A storm blew in during the small hours of the night. By about seven o’clock in the morning, the attic was cold and groaning and sleet was hammering against that loose square of glass in the widow. The little table that turned this bedroom into something of a living room was strewn with the wide sheets of the test print for Jacqueline’s book.
The edits were all marked out with pencil at long last, so I did what I would probably regret once Mr Lock found out. I wrapped myself in warm clothes and a blanket and took a cup of tea and the papers down to the print room.
The linotype machine struggled into life beneath the roar of a downpour on the tin roof above. The long run of glass up there was still cast to that impossible depth of black that could only happen in December, when sunrise was an hour or more away and would only present itself as a short burst of grey anyway.
I knew what I was doing would disturb Mr Lock. No one was supposed to understand this machine of his. He wouldn’t realise that a childhood spent roaming these buildings had left me with more than a simple love of books.
The machine worked by transferring letters from a deeply complicated keyboard into a molten alloy of lead and tin. There were far more keys here beneath my fingertips than I would find on my typewriter. As I worked, the machine was pressing out the letters in a complete line – a slug – in reverse, so that once it had been added to all the other slugs that made up that particular page, and inked and printed onto paper, the text would read the correct way round once more.
The gas burner took a while to heat the metal so I filled the time by slipping back up to the darkened office to open the overlooked drawers in my advent calendar.
There were more sweets for Larry, so the mystery leaver-of-dried-herbs must have added his own ration too.
But to my collection, I was able to add a small packet of rhubarb seeds and a single white mistletoe berry. I couldn’t quite remember what treasures of my own he’d taken as payment. A set of miniature pencils, perhaps, and a neat square of cloth.
Several hours later, I was in the icy space of the workshop, some lightness had come to the heavy skies and I was recoiling from the pattern that was forming in the corrections I had made.
I couldn’t seem to spell the Ashbrook name either, but unlike Mr Lock, there were no variations in my efforts. The freshly printed ink swam upon the white paper, reading the same name time and time again.
Ashbroke.
I stepped back from the press. In fact I retreated from it like it was poison.
Logically speaking, it was my own fault. I was an amateur at this and this was a very early morning after a particularly distracting night. Mr Lock would probably cry when he saw how many lines of type I’d scrapped. The slugs would be melted down and re-used of course, but still he would resent the waste.
But none of that mattered when the error, this room, this day, all felt dark and wrong. Because the same word ran broken across the pages. And then they were accompanied by that feeling again, like sea-sickness where the senses tilted.
It grew out of the cold dawn. It was the absence of any sound other than my own breathing that did it. The still air carried a burden of meaning because this house always moved and now the creaking timbers were waiting on bated breath.
It was an echo of the stillness that had met me in Jacqueline’s hotel.
That incident had been, I admitted now, not entirely without precedent. It had followed in the wake of the many strangely hushed months of my life in Bristol after the bombs had stopped falling.
At the time, I had deduced that the feeling was a product of shock and perhaps grief. I had decided that the dreadful impulse to shatter the peace by crashing about finding fresh noise might be soothed simply by turning to my aunt and uncle. Robert didn’t know it but I had valued him for months now for the steadiness of his presence in their office.
Lately, though, it had seemed as if nothing had changed for me in the months since; and not even after last night. And yet I couldn’t have sworn any more that this was the same persistent unease, or that it stemmed from the deeper workings of my own mind.
Because I had begun this day with the simple businesslike practicality that comes from hope.
Nothing moved in the workshop. The stillness was absolute. But all the while, the dark type that ran through lines of chatter about giraffes was punctuated here and there by the misspelled word: Ashbroke.
It ran like a message.
The contradiction to it stepped into the office building behind me. I didn’t catch a sound, but this time I felt the change as a breath of damp air on my cheek. It might have been a draught from someone trespassing through the great coach doors in the archway, except that they were barred and bolted today. I’d made sure of that.
It was hard to trace the origin of that change in the air. I moved quickly but my body was strangely leaden. I clumsily worked my way from anchor to anchor towards the shop door like wading through a racing current. The change was in the front door into the shop from the street outside. The door was locked with the key in its place. But the key wasn’t mine.
Mine was upstairs in my handbag. This key had been left as a courtesy by a person coming quietly into the office on a Sunday when the shop was shut, and he didn’t want me to think he was invading my home.
I shot drunkenly for the stairs. Robert was there by my desk. He had my advent calendar in his hands and he was setting it down again. He’d had about three seconds of warning before I opened the door from the stairs, thanks to the telltale groans of the bare boards.
Robert turned there by my desk, lit by my lamp and looking slightly ruffled by the day outside.
In fact, he looked rather like a man who had seen me at work in the print room and had hoped he could slip upstairs and down again unnoticed, but didn’t really mind that he had been caught. It was, I realised, only about nine o’clock.
I arrived in the doorway and stopped there with both my hands outstretched upon the handle for support, and demanded in the midst of a battle to catch my breath, ‘What are you doing?’
And then the feeling of life running slightly out of kilter with time stumbled to a dizzying halt, so that my thoughts abruptly came to a stop as well. I discovered that I had stepped into a mystery I had already tentatively solved.
He was setting the advent calendar down as I moved a little closer to say, ‘You lied to me. You’re the person who has been leaving me the little cuttings of herbs.’
He was entirely unapologetic. ‘It wasn’t really a lie. You accused me of tampering. This is a recipe. And I had to come this morning because the ingredients have changed.’
‘Oh?’
I was distracted but something very lovely plucked at the corners of his mouth. ‘No, Lucy. I can’t tell you what it is. You still have to wait until the drawers have run their course and see if you can work it out.’
He had no idea, of course, that the concept of secret messages would send a shockwave through me. It was like an invitation to the oppressive thing that had chased me from the printworks. Now I actually turned my head to look for it on the stairs but found nothing, of course. Silence didn’t take solid form. I stepped smartly in and shut the door.
‘Good morning,’ I said at last. I couldn’t quite get my mouth in order. Half my mind was shaken. The other half was swooping into a memory of the power of his farewell last night. I was aware that trust was supposed to mean that I was safe to show this man the quirkiness that shadowed my steps, but I was reasonably confident that this confession would sound like madness.
I said, ‘Have you been here long? I woke early and got to work on the giraffe book but it’s cold down there in the print room.’
‘Yes?’
‘Aunt Mabel believes this winter will be the kind that rushes in before Christmas and sweeps away into a mild and damp new year.’
‘Famous last words,’ he said. Then, ‘Is something the matter? And don’t,’ he added quickly, ‘say you’re fine.’
The remark was designed to jolt me into concentrating on him. And it worked.
It made me give a shy laugh, too. In a way, I don’t think I had ever looked at him properly until that moment. He was the same man he always was, of course; tallish with a poised kind of energy that went hand in hand with the expression in his eyes.
But I knew now how easily that mouth might move from seriousness into a smile and back again, and then a different kind of truth broke out of me with a lurch. ‘I was coming to find you.’
I put up a hand to sweep the hair from my face and was surprised to find it unsteady. I repeated, ‘I felt the air change and I realised you were here. I was coming to find you.’
I didn’t know what he was seeing in me. I saw his posture change to something stronger as I moved away from the door and stepped closer. Then I faltered because the hand that had been tidying my hair was black with ink. The sight of it checked me. That sense of being crowded hadn’t swept in after me at the top of the stairs because it had stalled when it had seen Robert, and then I had shut the door. But part of it was in here with me and on my skin all the same.
I was staring at my left hand as if the smudges were a curse as I said on a distracted note, ‘This is like the difficulty I had speaking Archie’s name. I’ve been battling with it for a long time, and I thought you were making it worse because you were making me admit all the parts of me that hurt. Then I found it was good to learn to talk to you because I caught a glimpse of a way out if I would just learn that I can tell you anything.’
I added in a rush, ‘Only I haven’t shaken off the past at all. This isn’t purely a shadow of the war. This is something else instead. Suddenly it’s here and it’s stronger. It’s as if last night with you has finally weakened my defences against it.’
I didn’t think I was making much sense. If I had been, I might have found room to be afraid that he would think I was trying to explain that I had changed my mind. But I didn’t grasp that danger just then.
I dropped my hand. I told him, ‘A different kind of grief dwells in that Ashbrook house, and I’ve brought it home with me. First it led me on that mad race about graveyards and now it’s taken up residence in the printworks. It’s in Jacqueline’s book and in the gaps between the creaks on the stairs. The test print is riddled with mistakes and I feel as if the dead have decided that if I won’t reach out to them, they’ll find their own way of coaxing me into listening.’
Abruptly, I approached the desk and claimed the support of the cool wood by settling back against the rim with my hands on either side of my hips. I couldn’t quite meet his eyes. But I had seen the way his body had jerked once in a single uncontrollable start as I had moved closer, and I knew he had watched me when I had sought this place against the desk as a compromise between distance and reaching for him.
This felt very close to him anyway, because he was just there beside me and he still had his fingertips out upon the desktop after returning my advent calendar to its place.
Now he said in a very strange voice, ‘Archie is talking to you through Jacqueline’s book?’
The hard wood of the desk was running in a line behind my thighs and beneath my hands. I gave a hasty shake of my head. ‘No. I’m confusing you. I don’t know what this is. Archie wouldn’t try to keep hold of me like this. It’s too cruel. And I’m not speaking about the sort of conversations my mother and grandmother have in a darkened room with a few shattered souls either.’
I drew breath and found it steadier than I had thought. I was able to say firmly, ‘This is too close to being internal. I only say I don’t know what they want from me because I haven’t got a better word for what this is.’
‘You think you have to do something?’
There was a sudden twist of a deeper kind of puzzlement in Robert’s voice.
He made the room stretch into focus where before I had only been aware of him, myself and the stairs. That was the moment when I vividly recalled what he had said about conflict and his lack of fitness to bear it.
I found I was turning my gaze to him to tell him quite plainly, ‘Until this moment I hadn’t grasped how I could prove this experience, even to myself. But it occurs to me that while Mr Lock was doing the typesetting, the misspelling on the printed pages said all sorts of things. Now I’ve put my hand to the task, the error has clarified to say one thing and one thing only. Ashbroke.’
I waited for a strangely stretched run of seconds while he turned something over in his mind. The sudden sense of space between us was emphasised by the coldness of this wood-lined office on a Sunday when I hadn’t lit any of the fires. And what was it he had said last night? That he was growing to believe that he ought to be allowed to worry about me without feeling ashamed?
Well, unexpectedly, when he finally spoke, it wasn’t to retract that generous statement. It was to touch something deeper inside me that rippled into certainty.
He remarked, ‘It just so happens that when I took the proof copy of Jacqueline’s book home the other night, it was to do my own research. That quote the family used on the uncle’s epitaph – “A man dies not while his world, his monument remains” – I’ve read it somewhere before.’
‘On a grave?’ I found that, suddenly, my heart was beating very rapidly.
For the second time in as many days, I was powerfully aware again of every inch of the contact between my body and this dark furniture and the floor beneath my feet. And he was still standing near to me, with his fingertips touching the desk barely inches from my left hand so that the wood became the link that connected me to him in one staggering experience.
He told me swiftly, ‘I found the original words for that memorial in a book; in a novel, in fact.’
‘A novel? Which novel?’
‘King Solomon’s Mines – the wild Victorian adventure in Africa by a man named H Rider Haggard. It turns out, after much thought, that the family memorial misquotes a line that ought to read, “Yet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains”.’
There was something very beautiful about Robert’s sincerity when he added, ‘The original version is, you’ll notice, a little less about bricks and mortar than the Ashbrook interpretation. It better befits a hero who is braving untold dangers with an entirely Colonial mixture of romanticism and a tendency for shooting exotic animals first and then admiring them afterwards. Have you ever read it?’
For once, I was actually able to say that I had. ‘A long time ago. But clearly not thoroughly enough to be able to hunt out the quotation at a moment’s notice. My uncle has a copy on his shelves at home, doesn’t he?’
Robert gave a nod. ‘I dredged the idea from my memory late on Friday, borrowed the book yesterday and finally found the exact line very early today. It seems you aren’t the only one who rose early to work this morning.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. It must be something to do with all the excitement of last night.’
I caught his swift sideways glance. Then he said rather more seriously, ‘I can tell you that the original passage doesn’t stop with that line. The original text goes on to say something very meaningful about the way a man’s name becomes lost as time marches on, but the air he breathed and the words he spoke still exist. The author was writing about the parts of human life that transcend the physical limitations of what we can control or fix into living memory.’
‘A man’s name becomes lost?’
He caught my emphasis on the particular kind of loss. ‘Does that mean something to you?’
And then I was shaking my head. ‘Not really,’ I said, because it was the truth, and yet at the same time I was feeling again the weight of that odd and formless pursuit, both up the stairs just now, and previously on my own hunt through those graveyards.
My hands were gripping the lip of the desk when I conceded, ‘It doesn’t really mean anything that you can quote the original book. The Ashbrook people clearly didn’t retain much of the principle of the passage you read. Their monument declares that Walter’s legacy was physical and real and continues to dwell in the material things that he and his father created.’
‘But?’
‘All right,’ I agreed. ‘But all the same, names do matter, because even though his children are recorded, his orphaned niece Harriet is emphatically missing from the epitaph that was inscribed for him.’
At that moment, I was conscious of many things – Robert’s eyes upon my profile, the polished wood bearing my weight, his nearness and my seriousness. He watched me as I in my turn watched my left hand gingerly ease its grip upon the tabletop. I had been holding the wood tightly enough to turn the knuckles white.
I added, ‘Last Friday, the morning after my obsessive but futile race around churchyards, I finally did the intelligent thing and asked Jacqueline where Harriet’s parents were buried. They’re somewhere in Norfolk; in or around King’s Lynn. Presumably, Harriet’s body was returned to them.’
He didn’t make the obvious remark about being able to guess where my next bus trip would take me. I found I had no choice but to lift my head and ask at long last, ‘Is that what this is? Am I supposed to find Harriet’s grave and finally correct the uncle’s neglect to the point of satisfying even an Ashbrook’s idea of permanence in this world?’
‘Is that what you think?’
Abruptly, I was amused. ‘I have absolutely no idea. I doubt it.’
I drew breath and stretched a little to ease the stiffness in my shoulders. Suddenly, it was as if all the time since my early start had been passed in a clouded dream and this was my first moment of waking.
I admitted in a better voice, ‘This isn’t what you deserved from me this morning, is it? You wanted to creep in to rearrange my advent calendar while I remained oblivious in the print room. Then you were going to stage your arrival with a knock at the door and follow it by hinting that you ought to be invited in for a cup of tea and a happy chat about the future.’
‘Well, in actual fact,’ he replied steadily, ‘when it comes to cups of tea, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I presume you realise that your aunt used to do both your job and mine? She’s set a high bar for both of us. Today, I’ll make the tea.’
There was something very dry there. It was the comfort of being teased. Then I put my hand out to cover his where he still reached to touch the tabletop.
He didn’t move much but every nerve of mine was sensitive to his concentration upon my touch. There was a temptation to ask why he was helping me to discuss this madness. But I knew why. Because I needed him to.
I told him simply, ‘I love you.’
And those three words should serve as a sufficient explanation for why, a short while later, I returned alone to the print room to collect the test print.
It wasn’t entirely a question of courage that made me do it while he went to set the kettle upon the hob. It was also a sense that he had acted just now to shield me from the oppressive feeling I had left stranded on the stairs. I didn’t intend to test his protection by steering him directly into its path.