Mrs P’s Book of Secrets. Lorna Gray

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СКАЧАТЬ matchboxes set in pairs so that twelve tiny cardboard drawers could be opened on each side. The end of each drawer had been numbered very carefully by hand. In my younger years the drawers had been filled with treats and puzzles but they had been left empty for a long time now.

      In truth, it was the sort of object that inspired that bittersweet sense of all those happy childhood Christmases. That sort of naivety could never be regained. I suppose it really ought to have found a new generation to enthral only there wasn’t one, and yet, somehow, the sight of it wasn’t as melancholy as all that.

      I set the calendar aside for the sake of more practical things such as opening the tin of baking powder for my aunt, and then she asked tentatively, ‘Lucy?’

      ‘Mmm?’

      ‘Will you answer my question?’

      ‘I’m snug, thank you. The attic is perfectly warm. Like toast.’

      ‘But?’

      I gave in. ‘All right. But I do have to ask … Did the floor joists always creak?’

      She laughed. ‘Like a sinking ship.’

      My aunt had a fabulous laugh. Her style of loveliness was the homely sort which dressed in neat blue frocks and chose yellow and brown patterned wallpaper for the stairs and hallway to match the lampshades which had little tassels dangling from them.

      The only part of her that was out of place these days was the unhappy curling of those beautiful fingers. They took up the sieve and I watched her with a parody of the fascination that as a child had made me covet this duty, and made her smile.

      She made me smile in my turn when she remarked far too knowingly, ‘If you’re worrying about noises in the attic, I suppose you’ve noticed the bang that goes off like a gunshot on the step at the turn every once in a while? It always caught me unawares when I used to work late there sometimes. I swear it would get worse whenever dusk descended.’

      I countered, ‘Don’t forget the pane of glass in the third window. It’s near my bed and it’s loose and it makes a scratching noise like fingernails. Only you don’t have to worry, dear Aunt,’ I confided quickly because she was beginning to look concerned.

      I knew it mattered to her that I was living alone there. ‘I’ve been making a habit of learning all the daytime noises so that I can cross them off at night. It’s becoming quite comforting now. Like growing up here and getting used to the way the rain thrummed on the roof, you know?’

      I was teasing her and preparing to be tutted at because as a child I had made an extraordinary amount of fuss about that rain – it was the one of the many variants of a joke we shared about the squeamishness of a girl born on my father’s farm. But she didn’t quite react in the cheerful way I had thought she would.

      She set the sieve down beside me, dusted off her hands and then startled me completely by saying in a tone entirely removed from any cosy childhood memory, ‘I’m sorry. I must just pop into the garden room to see Rob. He came in just now and put his head around the door, but he only stayed for a moment because we were talking and he didn’t like to interrupt. I expect George has gone along the hall to tell him that I’m keeping his supper warm.’

      She added distractedly, ‘Rob’s had a long day running back and forth on the train. We probably ought to have let him move in above the office and made you come home properly but, well, to be honest I think Rob’s better off where he is. You don’t mind, do you?’

      ‘Mr Underhill is home? Now?’ Then, ‘He overheard all that nonsense about the attic?’

      She didn’t notice my dismay for the simple reason that she had already passed out into the hall.

      I was standing in a silent kitchen that suddenly seemed strangely large and starkly lit. The ingredients of an unfinished cake were in my hands and I was feeling rather too much like the adopted girl who had come home after a short stay away to find a new and prettier child already installed in her place.

      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.

       Chapter 3

      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 СКАЧАТЬ