The Distant Hours (22 page)

A noise from upstairs and Percy froze, scrutinizing the ceiling. The castle was full of noises so it was a matter of sorting through the usual suspects. Too loud for the caretakers, surely? There it was again. Footsteps, she figured; but were they getting closer? Was Saffy coming downstairs? A long, breath-held moment in which Percy remained absolutely still; motionless until she was satisfied, finally, that the footsteps were moving away.

She stood up then, carefully, and scanned the kitchen with rather more desperation than she had before; still no sign of the bloody laundry. Brooms and a mop in the corner, wellington boots by the back door, the sink containing nothing more than soaking bowls, and on the stovetop a saucepan and a pot—

A pot! Of course. Surely she’d heard Saffy talking before about pots and washing, right before the topic turned to immovable stains and a lecture on Percy’s own lack of care. Percy hurried to the stove, peered inside the large steel container, and bingo! What relief – the trousers.

With a grin, she heaved out the sodden uniform, twisted it back and forth to find the collapsed pockets and squirrelled her hand into first one, then the other . . .

Blood drained instantly from her face: the pockets were empty. The letter was gone.

More noise from upstairs: footsteps again; Saffy pacing. Percy swore under her breath, berated herself again for her stupidity, then shut the hell up as she tracked her sister’s whereabouts.

The footsteps were coming nearer. Then there was a banging sound. The footsteps changed direction. Percy strained harder. Was someone at the door?

Silence. In particular, no urgent call from Saffy. Which meant no one had knocked, for one thing was certain – Percy’s absence would not be tolerated once guests arrived.

Perhaps it was the shutter again; she’d only tapped it lightly back into place with the small wrench – without a tool set handy there’d been little else she could do – and it was still blowing a gale outside. Add that to the list of things to mend tomorrow.

Percy took a deep breath and let out a dispirited sigh. She watched the trousers sink back into the pot. It was after eight o’clock, Juniper was already late, the letter could be anywhere. Maybe – her spirits lifted – Saffy had taken it for rubbish? It was torn, after all; perhaps the letter had already been burned, and was little more now than ashes in the Aga.

Short of running a fine-tooth comb over the entire house, or asking Saffy directly what had become of it – Percy winced just to imagine that conversation – she couldn’t see that there was anything more she could do. Which meant she might as well go back upstairs and wait for Juniper.

A great crash of thunder then, loud enough that even in the bowels of the house Percy shivered. In its wake, another, softer noise, closer. Outside perhaps, almost like someone scratching along the wall, hammering periodically, looking for the back door.

Juniper’s guest was due about now.

It was possible, Percy supposed, that a person unfamiliar with the castle, approaching it by night, during the blackout, in the midst of a great rain storm, might find themselves seeking entrance elsewhere than the front door. Slim though the possibility was, once she’d considered it Percy knew she had to check. She couldn’t jolly well leave him floundering out there.

Stitching her lips tight, she took a last glance about the kitchen – dry pantry goods ready for use on the bench, a scrunched tea towel, a saucepan lid: nothing even resembling a stack of torn paper – then she dug the battery torch from the emergency kit, pulled a mackintosh over her dress, and opened the back door.

Juniper was almost two hours late and Saffy was officially worried. Oh, she knew it was bound to be a delay on the train line, a punctured bus tyre, a roadblock, something ordinary, and certainly there’d be no enemy planes complicating matters on a sodden night like this; nonetheless, sensible reasoning had no place in the worries of a big sister. Until Juniper walked through that front door, life and limbs intact, a significant part of Saffy’s mind would remain encased by fear.

And what news, she wondered with a nibble on her bottom lip, would her baby sister bring with her when she did, finally, spill across the threshold? Saffy had believed it when she’d reassured Percy that Juniper wasn’t engaged to be married, she really had, but in the time since Percy had disappeared so abruptly, leaving her alone in the good parlour, she’d grown less and less certain. The doubts had started when she’d joked about the dubious spectacle of Juniper in white lace. Even as Percy was nodding agreement, the
frou-frou
image that had flashed into Saffy’s mind was undergoing transmutation – a reflection in rippling water – into another, far less unlikely vision. One Saffy already held within her imagination and had done since she’d started work on the dress upstairs.

From there, the pieces had fallen quickly into place. Why else had Juniper asked her to alter the dress? Not for something as ordinary as a dinner, but for a wedding. Her own wedding, to this Thomas Cavill who was coming tonight to meet them. A man they hitherto had known nothing about. Indeed, the extent of their knowledge now was limited to the letter Juniper had sent advising that she’d invited him to dinner. They’d met during an air raid, they shared a mutual friend, he was a teacher and a writer; Saffy racked her brains to remember the rest, the precise words Juniper had used, the turn of phrase that had left them with the impression that the gentleman in question had been responsible, in some way, for saving her life. Had they imagined that detail, she wondered? Or was it one of Juniper’s creative untruths, an embellishment designed to predispose their sympathies?

There had been a little more about him in the journal, but that information was not in a biographical vein. What had been written there were the feelings, the desires, the longings of a grown woman. A woman Saffy didn’t recognize, of whom she felt shy; a woman who was becoming worldly. And if Saffy found the transition difficult to reconcile herself to, Percy was going to need a great deal of coaxing. As far as her twin was concerned, Juniper would always be the baby sister who’d come along when they were almost fully grown, the little girl who needed spoiling and protecting. Whose spirits could be lifted, her loyalties won, with nothing more weighty than a bag of sweets.

Saffy smiled with sad fondness for her barnacled twin, who was, no doubt, even at this minute, arming herself so that their father’s wishes might be respected. Poor, dear Percy: intelligent in so many ways, courageous and kind, tougher than leather, yet unable ever to unshackle herself from Daddy’s impossible expectations. Saffy knew better; she’d stopped trying to please Himself a long time ago.

She shivered, cold suddenly, and rubbed her hands together. Then she crossed her arms, determined to find steel within them. Saffy needed to be strong for Juniper now; it was her turn. For she could understand, where Percy would not, the burden of romantic passion.

The door sucked open and Percy was there. A draught pulled the door closed with a slam behind her. ‘It’s bucketing down.’ She chased a drip from the end of her nose, her chin, shook her wet hair. ‘I heard a noise up here. Before.’

Saffy blinked, greatly perplexed. Spoke as if by rote: ‘It was the shutter. I think I fixed it, though of course I’m not much use with tools – Percy, where on earth have you been?’ And what had she been doing? Saffy’s eyes widened as she took in her twin’s wet, muddy dress, the – were they leaves? – in her hair. ‘Headache gone then, has it?’

‘What’s that?’ Percy had collected their glasses and was at the drinks table pouring them each another whisky.

‘Your headache. Did you find the aspirin?’

‘Oh. Thank you. Yes.’

‘Only you were gone a long time.’

‘Was I?’ Percy handed a glass to Saffy. ‘I suppose I was. I thought I heard something outside; probably Poe, frightened of the storm. I did wonder at first if it might be Juniper’s friend. What’s his name?’

‘Thomas.’ Saffy took a sip. ‘Thomas Cavill.’ Did she imagine that Percy was avoiding her eyes? ‘Percy, I hope—’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll be nice to him when he arrives.’ She swirled her glass. ‘
If
he arrives.’

‘You mustn’t prejudge him for being late, Percy.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘It’s the fault of the war. Nothing runs on time any more. Juniper’s not here either.’

Percy reclaimed the cigarette she’d left earlier, propped against the rim of the ashtray. ‘That’s hardly a surprise.’

‘He’ll be here eventually.’

‘If he exists.’

What an odd thing to say; Saffy tucked a wayward curl behind her ear, confused, concerned, wondering if Percy was making some sort of joke, one of the trademark ironies that Saffy had a habit of taking literally. Though her stomach had begun to churn, Saffy ignored it, choosing to take the remark as humour. ‘I do hope so; such a great shame to learn he’s a mere figment. The table will look terribly unbalanced minus a setting.’ She perched on the edge of the chaise longue, but no matter how she strove for ease, a peculiar nervousness seemed to have transplanted itself from Percy to her.

‘You look tired,’ said Percy.

‘Do I?’ Saffy tried to affect an amiable tone. ‘I suppose I am. Perhaps activity will perk me up. I might just slip down to the kitchen and—’

‘No.’

Saffy’s glass dropped. Whisky spilled across the rug, beading brown on the blue and red surface.

Percy picked up the glass. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I just meant—’

‘How silly of me.’ Saffy fussed at a wet spot on her dress. ‘Silly, silly . . .’

And then it came, a knock on the door.

They stood as one.

‘Juniper,’ said Percy.

Saffy swallowed, noting the assumption. ‘Or Thomas Cavill.’

‘Yes. Or Thomas Cavill.’

‘Well,’ said Saffy with a stiff smile. ‘Whoever it is, I expect we’d better let them in.’

1992

I couldn’t stop thinking about Thomas Cavill and Juniper Blythe. It was such a melancholy story; I made it
my
melancholy story. I returned to London, I got on with my life, but a part of me remained tethered to that castle. On the brink of sleep, in a moment of daydream, the whispers found me. My eyes fell closed and I was right back in that cool, shadowy, corridor, waiting alongside Juniper for her fiancé to arrive. ‘She’s lost in the past,’ Mrs Bird had told me as we drove away, as I watched through the rear-view mirror, the woods drawing their wings around the castle, a dark, protective shroud: ‘That same night in October 1941, over and over; a record player with a stuck needle.’

The proposition was just so terribly sad – an entire life spoiled in an evening – and it filled me with questions. How had it been for her that night when Thomas Cavill failed to show for dinner? Had all three sisters waited in a room done up specially for the occasion? I wondered at what point had she begun to worry; whether she’d thought at first that he’d been injured, that there’d been an accident; or whether she’d known at once she’d been forsaken? ‘He married another woman,’ Mrs Bird had told me when I asked, ‘engaged himself to Juniper then ran off with someone else. Nothing but a letter to break off their affair.’

I held the story in my hands, turned it over, looked at it from every angle. Envisaged, amended, replayed. I suppose the fact that I’d been similarly betrayed might have had a little to do with it, but my obsession – for, I confess, that’s what it became – was fed by more than empathy. It concerned itself particularly with the final moments of my encounter with Juniper; the transition I’d witnessed when I mentioned my return to London; the way the young woman waiting longingly for her lover had been replaced by a tense and wretched figure, begging me for help, berating me for having broken a promise. Most of all, I fixated on the moment she’d looked me in the eye and accused me of having failed her in some grave manner, the way she’d called me Meredith.

Juniper Blythe was old, she was unwell, and her sisters had been at great pains to warn me that she often spoke of things she didn’t understand. Nonetheless, the more I considered it the more awfully certain I became that Mum had played some part in her fate. It was the only thing, surely, that made any sense. It explained Mum’s reaction to the lost letter, the cry – for it had been of anguish, hadn’t it? – when she saw from whom it came, the same cry I’d heard as we drove away from Milderhurst when I was small. That secret visit, decades before, when Mum had taken my hand and wrenched me from the gate, forced me back into the car, saying only that she’d made a mistake, that it was too late.

But too late for what? To make amends, perhaps; to repair some long-ago transgression? Had it been guilt that took her back to the castle and then drove her away again before we passed through the gates? It was possible. And if it were true would certainly explain her distress. It might also account for why she’d kept the whole thing secret in the first place. For it was the secrecy as much as the mystery that struck me then. I don’t believe in an obligation of full disclosure, yet in this case I couldn’t shake off the sense that I’d been lied to. More than that: that I was somehow affected directly. Something sat in my mother’s past, something she’d made every attempt to hide, and it refused to stay there. An action, a decision, a mere moment, perhaps, when she was just a girl; something that had cast its shadow, long and dark, into Mum’s present, and therefore right across mine too. And, not just because I was nosy, not just because I was coming to empathize so strongly with Juniper Blythe, but because in some way that was difficult to explain, this secret had come to represent a lifetime’s distance between my mother and me – I needed to know what had happened.