Mrs P’s Book of Secrets. Lorna Gray

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.’

      The item in question was a relic from my childhood. It was made of twenty four small matchboxes set in pairs so that twelve tiny cardboard drawers could be opened on each side. The end of each drawer had been numbered very carefully by hand. In my younger years the drawers had been filled with treats and puzzles but they had been left empty for a long time now.

      In truth, it was the sort of object that inspired that bittersweet sense of all those happy childhood Christmases. That sort of naivety could never be regained. I suppose it really ought to have found a new generation to enthral only there wasn’t one, and yet, somehow, the sight of it wasn’t as melancholy as all that.

      I set the calendar aside for the sake of more practical things such as opening the tin of baking powder for my aunt, and then she asked tentatively, ‘Lucy?’

      ‘Mmm?’

      ‘Will you answer my question?’

      ‘I’m snug, thank you. The attic is perfectly warm. Like toast.’

      ‘But?’

      I gave in. ‘All right. But I do have to ask … Did the floor joists always creak?’

      She laughed. ‘Like a sinking ship.’

      My aunt had a fabulous laugh. Her style of loveliness was the homely sort which dressed in neat blue frocks and chose yellow and brown patterned wallpaper for the stairs and hallway to match the lampshades which had little tassels dangling from them.

      The only part of her that was out of place these days was the unhappy curling of those beautiful fingers. They took up the sieve and I watched her with a parody of the fascination that as a child had made me covet this duty, and made her smile.

      She made me smile in my turn when she remarked far too knowingly, ‘If you’re worrying about noises in the attic, I suppose you’ve noticed the bang that goes off like a gunshot on the step at the turn every once in a while? It always caught me unawares when I used to work late there sometimes. I swear it would get worse whenever dusk descended.’

      I countered, ‘Don’t forget the pane of glass in the third window. It’s near my bed and it’s loose and it makes a scratching noise like fingernails. Only you don’t have to worry, dear Aunt,’ I confided quickly because she was beginning to look concerned.

      I knew it mattered to her that I was living alone there. ‘I’ve been making a habit of learning all the daytime noises so that I can cross them off at night. It’s becoming quite comforting now. Like growing up here and getting used to the way the rain thrummed on the roof, you know?’

      I was teasing her and preparing to be tutted at because as a child I had made an extraordinary amount of fuss about that rain – it was the one of the many variants of a joke we shared about the squeamishness of a girl born on my father’s farm. But she didn’t quite react in the cheerful way I had thought she would.

      She set the sieve down beside me, dusted off her hands and then startled me completely by saying in a tone entirely removed from any cosy childhood memory, ‘I’m sorry. I must just pop into the garden room to see Rob. He came in just now and put his head around the door, but he only stayed for a moment because we were talking and he didn’t like to interrupt. I expect George has gone along the hall to tell him that I’m keeping his supper warm.’

      She added distractedly, ‘Rob’s had a long day running back and forth on the train. We probably ought to have let him move in above the office and made you come home properly but, well, to be honest I think Rob’s better off where he is. You don’t mind, do you?’

      ‘Mr Underhill is home? Now?’ Then, ‘He overheard all that nonsense about the attic?’

      She didn’t notice my dismay for the simple reason that she had already passed out into