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For all the people who have contributed to the making of this book

Chapter 1
December 1946, Moreton-in-Marsh

My grandmother and mother performed a rather unusual war service. Through the medium of regular séances, they worked – and still do work – to guide the wandering souls of poor lost soldiers out of the filthy quagmire of war.

There were some, they say, who found the shock of their violent end so sudden and so disorientating that it bewildered their soul. The living senses might have made the switch from the roar of bombs to the silence of the hereafter, but the shadow of the men they had been would sometimes remain there still. Detached from the nightmare of the battlefield, but bound to it; staggered and confused.

The process of reaching them called for no miasma, no rattling tables. My grandmother and her little gathering of fellow spiritualists simply treasured the serious belief that they were extending a kindly hand to those rudderless souls, before steering them first towards acceptance, and secondly into peace.

When my husband was killed, I refused flatly to let them do it.

I couldn’t bear to think of his soul being stranded in those dismal terms. And not because I was selfish, or enjoyed the kind of superior cynicism that masquerades as lucid reason. Everyone has their own way of dealing with loss. But for me it felt as if real selfishness would dwell in that sort of calling out of his name. I would never stand by while they did it without me, but if I joined them and some part of it worked, my husband might learn the truth from me – that I didn’t want to let him go.

Because, real or not, it would never feel like whispering a tender farewell to him across the divide. It would be like calling him back.

It would feel like I was telling him flatly that I can grasp him wherever he is, and that I mean to shackle him to me, when surely, of all things, I have to trust in the deeper workings of my heart and believe he has already found his release.

So, for now, I keep to life and leave my husband well alone.

I was first carried home to this place by that feeling eight weeks ago. This was the time, after all, when our newfound peace was stumbling towards its second Christmas in all the monotony of rationing. And in the spirit of the year’s end and the time of darkness and so on, it has lately seemed to me that nowhere was a better light shining for me than in my uncle’s little book printing business in the north Cotswolds town of Moreton-in-Marsh.

I was enjoying the process of reacquainting myself with his busy little first floor office, above the street front shop and the narrow printworks in the outbuildings behind. My uncle wasn’t staid, but his building was.

The rooms for Kershaw and Kathay Book Press Ltd ought to have belonged to a legal office or an academic’s study. Every surface was made of dark wood, and quiet studiousness had taken root in the dry corners behind the cabinets.

There were three of us working up here on the first floor. Robert Underhill was my uncle’s second-in-command, and he had the office that ran in a narrow line along the end wall from front to back. He also had possession of one of the fireplaces and the first of the windows that overlooked the street. For the few hours when the winter’s day outside grew bright enough to have any effect, white lines showed in the warped gaps between the wooden panels that divided his space from mine.

My uncle’s office occupied the other two windows at the front of the building. My desk was set in 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.