On an adult note though, there was something truly anxious about the hasty way my aunt had abandoned her obsession with Christmas. It matched the preoccupation my uncle had shown a few days ago when he had drawn Robert aside for their private meeting. They had excluded me and left behind a distracted edge of doubt that time too, and I couldn’t understand why.
So it was with a very peculiar degree of concern for these people who had all my love that I respected their privacy and avoided listening too intently to the distant whisper of voices.
Instead, I finished the cake and set it in the oven. Then I climbed the stairs to my old childhood bedroom.
I had, naturally, been back to this house many times since I had left at the bright age of nineteen for my wartime employment. I had also been here many times in the past two months for various dinners and Sunday lunch, so it was uncanny really that it had never before occurred to me to notice how hard it had been to establish whether they ever shared their other mealtimes with Robert.
Or why, when my aunt’s murmurings about propriety could hardly have applied to dinner, he never joined them when I was there.
The thought accompanied me upstairs. It followed me into the room that had become my haven after exchanging life on the family farm for an aunt and uncle I had barely even known.
This evening, I had come up here to rediscover the oddments and trinkets I had treasured in the years since, which might now make excellent fillings for the drawers of that old advent calendar. Only, when it came to the point of finding all these bits and pieces, I didn’t even have the exercise of rummaging under my old bed frame.
Most of the larger furniture had gone and it wasn’t because, as might be inferred from the pattern of my homecoming, my aunt had also given Robert the contents of my room.
My bedroom was largely empty because the ironwork of my bedstead had been turned into a Spitfire sometime in ’41 and the mattress was in my new attic hideaway. I thought I could guess too who had helped my uncle to move it from one house to the other. I deduced this solely on the basis that my uncle couldn’t have done it alone and yet no one had mentioned the part played by the man who was presently occupying my aunt’s garden room.
I wondered what Robert had thought when he had seen the bare attic floorboards of my current sleeping quarters above the office, with the storeroom of books and a mattress denuded of its bed frame. And how much it related to what he thought he knew about me.
Disconcertingly, I believe I caught the same thought there on his face when I tripped down the last of the stairs to the floor below to abruptly encounter him as he came out of the short passage from the bathroom.
He knew where I had been. I was looking thoroughly at home by now and flushing slightly pink because it had been strenuous searching through the boxes of my things and I had some of those childhood treasures piled into the crook of one arm. They spoke loudly of belonging to this house, both in the past and in the present.
He had been washing the grime of a winter’s day from his face and had found that my aunt had whisked his towel away to the laundry. He had shed his suit jacket, and was stumbling in rolled shirtsleeves to the linen cupboard when I stepped down onto the narrow landing and saved him the job.
His hair was wet and so was his skin when I handed him the towel. The space here was tiny. My aunt was quite right to keep me in the attic above the office. There truly wouldn’t have been room here for us both.
‘Thank you,’ he said as I slid away along the wall.
He made me pause in the midst of making for the next flight of stairs. I turned my head. ‘It’s nothing,’ I said.
His voice had held a firmer hint of certainty than I was used to when compared to the man who often looked taken aback if I surprised him in the office.
It was, in fact, like a continuation of that moment when he had corrected me for saying that he didn’t like me to talk – unexpectedly decisive.
And I was flushing because it really had been a rapid search through drawers and boxes upstairs, and his few words of thanks cut a little deeper when I lingered before making for the next set of stairs. There was a different kind of steadiness in the way he met my eye. Quite simply, he was at home here too.
And now that I had finally been permitted to meet the man out of hours, I could see that my aunt had been right to fuss and worry about his supper. Not even weariness could alter the posture this man had, or the way that he moved, but he certainly was tired. And for him I believe this quiet exchange was one of those gentler moments that are seized like an intense release after a test.
Wherever he had been on that train, it hadn’t been pleasant for him. Whereas this; in these few peaceful seconds, this was better.
I didn’t tell any of this to Amy Briar. It was Monday and we were in her shop and she had a theory about our Mr Underhill. It was fuelled, I might say, by the doctor who was Miss Prichard’s tenant and Amy’s friend and here with us in time for the morning cup of tea.
She was saying regretfully, ‘I had a cold last week.’
Doctor Bates understood her point even if I didn’t. He was nodding seriously from the other side of the counter that kept customers away from the foot of the stairs.
Beside me, the curve of Amy’s mouth moved as she added with a meaningful nod, ‘I was ill last week and he was barely here. I’m better today and he’s upstairs.’
‘Don’t be silly.’ My retort came swiftly.
I surprised the doctor. He often stopped in during the brief respite between his round of home visits and his lunchtime surgery. Today, his grave tones ought to have befitted a man who was old and wispy-haired. In fact, the doctor was in his late thirties and his hair was sandy and he was one of those thoroughly self-assured people who had been demobbed from his military service and seamlessly bought his stake in the town practice as if he had never spent time away.
Now he asked me with mock seriousness, ‘You don’t believe that our Mr Underhill was afraid of catching the office cold and put himself into quarantine? So what’s your explanation?’
Ignoring my memory of the way Robert had grimaced when Amy had sneezed last week, I protested rather too keenly, ‘I’m certain that Mr Underhill wasn’t hiding in his bedroom, at the very least. He went away overnight. And my uncle – Mr Kathay I mean – knew about it, so he must have been working on a job, mustn’t he?’
And that was when I realised that I’d just shared the way my aunt and uncle were guarding Robert’s absences, and I must have done it to prod Amy into showing that she knew where he was going.
Only of course she couldn’t tell me anything, and I was thoroughly ashamed of myself because the morning was running on and I shouldn’t be down here speaking about Robert like this when my mind was still swimming with the vividly living memory of the way the man had looked on Friday night.
That had been an abrupt encounter with thought laid bare, and now he was upstairs and working quietly in his office, while we were skulking down here and discussing a different kind of man who might have spent weeks creeping away from his desk because my uncle’s shopkeeper had shown the merest hint of ill health.
I didn’t want this conversation. I tried to curb it. ‘Anyway,’ I said brightly, ‘What about my advent calendar? I only really came down just now because today is the second day of December and I spent the weekend filling these drawers. I had imagined that Miss Briar would like to be the first person to bring our advent calendar up to speed.’
As it was, this was another decision