by Lorna Gray
Outside the shop door, a car went past with its headlights blazing. In here, the amber cast on our faces made us all look rather too eager to learn how a man might have recently visited his doctor to talk about the influence of illness upon his state of mind.
And now I was angry with them. And with myself too, because I had let them follow this course and I knew that the doctor’s tactful refusal to answer Amy’s question would change how I saw Robert now. It merged with my uncle’s troubled looks and my aunt’s eagerness to settle their houseguest down to his supper last week.
I knew that when Robert and I spoke next, I wouldn’t be able to avoid searching his face for signs of disturbed sleep.
In the next moment, Doctor Bates abruptly moved on from dissecting Robert’s health to remark in quite a different tone, ‘I understand it was you, Mrs P, who saw my esteemed landlady the other day. What did you think of her book?’
I couldn’t help remembering the expression I’d found on Robert’s face on that day too. I lingered on the staircase and said quite shortly, ‘I haven’t read it, Doctor. I handed it on to the editor and he’ll write back to her in due course with his thoughts.’
I was standing on the stairs, clutching the advent calendar and suddenly thinking how utterly trivial this little relic from my childhood history was in the face of a stiff discussion of the consequences from our recent past. I didn’t know whether either of my companions had noticed how reluctant I was to add the information that I’d given the manuscript to Robert. I asked instead, ‘Has Miss Prichard been worrying about it?’
‘No, no.’ There was a quick glimmer of a smile. ‘Consider this just the idle questions of a busybody who is wondering what kind of offer you intend to make his vulnerable old landlady.’
He left a silence that was clearly meant as another invitation to fill the void. And perhaps it was just a reflection of the way I was feeling now but I vaguely resented the implication in his tone. I was suddenly very conscious that he wasn’t just the visiting friend of our shopkeeper, but a customer; or the tenant of one.
I was representing my uncle’s business when I said carefully, ‘I can’t really discuss the terms we might offer Miss Prichard. But rest assured, Kershaw and Kathay Book Press works very hard to make sure every one of our authors feels that it is money well-spent.’
‘So you do intend to make her contribute to the costs then? I was hoping for the opposite. I thought I might claim the triumph of negotiating her first advance.’
His mouth dipped in a manner I believe he took to be charmingly daring. It worked on Amy. She giggled at the care he was showing for his aged landlady.
Whereas I was suddenly thinking very intensely about every word I said. It was conversations such as these that could create an awful lot of trouble if they could be quoted along the lines of, ‘Ah, but Mrs P said that the fee was negotiable …’
And it was always at times like these that I ended by feeling hopelessly small. Particularly when I had to say quite plainly that it would be up to my uncle to set the terms we would offer, and the doctor followed the discovery by remarking airily, ‘Not to worry. I imagine my landlady is looking at the wider options, anyway. I believe she may have had interest from another publisher. The one at Abingdon, you know? Nuneham’s.’
He said the name like it ought to mean something to me. It didn’t. Then I made my excuses and slid away up the darkened stairs.
I was back at my desk when I was joined by my uncle who benignly opened the second drawer on my advent calendar. He found it was a boiled sweet, which he never eats, and then handed me the returned proof copy of the Jacqueline Dunn book.
‘Rob asked me to ask whether you would mind lending a hand.’
The door into the other office was firmly shut and the only light coming through the gaps between the panels that divided us from Robert came in thin lines from the electric lamp that stood upon his desk. I was suddenly flushing because it was very quiet up here and I knew from experience that the whispering floorboards in this place liked to tell their own stories.
Uncle George noted the involuntary stray of my eyes to that closed office door and misunderstood, which made it worse.
He was suddenly an angular and kindly man saying anxiously, ‘I’m sorry. It’s what we said would never happen, isn’t it, when we said we could only afford to take you on to manage the correspondence side of things? It’s absolutely vital that you don’t end up doing Rob’s job while being paid for your own. That’s why Rob asked me first. He just needs you to read through the comments that the author has pencilled into the margin and then take the lot down to the print room. Will you do that? Please? He’s a bit overawed with things today and he’s out again tomorrow.’
My uncle gave me a swift apologetic smile that swept everything else away. I knew then that he wasn’t purely being made anxious by the difficulty of asking for my help. He was older than my parents by about fifteen years and today he looked it. The flecked browns of his ancient suit and waistcoat weren’t easing the effect.
I found myself suddenly concentrating intently upon his face and asking on an impulse, ‘Uncle George. Mr Underhill is all right, isn’t he? I mean, he isn’t ill?’
Surprise checked the nervous juggling of that boiled sweet in my uncle’s hand. His mouth twitched into a bland smile. ‘No, of course not. Why ever would you ask?’
The reply was a disguise. But not, I thought, entirely dishonest for all that.
It relieved me but left me with a very different kind of worry. I asked with equal earnestness, ‘And you’re all right, are you?’
There was an infinitesimal pause before he turned this into a real lie. ‘It’s just the Willerson job. It’s putting us all under a lot of strain. I spend half my time terrified these days that at some point we’ll overwork Rob so much, he’ll take the opportunity to go away on one of his trips and never come back.’ He gave a silly titter.
Then he collected himself, and said, ‘So work your usual magic, would you, Lucy, and brighten our day? There’s a dear.’
He left me to quietly open the neatly bound little book to find the first of many edits.
At this moment, though, I wasn’t concentrating very well. I was being distracted by the shock of hearing my uncle repeat Amy’s idea that Robert might be about to leave us.
He’d said it as a joke, but I had never been allowed to glimpse before the full burden of work being carried by his second-in-command. And now I was having to consider whether Uncle George had also just revealed that the greatest secret of all here was, in fact, the worry the older man was bearing himself.
Chapter 4
I had been glowering at the bound proof for about three hours when Robert finally chose to emerge from his office shortly before dusk fell. He was presumably wondering where his afternoon cup of tea had got to. The part that perplexed me was that he was looking perfectly unharrassed, while I was the one who was feeling short of rest.
I should explain that the Jacqueline Dunn book was a dramatized account of an old family by the name of Ashbrook who had owned a large estate in the region for about 200 years. She had authored it with a person called Harriet Clare, and their version of history was about as unconvincing as any children’s book I had ever read.
The last of the Ashbrooks had been snuffed out by the Great War. But aside from the authors’ intermittent tendency for spelling the worthy family name Ashbrok or Ashrbook, the main mystery here was how Jacqueline or Harriet had ever decided to call their book The Man who Bred Miniature Giraffes.
I suppose it was irrelevant to me whether or not there was any substance to this historic tale of diminutive African plains animals being bred in the Cotswolds. As her publisher, the point that I was concerned with – and was really causing my brain to ache – was the fact that Jacqueline’s covering letter had lightly explained that she had passed the book to someone else for a final perusal and this person had noted a few minor edits in the margins. Jacqueline’s instru
ctions to me were to confirm or discard this new hand’s changes before proceeding to print.
My principle difficulty was that this friend had made some pretty enormous alterations to Jacqueline’s idea of the English language. And they had also left a number of unfinished comments, so that often all I had were obscure instructions to insert a reference to the dedication in the family chapel. The problem for me was that no one had thought to mention what this dedication actually said.
So when I looked up to find Robert Underhill standing before my desk bearing the loose sheets of what appeared to be another manuscript, I was perhaps less than friendly.
Unperturbed, he handed his papers to me. ‘I thought you’d appreciate the chance to see this. Further to the accusations you levelled at me last week about misjudging your visitor Miss Prichard, I have to tell you that you’re guilty of forming misconceptions about the lady too.’
I politely waited for him to continue.
‘It turns out,’ he said, ‘that only a portion of Miss Prichard’s tale is about her famous doctor. The rest is about her own career, which isn’t purely housekeeping. It’s also the history of herbology. Miss Prichard is a historian and she’s determined to confront the slander cast upon nosegays by a notable brand of soap.’
‘Soap,’ I repeated flatly.
‘Yes. You know the one. It ran an advertisement in all the papers in the spring. Now half the nation is convinced that in the days before modern baths, brides carried bouquets to disguise their body odour. But Miss Prichard absolutely, categorically and unequivocally states that medieval girls knew perfectly well how to use a damp cloth. And she means to prove the real value of herbs and flowers by making reference to any historical texts that give a contemporary record of their uses. She begins by citing Shakespeare’s Ophelia.’
He directed my gaze to the quote at the head of the first page. It read: There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.
I will be frank here and admit that I was a little taken aback by this conversation. He had never spoken to me so freely before. I looked at the papers he had handed to me and then I looked up at him, trying not to feel too much like I was staring.
I wasn’t being helped by the guilty memory of all that recent gossiping. And all the time I had the echo of my uncle’s concerns ringing in my ear – in effect declaring that this man wasn’t permanently fixed here.
I wasn’t mute after all. I heard myself remarking vaguely, ‘Miss Prichard didn’t say a word to me about this last week.’
My eyes strayed to the pages of her manuscript again. Perhaps the change in him was because I wasn’t being terribly talkative myself. Or frightening him away by smiling.
I gave myself a shake and asked in a crisper tone, ‘Will you publish her?’
‘Read it,’ he said simply. ‘She’s a woman after your own heart.’
Then, having said something ambiguous like that to me so that my attention flew back to his face, he asked, ‘Now, what about the Jacqueline Dunn book?’
I took a breath and pulled myself together. Straightening my shoulders, I found professionalism and a stronger voice. ‘All right,’ I asked. ‘Who’s Harriet Clare?’
‘Her daughter. At least, I think so. She’s aged about eleven anyway, so I presume she’s the daughter.’ He hesitated, then added, ‘I got the impression that Jacqueline lost her husband during the war and had to move to the rotten lodge on the edge of this Ashbrook estate. As I understand it, the grieving daughter was a bit shaken up by the move so they wrote this book together as a way of forging a fresh start and a new bond with the place. She and Harriet uncovered the old story about the giraffes and dived straight in.’
‘That’s nice,’ I said sincerely. Then because of the way he had paused in the middle of that, added, ‘Aren’t you sure?’
‘It’s hard to be certain. Jacqueline is a touch too excitable to be clear at times and one can hardly ask about the husband.’
‘No,’ I agreed.
I didn’t mean him to, but he must have detected an undertone in that reply, because after a moment he remarked, ‘This has been rather dropped on you, hasn’t it? Shall I sit down and we’ll go through it?’
I actually laughed at that; quite genuinely all of a sudden. I had to ask him, ‘Have you even read the edits?’
I was far too far along the path of failure to mind the implication that, if I needed his help, I didn’t know my job. I set aside the loose sheets of Miss Prichard’s manuscript to tell him exasperatedly, ‘I’m supposed to decide whether the giraffes were the Masai or reticulated sort. And I have a sneaking suspicion that this meddling friend is actually Mrs Dunn herself, because, for all the changes this friend made, they don’t appear to have noticed any of the misspellings of Ashbrook.’
Robert claimed the chair on the other side of my desk.
I had already handed him the book and pointed out a few of the more choice corrections. After a time his eyebrows rose. To my relief I wasn’t sitting there watching him and wondering if he had slept at the weekend. I wasn’t even trying to calculate whether his little trips away meant he had found a new haunt. I was examining a set of bus timetables I had collected when I had stepped out for lunch.
He set the bound proof down on the desk and then leaned forwards in his seat to draw my attention. He lightly tapped the cover with his index finger. ‘There isn’t much time to get this sorted out.’
I told him by way of agreement, ‘I’ve been down to the print room. Mr Lock says that Friday is the latest they can accommodate my edits without running out of time before Christmas, and that’s only going to work if Mr Lock’s wife will let him come in on Saturday to begin the printing. I’ve tried to get Mrs Dunn on the telephone. She’s out or not answering or something. She’s been out all day.’
It was then that I showed him the bus timetables.
After a moment he said, ‘I see.’
‘There’s no time,’ I said almost apologetically, ‘to wait for the post. What if she’s away or it gets delayed? If it goes in the post today, she should get it tomorrow, which is Tuesday. Everything is fine if she makes the final changes swiftly and sends the book straight back to us. But what if she isn’t clear? Or isn’t there? I really don’t want to be responsible for making us miss our publication date.’
‘We won’t be missing it. She will.’
‘All the same …’
Abruptly he accepted my decision and came just as swiftly to his own. He sat back in his chair. ‘Would you like company tomorrow?’
‘Don’t you remember? You’re going out yourself. Uncle George said so.’
He didn’t rise to the bait. In fact, he didn’t even acknowledge it. ‘You’ll have a long day. Your journey home will involve a long stop at either Cirencester or Bourton-on-the-Water, depending on which route you take.’
‘I can read a timetable, Mr Underhill. And I think I can manage to buy myself a cup of tea somewhere.’
I made him smile very fleetingly. Then the relief of the feeling left again. He tipped his head to signify that he had come to another decision. This one was clearly less easy to voice. Finally, he said, ‘Very well, I’ll come straight out with it. You won’t find it difficult meeting this woman?’
His directness went through me with a cold jolt that felt remarkably like temper. So did the way he was watching my face. This was like the time he had as good as asked me whether I minded making the tea.
I believe it was something very restrained that made me accept his question and tell him rather too precisely, ‘I’ll be fine. Five years as a widow is long enough to achieve some sort of equilibrium, wouldn’t you say?’
After a moment, I added more convincingly, ‘I suspect that as long as neither of us pretends to know precisely how the other is feeling, there won’t be any trouble at all. In my experience, people always presume that everybody deals with bereavement in just the same way. But when it comes to
Mrs Dunn’s experience of losing her husband, who but her could even begin to imagine how it felt to explain his loss to a child?’
‘It’s always the same with you, isn’t it? Someone else has always got it worse.’
That sudden twist of sympathy stung me. Even more than his usual reserve. I felt entirely caught off guard. And now he was accepting my decision and climbing to his feet. I certainly didn’t dare tell him that I ranked him firmly alongside Mrs Dunn on the list of people I couldn’t fathom. ‘Mr Underhill?’
He paused with his hand on the back of the visitor’s chair ready to set it neatly back into its place. ‘Yes?’
‘Where do you go?’
‘I paid a long overdue visit to my parents at the beginning of last week.’
Something about the simply honesty of this answer touched my heart. I suppose I’d never asked him anything so directly before. In fact, I wasn’t sure we had ever spoken frankly like this at all.
Then I noticed the precise wording of his reply. It was a reflection of my careful evasion of his remark about meeting Jacqueline.
Suddenly, I was shaking my head, disbelieving. ‘You were visiting your parents when I was fussing about sending out the proof copy of this book about giraffes. But my uncle didn’t tell me.’
I faltered as I worked out what it meant for myself. Then I continued in a stronger voice, ‘Uncle George didn’t tell me where you were, because he still needed to conceal his inability to explain all the rest. So now I have to wonder whether he won’t tell me where else you’ve been going?’
I hesitated before adding, ‘Or he can’t?’
‘Don’t ask me that. Please.’
His plea was softly spoken. And that surprised me too.
I suspect that the harder dawning of doubt was showing there on my face because in the next moment Robert was saying briskly, to end this, ‘Anything else? No? Good. And good luck tomorrow.’
