The Distant Hours (16 page)

‘Of what, Daddy?’

He’d frowned at the slippery bank as if the right words might be hidden there, between the reeds. ‘Why . . . That I, too, am solid, I expect.’

She hadn’t understood his meaning then; had only presumed him enamoured of the stick’s weight. She certainly hadn’t probed further: Percy’s position as walking mate was tenuous, the rules governing its continuation firm. Walking was, according to the doctrine of Raymond Blythe, a time for contemplation; on rare occasions, when both parties were amenable, for the discussion of history or poetry or nature. Chatterboxes were certainly not tolerated and the label once given was never lost, much to poor Saffy’s chagrin. Many was the time Percy had glanced back towards the castle as she and Daddy set off on their ramble, to see Saffy scowling from the nursery window. Percy had always twinged in sympathy with her sister, but never sufficiently to stay behind. She figured that the favour was just reward for the countless times Saffy held Daddy’s ear, making him smile with amusement as she read aloud the clever little stories she’d written; more recently it was for the months they’d spent together, the two of them, immediately after his return from war, when Percy had been sent away with scarlet fever.

Percy came to the first bridge and stopped, resting her bicycle against the railing. She couldn’t see the castle from here, not yet; it remained hidden in the clutch of its woods and wouldn’t appear fully until she reached the second, smaller bridge. She leaned over the edge and scanned the shallow brook below. The water swirled and whispered where the banks widened, hesitating a little before continuing on towards the woods. Percy’s reflection, dark against the white-reflected sky, wavered in the smoother, deeper middle.

Beyond was the hop field in which she’d smoked her first cigarette. She and Saffy together, giggling over the stolen case, pinched from one of Daddy’s more pompous friends while he roasted his hammy ankles by the lake on a stifling summer’s day.

A cigarette . . .

Percy felt the breast pocket of her uniform, the firm cylinder beneath her fingertips. Having rolled the damned thing, it was as well to enjoy it, surely? She had a feeling that once she entered the castle’s fray a quiet smoke would be but a distant dream.

She turned, resting against the railing, struck a match and inhaled, holding her breath for a moment before letting go. God, how she adored tobacco. Percy sometimes suspected she would be happy to live alone, to never speak another word to a single living soul, on condition she could do so here at Milderhurst with a lifetime’s supply of cigarettes for company.

She hadn’t always been so wretchedly solitary. And even now she knew the fantasy – though certainly not without its comforts – to be just that. A fantasy. She could never bear to be without Saffy, not for long. Nor Juniper. It had been four months since their little sister took herself to London, and the two of them left at home had behaved in the interim like a pair of handkerchief-twisting old dearies: speculating as to whether she had sufficient warm socks, sending fresh eggs to London with whomever they knew was making the journey, reading her letters aloud over the breakfast table in an attempt to discern her mood, her health, her mind. Letters, incidentally, in which no mention – veiled or otherwise – was made of the possibility of marriage, thank you very much, Mrs Potts! The suggestion was laughable to anyone who knew Juniper. While some women were formed for marriage and prams in the hallway, others, most decidedly, were not. Daddy had known that, which is why he’d arranged things the way he had, to ensure that Juniper would be taken care of after he was gone.

Percy huffed with distaste and flattened her spent cigarette beneath her boot. Thoughts of the postmistress reminded her of the items she’d collected and she pulled them from her bag, an excuse to linger in the calm of her own company a little longer.

There were three pieces in total, just as Mrs Potts had advised: a parcel from Meredith to Juniper, a typed envelope addressed to Saffy, and another letter with her own name written across its front. The script, with its dizzy loops, could belong to none other than Cousin Emily, and Percy tore open the envelope eagerly, angling the top page so it caught the remaining light and she could make out the words.

With the exception of the time she’d dyed Saffy’s hair blue, Emily had borne the esteemed title of Favourite Cousin throughout the Blythe twins’ childhood. That her only challenge came from the pompous Cambridge cousins, the strange, thin cousins from the north, and her own younger sister, Pippa, whose unfortunate tendency to weep at the slightest provocation earned her immediate disqualification, rendered the honour no less heartfelt. A visit from Emily had been cause for great celebration at Milderhurst and without her the twins’ childhood would have been a rather more stagnant place. Percy and Saffy were very close, as twins couldn’t help but be, but they were not the sort whose bond excluded all others. Indeed, they were a pair whose friendship was improved by the incorporation of a third. Growing up, the village had been full of children with whom they might have played if not for Daddy’s suspicion of outsiders. Darling Daddy, he’d been a terrible snob in his way, only he’d have been shocked to be labelled as such. It wasn’t money or status that he admired, but brains; talent was the currency with which he sought to surround himself.

Emily, blessed with both, had received the Raymond Blythe stamp of approval and had thus been summoned to stay at Milderhurst every summer. She’d even earned inclusion in the Blythe Family Evenings, a semi-regular tournament instituted by Grandmother when Daddy was a boy. The call would go out on the auspicious morning – ‘Blythe Family Evening!’ – and anticipation would animate the household all day. Dictionaries were located, pencils and wits were sharpened, and finally, when dinner was done with, everyone would gather in the good parlour. Contestants would take up position at the table or in a favourite armchair, and finally Daddy would make his entrance. He always withdrew from general activity on tournament day, secreting himself away in the tower to produce his list of challenges, and their announcement was something of a ceremony. The specifics of the game varied, but at its most general a location, a character type, and a word would be supplied, then Cook’s largest egg-timer flipped, and the race would be on to craft the most entertaining fiction.

Percy, who was bright but not a wit, who loved to listen but not to tell, who wrote slowly and punctiliously when she was nervous and made everything sound impossibly starched, had dreaded and despised these evenings until, quite by accident, when she was twelve years old, she discovered the amnesty accorded to the game’s official score-keeper. While Emily and Saffy – whose devotion to one another only fuelled their competition – sweated over their stories, furrowed their brows, bit their lips, and raced their pencils across pages, vying hotly for Daddy’s praise, Percy sat serenely awaiting entertainment. For written expression they were evenly matched, Saffy perhaps a little stronger in vocabulary; however, Emily’s wicked humour gave her a distinct advantage and for a time it had been clear that Daddy suspected the family’s gift of flowering specially in her. That was before Juniper was born, of course, with a precocious talent that swept all other claims aside.

If Emily felt the chill when Daddy’s attention shifted orbit, her recovery had been swift. Her visits had continued happily and regularly for many years, long beyond childhood, until that last summer in 1925, the last before she was married and it all ended. It was to Emily’s great advantage, Percy had always supposed, that despite her talents she’d never possessed the artist’s temperament. She was too even-tempered, too good at sports, too jolly and well liked to walk the writer’s path. Not even the merest whiff of neuroses. Much better for Emily the fate that had found her after Daddy’s focus waned: marriage to a good sort, a clutch of freckle-nosed sons, a grand house overlooking the sea, and now, according to her correspondence, a pair of amorous pigs. The entire letter was little more than a collection of anecdotes from Emily’s Devonshire village: news about her husband and boys, adventures of the local ARP officers, her elderly neighbour’s obsession with her stirrup pump, yet Percy laughed as she read it. She was still smiling when she reached the end, folded the letter neatly and tucked it back into its envelope.

Then she tore it in half and in half again, pushing it deep within her pocket as she continued up the driveway. She made a mental note to remove the shreds to her wastepaper bin before her uniform found its way into the laundry pile. Better yet, she’d burn the pieces that very afternoon and Saffy would be none the wiser.

That Juniper, the only known Blythe not to occupy the nursery in childhood, should wake on the morning of her thirteenth birthday, toss a few valued possessions into a pillowcase, then head upstairs to stake her claim on the sleeping attic, had surprised no one. The perfect contrariness of the event was so in keeping with the Juniper they knew and loved that whenever anyone spoke of it, in years to come, the progression seemed utterly natural and they found themselves debating the very suggestion that the whole thing hadn’t been planned in advance. For her part, Juniper said very little on the subject, either at the time or later: one day she slept in her small annexed room on the second floor, the next she presided over the attic. What more
could
one say?

More telling than Juniper’s removal to the nursery, Saffy always thought, was the way in which she’d dragged an invisible cape of curious glamour after her. The attic, an outpost in the castle, the place to which children had traditionally been banished until by age or attribute they were deemed worthy of adult regard, a room of low ceilings and feisty mice, skull-freezing winters and simmering summers, the outlet through which all chimneys passed on their way to freedom, suddenly seemed to hum. People with no reason at all to subject themselves to the climb began to gravitate to the nursery. ‘Just going to pop my head in,’ they would say, before disappearing up the staircase, only to reappear somewhat sheepishly an hour or so later. Saffy and Percy would exchange an amused glance and entertain one another with guesses as to what on earth the poor unwitting guest had been doing up there when one thing was certain: Juniper had not been playing hostess. It wasn’t that their little sister was rude, only that she wasn’t particularly affable either, and there was no company she enjoyed as much as her own. Which was a good thing, given that she’d been afforded very little opportunity to meet anyone else. There were no cousins her age, no family friends, and Daddy had insisted she should be educated at home. The best Saffy and Percy could figure out was that Juniper ignored her visitors completely, leaving them to potter unfettered in the busy chaos of her room until finally they tired sufficiently and took it upon themselves to leave. It was one of Juniper’s strangest, most indefinable gifts and one she’d possessed all her life: a magnetism so strong it was worthy of study and medical categorization. Even people who didn’t like Juniper wanted to be liked by her.

The last thing on Saffy’s mind, however, as she climbed the uppermost staircase for the second time that day, was unravelling the mysteries of her little sister’s charm. The storm was gathering faster than Mr Potts’s Home Guard patrol, and the attic windows were wide open. She’d noticed them when she was sitting in the henhouse, stroking Helen-Melon’s feathers and fretting over Lucy’s sudden sternness. A light’s ignition had drawn her attention and she’d glanced up to see Lucy collecting the hospital dollies from the sewing room. She’d followed the housekeeper’s progress – a shadow as she passed the second-floor window, the spill of lingering daylight as she opened the hallway door, then a minute or so’s passing before a light flickered in the upper staircase that led to the attic. And that’s when Saffy had remembered the windows. She’d opened them herself that morning in the hope that a day’s fresh air might clear away months of stagnation. It had been a fond hope and one whose fulfilment Saffy doubted, but it was better, surely, to try and fail than to throw one’s hands in the air. Now, though, with the smell of rain on the breeze, she needed to get them shut. She’d watched for the light to be extinguished in the stairwell, waited another five minutes, then, judging it safe to venture upstairs without fear of meeting Lucy, headed inside.

Taking great care to avoid the third step from the top – the last thing Saffy needed tonight was the little uncle’s ghost making mischief – she pushed open the nursery door and switched on the light. It glowed dully, as did all the Milderhurst electrics, and she paused a while in the doorway. Murky light aside, it was her custom when considering a foray into Juniper’s domain. There were few rooms on earth, Saffy suspected, where it was as prudent to plot a course before attempting entry. Squalor was perhaps going a little too far, but only a little.

The smell, she noticed, remained; the blend of stale tobacco smoke and ink, wet dog, and feral mouse, had been too stubborn for a single day’s breeze. The doggy odour was easily explained – Juniper’s mutt Poe had languished in her absence, splitting his moping between the top of the driveway and the end of her bed. As to the mice, Saffy wasn’t sure whether Juniper had been feeding them on purpose or if the little opportunists were merely benefiting from her slatternly occupation of the attic. Either was possible. And, although she wouldn’t confess it too widely, Saffy quite liked the mousy smell; it reminded her of Clementina, whom she’d bought from the Harrods pet department on the morning of her eighth birthday. Tina had been a dear little companion, right up until the unfortunate altercation with Percy’s snake, Cyrus. Rats were a much-maligned breed, cleaner than people gave them credit for and truly companionable, the nobility of the rodent world.