by Lorna Gray
I watched him fold his damp coat over the back of my guest chair and set down his hat upon the top. It was a peculiarly vivid experience to see him so thoroughly at home in this space around my desk after what had just passed between me and the other man.
I wasn’t sure I could even speak without betraying the new secret of my parting from Doctor Bates. I didn’t want this memory. It meant straying into that difficult place of imagining that for a moment I’d reciprocated in the surprise of that near-kiss.
I hadn’t. I absolutely hadn’t. But, all the while, I was sitting here in my chair while Robert waited for me to give some cheery excuse that made everything all right, and as I did so I knew that it had been for his sake that Doctor Bates had gone roaming about this office last night. And now the doctor had entangled himself even further with me this morning, and for some ridiculous reason the only detail I was certain about was that I was feeling personally responsible for the lot.
I managed to find my voice after all. ‘I thought you would go to the meeting with Jacqueline on your own.’
‘No.’ Robert’s hair was dark and ruffled where his hat had been. This was the moment when he noticed the bandage about my hand. The injured limb was resting in my lap with my chair drawn in close in an attempt to hide it. He was beginning to stare when my other hand lightly moved to drape itself artfully along the edge of the desk.
I seemed to release him to remember what he had been about to say. He said, ‘It’s your project now; you might as well finish it. What happened to your wrist?’
He knew I couldn’t reasonably ignore a direct question. ‘It’s fine,’ I told him quickly. ‘Doctor Bates has already looked at it.’
I thought for a disconcerting moment I had slipped into using the doctor’s first name, Terry. But I hadn’t. I added, ‘Anyway, it’s my hand, not my wrist. I caught it between the door and the doorframe on the stairs last night. And it isn’t broken. It’s just bruised.’
Robert had already moved around the corner of my desk and now he was easing himself into a crouch in the space there.
I turned in my seat towards him. I believe I tried to say something crisp and orderly but he didn’t even hesitate. He was saying, ‘Will you show me that you can make a fist?’
The space behind my desk was very small when he crouched before me like this. His voice was different. It was suddenly more focussed, like a medical man getting to work.
I stirred uneasily. He was the second man to ignore my protest about my hand today. At the same time, his manner prompted me to remember everything I knew about his experiences at that awful camp. I didn’t want this injury to be the one that made him revisit them. My fierce effort to avoid this latest pitfall came out as a defensive, ‘Don’t you ever listen to a single thing I say?’
Clearly, he didn’t. First he got me to prove that I could still grip with the hand. Then he made me perform various movements with it. He didn’t take hold of it even once, or attempt to unwind the bandage. It was a very different method from the examination Doctor Bates had given me. I wouldn’t like to say which was the more medically correct, but this one preyed less upon the poor hand’s aversion to being touched. It didn’t make me feel as if he was affecting its increasing tendency to swell either.
And, very clearly, despite the running theory that life in a prison camp had given Robert a profound aversion to doctoring, he was able to use those skills readily enough now.
Now I was truly restless. The doctor’s accusations were prying into every thought of mine – the hints about the path that had brought Robert here and the pressure that might drive him away. All that remained was to risk everything by explaining how much had been exposed.
I drew back as I told him, ‘Doctor Bates knows all about your stock of paper.’
A wiser person might have finished the confession there, but an impatient urge to speak the angry truth rushed in with the ache of finding this man caring about that hated bandage like this.
I made his attention lift from my hand when I added, ‘In fact, the doctor thinks you asked me to lead him aside as a distraction while you got away with the hired van. And that little insult has led me to realise something very strange about you.’
‘It has?’
From his mild manner of asking, I might have believed he had nothing to hide at all.
‘Yes,’ I said firmly. ‘When you questioned me over dinner yesterday about Doctor Bates’ references to Nuneham’s, you must have at least suspected that his hints meant he’d uncovered your plan. Only, instead of worrying about that, all you wanted to know was what else he might have told me. So then I began to wonder what other secrets you might be guarding. Doctor Bates is convinced that you’re using my uncle to hide a habit of black market trading.’
‘And is that what you think?’
‘Not in the slightest,’ I replied flatly. ‘But it has finally occurred to me that yesterday, when you met me in Bourton, it wasn’t a matter of convenience or kindness. You were tasked with keeping me away from the office.’
There was a pause while Robert adjusted to the agitation in my tone.
He had his right forearm laid along the rim of my desk by way of support while he crouched before me. He considered the drape of his hand over the edge for a moment, then he replied, ‘I didn’t keep you away from the office.’
‘Yes, you did. You—’
‘You caught the same bus home from Bourton that you had always intended to catch.’ His insistence made my brows lower. He remarked, ‘I even told you about the paper.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Yes, you did tell me about the paper. And once you had successfully coaxed me into making light of the shady deals you’ve been making in my uncle’s name, you made an awful lot of references to the state of this company’s finances. So what I want to know is whose idea was it to leave you in Bourton to meet me? And what have you really been up to, if telling me about the trip to Nuneham’s was the easy part?’
I didn’t say it out loud, but I very nearly added that I particularly wanted to know why it was acceptable that my uncle should be involved, Mr Lock and the print room boy, and even Doctor Bates. But not me.
The colour in my cheeks was the pain of exclusion again. Not of myself but of him. I had been struggling all morning on the cusp of some unpleasant conflict. I had battled my own fear, and I’d tiptoed around the effort of defending this man while the doctor weighed up the risks of doing his civic duty.
In the process, I had been left trying to answer the disturbing question of how on earth I had spent the past minutes feeling terribly responsible for misleading Doctor Bates, when I ought to have been asking how it had happened that a trained medical professional should have visited a woman for the purpose of inspecting the injury he had caused, only to find himself contemplating romance.
I was increasingly angry with the doctor. And frustrated with him for deciding I was keen.
Now I was disturbing myself all over again with the effort of trying to guess what Robert might be reading in my distress at this moment – because if nothing else, the misunderstanding with Doctor Bates had taught me that what I thought I was saying and how my actions were interpreted appeared to be two very different things.
The simple solution was to withdraw, to busy myself with my work, to pretend that I didn’t care to hear anything this man had to say at all.
Robert’s manner wasn’t exactly warm any more, anyway. He was watching me from the nearness of that crouched position by my chair. His forearm was still claiming the support of the rim of my desk.
Then, while I reached for a sheet of paper to feed into the typewriter, there was the brief turn of his head away from me towards my uncle’s closed door. The act was followed by the short nod of a decision being made.
It was the smallest acknowledgement of the hurt beneath my temper. Then he rose to his feet.
I watched in silence while he walked to my uncle’s door. I heard the light rap and his muted request for
permission to enter. My mouth went dry.
If this was capitulation, it left behind a very peculiar feeling.
Chapter 12
A minute later, the office door opened again. Robert was there. He tipped his head at the room behind him. ‘Would you come in for a moment?’
I expected him to step out as I entered but he didn’t. Or, at least, he did step out but only to claim the guest chair from my desk before bringing it in to set it beside the seat I was taking. I thought he intended to supervise this talk.
My uncle was watching across the wide spread of his desk while Robert shut the door and took his seat. The older man’s chair was set before a window so that the natural light brightened the pages of notes in his hand. My uncle looked as he always did. Tall and willowy, but comfortable about the edges.
Beneath the familiar wooliness, though, there was that undertone of preoccupation that had concerned me before. Even now it didn’t fully take any specific form. At once his expression matched the general worry of a kindly relative; in the next a remoteness that must have stemmed from being the man in charge.
Uncle George certainly sounded unnaturally crisp when he leaned in to lay his work down upon the crowded tabletop and told me, ‘Lucy, dear child, I hoped to keep you blissfully ignorant of this, but Rob disagrees. He’s said it before, and now he’s said it considerably more loudly that he never approved of this particular aspect of our plan. He’s said that I’m acting as though wishing that all will be well is the same as it actually being so; and that it’s irresponsibly naïve of me to go on burying my head in the sand about the wider consequences of misleading you.’
My uncle left a pause long enough to give this the weight of a direct quotation and to receive a grimace from his second-in-command. Then my uncle’s attention returned to me. ‘So here you are. We needed the paper because I’ve spent the reserves keeping the business afloat.’
‘I don’t understand.’ I couldn’t help the sideways glance to my neighbour, but he was no help.
My uncle was saying, ‘My reserves are what your Aunt Mabel would call our pension. Only we haven’t got much left after the expense of the war. You know how hard it has been for small book presses like ours to weather the years of shortages. It’s what claimed Nuneham’s, and all the rest.’
I don’t know why but it startled me to hear my uncle mention the source of that paper so easily. I expected Robert to react too, but he simply sat in his chair with one leg crossed loosely over the other and his fingers laced around the knee. He looked, in fact, like a man who had been stepping in and out of meetings in this room for years, not the paltry eight or so months it had truly been.
Uncle George’s own fingers were mindlessly tidying the papers on his desk. He stilled his hands and sat back to say grimly, ‘About four years ago, while you were busily turning out notices from your office in Bristol, we began producing very short print runs and took to making up the shortfall in our income by spending our reserves. It was a common enough practice for those of us who were feeling the effects of the paper shortage. For your aunt and for me, it was the choice we had to make between closing down there and then – with the knowledge that we mightn’t have enough money for our dotage – or pressing on in the hope that conditions would improve enough to remedy some of the disaster.’
I hadn’t often seen my uncle look so grave. In a way, Robert had been perfectly accurate when he’d dubbed the older man naïve, because this kindly presence from my childhood had always existed within a wonderfully innocent world of books and writing. He was the man who had made up silly stories and left them on scraps of paper about the house to make a little girl laugh.
At this moment, however, I was feeling every one of my adult years, because my uncle’s narrow face was drawn as he explained, ‘The work has improved slowly. We’ve got new titles on our list; we’ve won the enormous challenge of publishing the Willerson archive. But the shortages of the war haven’t eased to match. We lack resources. Mabel and I are close to sinking. And I don’t mean we’re just a touch poor. I mean if we don’t fulfil these next few jobs, we’ll have nothing left. We’ll have to sell up. And we’ll lose the bulk of the sale of these buildings to the cost of settling our breaches of contract.’
‘You’ll have nothing left?’
My uncle knew it was a query for specifics. He tipped his head uneasily. ‘Mere pennies. Mr Lock and the print room boy will be out of work too. And Amy downstairs. All our responsibilities are hanging on by a thread. And it’s a terrible secret because it won’t matter how hard we work if even the smallest rumour gets out.’
He added, ‘When that happens, we’ll find our authors ringing to cancel our current projects quicker than we can answer the telephone. That’s what really did for Nuneham’s. The rumours. Which is why Rob here has been working to save us ever since he came. He’s the only one who could act without drawing attention to himself. I could hardly go dashing about the country chasing contacts – I’d be bumping into friends and neighbours at every turn. So it fell to Rob. He’s barely had a moment’s rest.’
That last part was said more briskly with a sideways glance at his fellow editor. And it carried the warmth of affection.
Whereas I was thinking that his note of excuse carried that trace of innocence again. And this time, the naivety didn’t quite ring true. Because Uncle George was always travelling to meetings if the query couldn’t be answered over the telephone. He had met the Willerson family at least five times since my return home, and the contradiction was reinforced when I caught the faint stirring beside me as Robert changed position in his chair. Something had surprised him too in my uncle’s speech. There was an alertness in the younger man like puzzlement, only suppressed to nothing very quickly because he knew I had noticed.
It was an odd time to remember the doctor’s harsh suspicion that Robert might have been more than my uncle’s lackey. That Robert might, in fact, have been driving this.
I didn’t believe for a moment in the doctor’s darker insinuations. But I was absolutely certain that Robert had expected my uncle to give a different excuse for leaving the work to his second editor.
Focusing very hard upon my uncle’s face, I asked, ‘Who else knows about the situation here? Presumably, Mr Lock and his assistant do, if they were involved with the hired van. Does Amy know about the risk to her job?’
‘No, of course not. She’s too gentle for me to risk upsetting her for no good reason. I know she acts as if she’s been managing our shop for years, but she spent her war wearing an air of frantic jolliness and daubing patches over holes in damaged training planes. She knows everyone – she even knew our man Gilbert Willerson before he died. If we worried her, she might let it out in conversation over her shop counter. The rest of us – myself, Rob and the men from the printworks – meet the public on very different terms.’
I wanted to bridle at that – it sounded like a criticism of Amy’s ability to bear bad news; and, by omission, mine too.
But Robert’s voice was making a quiet addition beside me. ‘It’s a basic fact that we needed the paper stock to print the books. We can produce all the Jacqueline Dunns and the Miss Prichards and so on within the scope of our usual allowance, but the Willerson project is likely to sell. If we’re going to meet demand we’ve got to print a good volume of books from the first moment. If it really takes off, we’ll need to licence the title to one of the big producers. But in order to achieve that, it’s vital that we first get it out and earning recognition.’
‘I know that.’ I had, in fact, said as much to Doctor Bates.
Perhaps Robert had guessed, not unreasonably given the way my left hand had tightened its grip upon my chair, that I was noticing once again the division that seemed to be perpetually being raised between the men and the women.
Perhaps he meant to bridge the gap by bringing this back to plain facts.
I told him as an aside, ‘You really needn’t explain yet again why it was necessary t
o purchase that paper. To be frank, it has been discussed so much by now and by so many different people that I feel we’ve established that you and my uncle wanted to combat the paper shortage.’
‘I wasn’t trying to justify myself,’ he replied quietly.
‘So perhaps you’re trying to distract me again?’ Somehow, I was almost making light of it. ‘Or are you directing my mind towards something I’m overlooking? You’ve led my thoughts before, after all, with that well placed query about my plans for the future. I suppose you couldn’t say more that time, without breaking your oath of silence to my uncle.’
He acknowledged the remark with a faint tilt of his head. His manner suited mine. There was a precision beneath the steadiness, and in the process he reminded me that I still hadn’t been given more than a partial answer to one of the many points I couldn’t quite comprehend – the point where I specifically couldn’t have been told.
‘What are you two talking about?’ My uncle’s voice drifted across the desk. The older man was bewildered.
I turned my head. My voice was bolder than I meant it to be when I asked, ‘Why didn’t you get me to contact Nuneham’s, or whichever of the other failing printworks you had Mr Underhill try first?’
‘I offered to help. I didn’t mind.’ This was said more crisply, by Robert.
I thought he was reacting to my unplanned stumble into the formal use of his name.
Or perhaps he was trying to show that his disapproval of my uncle’s decisions only went so far. That must have been my mistake based on my wish to assure myself that Robert was on my side. But I ought to have guessed that the younger man considered himself fully committed to his role. He had, after all, said as much while I’d been worrying about his tension during that companionable little meal between buses.
My manner was less reasonable than it had been when I told my uncle insistently, ‘All the same, it wasn’t right to let him take such a personal risk like this. When I might have done it.’
