The Distant Hours (24 page)

I bristled: it gets tiresome being treated like an ingénue. ‘I’m just telling you what they said in the village. A lady there said Juniper was always fragile, even when she was young.’

‘I
knew
her, Edie; I don’t need you telling me what she was like when she was young.’

She’d snapped and it had caught me unawares. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I—’

‘No.’ She lifted a palm then pressed it lightly against her forehead and stole a surreptitious glance over her shoulder. ‘No,
I’m
sorry. I can’t think what came over me.’ She sighed, smiled a little shakily. ‘It’s the surprise, I expect. To think that they’re all still alive; all of them at the castle. Why – they must be so
old
.’ She frowned, affecting great interest in the mathematical puzzle. ‘The other two were old when I knew them – at least they seemed that way.’

I was still startled by her outburst and said guardedly, ‘You mean they looked old? Grey hair and all?’

‘No. No, not that. It’s hard to say what it was. I suppose they were only in their mid-thirties at the time, but of course that meant something different back then. And I was young. Children do tend to see things differently, don’t they?’

I didn’t answer; she didn’t intend me to. Her eyes were on mine, but they had a faraway look about them, like an old-fashioned silver screen on which pictures were projected. ‘They behaved more like parents than sisters,’ she said, ‘to Juniper, I mean. They were a lot older than she was, and her mother had died when she was only a child. Their father was still alive, but he wasn’t much involved.’

‘He was a writer, Raymond Blythe.’ I said it cautiously, wary that I might be overstepping again, offering information that was hers firsthand. This time, though, she didn’t seem to mind and I waited for some indication that she knew all that the name meant, that she remembered bringing the book home from the library when I was a girl. I’d kept an eye out when I was packing up the flat; hoping I might be able to bring it to show her, but I hadn’t found it. ‘He wrote a story called
The True History of the Mud Man
.’

‘Yes,’ was all she said, very softly.

‘Did you ever meet him?’

She shook her head. ‘I saw him a few times, but only from a distance. He was very old by then and quite reclusive. He spent most of his time up in his writing tower and I wasn’t allowed to go up there. It was the most important rule – there weren’t many.’ She was looking down and a raised vein pulsed mauve beneath each lid. ‘They talked about him sometimes; he could be difficult, I think. I always thought of him as a little like King Lear, playing his daughters off, one against the other.’

It was the first time I’d ever heard my mother reference a character of fiction, and the effect was to derail my train of thought entirely. I wrote my honours thesis on Shakespeare’s tragedies and not once did she give any sign that she was familiar with the plays.

‘Edie?’ Mum looked up sharply. ‘Did you tell them who you were? When you went to Milderhurst. Did you tell them about me? Percy, the others?’

‘No.’ I wondered whether the omission would offend Mum; whether she’d demand to know why I hadn’t told them the truth. ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Good,’ she said, nodding. ‘That was a good decision. Kinder. You’d only have confused them. It was such a long time ago and I was with them so briefly; they’ve no doubt quite forgotten I was there at all.’

And here was my chance; I took it. ‘That’s just it though, Mum. They hadn’t, that is, Juniper hadn’t.’

‘What do you mean?

‘She thought I was you.’

‘She . . . ?’ Her eyes searched mine. ‘How do you know?’

‘She called me Meredith.’

Mum’s fingertips brushed her lips. ‘Did she . . . say anything else?’

A crossroads. A choice. And yet, it wasn’t really. I had to tread lightly: if I was to tell Mum exactly what Juniper had said, that she’d accused her of breaking a promise and ruining her life, our conversation would most certainly be ended. ‘Not much,’ I said. ‘Were you close, the two of you?’

The man sitting behind stood up then, his considerable backside nudging our table so that everything upon it quivered. I smiled distractedly at his apology, focused instead on preventing our cups and our conversation from toppling. ‘Were you and Juniper friends, Mum?’

She picked up her coffee; seemed to spend a long time running her spoon around the inside of her cup to tidy the froth. ‘You know, it’s so long ago it’s difficult to remember the details.’ A brittle, metallic noise as the spoon hit the saucer. ‘As I said, I was only there a little over a year. My father came and fetched me home in early 1941.’

‘And you never went back?’

‘That was the last I saw of Milderhurst.’

She was lying. I felt hot, light-headed. ‘You’re sure?’

A little laugh. ‘Edie – what a queer thing to say. Of course I’m sure. It’s the sort of thing one would remember, don’t you think?’

I would. I did. I swallowed. ‘That’s just it. A funny thing happened, you see. On the weekend, when I first saw the entrance to Milderhurst – the gates at the bottom of the drive – I had the most extraordinary sense that I’d been there before.’ When she said nothing, I pressed: ‘That I’d been there with you.’

Her silence was excruciating and I was aware suddenly of the murmur of cafe noise around us, the jarring thwack of the coffee basket being emptied, the grinder whirring, shrill laughter somewhere on the mezzanine. I seemed to be hearing it all at one remove, though, as if Mum and I were quite separate, encased within our own bubble.

I tried to keep the tremor from my voice. ‘When I was a kid. We drove there, you and I, and we stood at the gates. It was hot and there was a lake and I wanted to swim, but we didn’t go inside. You said it was too late.’

Mum patted her napkin to her lips, slowly, delicately, then looked at me. Just for a moment I thought I glimpsed the light of confession in her eyes, then she blinked and it was gone. ‘You’re imagining things.’

I shook my head slowly.

‘All those gates look alike,’ she continued. ‘You’ve seen a picture somewhere, sometime – a film – and become confused.’

‘But I
remember
—’

‘I’m sure it seems that way. Just like when you accused Mr Watson from next door of being a Russian spy, or the time you became convinced you were adopted – we had to show you your birth certificate, do you remember?’ Her voice had taken on a note I recalled only too well from my childhood. The infuriating certainty of someone sensible, respectable, powerful; someone who wouldn’t listen no matter how loudly I spoke. ‘Your father had me take you to the doctor about the night terrors.’

‘This is different.’

She smiled briskly. ‘You’re fanciful, Edie. You always have been. I don’t know where you get it from – not from me.
Certainly
not from your father.’ She reached down to reclaim her handbag from the floor. ‘Speaking of whom, I ought to be getting home.’

‘But Mum – ’ I could feel the chasm opening between us. A gust of desperation spurred me on. ‘You haven’t even finished your coffee.’

She glanced at her cup, the cooling grey dribble at the bottom. ‘I’ve had enough.’

‘I’ll get you another, my shout—’

‘No,’ she said. ‘What do I owe you for the first?’

‘Nothing, Mum. Please stay.’

‘No.’ She laid a five-pound note by my saucer. ‘I’ve been out all morning and your father’s by himself. You know what he’s like: he’ll have the house dismantled if I don’t get back soon.’

A press of her cheek, clammy against mine, and she was gone.

For the record it was Auntie Rita who made contact with me, not the other way round. It so happened that while I was floundering, trying without success to find out what had happened between Mum and Juniper Blythe, Auntie Rita was getting revved up to host a hen night for my cousin Samantha. I wasn’t sure whether to be offended or flattered when she phoned the office to ask me the name of an upmarket male strip club, so I went with bemused, and ultimately, because I can’t seem to help myself, useful. I told her I didn’t know off the top of my head but that I’d do some research, and we agreed to meet in secret at her salon the following Sunday so I could pass on my reconnaissance. It meant skipping Mum’s roast again, but it was the only time Rita was free; I told Mum I was helping with Sam’s wedding and she couldn’t really argue.

Classy Cuts squats behind a tiny shopfront on the Old Kent Road, breath held to fit between an indie record outlet and the best chippie in Southwark. Rita’s as old school as the Motown records she collects and her salon does a roaring trade specializing in finger waves, beehives and blue rinses for the bingo set. She’s been around long enough to be retro without realizing it and likes to tell anyone who’ll listen how she started out at the very same salon as a skinny sixteen-year-old when the war was still raging; how she’d watched through those very front windows on VE Day when Mr Harvey from the milliner’s across the road stripped off his clothes and started dancing down the street, nothing to know him by but his finest hat.

Fifty years in the one spot. It’s no wonder she’s wildly popular in her part of Southwark, the busy chattering stalls set apart from the glistening dress circle of Docklands. Some of her oldest clients have known her since the closest she got to a pair of scissors was the broom cupboard out back, and now there’s no one else they’d trust to set their lavender perms. ‘People aren’t daft,’ Auntie Rita says, ‘give ’em a bit of love and they’ll never stray.’ She has an uncanny knack for picking winners from the local form guide, too, which can’t be bad for business.

I don’t know much about siblings, but I’m quite sure no two sisters have ever been less alike. Mum is reserved, Rita is not; Mum favours neat-as-a-pin court shoes, Rita serves breakfast in heels; Mum is a locked vault when it comes to family stories, Rita is the willing font of all knowledge. I know this firsthand. When I was nine and Mum went to hospital to have her gallstones removed, Dad packed me a bag and sent me to Rita’s. I’m not sure whether my aunt somehow intuited that the sapling in the doorway was way out of touch with her roots, or whether I besieged her with questions, or whether she just saw it as a chance to aggravate Mum and strike a blow in an ancient war, but she took it upon herself that week to fill in many blanks.

She showed me yellowed photographs on the wall, told me funny stories of the way things had been when she was my age, and painted a vivid picture with colours and smells and long-ago voices that made me starkly aware of something I’d already opaquely known. The house where I lived, the family in which I was growing up, was a sanitary, lonely place. I remember lying on the small spare mattress at Rita’s house as my four cousins filled the room with their soft snores and fidgety sleep noises, wishing she were my mother instead; that I lived in a warm, cluttered house stretching at the seams with siblings and old stories. I remember, too, the instant rush of liquid guilt as the thought formed in my mind; screwing my eyes tight shut and picturing my disloyal wish as a piece of knotted silk, untying it in my mind then conjuring a wind to blow it away as if it had never been.

But it had.

Anyway. It was early July and hot the day I reported in; the sort of hot you carry in your lungs. I knocked on the glass door and, as I did so, caught a glimpse of my own tired reflection. Let me just say, carving out sofa real-estate with a flatulent dog does nothing for one’s complexion. I peered beyond the ‘Closed’ sign and saw Auntie Rita sitting at a card table in the back, cigarette dangling from her bottom lip as she examined something small and white in her hands. She waved me in. ‘Edie, luvvie,’ she said over the welcome bell and The Supremes, ‘lend me your eyes, will you, poppet?’

It’s a little like stepping back in time, visiting Auntie Rita’s shop. The black and white chessboard tiles, the bank of leather-look lounge chairs with lime-green cushions, the pearly eggcup hairdriers on retractable arms. Posters of Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross and The Temptations framed behind glass. The unchanging smell of peroxide and next-door’s chip grease, locked in mortal combat.

‘I’ve been trying to thread this blasted thing through there and there,’ Rita said around her cigarette, ‘but as if it’s not bad enough that my fingers have turned to thumbs, the bloody ribbon’s upped and grown a mind of its own.’

She thrust it towards me and with a bit of squinting I realized it was a small lacy bag with holes in the top where a drawstring should be.

‘They’re favours for Sam’s hens,’ Auntie Rita said, nodding at a box of identical bags by her feet. ‘Well, they will be once we’ve made ’em up and filled ’em with goodies.’ She dumped the ash from her cigarette. ‘Kettle’s just boiled, but I’ve got some lemonade in the fridge if you’d rather?’

My throat contracted at the mere suggestion. ‘I’d love one.’

It’s not a word you’d normally think to associate with your mother’s sister, but it’s true so I’ll say it: she’s saucy, my auntie Rita. Watching her as she poured our lemonades, rounded bottom stretching her skirt in all the right places, waist still small despite four babies more than thirty years ago, I could well believe the few anecdotes I’d gleaned from Mum over the years. Without exception these had been delivered in the form of warnings about the things good girls didn’t do, however they’d had a rather unintended effect: cementing for me the admirable legend of Auntie Rita, rabble-rouser.