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.
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 instructions 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.