Mrs P’s Book of Secrets. Lorna Gray

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      ‘Mr Underhill,’ Amy interrupted with renewed energy, ‘was drafted as a medic.’

      She didn’t notice the way Doctor Bates was staring at her. I didn’t think he was used to being interrupted. Which was silly really because she did it to the rest of us all of the time.

      Amy added, ‘Mr Underhill spent his war begging the guards for plasters and aspirin so that he might treat the many ailments of his fellow inmates. I believe that these days the poor man feels he’s seen enough sickness and runs away.’

      ‘Do you know this? Or are you surmising?’ This was said sharply, by Doctor Bates.

      Suddenly, he wasn’t looking so much like a man who had been offended by her lack of interest in his university life. Instead, he was paying far more attention than he had before.

      Amy’s bracelet clattered on the glass countertop as she moved. Beneath the cuffs of jacket and blouse, a thin gleam caught the dim light. She closed her hand over it, muffling it as she told her friend, ‘It’s just a guess, but the evidence is there in the way he kept away from me last week, wouldn’t you say? You must have seen plenty of signs of mental damage in the returning men.’

      They didn’t notice my quiet movement as I slid my advent calendar from the counter and retreated for the stairs. She was telling the doctor earnestly, ‘I don’t mean to blame Mr Underhill if he can’t bear to see people with winter colds. I mean he might justifiably have a real horror of illness now. That might be what brought him to us.’

      ‘Really?’ The light from the wall lamp caught the side of the doctor’s face as he stirred. He was being framed by the dark ranks of every title we had ever published, while the golden lettering of each book’s embossed spine ran away like fine threads into the gloom of the shop. He asked, ‘What do you know about Underhill’s arrival here?’

      Amy replied, ‘The first time I set eyes on him was when he wandered in one morning in the early spring with Mr Kathay, who took him upstairs and sat him down with a cup of tea. I can’t help wondering whether we’d find it was illness he was running away from that time too. The war can take people like that you know. It can leave them rootless. It can make them fragile.’

      She added softly, ‘And Mr Underhill’s got that handsome look that goes a bit drawn down to a fine art, if you know what I mean? He looks like a man who ought to have gone back to doctoring and finished his studies. The trouble is, he definitely doesn’t fit that life any more. For all we know, he mightn’t quite fit this one either.’

      I saw her fidget as she confided with renewed energy, ‘He might be going away for days on end because he’s building up the courage to escape us. One of these days I think we might find he’s gone and he won’t come back.’

      ‘And yet,’ the doctor added like it was his job to be the voice of reason, ‘let’s not get too carried away with this dire portrait of a man shaken by war.’

      I thought I caught a sideways glance from him. I didn’t think that he was saying this for her sake. He was saying it for mine. He was a man who liked everything to be orderly and he must have abruptly noticed that I was retreating step by step up the stairs.

      I don’t know what my expression was showing, but it was as if Doctor Bates didn’t want me to leave like this when he observed calmly, ‘If Mr Underhill is truly afraid of illness, he might simply be aware that the slightest hint of a temperature is enough to bring out his more difficult memories in the form of some awfully vivid dreams.’

      ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, puzzled.

      The doctor replied kindly, ‘Mr Underhill may simply be a man for whom a short illness will mean a hard battle with some utterly troubled nights. It’s a common enough problem, believe me, for men who have experienced war. And if the man actually caught an illness of some kind, the ensuing mental fatigue might certainly be enough to keep him away from his work for a few days. But,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘I believe, Mrs P, you said that he went away on a job last week?’

      He seemed to be expecting me to answer this. He barely even blinked.

      But Amy had noticed a detail that I had missed. I saw her head turn on its neck and her remark was a quick, ‘You’re speaking with a remarkable degree of authority there. Do you mean to say that Mr Underhill is your patient?’

      Outside the shop door, a car went past with its headlights blazing. In here, the amber cast on our faces made us all look rather too eager to learn how a man might have recently visited his doctor to talk about the influence of illness upon his state of mind.

      And now I was angry with them. And with myself too, because I had let them follow this course and I knew that the doctor’s tactful refusal to answer Amy’s question would change how I saw Robert now. It merged with my uncle’s troubled looks and my aunt’s eagerness to settle their houseguest down to his supper last week.

      I knew that when Robert and I spoke next, I wouldn’t be able to avoid searching his face for signs of disturbed sleep.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ