‘And then it just sort of stuck, Mr Underhill.’ I raised my voice so that it carried into the other room.
I had to stop this. It was all wrong that I should discover the tension I’d noted in Robert present in my uncle too. And I certainly couldn’t bear to hear this story of my childhood being told on these terms; as if my uncle needed to worry himself into an apology, when I didn’t need to be offended by this.
So perhaps I even intervened for Robert’s sake, because he had been a part of this too, and I thought he might recognise the gesture behind my abrupt return to plain honesty.
I added in that same clear voice, ‘This life stuck so completely, Mr Underhill, that some twenty-two years later when my job dried up and things got a little frayed about the edges, my idea of running for home carried me here.’
My uncle beamed at me.
Then he shuffled away to his office. He didn’t hear the way I felt compelled to add my own small aside to the secrets of this place by murmuring to myself, ‘Of course my real motive was that Aunt Mabel bakes like a dream and we are four weeks from Christmas …’
‘Mrs P?’
Robert was calling me back into his room. He hadn’t heard that last part either. He was being distracted by the effort of remembering whatever it was that he and I had been speaking about before my uncle had begun to lecture him on my origins.
At least his voice was closer to his usual harmless tone. He was searching through the papers on his desk when I approached near enough for him to say, ‘Did she ask any particular questions, by the way?’
‘Who?’ I asked blankly.
‘Miss Prichard. What were you talking about as I climbed the stairs?’
It turned out that his idea of what had passed between us was different from mine. He wanted to discuss Miss Prichard and the submission of her manuscript.
While he eased a pen out from beneath a stack of notes, I told him, ‘She wanted me to give her some examples of similar titles we’d produced. She had heard about the Willerson archive, naturally. Everybody has. She asked how soon she might expect to be able to get her hands on a copy. She wondered if it might be out for Christmas.’
On any other day, a comment like that would have been guaranteed to draw a laugh.
The Willerson archive was a collection of photographs belonging to the family of a dead airman by the name of Gilbert Willerson. He had documented his non-operational life, his happy days spent on leave, the dances, the encounters with people in the town and his friends. Now his family wanted to publish the collection as a memorial to his death and, to be honest, the whole project was one big complication for us.
Gilbert Willerson’s fearsome last act with one of the training planes from our very own airfield had enthralled the national press. This was a man who, not to put too fine a point on it, had long been exploited for the purposes of propaganda. For my uncle, any attempt to publish even our small portion of the man’s private photographs was a tricky dance around the Official Secrets Act. It meant that Uncle George was having to negotiate with the various Ministry departments which might have an opinion on whether we should be prohibited from publishing at all. Robert had the unenviable job of pulling the pictures into some kind of logical order to give a sense of narrative. It was safe to say we were months away from making the print run that would be our largest title yet.
Today, however, Robert neither shuddered nor gave the customary rueful smile.
He merely paused in the midst of testing whether his pen worked while the distant sound of a rather wet sneeze carried through the floorboards from the shop beneath our feet. I saw him give an unconscious grimace, then he asked, ‘And was that the moment when she decided her manuscript should be submitted to me?’
‘She didn’t decide that. I did.’ I couldn’t help the impatience that was beginning to creep in. I wasn’t so nervous of his questions any more; just bemused.
‘So she wasn’t sent to us by her tenant, Doctor Bates?’
‘Not that she told me. And I should say,’ I couldn’t help adding, ‘that if you could hear our conversation as you climbed the stairs, you already know this.’
Suddenly, he proved he could still smile after all. ‘I couldn’t really hear a word,’ he said, ‘but it’s a fair point.’
Then he changed the subject.
He tipped his head towards his desk and said in a lighter tone, ‘I saw your note about the Jacqueline Dunn book, by the way.’
Oh heavens, I thought. At last I understood why I was finding that every fresh turn today seemed designed to remind me of my place – because here was proof of my absolute inability to keep within the bounds of my job.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said in a very different spirit of sincerity. ‘I thought I was doing the right thing. I sent out the proof copy on Monday.’
I added shamefacedly, ‘You weren’t here, but you and I had discussed last week how the author had to approve it in a matter of days if the print room people were going to have even half a chance of binding the books before Christmas. Uncle George couldn’t say where you were; I didn’t know when you would be back, and I thought that if you were going to be keeping the same uncertain hours this week as you had at the end of last week, you might not come in to the office in time to get it into the post. Today is Wednesday, so she must have it by now. I really am so sorry. I suppose you needed to check it before it went. Should I—?’
While I worked myself into a tangle, he seized the opportunity to say, ‘Why should you apologise? Under the circumstances, I don’t think you could have done anything else. I was simply going to say thank you.’
He implied that I’d misunderstood him completely this time.
He made my hands still, where previously my fingers had been tying themselves in knots. I heard myself ask with a rather too eager quickening into confidence, ‘Do you really think so? Are you sure? Because it’s a marvellous story and we don’t publish much in the line of children’s histories so I couldn’t help taking a quick look, only …’
I made the mistake of forgetting every one of the difficulties of the past minutes. I leaned in to confide with a brief twist of a teasing smile, ‘Only, do you know if she really means to spell Ashbrook with only one “o”?’
Of course it was a really terrible moment to make a joke out of the quality of his author’s spelling. I saw his expression change in the way that it always did whenever I slipped into revealing my usual unguarded self, and it was worse today because of the shadow that had come in with his late arrival.
Instantly, I was apologising and retreating back a step to the doorway.
‘I’m sorry,’ I was saying more formally. ‘I’m talking when I ought to be serious, and I know you don’t like it. I should let you get to your meeting with my uncle, with Mr Kathay, I mean, and—’
‘Mrs P.’ He said it flatly to interrupt the flow.
He waited until I stalled and turned my head to look at him. Then he asked with absolute incredulity, ‘Why on earth should you think that I mind the way that you talk?’
I floundered on the threshold. I was dumbstruck, really.
This was like that moment earlier when he had caught me staring by my desk. He tripped me headlong out of worrying about the people of this office, into acknowledging the reality that sometimes they cared for me in my turn.
He stated firmly into the silence I left, ‘I don’t mind.’
I believe the full depth of my stupefaction embarrassed him.
The turn of his head towards the papers in his hand