t depend so much upon my history. When I spoke, my voice was less giddy, more ready to sound like my own. ‘After our latest bus ride, when you left me, you said—’
The silent touch of his smile interrupted me. It was a fresh introduction to my habit of confusing his words with everyone else’s version of him, and was in itself a final answer to the manner of his farewell those few days ago. The gentleness of his departure hadn’t been inaction in the face of the hint I had given, but the opposite of it.
In the wake of that appalling day, his simple use of my name had been a very decisive action indeed. Because I’d made him free to use it. And after a day of extreme emotions when it might have hurt us both to react too swiftly to the better feelings I’d shared – for him the use of my name had been a promise of the value he placed on getting to know me.
A car slunk past in a blaze of light and a choir was practicing its carols in the very distant memorial hall beyond the Curfew Tower – which was as stark and still as it ever was because no bell tolled an end of things in this town tonight.
He didn’t let me go. Beneath the intermittent drift of that distant song, I confessed, ‘All the same, I still don’t understand why you made me wait so long before letting me meet you at home. I felt so cut off.’
‘I promise I didn’t mean it like that,’ he said gently, ‘and the choice wasn’t all mine. But I suppose your past was sufficiently matched by my own to make me sure you needed the room to settle in on your own terms. I thought you needed to do it without the pressure of finding a strange man crowding every footstep. Didn’t you?’
He didn’t require an answer. This wasn’t another remark on that slight discrepancy between how resilient I thought I was, and everyone else’s idea of me.
Because he was already sharing this piece of his own history when he admitted, ‘In truth, I believe I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about you, one way or another. When you met me that time on the landing outside your aunt’s bathroom with your hands full of childhood treasures, it came after the latest of many hellish visits to failing publishers. All of a sudden there you were. There was no camouflage at that moment – for either of us.’
I felt his grip tighten on the memory as he added, ‘So then I had to worry about what it should mean, and consider the way your aunt and uncle and I were all teetering on the brink of lying to you horribly. And with that in mind, I should tell you that I wasn’t under orders when I met you at Bourton. It was my choice, and I was painfully nervous about what your reaction would be.’
‘I’m sorry.’
I sensed the warmth that grew in the dark. ‘Lucy, I’m trying to say that I like worrying about you. You make it so harmless. And I don’t have to feel ashamed.’
No one had ever said anything like that to me before. And I didn’t think I had ever heard anything quite so brave. Framed somewhere within that last part was another tentative attempt to explain that there had never really been any doubt that he would stay, or that he would do what he could at Nuneham’s.
Sometime later we were stepping out into the deserted road. I asked very gently indeed, ‘What did happen to your friend who was shot? Did he die?’
Robert took the question as it was meant: a quiet continuation of what had been shared just before.
We were passing the Curfew Tower and I didn’t know why I had been convinced that a choir was working its way through its Christmas repertoire. The meeting room was black and silent when Robert told me with some relief, ‘Fergus didn’t die.’
He added, ‘The better German prisoner-of-war camps tended to avoid having a British soldier’s death on their hands, if they could help it; just as we did here with our prisoners. Both sides had a system of medical exchange, where we’d attempt to return the patients who were in most danger. I managed to galvanise the warden into getting him evacuated. Fergus lost a lung but he’s living in Bognor Regis these days. He’s well enough.’
We were at the shop door. Without fully knowing what I was doing, I hesitated in the recess of the doorframe so that he turned to face me. Then I reached up and kissed him.
And then in the next moment, I was shyly ducking my head for the sake of rummaging in my handbag for my key.
My shoulder was lightly resting against him as I searched. He didn’t move away. It was a powerful feeling, understanding how the simple, everyday ordinariness of this contact mattered too.
Suddenly, every confused emotion in me was vivid and warm, and my probing fingers couldn’t find that key beneath the usual clutter of purse and diary and other nonsense. Tonight, I could immediately lay a hand upon my handkerchief, which was no use at all.
Still searching, I asked without thinking, ‘Unless you’ve got your set to hand?’
Then my skin burned when I realised how much that sounded like an invitation. Robert’s reply above my bent head left some ambiguity about which question he was answering. ‘Not tonight.’
I lifted my head. I asked on a strangely uncertain note, ‘You’re going?’
It wasn’t that I was trying to rush this. Or returning to that old fear of loss. Suddenly and without being able to fully define why, I didn’t want to end this by stepping back in there myself.
He understood, at least in part. His hand lifted to leave the smallest trace of fire upon my cheek.
He told me, ‘Goodbye is only until tomorrow, isn’t it?’
Chapter 21
A storm blew in during the small hours of the night. By about seven o’clock in the morning, the attic was cold and groaning and sleet was hammering against that loose square of glass in the widow. The little table that turned this bedroom into something of a living room was strewn with the wide sheets of the test print for Jacqueline’s book.
The edits were all marked out with pencil at long last, so I did what I would probably regret once Mr Lock found out. I wrapped myself in warm clothes and a blanket and took a cup of tea and the papers down to the print room.
The linotype machine struggled into life beneath the roar of a downpour on the tin roof above. The long run of glass up there was still cast to that impossible depth of black that could only happen in December, when sunrise was an hour or more away and would only present itself as a short burst of grey anyway.
I knew what I was doing would disturb Mr Lock. No one was supposed to understand this machine of his. He wouldn’t realise that a childhood spent roaming these buildings had left me with more than a simple love of books.
The machine worked by transferring letters from a deeply complicated keyboard into a molten alloy of lead and tin. There were far more keys here beneath my fingertips than I would find on my typewriter. As I w
orked, the machine was pressing out the letters in a complete line – a slug – in reverse, so that once it had been added to all the other slugs that made up that particular page, and inked and printed onto paper, the text would read the correct way round once more.
The gas burner took a while to heat the metal so I filled the time by slipping back up to the darkened office to open the overlooked drawers in my advent calendar.
There were more sweets for Larry, so the mystery leaver-of-dried-herbs must have added his own ration too.
But to my collection, I was able to add a small packet of rhubarb seeds and a single white mistletoe berry. I couldn’t quite remember what treasures of my own he’d taken as payment. A set of miniature pencils, perhaps, and a neat square of cloth.
Several hours later, I was in the icy space of the workshop, some lightness had come to the heavy skies and I was recoiling from the pattern that was forming in the corrections I had made.
I couldn’t seem to spell the Ashbrook name either, but unlike Mr Lock, there were no variations in my efforts. The freshly printed ink swam upon the white paper, reading the same name time and time again.
Ashbroke.
I stepped back from the press. In fact I retreated from it like it was poison.
Logically speaking, it was my own fault. I was an amateur at this and this was a very early morning after a particularly distracting night. Mr Lock would probably cry when he saw how many lines of type I’d scrapped. The slugs would be melted down and re-used of course, but still he would resent the waste.
But none of that mattered when the error, this room, this day, all felt dark and wrong. Because the same word ran broken across the pages. And then they were accompanied by that feeling again, like sea-sickness where the senses tilted.
It grew out of the cold dawn. It was the absence of any sound other than my own breathing that did it. The still air carried a burden of meaning because this house always moved and now the creaking timbers were waiting on bated breath.
It was an echo of the stillness that had met me in Jacqueline’s hotel.
That incident had been, I admitted now, not entirely without precedent. It had followed in the wake of the many strangely hushed months of my life in Bristol after the bombs had stopped falling.
At the time, I had deduced that the feeling was a product of shock and perhaps grief. I had decided that the dreadful impulse to shatter the peace by crashing about finding fresh noise might be soothed simply by turning to my aunt and uncle. Robert didn’t know it but I had valued him for months now for the steadiness of his presence in their office.
Lately, though, it had seemed as if nothing had changed for me in the months since; and not even after last night. And yet I couldn’t have sworn any more that this was the same persistent unease, or that it stemmed from the deeper workings of my own mind.
Because I had begun this day with the simple businesslike practicality that comes from hope.
Nothing moved in the workshop. The stillness was absolute. But all the while, the dark type that ran through lines of chatter about giraffes was punctuated here and there by the misspelled word: Ashbroke.
It ran like a message.
The contradiction to it stepped into the office building behind me. I didn’t catch a sound, but this time I felt the change as a breath of damp air on my cheek. It might have been a draught from someone trespassing through the great coach doors in the archway, except that they were barred and bolted today. I’d made sure of that.
It was hard to trace the origin of that change in the air. I moved quickly but my body was strangely leaden. I clumsily worked my way from anchor to anchor towards the shop door like wading through a racing current. The change was in the front door into the shop from the street outside. The door was locked with the key in its place. But the key wasn’t mine.
Mine was upstairs in my handbag. This key had been left as a courtesy by a person coming quietly into the office on a Sunday when the shop was shut, and he didn’t want me to think he was invading my home.
I shot drunkenly for the stairs. Robert was there by my desk. He had my advent calendar in his hands and he was setting it down again. He’d had about three seconds of warning before I opened the door from the stairs, thanks to the telltale groans of the bare boards.
Robert turned there by my desk, lit by my lamp and looking slightly ruffled by the day outside.
In fact, he looked rather like a man who had seen me at work in the print room and had hoped he could slip upstairs and down again unnoticed, but didn’t really mind that he had been caught. It was, I realised, only about nine o’clock.
I arrived in the doorway and stopped there with both my hands outstretched upon the handle for support, and demanded in the midst of a battle to catch my breath, ‘What are you doing?’
And then the feeling of life running slightly out of kilter with time stumbled to a dizzying halt, so that my thoughts abruptly came to a stop as well. I discovered that I had stepped into a mystery I had already tentatively solved.
He was setting the advent calendar down as I moved a little closer to say, ‘You lied to me. You’re the person who has been leaving me the little cuttings of herbs.’
He was entirely unapologetic. ‘It wasn’t really a lie. You accused me of tampering. This is a recipe. And I had to come this morning because the ingredients have changed.’
‘Oh?’
I was distracted but something very lovely plucked at the corners of his mouth. ‘No, Lucy. I can’t tell you what it is. You still have to wait until the drawers have run their course and see if you can work it out.’
He had no idea, of course, that the concept of secret messages would send a shockwave through me. It was like an invitation to the oppressive thing that had chased me from the printworks. Now I actually turned my head to look for it on the stairs but found nothing, of course. Silence didn’t take solid form. I stepped smartly in and shut the door.
‘Good morning,’ I said at last. I couldn’t quite get my mouth in order. Half my mind was shaken. The other half was swooping into a memory of the power of his farewell last night. I was aware that trust was supposed to mean that I was safe to show this man the quirkiness that shadowed my steps, but I was reasonably confident that this confession would sound like madness.
I said, ‘Have you been here long? I woke early and got to work on the giraffe book but it’s cold down there in the print room.’
‘Yes?’
‘Aunt Mabel believes this winter will be the kind that rushes in before Christmas and sweeps away into a mild and damp new year.’
‘Famous last words,’ he said. Then, ‘Is something the matter? And don’t,’ he added quickly, ‘say you’re fine.’
The remark was designed to jolt me into concentrating on him. And it worked.
It made me give a shy laugh, too. In a way, I don’t think I had ever looked at him properly until that moment. He was the same man he always was, of course; tallish with a poised kind of energy that went hand in hand with the expression in his eyes.
But I knew now how easily that mouth might move from seriousness into a smile and back again, and then a different kind of truth broke out of me with a lurch. ‘I was coming to find you.’
I put up a hand to sweep the hair from my face and was surprised to find it unsteady. I repeated, ‘I felt the air change and I realised you were here. I was coming to find you.’
I didn’t know what he was seeing in me. I saw his posture change to something stronger as I moved away from the door and stepped closer. Then I faltered because the hand that had been tidying my hair was black with ink. The sight of it checked me. That sense of being crowded hadn’t swept in after me at the top of the stairs because it had stalled when it had seen Robert, and then I had shut the door. But part of it was in here with me and on my skin all the same.
I was staring at my left hand as if the smudges were a curse as I said on a distracted note, ‘This is like the difficulty I had speaking Ar
chie’s name. I’ve been battling with it for a long time, and I thought you were making it worse because you were making me admit all the parts of me that hurt. Then I found it was good to learn to talk to you because I caught a glimpse of a way out if I would just learn that I can tell you anything.’
I added in a rush, ‘Only I haven’t shaken off the past at all. This isn’t purely a shadow of the war. This is something else instead. Suddenly it’s here and it’s stronger. It’s as if last night with you has finally weakened my defences against it.’
I didn’t think I was making much sense. If I had been, I might have found room to be afraid that he would think I was trying to explain that I had changed my mind. But I didn’t grasp that danger just then.
I dropped my hand. I told him, ‘A different kind of grief dwells in that Ashbrook house, and I’ve brought it home with me. First it led me on that mad race about graveyards and now it’s taken up residence in the printworks. It’s in Jacqueline’s book and in the gaps between the creaks on the stairs. The test print is riddled with mistakes and I feel as if the dead have decided that if I won’t reach out to them, they’ll find their own way of coaxing me into listening.’
Abruptly, I approached the desk and claimed the support of the cool wood by settling back against the rim with my hands on either side of my hips. I couldn’t quite meet his eyes. But I had seen the way his body had jerked once in a single uncontrollable start as I had moved closer, and I knew he had watched me when I had sought this place against the desk as a compromise between distance and reaching for him.
This felt very close to him anyway, because he was just there beside me and he still had his fingertips out upon the desktop after returning my advent calendar to its place.
Now he said in a very strange voice, ‘Archie is talking to you through Jacqueline’s book?’
The hard wood of the desk was running in a line behind my thighs and beneath my hands. I gave a hasty shake of my head. ‘No. I’m confusing you. I don’t know what this is. Archie wouldn’t try to keep hold of me like this. It’s too cruel. And I’m not speaking about the sort of conversations my mother and grandmother have in a darkened room with a few shattered souls either.’
