Thursday was a day for sharp gusts and sunshine between low grey skies. It gave a cold beauty to the final stage of our journey to that overdue meeting with Jacqueline Dunn – and I say it was ours because Robert had shed another day from his busy programme and was beside me.
I could really have come alone because the trepidation of a second meeting with Jacqueline felt entirely distant after the emotional marathon of yesterday. But he was here and there was shyness but no acrimony as we walked along the drive between Jacqueline’s gatehouse and the main house.
She had left a note pinned to her door telling us that she was wrestling with workmen and to come and find her. Robert was asking me about that move I had made from my farming home to Moreton to live with my aunt and uncle. Previously, I had felt that he was asking personal questions of me as a means of distracting himself from some deep internal tension. This wasn’t like that.
He was probing the connection between my aunt and uncle and my parents.
I told him, ‘Uncle George is the blood relative. He’s my mother’s vastly older half-brother. My grandfather’s first wife died and when he remarried, her son – Uncle George – was sent away to be apprenticed to The Kershaw Book Press.’
‘Not the Kershaw and Kathay Book Press?’
‘Not at that stage, no. So you can hazard a fair guess that the apprenticeship worked out pretty well for him. Mr Kershaw was Aunt Mabel’s father. Uncle George married her, and the company became Kershaw and Kathay. It’s all so wonderfully dynastic.’
I didn’t add that I had been quietly wondering lately if the name were set to move on again into Kathay and Peuse. Because that would mean admitting that I suspected that there was a far greater chance it would become Kathay and Underhill instead.
I said inconsequentially, ‘The view from here is spectacular, isn’t it?’
The drive was on the high ground and rolling clouds and bleak farmland competed with each other to form the most unforgiving horizon. I was holding the collar of my coat closed at my neck in that way a person does to keep the draughts out – futilely, I might add. I hadn’t bothered with the wind-shy hat this time so my hair was running in curling wisps past my face.
I risked a glance at him. He had the collar of his raincoat turned up. The coat was well made and it gave me a hint of the life he must have fitted at his medical college. I knew his absence from the office yesterday afternoon had been for the sake of talking to Doctor Bates, but there was no new shadow in this man’s face to tell me what had been said. I didn’t dare ask. If we spoke about that again now, it would feel raw, exposing, like forgetting the value of what he had done for me yesterday in the course of that small exchange on the stairs.
‘Do you know,’ I was saying instead, ‘I’m not surprised that my uncle’s business is struggling. Look at us both; taking a day to visit one author about a book she’s already had us edit twice.’
I made him laugh. Overhead, the pollarded limes which lined the high point of the drive were rattling their thin fingers.
Beneath their reach, Robert remarked seriously, ‘Brace yourself. Now you know the truth and you’ve promised to help Mr Kathay chart his path through this mess, he’ll have you working all hours.’
‘Well in that case, he’ll be getting very good value out of me, because I’ve already decided to work for the smallest remuneration I can afford, for the time being.’
I saw his disapproval. ‘They’d never let you.’
‘They won’t have a choice,’ I said a shade tartly before easing the tone to something more wry. ‘They don’t know what power they’ve given me by making me the woman who types up the letters and answers the telephone. I deal with the bank as well and write out all the payslips at the end of each month. So please don’t tell them.’
His promise came in the form of a single shake of his head.
‘That’s the little church near the bus stop, isn’t it?’ I was looking at the curling line of the distant river where it passed into a smear of trees.
A small farmstead was crumbling in the wintery light nearby, but there were no other signs of life. Even so, I could remember seeing a notice that had been pasted up by the bus stop there, advertising a carol service. I couldn’t imagine how this desolate landscape had enough people in it to even make up a congregation.
His thoughts must have been running along similar lines because he asked, ‘Do you go home for Christmas? To your parents, I mean?’
‘No, I’ll go in the new year. What about you?’
‘No. That visit I paid to my family last week will do for a while. My relationship with my own parents has never been as smooth as yours.’
It was the brief silence that followed that made me remember where comments like that usually led. I pre-empted it by telling him freely, ‘I’m not estranged from my parents, you know. They’re still Mum and Dad. It’s just that their house tends to be very full at this time of year. When I was a small child, it always seemed to me that there were so many of us that we barely bothered to see anyone else – and I was only the middle child of an eventual seven. It’s no wonder, when you think about it, that my life with my aunt and uncle seemed so much simpler. I suppose this’ll be your first Christmas with us? Kershaw and Kathay really does collect people, doesn’t it? First my uncle, then me, and now you?’
It was then that I realised that I was rambling and he hadn’t been asking about my background anyway since the evidence was there that he already knew. To make matters worse, I suspected that I was the one who was prying here, and I was in danger of breaching that personal line I had drawn about asking and being asked about things that had grown from the war.
He made the feeling stronger when he said, ‘Is that a very circumspect way of asking me how I met your aunt and uncle?’
His head had turned towards me. He didn’t mind. The faint teasing note made my heart give a sudden tilt as I gripped the collar of my coat and gave the smallest of consenting nods.
He told me, ‘Your uncle met me at the end of a drizzly day in March after he’d stepped down from the train in Moreton. He’d been in Warwick all day, talking to other publishers.’
‘Is this the time when he’d begun to take steps to resolve the company’s problems himself?’
‘Yes, and it wasn’t going terribly well. Night had fallen by then. I’d arrived about half an hour before. I didn’t have enough money in my pocket for a hotel and I’d stalled where the last gas lamp from the platform fades into the terrace of filthy brick railwaymen’s cottages. I presume you know the spot?’
I did. The place was dirty with soot and the debris from the nearby factory workshops, and fearsomely bleak at that time of day.
‘I was standing there, just wondering if I had the energy to think my way through this latest pitfall. I let my bag slip from my shoulder to the ground just as this tired old fellow passed me. I heard him murmur, “You too?” Then he offered me a meal. You have to understand,’ added Robert in a tone that certainly didn’t match the vision I had of the kind of weariness that defeated a person at the darker end of a rain-soaked day, ‘that I’d walked out of my medical school about three months before. And when I say I walked out, I mean I started walking and kept walking. Or moving by bus or train, or a lift in a stranger’s car. I picked up the odd rough job in return for bed and board here and there along the way, and that path led me to Moreton.’
‘You were a vagrant?’
He made one of those tips of the head that conveyed both agreement and yet an adjustment to the term to make it fit. Slowly, he settled on saying, ‘Close to becoming one.’
He said, ‘I certainly chose an awfully hard time of year to take to moving about the country. A “Gentleman of the Road” is what they call us, isn’t it? Referring to those war-damaged old soldiers who can’t quite settle to normal life. Only I wasn’t fully down to my last penny, and I wasn’t hopelessly unemployable. I was rejecting the life I was being moulded to. And I was barely a soldier at all when you think about it. Is this the house that’s destined to become a new hotel?’
His eyes had abruptly fixed upon the tattered façade before us. It looked both really grand and painfully tired of its former life today too, and I presumed that this was his way of neatly closing the subject. I was willing enough to let him do it.
But in the last few yards before we approached the steps, he added the next part with sudden steadiness as if it wasn’t so much that he thought I wished him to explain any more, but that he felt it necessary. ‘I never wanted to reclaim my place as a medical student as if the war had never happened, but I would have borne it. Just. Do you know what really drove me to finally abandon my studies once and for all?’
I shook my head.
‘It was the endlessness of going home after all those years away and realising that I was set to forever hear myself being called Doctor. When I like being merely Rob, or Robert.’
There was the smallest emphasis in the way he added that last variation of his name. As if the addition belonged here, with me. After the easier back and forth of the moment before, it chilled me a little. It made me think of the sting I had given him yesterday when I had briefly reverted to calling him Mr Underhill.
And because of that, I found myself saying a shade too briskly, ‘So are you telling me that you’ve stayed and helped Uncle George out of gratitude? Because of the way he and my aunt gave you back your name? I don’t believe you.’
I saw his jaw lift in a manner that somehow met my challenge and countered it. ‘I didn’t say that, Lucy, did I?’
He had drawn to a halt on the strip of gravel before the steps and so I stopped with him. This ridgetop walk wasn’t desolate any more. It was rattling with the secret whispering of those dormant trees. Their black fingers crowded, and I was almost wishing that I could break this intimacy because it was perfect, and yet at the same time it was making me feel strangely uncertain.
I watched as his head turned away to run his gaze up to the open door of the house. Then his eyes dropped back to mine and there wasn’t any difficulty in them to mirror mine. He seemed entirely unaffected by the current running beneath all this honesty when he confided, ‘It’s idiotic to admit I threw away an entire career for a name, isn’t it? Particularly when I’ve studied enough medicine to know that a sense of rootlessness is a pretty common experience for newly demobbed souls. And I knew that with time the feeling might pass; or at least reduce itself to a dormant undertone. So, by all logical means I could have stayed and qualified and established my practice. And eventually I probably would have even found some idea of normality within my old family home.’
With an effort, I swept the hair back from my face with my free hand and found a lighter tone. ‘Do you know, I realise I’ve never asked where you’re from?’
‘I was studying in Birmingham, but my childhood home was Coventry.’
‘Good heavens. Were your parents bombed?’
‘Not at all. Perhaps the easiest way to convey the life I’ve left is to ask you to imagine a respectable house filled with dark wallpapers, glass cabinets and clocks that tick.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘Oh dear.’
‘Yes,’ he said, smiling. ‘Whereas I gather you were significantly closer to the dust and rubble during your years of service in Bristol?’
I didn’t rise to the reference to yet more tales my aunt and uncle had been telling about me. The rooms my sister and I had shared were hit once. Instead, I countered it with an unguarded retort to rival his own idea of a teasing note. ‘I suppose all those clocks and things explain why you’re so at home in my uncle’s office – with the endless yards of dark wood, and the thoughtful silences which practically grow in the corners?’
I shouldn’t have said that. I was already beginning to frame a retraction because my sort of instinctive humour had the capacity to ruin things. And, besides, there was a private concern of my own in there to do with my relationship with the place, and I didn’t want him to see it.
But I found that I had made him laugh. ‘You think I sought the familiar? Not a bit of it. If you knew my childhood, you’d know the idea of working at the office of a small, unambitious printworks counts as very careless indeed.’
He caught my eye. I saw him cast a brief sigh into the cold wind, like a release from the past in one breath of air. He told me on quite a different note of confidence, ‘My parents wanted me to treat my return to my studies as the cure for all their years of unhappy worry. But I’m nearly thirty years old now and it turns out there is a world of difference between the idea of responsibility held by this man before you today, and that of the reckless youth who hurt them terribly by dashing off with his friends to do something very patriotic but entirely foolhardy.’
He added, ‘I’ll make amends and go back for visits as I did last week – my sister’s just had a baby, by the way, so we were all very polite to one another. But I didn’t expect them to approve of my part in your uncle’s absorbing, challenging work. And I certainly didn’t forget how easy it was to leave them and come back to your Uncle George, or your Aunt Mabel. Or you.’
His declaration of his commitment to return to us after his trip away absolutely stunned me.
Whereas he seemed oblivious, as if he had barely noticed the strength of those last few words while the nearby house snared his thoughts. There had been movement in there.
Then the man beside me turned his attention back to me with a suddenness that made my heart miss a beat.
I heard him say quickly, ‘By the way, before there’s any confusion in that house, I’m not here to take over responsibility for the book. I’m here to make amends for laying you bare to Jacqueline’s manipulations, and also to carry anything she gives us. Your bruised hand is terribly sore, isn’t it?’
‘Not really.’ Now my heart was beating in a different way.
‘Lucy,’ he said severely. ‘You’ve been trying to keep your hand raised by gripping the collar of your coat, so I know you wish you had it in a sling to ease the ache a little. Do you want us to attempt to fashion one out of your scarf?’
‘Fashion what? A sling?’ Suddenly, my attention was upon the injured limb; instinctively releasing its grip upon my coat like a guilty secret. ‘No. It’s fine really. It’s more habit than anything. The swelling’s reduced already, as you can see.’ To prove the point, I showed him the neatly turned bandage and then thrust it into a coat pocket.
He didn’t mean it to but his observation cooled every heating feeling. It hardened me all of a sudden, and not because he was wrong to suspect that the throbbing of the bruise still ran as an undertone to every thought. This was an unexpected tumble back into the sense that it wasn’t so much that he didn’t speak about himself, but that getting to know him made everything more complicated.
I had barely absorbed the description he had just given of his retreat from his sense of obligation to his parents. Now he was bewildering me because I could perfectly recall the undeniable strain he had shown in the course of his recent management of my uncle’s affairs, and yet it had never even occurred to me to ask him if he could cope with the trip to this place.
His decision to ask me about my own fitness now, all of a sudden, as a footnote to all that intimacy, struck me like an act of sabotage.
It was as if all along he had been working towards laying me open to this when he said insistently, ‘If you’re sure? Just, please, don’t wear yourself out.’
My nerves were on edge. I was bristling.
He had done this to me once before, when I had planned my last visit to this place. This time the injury was worse, because now I had the memory of all our recent minutes of companionableness, and I had the sudden chance to realise that, before him, the last man to cut this close to my idea of confidence had been my husband.
‘Robert,’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’
From my tone and posture I might as well have reverted to calling him Mr Underhill. And then it was too late to explain the sudden defensiveness because I was too cold to find words that would be more like my usual manner; and then Jacqueline was coming out of the house.