by Lorna Gray
‘Will you answer my question?’
‘I’m snug, thank you. The attic is perfectly warm. Like toast.’
‘But?’
I gave in. ‘All right. But I do have to ask … Did the floor joists always creak?’
She laughed. ‘Like a sinking ship.’
My aunt had a fabulous laugh. Her style of loveliness was the homely sort which dressed in neat blue frocks and chose yellow and brown patterned wallpaper for the stairs and hallway to match the lampshades which had little tassels dangling from them.
The only part of her that was out of place these days was the unhappy curling of those beautiful fingers. They took up the sieve and I watched her with a parody of the fascination that as a child had made me covet this duty, and made her smile.
She made me smile in my turn when she remarked far too knowingly, ‘If you’re worrying about noises in the attic, I suppose you’ve noticed the bang that goes off like a gunshot on the step at the turn every once in a while? It always caught me unawares when I used to work late there sometimes. I swear it would get worse whenever dusk descended.’
I countered, ‘Don’t forget the pane of glass in the third window. It’s near my bed and it’s loose and it makes a scratching noise like fingernails. Only you don’t have to worry, dear Aunt,’ I confided quickly because she was beginning to look concerned.
I knew it mattered to her that I was living alone there. ‘I’ve been making a habit of learning all the daytime noises so that I can cross them off at night. It’s becoming quite comforting now. Like growing up here and getting used to the way the rain thrummed on the roof, you know?’
I was teasing her and preparing to be tutted at because as a child I had made an extraordinary amount of fuss about that rain – it was the one of the many variants of a joke we shared about the squeamishness of a girl born on my father’s farm. But she didn’t quite react in the cheerful way I had thought she would.
She set the sieve down beside me, dusted off her hands and then startled me completely by saying in a tone entirely removed from any cosy childhood memory, ‘I’m sorry. I must just pop into the garden room to see Rob. He came in just now and put his head around the door, but he only stayed for a moment because we were talking and he didn’t like to interrupt. I expect George has gone along the hall to tell him that I’m keeping his supper warm.’
She added distractedly, ‘Rob’s had a long day running back and forth on the train. We probably ought to have let him move in above the office and made you come home properly but, well, to be honest I think Rob’s better off where he is. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Mr Underhill is home? Now?’ Then, ‘He overheard all that nonsense about the attic?’
She didn’t notice my dismay for the simple reason that she had already passed out into the hall.
I was standing in a silent kitchen that suddenly seemed strangely large and starkly lit. The ingredients of an unfinished cake were in my hands and I was feeling rather too much like the adopted girl who had come home after a short stay away to find a new and prettier child already installed in her place.
On an adult note though, there was something truly anxious about the hasty way my aunt had abandoned her obsession with Christmas. It matched the preoccupation my uncle had shown a few days ago when he had drawn Robert aside for their private meeting. They had excluded me and left behind a distracted edge of doubt that time too, and I couldn’t understand why.
So it was with a very peculiar degree of concern for these people who had all my love that I respected their privacy and avoided listening too intently to the distant whisper of voices.
Instead, I finished the cake and set it in the oven. Then I climbed the stairs to my old childhood bedroom.
Chapter 3
I had, naturally, been back to this house many times since I had left at the bright age of nineteen for my wartime employment. I had also been here many times in the past two months for various dinners and Sunday lunch, so it was uncanny really that it had never before occurred to me to notice how hard it had been to establish whether they ever shared their other mealtimes with Robert.
Or why, when my aunt’s murmurings about propriety could hardly have applied to dinner, he never joined them when I was there.
The thought accompanied me upstairs. It followed me into the room that had become my haven after exchanging life on the family farm for an aunt and uncle I had barely even known.
This evening, I had come up here to rediscover the oddments and trinkets I had treasured in the years since, which might now make excellent fillings for the drawers of that old advent calendar. Only, when it came to the point of finding all these bits and pieces, I didn’t even have the exercise of rummaging under my old bed frame.
Most of the larger furniture had gone and it wasn’t because, as might be inferred from the pattern of my homecoming, my aunt had also given Robert the contents of my room.
My bedroom was largely empty because the ironwork of my bedstead had been turned into a Spitfire sometime in ’41 and the mattress was in my new attic hideaway. I thought I could guess too who had helped my uncle to move it from one house to the other. I deduced this solely on the basis that my uncle couldn’t have done it alone and yet no one had mentioned the part played by the man who was presently occupying my aunt’s garden room.
I wondered what Robert had thought when he had seen the bare attic floorboards of my current sleeping quarters above the office, with the storeroom of books and a mattress denuded of its bed frame. And how much it related to what he thought he knew about me.
Disconcertingly, I believe I caught the same thought there on his face when I tripped down the last of the stairs to the floor below to abruptly encounter him as he came out of the short passage from the bathroom.
He knew where I had been. I was looking thoroughly at home by now and flushing slightly pink because it had been strenuous searching through the boxes of my things and I had some of those childhood treasures piled into the crook of one arm. They spoke loudly of belonging to this house, both in the past and in the present.
He had been washing the grime of a winter’s day from his face and had found that my aunt had whisked his towel away to the laundry. He had shed his suit jacket, and was stumbling in rolled shirtsleeves to the linen cupboard when I stepped down onto the narrow landing and saved him the job.
His hair was wet and so was his skin when I handed him the towel. The space here was tiny. My aunt was quite right to keep me in the attic above the office. There truly wouldn’t have been room here for us both.
‘Thank you,’ he said as I slid away along the wall.
He made me pause in the midst of making for the next flight of stairs. I turned my head. ‘It’s nothing,’ I said.
His voice had held a firmer hint of certainty than I was used to when compared to the man who often looked taken aback if I surprised him in the office.
It was, in fact, like a continuation of that moment when he had corrected me for saying that he didn’t like me to talk – unexpectedly decisive.
And I was flushing because it really had been a rapid search through drawers and boxes upstairs, and his few words of thanks cut a little deeper when I lingered before making for the next set of stairs. There was a different kind of steadiness in the way he met my eye. Quite simply, he was at home here too.
And now that I had finally been permitted to meet the man out of hours, I could see that my aunt had been right to fuss and worry about his supper. Not even weariness could alter the posture this man had, or the way that he moved, but he certainly was tired. And for him I believe this quiet exchange was one of those gentler moments that are seized like an intense release after a test.
Wherever he had been on that train, it hadn’t been pleasant for him. Whereas this; in these few peaceful seconds, this was better.
I didn’t tell any of this to Amy Briar. It was Monday and we were in her shop and she had a theory about our Mr Underhill. It was
fuelled, I might say, by the doctor who was Miss Prichard’s tenant and Amy’s friend and here with us in time for the morning cup of tea.
She was saying regretfully, ‘I had a cold last week.’
Doctor Bates understood her point even if I didn’t. He was nodding seriously from the other side of the counter that kept customers away from the foot of the stairs.
Beside me, the curve of Amy’s mouth moved as she added with a meaningful nod, ‘I was ill last week and he was barely here. I’m better today and he’s upstairs.’
‘Don’t be silly.’ My retort came swiftly.
I surprised the doctor. He often stopped in during the brief respite between his round of home visits and his lunchtime surgery. Today, his grave tones ought to have befitted a man who was old and wispy-haired. In fact, the doctor was in his late thirties and his hair was sandy and he was one of those thoroughly self-assured people who had been demobbed from his military service and seamlessly bought his stake in the town practice as if he had never spent time away.
Now he asked me with mock seriousness, ‘You don’t believe that our Mr Underhill was afraid of catching the office cold and put himself into quarantine? So what’s your explanation?’
Ignoring my memory of the way Robert had grimaced when Amy had sneezed last week, I protested rather too keenly, ‘I’m certain that Mr Underhill wasn’t hiding in his bedroom, at the very least. He went away overnight. And my uncle – Mr Kathay I mean – knew about it, so he must have been working on a job, mustn’t he?’
And that was when I realised that I’d just shared the way my aunt and uncle were guarding Robert’s absences, and I must have done it to prod Amy into showing that she knew where he was going.
Only of course she couldn’t tell me anything, and I was thoroughly ashamed of myself because the morning was running on and I shouldn’t be down here speaking about Robert like this when my mind was still swimming with the vividly living memory of the way the man had looked on Friday night.
That had been an abrupt encounter with thought laid bare, and now he was upstairs and working quietly in his office, while we were skulking down here and discussing a different kind of man who might have spent weeks creeping away from his desk because my uncle’s shopkeeper had shown the merest hint of ill health.
I didn’t want this conversation. I tried to curb it. ‘Anyway,’ I said brightly, ‘What about my advent calendar? I only really came down just now because today is the second day of December and I spent the weekend filling these drawers. I had imagined that Miss Briar would like to be the first person to bring our advent calendar up to speed.’
As it was, this was another decision I would rapidly come to regret. Amy obediently drew out a drawer, discovered a neatly rolled length of very pretty ribbon and set it to one side without really looking at it. Then she seamlessly resumed the discussion about her concern for Mr Underhill.
And it really was concern. She was a universally caring woman who seemed as if she and her country tweeds had worked for my uncle since the dawn of time. She hadn’t. Amy was like the doctor and only about ten years old than me. I hadn’t known either of them as a child.
‘Watch him,’ she told me seriously. ‘Next time someone sneezes, you watch him. I have a theory about our Mr Underhill. You know he trained as a doctor, don’t you? Before the war, I mean?’
‘He never qualified,’ corrected Doctor Bates. ‘He and some of his fellow students got caught up in all that excited talk about duty and service, and abandoned their medical college when the first call went out for volunteers.’
He didn’t mean that as a compliment. He meant to imply that the decision counted as lunatic when Robert might have qualified and postponed his war duty, or might even have never served abroad at all.
Amy added thoughtfully, ‘Actually, it must drive the man mad, really, mustn’t it, to think that after all that enthusiasm and training, he had one brief battle in northern France and was a prisoner for the rest anyway.’
‘I served in the European War too, you know,’ remarked the doctor a shade plaintively when he realised how his comments had been interpreted. ‘I’m not suggesting that qualified doctors didn’t serve at all. I staffed a field hospital behind the front line, wherever that line should have been at the time.’
‘You were already qualified?’ I hadn’t meant to say that. I had meant to slip away to resume my work. Then I realised what I’d asked. I drew back and added quickly, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry into your war service.’
Just as I had never asked Robert about his life as a POW, it wasn’t really the done thing to push returning soldiers into speaking about their experiences, any more than anyone dared ask me about my husband. People offered whatever they were willing to share and we were all content to leave it at that.
Doctor Bates, to do him credit, though, didn’t look remotely shaken by my question. He didn’t look proud either. He simply looked tougher all of a sudden. Less like a Cotswold teddy bear and more like a man who had experienced some of the harder corners of the world when he said, ‘I qualified in ’36. I got my name on a brass plate the year Mr Underhill began his training. In fact, he and I both studied at the same university hospital in Birmingham, although I’d already left by the time Underhill joined my old college.’
Amy leaned in to rest her folded arms upon the glass countertop. Beneath her, ranks of pens and other writing tools glittered as a shining island in a sea of yet more old and blackened wood. ‘You knew him back then?’
The doctor shook his head, ‘He wasn’t a native of this town. There was no earthly reason for our paths to cross either before or after his studies, until Underhill moved here and took up his job with Mr Kathay. But you might be interested to know that these days I’m still very much in contact with my old lecturer, and he mentioned Underhill’s name only last week. In fact, the story the old fellow told was quite enlightening. Mrs P, has your uncle ever mentioned—’
‘Mr Underhill,’ Amy interrupted with renewed energy, ‘was drafted as a medic.’
She didn’t notice the way Doctor Bates was staring at her. I didn’t think he was used to being interrupted. Which was silly really because she did it to the rest of us all of the time.
Amy added, ‘Mr Underhill spent his war begging the guards for plasters and aspirin so that he might treat the many ailments of his fellow inmates. I believe that these days the poor man feels he’s seen enough sickness and runs away.’
‘Do you know this? Or are you surmising?’ This was said sharply, by Doctor Bates.
Suddenly, he wasn’t looking so much like a man who had been offended by her lack of interest in his university life. Instead, he was paying far more attention than he had before.
Amy’s bracelet clattered on the glass countertop as she moved. Beneath the cuffs of jacket and blouse, a thin gleam caught the dim light. She closed her hand over it, muffling it as she told her friend, ‘It’s just a guess, but the evidence is there in the way he kept away from me last week, wouldn’t you say? You must have seen plenty of signs of mental damage in the returning men.’
They didn’t notice my quiet movement as I slid my advent calendar from the counter and retreated for the stairs. She was telling the doctor earnestly, ‘I don’t mean to blame Mr Underhill if he can’t bear to see people with winter colds. I mean he might justifiably have a real horror of illness now. That might be what brought him to us.’
‘Really?’ The light from the wall lamp caught the side of the doctor’s face as he stirred. He was being framed by the dark ranks of every title we had ever published, while the golden lettering of each book’s embossed spine ran away like fine threads into the gloom of the shop. He asked, ‘What do you know about Underhill’s arrival here?’
Amy replied, ‘The first time I set eyes on him was when he wandered in one morning in the early spring with Mr Kathay, who took him upstairs and sat him down with a cup of tea. I can’t help wondering whether we’d find it was illness he was r
unning away from that time too. The war can take people like that you know. It can leave them rootless. It can make them fragile.’
She added softly, ‘And Mr Underhill’s got that handsome look that goes a bit drawn down to a fine art, if you know what I mean? He looks like a man who ought to have gone back to doctoring and finished his studies. The trouble is, he definitely doesn’t fit that life any more. For all we know, he mightn’t quite fit this one either.’
I saw her fidget as she confided with renewed energy, ‘He might be going away for days on end because he’s building up the courage to escape us. One of these days I think we might find he’s gone and he won’t come back.’
‘And yet,’ the doctor added like it was his job to be the voice of reason, ‘let’s not get too carried away with this dire portrait of a man shaken by war.’
I thought I caught a sideways glance from him. I didn’t think that he was saying this for her sake. He was saying it for mine. He was a man who liked everything to be orderly and he must have abruptly noticed that I was retreating step by step up the stairs.
I don’t know what my expression was showing, but it was as if Doctor Bates didn’t want me to leave like this when he observed calmly, ‘If Mr Underhill is truly afraid of illness, he might simply be aware that the slightest hint of a temperature is enough to bring out his more difficult memories in the form of some awfully vivid dreams.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, puzzled.
The doctor replied kindly, ‘Mr Underhill may simply be a man for whom a short illness will mean a hard battle with some utterly troubled nights. It’s a common enough problem, believe me, for men who have experienced war. And if the man actually caught an illness of some kind, the ensuing mental fatigue might certainly be enough to keep him away from his work for a few days. But,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘I believe, Mrs P, you said that he went away on a job last week?’
He seemed to be expecting me to answer this. He barely even blinked.
But Amy had noticed a detail that I had missed. I saw her head turn on its neck and her remark was a quick, ‘You’re speaking with a remarkable degree of authority there. Do you mean to say that Mr Underhill is your patient?’
