Mrs P’s Book of Secrets. Lorna Gray
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the square area behind. My view was of those closed office doors and the thin glass of the screen that stopped the draught from the stairs.
At present this small reception area also contained a member of the public by the name of Miss Prichard who was beaming at me through the unflattering glare of my electric lamp.
Miss Prichard hadn’t come to see me. She had come to thrust her manuscript under the nose of Mr Underhill, only he was out – as he had often been during this last week or so – and my uncle was shut up in his office muttering vagaries on the telephone.
She and her felt hat were sitting in my guest chair, looking every inch the aged housekeeper she was claiming to be with a story to tell about an old doctor who had employed her to keep house for him in the 1920s. I believe she took it as a sign of our seriousness as a publisher that she was being interviewed by the woman who answered the telephone and wrote Uncle George’s letters.
‘It’s very thrilling,’ she confessed, ‘to be in here at last. I suppose the editors are terribly busy.’ She kept running her eyes across the closed doors as though waiting for someone important to bustle out, proving that only by sheer luck and cunning had a small author such as her found a way in.
I thought that it was at times like these that my real job began.
I had been taken on because my aunt had retired. Aunt Mabel’s hands had grown too arthritic and I was stepping in to fill the gap. I had been told that my aunt was the chief tea-maker – to ensure I understood the limitations of what the family company could do for me, presumably – but I was already learning that I was performing a fundamentally larger role in this business.
I was lending prestige to our two editors, Uncle George and Robert Underhill, because it transpired that new authors of the sort who would pay for the services of Kershaw and Kathay Book Press Ltd really liked to feel the weight of the towering intellects couched behind those enticingly unwelcome closed doors.
There was a sort of tradition in it, I suppose. I imagine it matched their general idea of the marvellously grand publishing houses of the capital city, only on a more intimate, old-time scale.
Those London publishing houses weren’t very like us really, though. Uncle George didn’t have their degree of clout with the government agency in charge of paper supplies. Instead, he worked to produce the smaller treasures of the literary world – the unusual memoirs, the local histories and the unsung gem of a novel – all bound in sturdy little hardbacks about the size of a Victorian pocket book. Needless to say, there wasn’t a lot of money in it.
And also needless to say, the process of submitting a manuscript to us was actually managed without anyone being required to negotiate their way past me; when I wasn’t the gatekeeper, and rudeness was hardly my uncle’s forte, and Mr Underhill barely spoke at all.
Miss Prichard was smiling at me again as she set down her teacup on its saucer. ‘I did catch your name correctly, didn’t I? Mrs Peuse?’
‘You did. Mrs Lucinda Peuse. It isn’t a terribly nice name, is it? The staff here call me Mrs P. The lady who runs the shop downstairs started it, and then the abbreviation caught on like wildfire.’
‘Well,’ Miss Prichard replied comfortably, ‘I suppose it’s easier than a surname which might stray close to sounding like “peas” in the local accent, or “puce”, when I gather it simply ought to sound like “pews”?’
‘Precisely.’
My family called me Lucy.
My visitor was getting up to leave. Then the door from the stairs opened with a waft of damp air as a man of about thirty stepped in and moved quietly past us with only an idle eye for my visitor. The door for Mr Underhill’s office was pressed shut behind him. Miss Prichard turned back to me. Her eyes briefly widened to silently enquire whether this pleasantly built stranger had indeed been the great editor himself. I smiled and tipped my head. It created the right impression.
I told her, ‘Thank you for coming. I’ll pass on my notes and your papers to Mr Underhill or Mr Kathay later today. Either way, I’m sure you’ll hear from us soon.’
She let herself out. And I, in the moment of hearing her footfalls creak down to the turn and away into the small shop below, felt again the odd stillness that sometimes followed in the wake of any bustle in this building.
Anything that happened here by day passed away behind a closed door or into another room, and always the tired wooden floorboards added their solemn voices to the distant tale. They stayed with me at night too because there was another door in the wall between the stairs and my uncle’s office. It led to the attic where my bedroom lay.
My night-times were spent nestling in the space beyond the office kitchen and a storeroom that housed an awful lot of unsold books.
‘That was Doctor Bates’ landlady, wasn’t it?’
Mr Underhill’s question made me jump.
I found that I had left my seat but paused in the act of moving past my desk. I had hesitated with my fingertips just touching the base of my lamp. It was as if the severe pool of light had become my anchor in the midst of that curious sense of being very much alone after the woman had left.
I turned my head. He couldn’t have been aware of the silence of this place because it didn’t dwell behind his office door. Clouds were streaking across the sky outside his window but, even so, daylight was streaming in and brightening the floor beside his desk.
I told him, smiling, ‘Landlady to a doctor may be a fair description of her business, but appearances are deceptive. I vaguely remember the doctor who had the practice before the fellow who sold it to Doctor Bates. About twenty years ago he was the town’s greatest claim to fame. I think he found his way to developing a new vaccine. By the time I knew him he was a crabbed old man and adored her, so if the lady’s book even begins to stray into their little tale of rich and poor, it’ll be pretty inflammatory stuff.’
I was speaking with one of those cheery undertones that didn’t really mean to convey anything except perhaps my relief at being interrupted. Only then his mouth merely mustered something far short of his usual brief smile, before he asked me to join him in his office.
His reaction surprised me, actually. It wasn’t normal for him to embarrass me by making it seem as if I had been attempting to gossip about the lady’s unmarried state, and it wasn’t normal either for him to summon me to his desk.
Over the past two months since I had joined this office, we’d exchanged pleasantries about the weather or some future publication or other that he was editing, but very little more. My unbound cheeriness shocked him sometimes, I knew, but I could usually tell when that had happened because he’d retreat to his desk – which was, admittedly, just as he was doing at present – and I’d settle into collecting up whatever papers I had for him before moving to follow.
Usually, I was glad of it. Quiet reserve was what I was used to from him. It kept us safely clear of that other extreme of the office workplace – the one where my little slips into unchained friendliness would have been exploited as an excuse to be over familiar, as only a higher ranking male in business might. But he had never preyed on any mistakes of mine.
So I suppose what I’m trying to say is that in the main I found his uncomplicated style of company wonderfully restful. Whereas this moment was different, because it was unlike him to make me uncomfortable.
None of this was remotely exciting enough for Amy Briar who ran the bookshop below us. She couldn’t understand him at all.
She had told me that he had been one of those poor unfortunate men who had gone over in the first wave and been captured almost on the spot. He’d been a prisoner of war until the cessation of hostilities in ’45. Amy couldn’t comprehend why any man would choose, after all those years of incarceration, to settle in this small town business when he might have seized freedom with both hands and claimed every excitement with it.
I remember thinking simply: what a waste war had made of five years of life.