The Distant Hours

  ‘I do. Very much.’

  ‘Saffy altered it for me. She’s a wonder with a sewing machine. If you show her any picture you fancy she can work out how it’s made, even the newest Parisian designs, the pictures in Vogue. She’s been working on my dress for weeks but it’s a secret. Percy wouldn’t approve, on account of the war, and on account of her being Percy, but I know you won’t tell.’ She smiled then, and it was so enigmatic that my breath caught.

  ‘I won’t say a word.’

  We stood for a moment, each observing the other. My earlier fear had dissipated now, and for that I was glad. The reaction had been unfounded, an instinct only, and I was embarrassed by its memory. What was there to fear, after all? This lost woman in the lonely corridor was Juniper Blythe, the same person who had once upon a time chosen my mother from a clutch of frightened children, who had given her a home when the bombs were falling on London, who had never stopped waiting and hoping for a long-ago sweetheart to arrive.

  Her chin lifted as I watched her, and she exhaled thoughtfully. Apparently, as I’d been reaching my conclusions she’d been drawing her own. I smiled, and it seemed to decide her in some way. She straightened, then started towards me again, slowly but with clear purpose. Feline, that’s what she was. Her every movement contained the same elastic mixture of caution and confidence, languor that masked an underlying intent.

  She stopped only when she was close enough that I could smell the naphthalene on her dress, the stale cigarette smoke on her breath. Her eyes searched mine, her voice was a whisper. ‘Can you keep a secret?’

  I nodded, which made her smile; the gap between her two front teeth was impossibly girlish. She took my hands in hers as if we were friends in the schoolyard, her palms were smooth and cool. ‘I have a secret but I’m not supposed to tell.’

  ‘OK.’

  She cupped her hand like a child and leaned in close, pressing it against my ear. Her breath tickled. ‘I have a lover.’ And when she pulled away her old lips formed a youthful expression of lustful excitement that was grotesque and sad and beautiful all at once. ‘His name is Tom. Thomas Cavill, and he’s asked me to marry him.’

  The sadness I felt for her came upon me in a rush, almost too great to bear, as I realized she was stuck in the moment of her great disappointment. I longed for Percy to return so that our conversation might be ended.

  ‘Promise you won’t breathe a word of it?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘I’ve told him yes, but shhh – ’ a finger pressed against her smiling lips – ‘my sisters don’t know yet. He’s coming soon to have dinner.’ She grinned, old lady teeth in a powder-smooth face. ‘We’re going to announce our engagement.’

  I saw then that she wore something around her finger. Not a ring, not a real one. This was a crude impostor, silver but dull, lumpy, like a piece of aluminium foil rolled and pressed into shape.

  ‘And then we’re going to dance, dance, dance . . .’ She started to sway, humming along to music that was playing, perhaps, in her head. It was the same tune I’d heard earlier, floating in the cold pockets of the corridors. The name eluded me then, no matter how tantalizingly close it came. The recording, as it must have been, had stopped some time ago, but Juniper listed regardless, her eyelids closed, her cheeks coloured with a young woman’s anticipation.

  I worked on a book once for an elderly couple writing a history of their life together. The woman had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s but was yet to begin the final harrowing descent, and they’d decided to record her memories before they blew away like bleached leaves from an autumn tree.

  The project took six months to complete, during which time I watched her slip helplessly through forgetting towards emptiness. Her husband became ‘that man over there’ and the vibrant, funny woman with the fruity language, who’d argued and grinned and interrupted, was silenced.

  No, I’d seen dementia, and this wasn’t it. Wherever Juniper was, it wasn’t empty, and she’d forgotten very little. Yet there was something the matter; she clearly wasn’t well. Every elderly woman I’ve known has told me, at some point, and with varying degrees of wistfulness, that she’s eighteen years old on the inside. But it isn’t true. I’m only thirty and I know that. The stretch of years leaves none unmarked: the blissful sense of youthful invincibility peels away and responsibility brings its weight to bear.

  Juniper wasn’t like that, though. She genuinely didn’t realize she was old. In her mind the war still raged and, judging by the way she was swaying, so did her hormones. She was such an unnatural hybrid, old and young, beautiful and grotesque, now and then. The effect was breathtaking and it was eerie and I suffered a sudden surge of revulsion, followed immediately by deep shame at having felt such an unkind thing—

  Juniper seized my wrists; her eyes had reeled wide open. ‘But of course!’ she said, catching a giggle in a net of long, pale fingers. ‘You already know about Tom. If it weren’t for you, he and I would never have met!’

  Whatever I might have said in reply was swallowed then as every clock within the castle began to chime the hour. What an uncanny symphony it was, room after room of clocks, calling to one another as they marked the passing time. I felt those chimes deep within my body and the effect spread icy and instant across my skin, utterly unnerving me.

  ‘I really do have to go now, Juniper,’ I said, when finally they stopped. My voice, I noticed, was hoarse.

  A slight noise behind me and I glanced over my shoulder, hoping to see Percy returning.

  ‘Go?’ Juniper’s face sagged. ‘But you’ve just arrived. Where are you going?’

  ‘Back to London.’

  ‘London?’

  ‘Where I live.’

  ‘London.’ A change came over her then, swift as a storm cloud and just as dark. She reached out, gripping my arm with surprising strength and I saw something I hadn’t before: spider-web scars, silvered with age, scribbled along her pale wrists. ‘Take me with you.’

  ‘I . . . I can’t do that.’

  ‘But it’s the only way. We’ll go and find Tom. He might be there, up in his little flat, sitting by the windowsill . . .’

  ‘Juniper —’

  ‘You said you’d help me.’ Her voice was tight, hateful. ‘Why didn’t you help me?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t—’

  ‘You’re supposed to be my friend; you said you’d help me. Why didn’t you come?’

  ‘Juniper, I think you’re confusing me—’

  ‘Oh, Meredith,’ she whispered, her breath smoky and ancient. ‘I’ve done a terrible, terrible thing.’

  Meredith. My stomach turned like a rubber glove pulled inside out too fast.

  Hurried footsteps and the dog appeared, followed closely by Saffy. ‘Juniper! Oh, June, there you are.’ Her voice was drenched with relief as she reached her sister’s side. She wrapped Juniper in a gentle embrace, drawing back at length to scan her face. ‘You mustn’t run off like that. I’ve been so worried; I looked everywhere. I didn’t know where you’d got to, my little love.’

  Juniper was shaking; I expect I was too. Meredith . . . The word rang in my ears, sharp and insistent as a mosquito drone. I told myself it was nothing, a coincidence, the meaningless ravings of a sad, mad old woman, but I’m not a good liar and I had no chance of fooling myself.

  As Saffy brushed stray hair from Juniper’s forehead, Percy arrived. She stopped abruptly, leaning on her cane for support as she surveyed the scene. The twins exchanged a glance, similar to the one I’d witnessed earlier in the yellow parlour that had so perplexed me: this time, however, it was Saffy who broke away first. She’d managed, somehow, to penetrate the knot of Juniper’s arms and was holding her little sister’s hand tightly in her own. ‘Thank you for staying with her,’ she said to me, voice quavering. ‘It was kind of you, Edith – ’

  ‘E-dith,’ Juniper echoed, but she didn’t look my way.

  ‘ – she gets confused and wanders sometimes. We wa
tch her closely, but . . .’ Saffy shook her head shortly, the gesture communicating the impossibility of living one’s life for another.

  I nodded, unable to find the right words to reply. Meredith. My mother’s name. My thoughts, hundreds of them, swarmed at once against the current of time, picking over the past few months for meaning, until finally they arrived en masse at my parents’ home. A chilly afternoon in February, an uncooked chicken, the arrival of a letter that made Mum cry.

  ‘E-dith,’ said Juniper again. ‘E-dith, E-dith . . .’

  ‘Yes, darling,’ said Saffy, ‘that’s Edith, isn’t it? She’s come to visit.’

  I knew then what I’d suspected all along. Mum had been lying when she told me Juniper’s message was little more than a greeting, just as she’d lied about our visit to Milderhurst. But why? What had happened between Mum and Juniper Blythe? If Juniper was to be believed, Mum had made a promise that she’d failed to keep; something to do with Juniper’s fiancé, with Thomas Cavill. If that was the case, and if the truth really was as dreadful as Juniper suggested, the letter might have been an accusation. Was that it? Was it suppressed guilt that had made my mother cry?

  For the first time since I’d arrived at Milderhurst I longed to be free of the house and its old sorrow, to see the sun and feel the wind on my face and smell something other than rancid mud and mothballs. To be alone with this new puzzle, so that I might begin to unpick it.

  ‘I hope she didn’t offend you . . .’ Saffy was still speaking; I could hear her through my own reeling thoughts as though she was far away, on the other side of a thick and heavy door. ‘Whatever she said, she didn’t mean it. She says things sometimes, funny things, meaningless things . . .’

  Her voice tapered off but the silence left behind it was unsettled. She was watching me, unspoken sentiments in her eyes, and I realized that it wasn’t concern alone that weighted her features. There was something else hiding in her face, particularly when she glanced again at Percy. Fear, I realized. They were frightened, both of them.

  I looked at Juniper, hiding behind her own crossed arms. Did I imagine she was standing especially still, listening carefully, waiting to see how I’d answer, what I’d tell them?

  I braved a smile, hoping against hope that it might pass for casual. ‘She didn’t say anything,’ I said, then shrugged my shoulders for good measure. ‘I was just admiring her pretty dress.’

  The surrounding air seemed to shift with the force of the twins’ relief. Juniper’s profile registered no change, and I was left with a strange, creeping sensation, the vague awareness that I’d somehow made a mistake. That I ought to have been honest, to have told the twins all that Juniper had said, the cause of her upset. But having failed thus far to mention my mum and her evacuation, I wasn’t sure that I could find the necessary words—

  ‘Marilyn Bird has arrived,’ said Percy bluntly.

  ‘Oh, but things do have a habit of happening all at once,’ said Saffy.

  ‘She’s come to drive you back to the farmhouse. You’re due in London, she says.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Thank God.

  ‘Such a shame,’ said Saffy. Through sterling effort and, I suppose, many years of practice, she managed to sound completely normal. ‘We had hoped to offer you tea. We have so few visitors.’

  ‘Next time,’ said Percy.

  ‘Yes,’ Saffy agreed. ‘Next time.’

  It seemed unlikely, to say the least. ‘Thank you again, for the tour . . .’

  And as Percy led me back along a mysterious route, to Mrs Bird and the promise of normality, Saffy and Juniper retreated in the opposite direction, their voices skirting back along the cold stones.

  ‘I’m sorry, Saffy, I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. I just . . . I forgot . . .’ The words broke then into sobs. A weeping so wretched I wanted to slam my hands against my ears.

  ‘Come along now, dearest, there’s no need for all that.’

  ‘But I’ve done a terrible thing, Saffy. A terrible, terrible thing.’

  ‘Nonsense, little dear, put it out of your mind. Let’s have our tea, shall we?’ The patience, the kindness in Saffy’s voice made a small chamber within my chest clench tight. I think that’s when I first grasped the interminable length of time that she and Percy had been making such reassurances, wiping the confusion from their younger sister’s ageing brow with the same judicious care a parent gives their child, but without the promise that the burden would some day ease. ‘We’ll get you back into something sensible, and then we’ll all have tea. You and Percy and I. Things always look better after a cup of nice, strong tea, don’t they?’

  Mrs Bird was waiting beneath the domed ceiling at the entrance to the castle, puffed up with apologies. She fawned on Percy Blythe, grimacing dramatically as she lambasted the poor unwitting villagers who’d held her up.

  ‘It is of no matter, Mrs Bird,’ said Percy in the same imperious tone a Victorian nanny might use to address a tiresome charge. ‘I enjoyed leading the tour myself.’

  ‘Well of course you did. For old times’ sake. It must be lovely for you to—’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Such a shame that the tours were ended. Understandable, of course, and it’s a credit to you and Miss Saffy that you managed to keep them going for so long, especially with so much else on your—’

  ‘Quite.’ Percy Blythe straightened and I became aware suddenly that she didn’t like Mrs Bird. ‘Now if you’ll both excuse me.’ She bowed her head towards the open door, through which the outside world seemed a brighter, noisier, faster place than when I’d left it.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said before she could disappear, ‘for showing me your beautiful home.’

  She eyed me a moment longer than seemed necessary, then retreated along the corridor, cane beating softly beside her. After a few paces she stopped and turned, barely visible in the cloaking dim. ‘It was beautiful, you know. Once upon a time. Before.

  ONE

  October 29th, 1941

  One thing was certain: there’d be no moon tonight. The sky was thick, a roiling mass of grey, white and yellow, folded together like victims of a painter’s palette knife. Percy licked the tobacco paper and tamped it shut, rolling the cigarette between her fingertips to seal it. An aeroplane droned overhead, one of theirs, a patrol plane heading south towards the coast. They had to send one, of course, but there’d be nothing to report, not on a night like this, not now.

  From where she leaned, her back against the van, Percy followed the plane’s progress, squinting as the brown insect grew small and smaller. The glare brought on a yawn and she rubbed her eyes until they stung pleasantly. When she opened them again the plane was gone.

  ‘Oi! Don’t you go marking my polished bonnet and wings there with your lounging.’

  Percy turned and rested her elbow on the van’s roof. It was Dot, grinning as she loped from the station door.

  ‘You should be thanking me,’ Percy called back. ‘Save you twiddling your thumbs next shift.’

  ‘True enough. Officer’ll have me washing tea towels otherwise.’

  ‘Or giving another round of stretcher demonstrations to the wardens.’ Percy cocked a brow. ‘What could be better?’

  ‘Mending the blackout curtains, for one.’

  Percy winced. ‘That is dire.’

  ‘Stick around here much longer and you’ll be needle in hand,’ warned Dot, arriving to lean beside Percy. ‘Not much else doing.’

  ‘He’s heard then?’

  ‘RAF boys sent word just now. Nothing on the horizon, not tonight.’

  ‘Guessed as much.’

  ‘Not just the weather, neither. Officer says the stinking Bosch are too busy marching for Moscow to bother much with us.’

  ‘More fool them,’ said Percy as she inspected her cigarette. ‘Winter’s advancing faster than they are.’

  ‘I suppose you’re planning on hanging about anyway, making a nuisance of yourself in the hopes Jerry gets confused and drops a load near
by?’

  ‘Thought about it,’ said Percy, tucking the cigarette into her pocket and swinging her bag over her shoulder. ‘Decided against. Not even an invasion could keep me here tonight.’

  Dot’s eyes widened. ‘What’s this then? Handsome fellow asked you to go dancing, has he?’

  ‘No such luck; good news all the same.’

  ‘Oh?’

  The bus arrived and Percy had to shout to be heard over its motor as she climbed aboard. ‘My little sister’s coming home tonight.’

  Percy had no greater lust for warfare than the next person – indeed, she’d had more occasion than most to witness its horrors – which was why she never, ever, acknowledged aloud the strange kernel of disappointment that had festered deep inside her since the cessation of nightly raids. It was utterly absurd, she knew, to feel nostalgia for a period of abject danger and destruction; anything other than cautious optimism was damn near sacrilege and yet an appalling temper had kept her awake these past months, ears trained on the quiet night skies above her.

  If there was one thing on which Percy prided herself it was her ability to exercise pragmatism in all matters – Lord knew, someone had to – thus she’d determined to Get to the Bottom of Things. To find a way to still the little clock that threatened to tick away inside her without opportunity ever to strike. Over the course of weeks, taking great care never to reveal her inward state of flux, Percy had evaluated her situation, observing her feelings from all angles before finally reaching the conclusion that she was, quite clearly, several shades of crazy.

  It was only to be expected; madness was something of a family condition, as surely as the gift for artistry and the likelihood of long limbs. Percy had hoped to avoid it, but there you are. Inheritance was a damn good shot. And if she was honest, hadn’t she always supposed it a mere matter of time before her own unhinging?