The Distant Hours

  ‘I know you did.’

  ‘Your mum . . .’ He tightened his lips against his sorrow and a part of me wanted to put him out of his misery. But I couldn’t. I’d waited such a long time to hear this story – it described my absence, after all – and I was greedy for any crumb he might share. He chose his next words with a care that was painful to watch. ‘Your mother took it especially badly. She blamed herself. She couldn’t accept that what happened – ’ he swallowed – ‘what happened to Daniel was an accident. She got it into her head that she’d brought it on herself somehow, that she deserved to lose a child.’

  I was speechless, and not just because what he described was so horrid, so sad, but because he was telling me at all. ‘But why would she think such a thing?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Daniel’s condition wasn’t hereditary.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It was just . . .’ I struggled for words that weren’t, ‘one of those things’, but failed.

  He folded over the cover of his spiral notebook, laid it evenly on top of the Mud Man and set them on the bedside table. Evidently, we wouldn’t be reading tonight. ‘Sometimes, Edie, a person’s feelings aren’t rational. At least, they don’t seem that way on the surface. You have to dig a little deeper to understand what lies at the base.’

  And I could only nod because the day had already been so bizarre and now my father was reminding me about the subtleties of the human condition and it was all just too topsy-turvy to compute.

  ‘I’ve always suspected it had something to do with her own mother; a fight they’d had years before, when your mum was still a teenager. They became estranged afterwards. I never knew the details, but whatever your gran said, Meredith remembered it when she lost Daniel.’

  ‘But Gran would never have hurt Mum, not if she could help it.’

  He shook his head. ‘You never can tell, Edie. Not with people. I never liked the way your gran and Rita used to gang up on your mother. It used to leave a bad taste in my mouth. The two of them setting against her, using you to create a wedge.’

  I was surprised to hear his reading of the situation; touched by the care in his voice as he told me. Rita had implied that Mum and Dad were snobs, that they’d looked down on the other side of the family, but to hear Dad tell it – well, I began to wonder whether things weren’t quite as clear as I’d supposed.

  ‘Life’s too short for rifts, Edie. One day you’re here, the next you’re not. I don’t know what’s happened between you and your mum, but she’s unhappy and that makes me unhappy, and I’m a not-quite-old-yet chap, recovering from a heart attack, whose feelings must be taken into account.’

  I smiled, and he did too. ‘Patch it up with her, Edie love.’ I nodded.

  ‘I need my mind clear if I’m to sort out this Mud Man business.’

  I sat on top of my bed later that night with the letting pages spread out before me, doodling circles around flats I hadn’t a hope of affording and wondering about the sensitive, funny, laughing, crying young woman I’d never had the chance to know. An enigma in one of those dated photographs – the square ones with the rounded corners and the soft, sun-shadowed colours – wearing faded bell-bottoms and a floral blouse, holding the hand of a little boy with a bowl haircut and leather sandals. A little boy who liked to jump, and whose death would soon despoil her.

  I thought, too, about Dad’s suggestion that Mum had blamed herself when Daniel died. Her conviction that she’d deserved to lose a child. Something in the way he’d said it, his use of the word ‘lost’ perhaps, his suspicion that it had something to do with a fight she’d had with Gran, made me think of Mum’s final letter home to her parents. Her pleas to be allowed to remain at Milderhurst, her insistence that she’d finally found the place where she belonged, her reassurances that her choice didn’t mean Gran had ‘lost’ her.

  Links were being made, I could feel them, but my stomach didn’t care one whit. It issued an unceremonious interruption, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten a bite since Herbert’s lasagne.

  The house was quiet and I went carefully along the dark corridor towards the stairs. I’d almost made it when I noticed the thin strip of light issuing from beneath Mum’s bedroom door. I hesitated, the promise I’d made to Dad ringing in my ears; the small matter of patching things up. I didn’t like my chances – there’s no one quite like Mum for skating airily along the surface of a frost – but it was important to Dad, so I drew a deep breath and knocked, ever so lightly, on the door. Nothing happened and for a moment I thought I might be spared, but then a soft voice came from the other side: ‘Edie? Is that you?’

  I opened the door and saw Mum sitting up in bed beneath my favourite painting of the full moon turning a liquorice-black sea to mercury. Her reading glasses were balanced on the tip of her nose and a novel called The Last Days in Paris leaned against her knees. Her expression as she blinked at me was one of strained uncertainty.

  ‘I saw the light under the door.’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep.’ She tilted the book towards me. ‘Reading helps sometimes.’

  I nodded agreement and neither of us spoke further; my stomach noticed the silence and took the opportunity to fill it. I was making movements to excuse myself and escape back towards the kitchen, when Mum said, ‘Close the door, Edie.’

  I did as she said.

  ‘Please. Come and sit down.’ She took off her glasses and hung them by the chain over her bedpost. I sat carefully, leaning against the wooden end-rail in the same place I’d occupied as a kid on birthday mornings.

  ‘Mum,’ I started, ‘I—’

  ‘You were right, Edie.’ She slid the bookmark into her novel, closed its cover but didn’t relinquish it to the bedside table. ‘I did take you back to Milderhurst. Many years ago now.’

  I was seized by a sudden urge to cry.

  ‘You were just a little girl. I didn’t think you’d remember. We weren’t there for long. As it happens, I lacked the courage to go any further than the front gates.’ She didn’t meet my eyes, hugging her novel firmly to her chest. ‘It was wrong what I did, pretending that you’d imagined the whole thing. It was just . . . such a shock when you asked. I was unprepared. I didn’t mean to lie about it. Can you forgive me?’

  Is it possible not to wilt before a request like that? ‘Of course.’

  ‘I loved that place,’ she said, lips drawing. ‘I never wanted to leave it.’

  ‘Oh, Mum.’ I wanted to reach out and touch her.

  ‘I loved her, too: Juniper Blythe.’ And then she looked up and the expression on her face was so lost, so forlorn, that my breath caught in my throat.

  ‘Tell me about her, Mum.’

  There was a pause, an enduring pause, and I could see by her eyes that she was far away and long ago. ‘She was . . . like no one else I’d ever met.’ Mum brushed a phantom strand of hair from her forehead. ‘She was enchanting. And I say that quite earnestly. She enchanted me.’

  I thought of the silver-haired woman I’d met within the shadowy corridor of Milderhurst; the utter transformation of her face when she smiled; Theo’s account of his brother’s love-mad letters. The little girl in the photograph, caught unawares and staring at the camera with those wide-apart eyes.

  ‘You didn’t want to come home from Milderhurst.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You wanted to stay with Juniper.’

  She nodded.

  ‘And Gran was angry.’

  ‘Oh, yes. She’d wanted me home for months, but I’d . . . I’d managed to persuade her that I should stay. Then the Blitz happened and they were pleased, I think, that I was safe. She sent my father to get me in the end, though, and I never went back to the castle. But I always wondered.’

  ‘About Milderhurst?’

  She shook her head. ‘About Juniper and Mr Cavill.’

  My skin actually tingled and I held the bedrail very tightly.

  ‘That was my favourite teacher’s name,’ she continu
ed. ‘Thomas Cavill. They became engaged, you see, and I never heard from either one of them again.’

  ‘Until the lost letter arrived from Juniper.’

  At mention of the letter, Mum flinched. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘And it made you cry.’

  ‘Yes.’ And for a long moment I thought she might do so again. ‘But not because it was sad, not the letter itself. Not really. All that time, you see, all the time that it was lost, I thought that she’d forgotten.’

  ‘Forgotten what?’

  ‘Why, me, of course.’ Mum’s lips were trembling. ‘I thought that they’d got married and forgotten all about me.’

  ‘But they hadn’t.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They hadn’t even got married, for that matter.’

  ‘No, but I didn’t know that then. I didn’t realize until you told me. All I knew was that I never heard from either one of them again. I’d sent something to Juniper, you see, something very important to me, and I was waiting to hear back from her. I waited and waited and checked the post twice every day, but nothing came.’

  ‘Did you write back to her? To find out why, to check that she’d received it?’

  ‘I almost did a number of times but it seemed so needy. Then I bumped into one of Mr Cavill’s sisters at the grocery shop and she told me that he’d run off to get married without telling any of them.’

  ‘Oh, Mum. I’m sorry.’

  She set her book down on the quilt beside her and said, softly, ‘I hated them both after that. I was so hurt. Rejection is a cancer, Edie. It eats away at a person.’ I shifted closer and took her hand in mine; she held on tightly. There were tears on her cheeks. ‘I hated her and I loved her and it hurt so very deeply.’ She reached into the pocket of her dressing gown and handed me an envelope. ‘And then this. Fifty years later.’

  It was Juniper’s lost letter. I took it from Mum, unable to speak, uncertain whether she meant for me to read it. I met her eyes and she nodded slightly.

  Fingers trembling, I opened it and began.

  Dearest Merry,

  My clever, clever chicken! Your story arrived safely and soundly and I wept when I read it. What a beautiful, beautiful piece! Joyous and terribly sad, and oh! so beautifully observed. What a clever young Miss you are! There is such honesty in your writing, Merry; a truthfulness to which many aspire, but which few attain. You must keep on; there is no reason why you shouldn’t do exactly what you wish with your life. There is nothing holding you back, my little friend.

  I would love to have been able to tell you this in person, to hand your manuscript back to you beneath the tree in the park, the one with the little diamonds of sunlight caught within its leaves, but I’m sorry to say that I won’t be back in London as I thought. Not for a time, at any rate. Things here have not worked out as I’d imagined. I can’t say too much, only that something has happened and it’s best for me to stay at home for now. I miss you, Merry. You were my first and only friend, did I ever tell you that? I think often of our time here together, especially that afternoon on the roof – do you remember? You’d only been with us a few days and hadn’t yet told me you were frightened of heights. You asked me what I was frightened of and I told you. I’d never spoken of it to anyone else.

  Goodbye, little chicken,

  Much love always,

  Juniper x

  I read it again, I had to, tracing the scratchy, cursive handwriting with my eyes. There was so much within the letter that made me curious, but one thing in particular to which my focus returned. Mum had shown it to me so I’d understand about Juniper, about their friendship, but all I could think of was Mum and me. My whole adult life had been spent happily immersed in the world of writers and their manuscripts: I’d brought countless anecdotes home to the dinner table even though I knew they were falling on deaf ears and I’d presumed myself since childhood an aberration. Not once had Mum even hinted that she’d harboured literary aspirations of her own. Rita had said as much, of course, but until that moment, with Juniper’s letter in hand and my mother watching me nervously, I don’t think I’d fully believed her. I handed the letter back to Mum, swallowing the clot of aggrievement that had settled in my throat. ‘You sent her a manuscript? Something you’d written?’

  ‘It was a childish fancy, something I grew out of.’

  But I could tell by the way she wouldn’t meet my eyes that it had been far more than that. I wanted to press harder, to ask if she ever wrote now, if she still had any of her work, if she’d ever show it to me. But I didn’t. She was gazing at the letter again, her expression so sad that I couldn’t. I said instead, ‘You were good friends.’

  ‘Yes.’

  My first and only friend, I loved her, Mum had said, Juniper had written. And yet they’d parted in 1941 and never made contact again. I thought carefully before saying, ‘What does Juniper mean, Mum? What do you think she means when she says that something happened?’

  Mum smoothed the letter. ‘I expect she means that Thomas ran off with another woman. You’re the one who told me that.’

  Which was true, but only because that’s what I’d thought at the time. I didn’t think it any more, not after speaking with Theo Cavill. ‘What about that bit at the end,’ I said, ‘about being frightened? What does she mean there?’

  ‘That is a bit odd,’ Mum agreed. ‘I suppose she was remembering that conversation as an instance of our friendship. We spent so much time together, did so many things – I’m not sure why she’d mention that especially.’ She looked up at me and I could tell that her puzzlement was genuine. ‘Juniper was an intrepid sort of person; it didn’t occur to her to fear the things that other people do. The only thing that scared her was some notion she had that she’d turn out like her father.’

  ‘Like Raymond Blythe? In what way?’

  ‘She never told me, not exactly. He was a confused old gentleman, and a writer, as was she – but he used to believe that his characters had come to life and were going to come after him. I ran into him once, by mistake. I took a wrong turn and wound up near his tower – he was rather terrifying. Perhaps that’s what she meant.’

  It was certainly possible; I cast my mind back to my visit to Milderhurst village and the stories I’d been told about Juniper. The lost time that she couldn’t account for later. Watching her father lose his mind in old age must have been particularly scary for a girl who suffered her own episodes. As it turned out, she’d been right to be afraid.

  Mum sighed and ruffled her hair with one hand. ‘I’ve made a mess of everything. Juniper, Thomas – now you’re looking at the letting pages because of me.’

  ‘Now that’s not true,’ I smiled. ‘I’m looking at the letting pages because I’m thirty years old and I can’t stay at home forever, no matter how much better the tea tastes when you make it.’

  She smiled too then, and I felt a tug of deep affection, a stirring sensation of something profound that had been sleeping for a very long time.

  ‘And I’m the one who made a mess. I shouldn’t have read your letters. Can you forgive me?’

  ‘You don’t need to ask.’

  ‘I just wanted to know you better, Mum.’

  She brushed my hand with a feather-light touch and I knew she understood. ‘I can hear your stomach grumbling from here, Edie,’ was all she said. ‘Come down to the kitchen and I’ll make you something nice to eat.’

  An Invitation and a New Edition

  And right when I was puzzling over what had gone on between Thomas and Juniper and whether I’d ever have the chance to find out, something completely unexpected happened. It was Wednesday lunchtime and Herbert and I were returning with Jess from our constitutional around Kensington Gardens. Returning with a lot more fuss than that description suggests, mind you: Jess doesn’t like to walk and she has no difficulty making her feelings known, registering protest by stopping every fifty feet or so to snout about in the gutters, chasing one mysterious odour after another.

&nb
sp; Herbert and I were cooling our heels during one such fossicking session, when he said, ‘And how’s life on the home front?’

  ‘Beginning to thaw, actually.’ I proceeded to give him the summary version of recent events. ‘I don’t want to speak too soon, but I believe we might’ve reached a new and brighter dawn.’

  ‘Are your plans to move on hold, then?’ He steered Jess away from a patch of suspiciously odorous mud.

  ‘Lord, no. My dad’s been making noises about buying me a personalized robe and putting a third hook in the bathroom once he’s able. I fear if I don’t make the break soon, I’ll be lost forever.’

  ‘Sounds dire. Anything in the letting pages?’

  ‘Loads. I’m just going to need to hit my boss for a significant pay rise to afford them.’

  ‘Fancy your chances?’

  I shifted my hand like a puppeteer.

  ‘Well,’ said Herbert, passing me Jess’s lead while he dug out his cigarettes. ‘Your boss may not be able to stretch to a pay rise, but he might have had an idea.’

  I raised a brow. ‘What sort of an idea?’

  ‘Rather a good one, I should think.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘All in good time, Edie, my love.’ He winked over the top of his cigarette. ‘All in good time.’

  We turned the corner into Herbert’s street to find the postman poised to feed some letters through the door. Herbert tipped his hat and took the clutch of envelopes beneath his arm, unlocking the door to let us in. Jess, as per habit, went straight for the cushioned throne beneath Herbert’s desk, arranging herself artfully before fixing us with a look of wounded indignation.

  Herbert and I have our own post-walk habit, so when he closed the door behind him and said, ‘Potlatch or post, Edie?’, I was already halfway to the kitchen.

  ‘I’ll make the tea,’ I said. ‘You read the mail.’