by Lorna Gray
I can’t describe how painful it was to finally grasp that the term ‘widow’ wasn’t mine to define. Some years ago, when the news had been fresh, I had imagined my relationship with my past marriage would be a private matter; personal and wholesome, like the memories I had of the man who had given me his name.
Here, though, the term was worse than a shackle upon my capacity for independent thought. Today, the fumbling steps of Mrs Lucinda Peuse also seemed to be tainting Robert’s choices and the future of my uncle’s business.
Before this man could find words to contain me further, I asked rather more pertinently, ‘Do you love her?’
I was beginning to feel concerned for Amy. I didn’t want to have to learn that this man was my enemy. I didn’t want to find myself deciding that the pleasant, uncomplicated woman who ran my uncle’s shop needed my help.
She had chosen Doctor Bates after being his friend for a long time, and I didn’t want to assume responsibility for her welfare with the same damaging fervour I was experiencing here.
So I did what I could to seize authority with the tools within my grasp. I surprised him with my question. I leaned in and repeated, ‘Do you love Amy?’
The doctor stumbled into speaking with the most honesty I had heard from him yet. He nodded and confessed shyly, ‘When you popped upstairs after our little chat on Wednesday morning and she stepped in from speaking to Mr Lock, I’m afraid it just stuck me there and then who I had been visiting all this time. You’re nice to look at, but she’s … well, whatever she is, I tripped headlong into asking her. I don’t want you. I want Amy Briar. And she wants to be my wife.’
He was flushing his way into a complicated smile. If anything, I suddenly had the impression he was near to tears. Doctor Bates wasn’t predatory. He was desperate to be free of me.
I began to gather my coat and my handbag. I said quite seriously, ‘Well then, Doctor. I wish you and Amy every happiness, and that’s that, really, isn’t it? There’s nothing else to be said. I do not wish you to think of me. I don’t want you to interfere in my choices. I don’t want you to steer me or otherwise manage my business at all. Good day Doctor Bates. And thank you for the tea.’
This was, I’m afraid, a rapid bit of management of my own. Of myself, I mean. I knew that if I didn’t tell the man plainly what I wanted from him – which was nothing at all – I would only end by feeling responsible for whatever he decided to do next.
After that, I went home. I attacked the edits to Mr Lock’s test print in a silent and deserted office. I was still pretending that the giraffe book was occupying every thought in my mind when I was called down the stairs about five hours later by a light knock upon the locked door of the shop.
My visitor was Robert and he greeted me cheerfully with, ‘I’ve been sent by your aunt and uncle to fetch you to our council of war.’
Chapter 18
It seemed to me that my life was set to always swing from one extreme to the other these days. My first step that evening into my old childhood home was a blast of merry bustle. I had expected to be met by the first scheme in a plan of campaign. But all I had was the sudden brightness of the hallway, with Robert beside me as we struggled our way out of our coats after the bleak cold of the night outside.
We could hear my aunt and uncle in the front room. My aunt had just finished wrestling with the Christmas tree. This wasn’t a real tree, just a wooden contraption that was basically a collapsible many-pronged coat stand, with boughs that were hinged from the main trunk. It always developed a list in the third week.
Today it was upright and bare, and when I moved into the light of the doorway into the front room, I found that Aunt Mabel was glowering upwards at the bands of crepe paper Uncle George was running across the ceiling.
‘It isn’t straight, George. You’ll have to do it again. Hello dear.’
This was another one of those wonderfully familiar patterns of this household, like the baking of the Christmas cake and the drinking of the sherry. The paper was ancient and patched and irreplaceable because, as I believe had been observed once or twice in recent days, new stock was in very short supply.
Robert passed me to take up one of many cardboard stars from the footstool as Aunt Mabel told him, ‘That’s supposed to unfold like a fan to make its finished shape. I think it’s broken.’
I saw the way my aunt smiled at him when he held up the flimsy bit of cotton which was meant to hold the whole thing together. I was dispatched to the bay window with decorations for the tree.
The decorations were a potted history of generations. Paper and glass more ancient than memory dwelt in this box to be greeted like old friends each year. The small and bespeckled ceramic mushrooms always seemed to me to be an odd choice.
Robert must have thought so too. As he came near me to hang the star upon the picture rail, he asked me, ‘Why have you got mushrooms?’
I studied the little decoration standing proud on its wire fastening as I held it between finger and thumb.
It turned slightly, as I repeated what my aunt had once told me, ‘They were my Great-Aunt Gert’s.’
She’d said it as if that answered everything, which in a way I suppose it did.
Family folded round me like a cloak. Peaceful and assuring me that this was why my steps had brought me home. It was peculiar to go from such simple happiness to the discovery that my uncle had come in with a tray and was offering us a glass of something.
It was my aunt’s fearsome homemade dandelion wine. Robert was reaching to take his own drink and saluting me with it in a discreet and silent toast. I didn’t quite know what he meant. It wasn’t about festive things. It was more personal; a mild way of saying ‘over to you’.
I sipped my drink and found that a sudden flurry of activity had directed Robert to take the armchair that nestled in the space between the fire and the bay window. My uncle was already sitting on the settee that ran along the hall wall. My aunt took her place beside her husband and then looked at me. She was laughing at me quite affectionately because I looked stranded somehow, as if I had missed a vital cue.
Then Robert was getting up again and offering me his armchair while he went to claim a hard dining chair from the kitchen and I was saying quickly, ‘Don’t bother, please.’
I sat down abruptly upon the round footstool that had been pushed aside into the space between Robert’s armchair and the prongs of the Christmas tree. I found I was flushing a little when Robert finally reclaimed his seat beside me. I hadn’t anticipated that instinct would make me take the spot quite so near him or that my uncle would instantly begin teasing Robert into admitting that the offer of the armchair had been hollow anyway. I saw Robert’s grin. It was all so homely.
And it was in its way an answer to Doctor Bates’ many and varying ideas about the nature of my place in my uncle’s world. The doctor had never seen this side of things. The experience shook me into acknowledging what I had known for some time: that Robert belonged amongst these people too.
I didn’t intend to be the one who ruined it for him.
Abruptly, certainty defeated the nervousness that was working like a worm upon my capacity for speech.
It shook off the sense that I was feeling a little like a spectator of this bustling scene. It had been a familiar sensation of late. I will admit here and now that sometimes I have this insane feeling that it wasn’t Archie who died, but me. That I had succumbed to one of those dreadful near misses in the Blitz on Bristol.
It has felt sometimes that this pathetic craving I have for the old comfort of my childhood home is a stretched out memory ringing endlessly in those last few seconds of thought while life fades. And that my refusal to attend one of my mother’s séances in my husband’s name had grown from the fear of having to learn it was my name she meant to use; and that it was my soul that needed guiding into what lies beyond.
I have sometimes caught myself listening to the sound of my breathing just to establish one of the usual patt
erns that went with living.
This was the opposite of one of those moments.
I knew I was very much alive. And very much present. I could feel the way my hand was smoothing my skirts over the neat fold of my legs as I perched very near to the floor. Every muscle was sensitive of the warm glow of my aunt’s cosy living room as I sat up and lifted my head. My voice interrupted my uncle as he was explaining that the Willerson archive would be a good step in the right direction if it finally went to print, but it would only keep things afloat.
‘You’re perfectly right,’ I agreed. ‘Publishing the Willerson archive won’t rebuild what you’ve lost. But you might make things easier upon yourself if you’ll consider leasing the business to me.’
I probably said that a shade too earnestly. My gaze ran from my uncle’s face to my aunt’s, faltered and ran back again. After a dumbfounded silence, my uncle mustered nothing more than a blank, ‘Right.’
I could tell my aunt was going to follow him by explaining reasonably how I’d ever so slightly misunderstood the point of this meeting. My own seriousness made me laugh at myself. Because the doctor had repeatedly attempted to galvanize me into working to unseat Robert’s claims on my uncle’s business, and this might well have seemed like the start of it. Only it wasn’t.
I began saying sheepishly and considerably more naturally, ‘Do people ever lease a business? I thought they did but now I’ve said it, the idea sounds a bit off-kilter. What I mean to say, Uncle George, is that I gather that you keep thinking about retiring, but as it stands you can’t actually do anything about it until you’ve got the business into a state where you can reclaim some of that lost capital?’
‘In a manner of speaking, yes. But that doesn’t mean that you—’
I saw the movement as my aunt put her hand upon her husband’s arm to discourage him from correcting me. I experienced a sudden memory of being quizzed as a child on my spellings as my uncle sat there on his deep settee, fingers pinching the stem of a small port glass – the only size suitable for his lethal brews – while my aunt urged leniency upon an affectionate man whose angular frame was clad in a pale blue jumper that was fine enough for his braces to show through.
Blinking through the force of the memory, I repeated seriously, ‘You could lease out the business, couldn’t you? You could lease it to me or Robert, and I … we … or Robert or I could muddle our way through one job at a time until things were more robust once more. Whichever of us did it, you’d certainly stand a reasonable chance of getting some form of pension.’
I knew I didn’t sound sensible. I could feel Robert’s attention on my profile, like a touch from his mind. He at least had noticed the way I had drawn his name into this scheme. I didn’t know whether he liked it. And I could feel the counterargument brewing in the older couple sitting upon the settee where they would explain that the business couldn’t support three salaries – mine, my uncle’s and Robert’s.
There was no way it could support a pension if the workforce were to be reduced to just the two of us. And aside from that I had the tangle of knowing that everyone here had expected Robert to take the lead, and yet I didn’t seem to be leaving much room for him to talk.
I found myself hoping vehemently that they could at least see that this was different from the last meeting I’d shared with the two men; that this was being inspired by more than a stubborn refusal to sit quietly while my uncle and Robert sorted it out between them.
My attention was drawn by the brief and private flare of Robert’s own brand of seriousness as he leaned forwards to prop his elbows upon his knees. He meant to speak to me.
But his gaze was drawn across the room by my aunt’s brisk query. ‘Do you mean, Lucy, that we should pass the shortfall along the line?’
She always did hide a very precise nature behind the homeliness. I suppose it was what made her equally a fearsomely capable cook, typist, telephonist and draughtswoman.
A bauble from the tree lightly brushed my shoulder as I stirred to say carefully, ‘I mean to say that by working at it piecemeal, time isn’t on Uncle George’s side. It’ll take too long to save up again.’ I heard my uncle sniff and I added, ‘I’m sorry, Uncle, this isn’t a terribly tactful thing to say. But you have been talking about retirement.’
I added, ‘If you lease the business to me – or Robert – we can agree a fixed income, or at least I think we can. We still have to work out if the business would be able to pay you enough to make it feasible. But the main point is that if we do it this way, it won’t be you who spends the next run of years reclaiming that lost capital, and there won’t be such a fearsome deadline. It might take ages to break even; it might not even be possible. But all the same it won’t matter any more, because we’ll be meeting the work. And you’ll be getting your pension.’
From my place on my little footstool between the watchful scrutiny of Robert, the tree and my relatives, I felt the force of all the assumptions I was making about Robert’s involvement.
‘Why would you do this for us?’ This was from Uncle George. This was like that meeting I had joined in his office, when I had suggested that he and Robert had been wrong to pursue a certain course. There was a grimness here that rang painfully like disapproval and a hint that I was overlooking some of the harder arguments.
It was then that I was suddenly struck on a very faint but doubtful note by the memory of all those ill-founded comments from the doctor about my upbringing and the question of an inheritance. I had the excruciating suspicion that this sounded like I was undertaking the sort of manoeuvrings that would force these people to put my name very specifically into their Will.
I tried not to fidget upon my footstool. This was not why my aunt and uncle had sent Robert to bring me here. I hadn’t even let them speak. I was rubbing my hand upon my arm as I reached for a better excuse than a mildly apologetic, ‘I think my solution suits your nature better than the one you were going to suggest.’
My uncle sniffed his disapproval again. ‘I was going to explain how we might work quickly to pursue more new authors.’
I countered him gently, knowing I was straying from kindness into going too far. I sensed Robert’s stillness in his armchair as I said, ‘Yours is a policy which depends on growth. The pursuit of new customers is a natural strategy for any decent businessman, I know that. But how are you even going to achieve growth, when legally you’re only permitted to buy enough paper to output the same volume of books as you did eight years ago at the outbreak of war?’
I saw my uncle stir. He believed I had just tried to scold him about the purchase of that blasted Nuneham’s paper yet again.
But it was then that Robert surprised me by speaking from his armchair. ‘You don’t need to invent arguments here, Mr Kathay. You don’t need to protect Lucy from her own generosity. Because she isn’t acting entirely selflessly.’
Robert eyes didn’t stray from their steady gaze across the room when I turned my head, but I saw the flicker as he registered my look all the same. He told the older man, ‘She’s pursuing the course that is most likely to lead to her success. You don’t even have to retire here. Under her terms, this can simply count as an insurance policy.’
‘Insurance?’ This was a question from my aunt.
‘For all of you. Because she isn’t even offering to buy the business on instalments as any normal person might. And you don’t have to retire, Mr Kathay. You can lead this business for as long as you like. It remains your business. But you can at least rest safe in the knowledge that if you do take Lucy’s proffered pension, you’ll be helping her too.’
He paused before adding, ‘She might be committing herself to a lease she can barely afford. But at the same time, she’ll also be tying her name to your business’s reputation. She’ll use it to build an increasing list of published works of her own. This isn’t a simple act of self-sacrifice, Mr Kathay.’
I wasn’t entirely sure I liked his summary of my motivation. But I certainly no
ticed that he had excluded himself from this plan. He was smoothing out the potential for misunderstanding between me and my relatives, when he might have used their confusion to introduce an offer of his own.
I told him before I had thought, ‘I haven’t forgotten the promise you asked of me, you know.’
I saw him jump and then blink his way into the memory. He understood what I was saying about letting him join me in my future work, but he didn’t exactly like the way I was reminding him of his request now. That made something stronger than embarrassment drag my mind down to the glass in my hand.
The partially consumed contents were swirling and glittering gold in the depths. Dandelion wine was delicious but fierce, like water mixed delicately with a musky kind of fire.
Miss Prichard had plenty to say about this drink. A number of ancient records existed for its use as a health tonic. And all the while the man who had given me her manuscript was sitting very near to me. I thought he was studying what little he could see of my face while I turned my head away. Even the thought of it made me feel exposed. In fact, it was the same feeling that had struck me when he had left me in the office after that last bus ride. It had been like being met by the very deepest kind of care, except that he always retained certain boundaries.
I had a horrible feeling then that the doctor had been entirely wrong when he had listed friendship amongst Robert’s reasons for deciding to stay. So wrong in fact, that I ought to have been perceiving that every one of Robert’s generous efforts on my uncle’s behalf with the paper – and now for my sake in this room – were all meant as a gift before saying farewell.
Chapter 19
It was two hours later and about nine o’clock when I stepped into the hall to put on my coat.
My aunt was there to help me. She was warm and pink from the wine and the general energy of the evening’s party after that serious discussion. I expect I was too. It hadn’t all been deeply thoughtful. There had been laughter and my uncle’s idea of witty puns.
