The Distant Hours (23 page)

‘I should say that you do,’ Herbert had agreed, when I said as much to him. We’d spent the afternoon squeezing my boxes of books and other assorted household items into storage in his cluttered attic, and had just headed out for a stroll through Kensington Gardens. The walks are a daily habit of ours, begun at the vet’s behest; they’re supposed to help with Jess’s digestion, the regular activity giving her metabolism a little boost, but she approaches the event with spectacularly bad grace. ‘Come along, Jessie,’ said Herbert, tapping his shoe against a stubborn bottom, which had affixed itself rather firmly to the concrete. ‘We’re nearly at the ducks, old lovely.’

‘But how am I going to find out?’ There was Auntie Rita, of course, but Mum’s fraught relationship with her elder sister made that idea seem particularly sneaky. I pushed my hands deep into my pockets, as if the answer might be found amongst the lint. ‘What should I do? Where should I start?’

‘Well now, Edie.’ He handed over Jess’s lead while he fussed a cigarette from his pocket and cupped his hand to light it. ‘It seems to me there’s only one place
to
start.’

‘Oh?’

He exhaled a theatrical stream of smoke. ‘You know as well as I, my love; you need to ask your mother.’

You would be forgiven for thinking that Herbert’s suggestion was obvious, and I must take some of the blame for that. I suspect I’ve given you entirely the wrong impression about my family, beginning as I did with that long-lost letter. It’s where this story starts, but it’s not where
my
story starts; or rather, it’s not where the story of Meredith and Edie starts. Coming into our family that Sunday afternoon, you’d be forgiven for thinking we were a rather expansive pair, that we chatted and shared easily. However nice that might sound, it was not the case. There are any number of childhood experiences I could submit in evidence to demonstrate that ours was not a relationship marked by conversation and understanding: the unexplained appearance in my drawer of a military-style bra when I turned thirteen; my reliance on Sarah for all but the most basic information regarding birds and bees and everything in between; the ghostly brother my parents and I pretended not to see.

But Herbert was right: this was my mother’s secret, and if I wanted to know the truth, to learn more about that little girl who’d shadowed me around Milderhurst Castle, it was the only proper place to begin. As good luck would have it, we’d arranged to meet for coffee the following week in a patisserie around the corner from Billing & Brown. I left the office at eleven o’clock, found a table in the back corner and placed our order, as per habit. The waitress had just brought me a steaming pot of Darjeeling when there came a blurt of road noise and I looked up to see the patisserie door was open and Mum was standing tentatively, just inside, bag and hat in hand. A spirit of defensive caution had taken hold of her features as she surveyed the unfamiliar, decidedly modern cafe, and I glanced away, at my hands, the table, fiddled with the zip on my bag, anything to avoid bearing witness. I’ve noticed that look of uncertainty more often lately, and I’m not sure whether it’s because she’s getting older, or because I am, or because the world really is speeding up. My reaction to it dismays me, for surely a glimpse of my mother’s weakness should engender pity, make her more lovable to me, but the opposite is true. It frightens me, like a tear in the fabric of normality that threatens to render everything unlovely, unrecognizable, not as it should be. All my life my mother has been an oracle, a brick wall of propriety, so to see her unsure, particularly in a situation that I meet without a wrinkle, tilts my world and makes the solid ground swirl like clouds beneath me. So I waited, and only when enough time had passed did I look up again, catch her eye, sure again now, confident, and wave with candour, as if only in that moment had I realized she was there.

She negotiated the crowded cafe cautiously, guarding her bag from bumping people’s heads in an ostentatious way that managed somehow to convey disapproval at the seating arrangements. I, meanwhile, busied myself making sure no one had left spilled sugar granules or cappuccino froth or pastry flakes on her side of the table. These semi-regular coffee dates of ours were a new thing, instituted a few months after Dad’s retirement started. They were a little awkward for both of us, even when I wasn’t hoping to undertake a delicate excavation of Mum’s life. I stood halfway out of my seat when she reached the table, my lips met the air near her proffered cheek, then we both sat down, smiling with excessive relief because the public greeting was over.

‘Warm out, isn’t it?’

I said , ‘Very,’ and we were back in motion down a comfortable road: Dad’s current home-improvement obsession (tidying the boxes in the attic), my work (supernatural encounters on Romney Marsh), and Mum’s bridge club gossip. Then a pause while we smiled at each other, both waiting for Mum to falter beneath the weight of her routine enquiry: ‘And how’s Jamie?’

‘He’s well.’

‘I saw the recent write up in
The Times.
The new play’s been well received.’

‘Yes.’ I’d seen the review, too. I didn’t go hunting, I really didn’t; it just jumped out at me when I was looking for the letting pages. A
very
good review, as it happens. Damn paper: no suitable flats to rent either.

Mum paused while the cappuccino I’d ordered for her arrived at the table. ‘And tell me,’ she said, laying a paper napkin between her cup and saucer to soak up the slopped milk, ‘what’s next on his agenda?’

‘He’s working on his own script. Sarah has a friend, a film director, who’s promised to read it when he’s done.’

Her mouth formed a silent, cynical ‘Oh’ before she managed to utter some positive noises. The last of these was drowned when she took a sip of coffee, flinched at the bitter taste, and, blessedly, changed the subject. ‘And how’s the flat? Your father wants to know whether that tap in the kitchen’s still giving you trouble. He’s had another idea he thinks will fix it once and for all.’

I pictured the cold and empty flat I’d left for the final time that morning, phantom memories sealed within the collection of brown cardboard boxes my life had become, then crammed into Herbert’s attic. ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘The flat’s fine, the tap’s fine. Tell him he really doesn’t need to worry any more.’

‘I don’t suppose there’s anything else that needs attention?’ A faint pleading note had crept into her voice. ‘I thought I might send him around on Saturday to do some general maintenance.’

‘I told you. Everything’s fine.’

She looked surprised and hurt and I knew I’d spoken brusquely, only these dreadful conversations in which I pretended all was going swimmingly were wearing me down. Despite my willingness to disappear inside story books, I’m not a liar and I don’t cope well with subterfuge. Under ordinary circumstances this might have been the perfect time for me to break the news about Jamie – but I couldn’t, not when I wanted to steer us back to Milderhurst and Juniper Blythe. In any case, the man at the next table chose that very instant to turn around and ask whether he could borrow our salt shaker.

As I handed it to him, Mum said, ‘I have something for you.’ She pulled out an old M&S bag, folded over to protect whatever was inside. ‘Don’t get too excited,’ she added, passing it to me. ‘It’s nothing new.’

I opened the bag, slipped out the contents and stared in puzzlement for a moment. People are often giving me things they think are worth publishing, but I couldn’t believe anyone could be that far off the mark.

‘Don’t you remember?’ Mum was looking at me as if I’d forgotten my own name.

I gazed again at the stapled wad of paper, the child’s drawing on the front, the ill-formed words at the top of the page:
The Book of Wet Animals
,
Written and Illustrated by Edith Burchill.
A little arrow had been inserted between
of
and
Wet
and the word
Magical
added in a different-coloured pen.

Mum said, ‘You wrote it. Don’t you remember?’

‘Yes,’ I lied. Something in Mum’s expression told me it was important to her that I did, and besides – I ran my thumb over an inky blob made by a pen allowed to rest too long between strokes – I wanted to remember.

‘You were so proud of it.’ She tilted her head to look at the little bundle in my hands. ‘You worked on it for days, crouched over on the floor beneath the dressing table in the spare room.’

Now that
was
familiar. A delicious memory of being tucked in the warm, dark space withdrew itself from long-term storage and my body tingled with its release: the smell of dust in the circular rug, the crack in the plaster just large enough to store a pen, the hardness of wooden boards beneath my knees as I watched the sunlight sweep across the floor.

‘You were always working on one story or another, scribbling away in the dark. Your father worried sometimes that you were going to turn out shy, that you’d never make any friends, but there was nothing we could do to dampen your enthusiasm.’

I remembered reading but I didn’t remember writing. Still, Mum’s talk of dampening my enthusiasm struck a nerve. Distant memories of Dad shaking his head incredulously when I returned from the library, asking me over dinner why I wasn’t borrowing from the non-fiction shelves, what I wanted with all that fairy nonsense, why I didn’t want to learn about the real world.

‘I’d forgotten that I wrote stories,’ I said, turning the book over and smiling at the pretend publisher’s logo I’d drawn on the back.

‘Well.’ She wiped an old crumb from the table. ‘Anyway, I thought you should have it. Your father’s been pulling boxes down from the attic, that’s how I came to find it. No point leaving it for the silverfish, is there? You never know, you may even have your own daughter to show it to one day.’ She straightened in her seat and the rabbit hole to the past closed behind her. ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘How was your weekend? Did you do anything special?’

And there it was. The perfect window, curtains drawn wide. I couldn’t have constructed a better opening for myself if I’d tried. And as I looked down at
The Book of Magical Wet Animals
in my hand, the time-dusted paper, the imprints from felt pens, the childish shading and colouring; as I realized that my mum had kept it all this time, that she’d wanted to save it despite her misgivings about my wasteful occupation, that she’d chosen today, of all days, to remind me of a part of myself I’d quite forgotten; I was overcome by a sudden swelling desire to share with her everything that had happened to me at Milderhurst Castle. A sweet sense that it would all work out for the best.

‘Actually,’ I said. ‘I did.’

‘Oh?’ She smiled brightly.

‘Something very special.’ My heart had begun to gallop ahead; I was watching myself from the outside, wondering, even as I teetered on the cliff edge, whether I was really going to jump. ‘I went for a tour,’ said a faint voice rather like my own, ‘inside Milderhurst Castle.’

‘You . . . You what?’ Mum’s eyes widened. ‘You went to Milderhurst?’ Her gaze held mine as I nodded, then it dropped. She shifted her cup on the saucer, swivelled it by its dainty handle, this way and that, and I watched with cautious curiosity, unsure what was about to happen, eager and loath, in equal measure, to find out.

I ought to have had more faith. Like a brilliant sunrise clarifying the clouded horizon, dignity reasserted itself. She lifted her head and smiled across the table as she set her saucer straight. ‘Well now,’ she said. ‘Milderhurst Castle. And how was it?’

‘It was . . . big.’ I work with words and that was the best I could come up with. It was the surprise, of course; the utter transformation I’d just witnessed. ‘Like something out of a fairy tale.’

‘A tour, did you say? I didn’t realize one could do such a thing. That’s our modern times, I suppose.’ She waved a hand. ‘Everything for a price.’

‘It was informal,’ I said. ‘One of the owners took me. A very old lady called Persephone Blythe.’

‘Percy?’ A tiny tremble in her voice; the only prick in her composure. ‘Percy Blythe? She’s still there?’

‘They all are, Mum. All three. Even Juniper, who sent you the letter.’

Mum opened her mouth as if to speak; when no words came out she closed it again, tightly. She laced her fingers in her lap, sat as still and as pale as a marble statue. I sat too, but the silence took on weight and it became more than I could bear.

‘It was eerie,’ I said, picking up my teapot. I noticed that my hands were shaking. ‘Everything was dusty and dim and to see them all sitting in the parlour together, the three of them in that big, old house – it felt a little like I’d stumbled inside a doll’s—’

‘Juniper, Edie – ’ Mum’s voice was strange and thin and she cleared her throat – ‘how was she? How did she seem?’

I wondered where to start: the girlish joy, the dishevelled appearance, the final scene of desperate accusations. ‘She was confused,’ I said. ‘She was wearing an old-fashioned dress and she told me she was waiting for someone, a man. The lady at the farmhouse where I stayed said that she isn’t well, that her sisters look after her.’

‘She’s ill?’

‘Dementia. Sort of.’ I continued carefully: ‘Her boyfriend left her years ago and she never fully recovered.’

‘Boyfriend?’

‘Fiancé to be precise. He stood her up and people say it drove her mad. Literally mad.’

‘Oh, Edie,’ said Mum. The slightly ill look on her face resolved into the sort of smile you might give a clumsy kitten. ‘Always so full of fancy. Real life isn’t like that.’