The Distant Hours (55 page)

And it seemed to him then, and every time thereafter that he replayed the conversation, that no three words had ever been finer, contained more truth, than those.

‘Are you going home, Mr Cavill?’ This was Meredith. He’d forgotten she was there.

‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘it’s Mum’s birthday.’ He glanced at his wristwatch, the numbers made no sense. ‘I should be getting on.’

Meredith grinned and held up two fingers in the V symbol; Juniper only smiled.

Tom waited until he was on his mother’s street before opening the piece of paper, but by the time he reached the front door, he’d committed the Bloomsbury address to memory.

Not until late that night was Meredith finally alone and able to write it all down. The evening had been torturous: Rita and Mum had argued all through dinner, Dad had made them sit together and listen to Mr Churchill’s announcement on the wireless about the Russians, and then Mum – still punishing Meredith for her betrayal at the castle – had found a huge pile of socks that needed darning. Consigned to the kitchen, which always sweltered in summer, Meredith had run the day over and over in her mind, determined not to forget a single detail.

And now, at long last, she’d escaped to the quiet of the room she shared with Rita. She was sitting on the bed, her back against the wall; her journal, her precious journal, resting on her knees as she scribbled furiously across its pages. It had been wise to wait, torture or not; Rita was particularly obnoxious at the moment and the consequences if she were to find the journal would be dire. Thankfully, the coast was clear for the next hour or so. Through some black magic Rita had managed to get the assistant from the butcher’s across the way to pay her notice. It must be love: the fellow had taken to putting sausages aside and giving them to Rita on the sly. Rita, of course, considered herself the bee’s knees and was quite convinced that marriage would be next.

Love, unfortunately, had not softened her. She’d been waiting when Meredith got home that afternoon, demanding to know who the woman was at the door that morning, where they’d gone in such a hurry, what Meredith was up to. Meredith hadn’t told her, of course. She hadn’t wanted to. Juniper was her own secret.

‘Just someone I know,’ she’d said, trying not to seem at all mysterious.

‘Mum won’t be happy when I tell her you’ve been shirking your chores and walking about with Lady Muck.’

But Meredith, for once, had possessed her own shot to fire. ‘Nor Dad when I tell him what you and the sausage man have been doing in the Anderson.’

Rita’s face had flushed with indignation and she’d thrown something, which turned out to be her shoe, and left a nasty bruise above Meredith’s knee, but she hadn’t mentioned Juniper to Mum.

Meredith finished her sentence, made an emphatic full stop, and then sucked thoughtfully on the end of her pen. She’d reached the moment in which she and Juniper had come across Mr Cavill, walking along the pavement, frowning at the ground with as much concentration as if he’d been counting his footsteps. From across the park Meredith’s body had known that it was him before her brain caught up. Her heart had lurched inside her, like it was spring-loaded, and she’d remembered at once the childish crush she used to harbour. The way she’d watched him and hung on his every word and imagined that one day they might even be married. It made her cringe to remember! Why, she’d only been a kid back then. What on earth had she been thinking?

How strange it was, though, how unfathomable, how wonderful, that Juniper and he should both rematerialize on a single day; the two people who had been most instrumental in helping her discover the path she wished to follow through life. Meredith knew herself to be fanciful, her mum was always accusing her of daydreaming, but she couldn’t help but feel it meant something. That there was an element of fate in their twinned arrival back in her life. Of destiny.

Seized by an idea, Meredith leaped off the bed and pulled her collection of cheap notebooks out from the hiding spot at the bottom of the wardrobe. Her story didn’t have a title yet, but she knew it must be given one before she handed it over to Juniper. Typing it up like a proper manuscript wouldn’t hurt either – Mr Seebohm at number fourteen had an old typewriter; perhaps if Meredith were to offer to fetch him lunch he might be induced to let her use it?

Kneeling on the floor, she hurried her hair behind her ears and flicked through the books, reading a few lines here, a few there, tensing as even those she’d been most proud of wilted under the imagined scrutiny of Juniper. She deflated. The whole story was too starchy by half, Meredith could see that now. Her characters spoke too much and felt too little and didn’t seem to know what it was they wanted from life. Most importantly, there was something vital missing – an aspect of her heroine’s existence, that she suddenly understood must be fleshed out. What a wonder that she hadn’t realized it before!

Love, of course. That’s what her story needed. For it was love, wasn’t it – the glorious lurching of a spring-loaded heart – that made the world go round?

London, October 17th, 1941

The windowsill in Tom’s attic was wider than most, which made it perfect for sitting on. It was Juniper’s favourite place to perch, a fact that she refused to believe had anything to do with her missing the attic roof at Milderhurst. Because she didn’t. She wouldn’t. In fact, during the months that she’d been gone, Juniper had resolved never to go back.

She knew now about her father’s will, the things he’d wanted for her and the lengths to which he’d been prepared to go to get his way. Saffy had explained it all in a letter, her intention not to make Juniper feel bad, only to agonize about Percy’s ill-humour. Juniper had read the letter twice, just to make sure she properly understood its meaning, and then she’d drowned it in the Serpentine, watching as the fine paper submerged and the ink ran blue and her temper finally subsided. It was precisely the sort of thing Daddy had always done, she could see that clearly from this distance, and it was just like the old man to try to pull his daughters’ strings from beyond the grave. Juniper, though, refused to let him. She wasn’t prepared to let even
thoughts
of Daddy bring black clouds upon her day. Today of all days was to be only sunshine – even if there wasn’t much of the real thing about.

Knees drawn up, back arched against the render, smoking contentedly, Juniper surveyed the garden below. It was autumn and the ground was thick with leaves, the little cat in raptures. He’d been busy for hours down there, stalking imaginary foes, pouncing and disappearing beneath the drifts, hiding in the dusk of dappled shadows. The lady from the ground-floor flat, whose life had gone up in flames in Coventry, was there too, putting down a saucer of milk. There wasn’t much to spare these days, not with the new register, but between them there was always enough to keep the stray kitten happy.

A noise came from the street and Juniper craned her neck to see. There was a man in uniform walking towards the building and her heart began its race. Only a second passed before she knew it wasn’t Tom, and she drew on her cigarette, suppressing a pleasant shiver of anticipation. Of course it wasn’t him, not yet. He’d be another thirty minutes at least. He was always an age when he visited his family, but he’d be back soon, full of stories, and then she would surprise him.

Juniper glanced inside at the small table by the gas cooker, the one they’d bought for a pittance and convinced a taxi driver to help them transport back to the flat in exchange for a cup of tea. Spread across its top was a feast fit for a king. A king on rations, anyway. Juniper had found the two pears at Portobello market. Lovely pears, and at a price they’d been able to pay. She’d polished them carefully and set them out alongside the sandwiches and the sardines and the newspaper-wrapped parcel. In the centre, standing proud atop an up-turned bucket, was the cake. The first that Juniper had ever baked.

The idea had come to her weeks ago that Tom must have a birthday cake and that she ought to make it for him. The plan had faltered, though, when Juniper realized that she hadn’t a clue how to go about doing such a thing. She’d also come to entertain serious doubts about the ability of their tiny gas cooker to cope with such a mighty task. Not for the first time, she’d wished that Saffy were in London. And not only to help with the cake; although Juniper didn’t mourn the castle, she found she missed her sisters.

In the end, she’d knocked on the door of the basement flat, hoping to find that the man who lived there – whose flat feet had kept him out of the army, much to the local canteen’s gain – would be at home. He was, and when Juniper explained to him her plight, he’d been delighted to lend a hand, drawing up a list of things they’d need to procure, almost seeming to relish the restraints that rationing imposed. He’d even donated one of his very own eggs to the cause, and as she was leaving, handed her something wrapped in newspaper, tied with twine – ‘A present for the two of you to share.’ There’d been no sugar for icing, of course, but Juniper had written Tom’s name on top with spearmint toothpaste and it really didn’t look half bad.

He’d been trying to leave for forty minutes, politely of course, and it wasn’t proving easy. His family were so happy to see him returned somewhat to normal, acting like ‘our Tom’, that they’d taken to directing each morsel of conversation his way. Never mind that his mother’s tiny kitchen was stretched to the seams with assorted Cavills, every question, every joke, every statement of fact hit Tom right between the eyes. His sister was talking now about a woman she knew, killed during the blackout by a double-decker bus. Shaking her head at Tom and tutting, ‘Such a shock, Tommy. Only stepped out to deliver a bundle of scarves for the service men.’

Tom agreed that it was awful; it was awful; and he listened as his Uncle Jeff related a neighbour’s similar run-in with a bicycle, then he shuffled his feet a little before standing. ‘Look, thank you, Mum—’

‘You’re leaving?’ She held up the kettle. ‘I was just about to put it on to boil again.’

He planted a kiss on her forehead, surprised to notice how far down he had to lean. ‘There’s no one brews tea better, but I really have to go.’

His mum raised a single brow. ‘When are we going to meet her, then?’

Little brother Joey was pretending to be a train and Tom gave him a playful pat, avoiding his mother’s eyes. ‘Ah, Mum,’ he said as he swung his satchel over his shoulder, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

He walked briskly, keen to get back to the flat, to her; keen to get out of the thickening weather. It didn’t matter how fast he went, though, his mother’s words kept pace. They had claws because Tom longed to tell his family about Juniper. Every time he saw them he had to fight the urge to grab hold of their shoulders and exclaim like a child that he was in love and that the world was a wonderful place, even if young men were shooting one another and nice ladies – mothers with small children at home – were being killed by double-decker buses when they’d only set out to deliver scarves for soldiers.

But he didn’t because Juniper had made him promise not to. Her determination that nobody should know they were in love confounded Tom. The secrecy seemed an ill fit for a woman who was so forthright, so unequivocal in her opinions, so unlikely to apologize for anything she felt or said or did. He’d been defensive at first, wondering that perhaps she thought his people were beneath her, but her interest in them had quashed that notion. She talked about them, asked after them, like somebody who’d been friendly with the Cavills for years. And he’d since learned that she didn’t discriminate. Tom knew for a fact that the sisters she professed to adore were being kept just as deeply in the dark as his own family. Letters from the castle always came via her godfather (who seemed remarkably unfazed by the deception), and Tom had noticed her replies gave Bloomsbury as the return address. He’d asked her why, indirectly at first, then outright, but she’d refused to explain, speaking only vaguely about her sisters being protective and old-fashioned, and saying that it was best to wait until the time was right.

Tom didn’t like it, but he loved her so he did as she asked. For the most part. He hadn’t been able to stop himself from writing to Theo. His brother was in the north with his regiment, which seemed to make it somehow all right. Besides, Tom’s first letter about the strange and beautiful girl he’d met, the one who’d managed to mend his emptiness, had been written long before she’d asked him not to.

Tom had known from that first meeting in the street near Elephant and Castle that he must see Juniper Blythe again. He’d walked to Bloomsbury at dawn the very next day, just to look, he told himself, just to see the door, the walls, the windows behind which she was sleeping.

He’d watched the house for hours, smoking nervously, and finally she’d come out. Tom followed her a little way before he found the courage to call her name.

‘Juniper.’

He’d said it, thought it, so many times, but it was different when he called it out loud and she turned.

They spent the whole sunlit day together, walking and talking, eating the blackberries they found growing over the cemetery wall, and when evening came, Tom wasn’t ready to let her go. He suggested that she might like to come to a dance, thinking that was the sort of thing girls enjoyed. Juniper, it seemed, did not. The look of distaste that crossed her face when he said it was so guileless that Tom was momentarily stunned. He regained his composure sufficiently to ask whether there was something else she’d rather do, and Juniper replied that of course they should keep walking. Exploring, she had called it.