Mrs P’s Book of Secrets. Lorna Gray

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      ‘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 was a means of curbing the feeling.

      And yet, even though this was finally closer to what I considered normal for him, he also proved that something really was wrong here. Because the act was also my dismissal.

      After that, it was with very mixed feelings of my own that I returned to my desk for the final time that morning. Robert wasn’t merely the man who had pipped me by a matter of months to the editor’s job. He was also the reason why I was making a home in the creaking attic above the office.

      My aunt and uncle’s house stood on the other end of the High Street. They had a room to let in the outbuilding behind their kitchen. In days of old, the room had been home to a pair of junior clerks from the town gasworks. They had been a harmless addition to the household when I had been a small girl. These days, the tenant was Robert and Aunt Mabel didn’t think it would be terribly seemly for me to return to my childhood roost in their second floor bedroom, when I was a widow of only twenty-six and they had an unmarried man living on the property.

      My aunt didn’t, however, need to worry too much about the impropriety of crowding both me and Robert into the small space of her home for the next couple of days. Her houseguest left the office after lunch on Thursday, and on Friday, when I received the call to go and help her bake the Christmas cake, he wasn’t at home at all.

       Chapter 2

      One of the main hazards from living above my own desk was that I hadn’t actually stepped out of doors that Friday until I set off for an evening at my aunt and uncle’s house. It meant that I wasn’t remotely prepared for the force of the wind. Or the darkness that had descended abruptly at about four o’clock and had refused to shift since.

      Moreton-in-Marsh was particularly poorly lit anyway. The main thoroughfare was exceptionally wide so that the shops and hotels opposite were a distant line screened by ranks of bleak pollarded trees. Behind me, the heavy doors that barred the passage to the printworks were rattling ominously against their lock. Very little else was moving, except I caught the distant shrill of a train whistle about five minutes later when I ran up a steep set of steps at the northern end of the High Street to let myself into my old childhood home.

      Aunt Mabel always baked her cake on the first weekend in advent. This was a ritual. She was supposed to follow this by tipping in a teaspoon of brandy weekly until the moment it was iced. Instead, my aunt basically waved the sherry bottle at it whenever she remembered, and Uncle George could drink whatever was left. This was another Christmas ritual.

      Now Aunt Mabel was muttering about eggs while Uncle George skulked in the long passage of the hallway to help me as I struggled out of my coat. I might describe the rows they had at times like these as loving but that would have been a lie. They did love each other very much, it was simply that they forgot when it came to crucial things like the cake.

      The problem this time was that they had miscounted the number of eggs they had accumulated through hoarding their ration and my aunt hated to bake with the powdered stuff. It was fortunate, therefore, that I had thought to save the solitary egg which constituted my own ration this week.

      My aunt was hunting for the baking powder. She was flushing in a happy sort of way as she got me to reach a tin down from the top shelves in the cupboards. Then she was distracted in the midst of giving me my instructions for the margarine.

      She turned her head towards the hallway. ‘Was that the front door?’

      I said with a smile, ‘I think Uncle George is trying to make amends by taking on the job of putting out the empty bottle for the milkman.’

      A murmur carried along the length of the hall as he spoke to someone outside, before the door rattled shut again.

      My attention was firmly drawn back to the task at hand by the sensation of a mixing bowl being placed before me. I knew which duties were mine of course. We had performed this little dance about the kitchen table since I had first moved here aged four.

      Aunt Mabel was frowning at the weighing scales with the bag of flour held ready and asking me, ‘Are you keeping warm enough in that attic of yours? And are you taking that advent calendar? George found it today when he was looking for the box of decorations and thought you’d like to see it. I haven’t filled it.’

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