The Distant Hours (67 page)

I smiled too, unfeasibly pleased by her description of the intrepid young Meredith Baker.

‘I embarked on a programme of my own, reading whatever I could find in the library, writing articles, reviews, stories sometimes, and sending them off.’

‘Was anything published?’

She shifted coyly in her seat. ‘A few small pieces here and there. I got some encouraging letters from the editors of the bigger journals, gentle but firm, telling me that I needed to learn more about their house style. Then, in 1952, a job came up.’ Mum glanced over to where the geese were flapping their wings and something in her bearing changed, some of the air went out of her. She set down her spoon. ‘The job was with the BBC, entry level, but exactly what I wanted.’

‘What happened?’

‘I saved up and bought myself a smart little outfit and a leather satchel so I’d look the part. I gave myself a stern talking to about acting confidently, speaking clearly, not letting my shoulders slouch. But then – ’ she inspected the backs of her hands, rubbed a thumb across her knuckles – ‘then there was a mix up with the buses and instead of taking me to Broad casting House, the driver let me off down near Marble Arch. I ran most of the way back, but when I got to the top of Regent Street, I saw all these girls sallying out of the building, laughing and joking, so smart and together, so much younger than I was, and looking as if they knew the answers to all life’s questions.’ She swept a crumb from the table to the ground before meeting my eyes. ‘I caught sight of myself then in a department store window and I looked such a fraud, Edie.’

‘Oh, Mum.’

‘Such a bedraggled fraud I despised myself and I was embarrassed that I’d ever thought I might belong in such a place. I don’t think I’d ever felt so lonely. I turned away from Portland Place and walked in the other direction, tears streaming. What a mess I must’ve looked. I felt so desolate and sorry for myself and strangers kept telling me to keep my chin up, so when I finally passed a cinema I ducked inside to be miserable in peace.’

I remembered Dad’s account of the girl who’d cried the whole way through a film. ‘And you saw
The Holly and the Ivy
.’

Mum nodded, drew a tissue from somewhere and dabbed at her eyes. ‘And I met your father. And he took me to tea and bought me pear cake.’

‘Your favourite.’

She smiled through tears, fond of the memory. ‘He kept asking what the matter was and when I told him that the film had made me cry he looked at me with total disbelief. “But it’s not real,” he said, as he ordered a second slice of cake. “It’s all made up.” ’

We both laughed then; she’d sounded just like Dad.

‘He was so firm, Edie; so solid in his perception of the world and his place in it. Astonishingly so. I’d never met anyone quite like him. He didn’t see things unless they were there, he didn’t worry about them until they happened. That’s what I fell in love with, his assurance. His feet were planted firmly in the here and now and when he spoke I felt enveloped in his certainty. Happily, he saw something in me too. It may not sound exciting, but we’ve been very happy together. Your father’s a good man, Edie.’

‘I know he is.’

‘Honest, kind, reliable. There’s a lot to be said for that.’

I agreed, and as we fell to sipping our soup a picture of Percy Blythe came into my mind. She was a bit like Dad in that respect: the sort of person who might be overlooked amongst more vibrant company, but whose sturdiness, steeliness even, was the foundation upon which everybody else could shine. Thoughts of the castle and the Sisters Blythe reminded me of something.

‘I can’t believe I forgot!’ I said, reaching for my bag and pulling out the box that Juniper had given me in the night.

Mum laid down her spoon and wiped her fingers on the napkin in her lap. ‘A present? You didn’t even know that I was coming.’

‘It’s not from me.’

‘Then who?’

I was about to say, ‘Open it and find out,’ when I remembered that the last time I’d presented her with a box of memories and said the same thing it hadn’t worked out so well. ‘It’s from Juniper, Mum.’

Her lips parted and she made a tiny winded noise, fumbled with the box, trying to get it open. ‘Silly me,’ she said, in a voice I didn’t recognize, ‘I’m all thumbs.’ Finally, the lid came off and her hand went to her mouth in wonder. ‘Oh my.’ She took the delicate sheets of austerity paper from inside and held them, as if they were the most precious items in the world.

‘Juniper thought I was you,’ I said. ‘She’d been keeping this for you.’

Mum’s eyes darted to the castle on the hill and she shook her head with gentle disbelief. ‘All this time . . .’

She turned over the typewritten pages, scanning as she read bits here and there, her smile flickering. I watched her, enjoying the evident pleasure the manuscript was giving her. There was something else, too. A change had come over her, subtle but certain, as she realized that her friend had not forgotten her: the features of her face, the muscles in her neck, even the blades of her shoulders seemed to soften. A lifetime’s defensiveness fell away and I could glimpse the girl within as if she’d just been woken from a long, deep sleep.

I said gently, ‘What about your writing, Mum?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Your writing. You didn’t continue?’

‘Oh, no. I gave up on all that.’ She wrinkled her nose a little and her expression cast a sort of apology. ‘I suppose that sounds very cowardly to you.’

‘Not cowardly, no.’ I continued carefully, ‘Only, if something gave you pleasure, I don’t understand why you would stop.’

The sun had broken through the clouds, skating off puddles to throw a layer of dappled shadow across Mum’s cheek. She readjusted her glasses, shuffled slightly in her chair, and pressed her hands delicately on the manuscript. ‘It was such a big part of my past, of who I’d been,’ she said. ‘The whole lot got all wrapped up together. My distress at having thought myself abandoned by Juniper and Tom, the feeling that I’d let myself down by missing the interview . . . I suppose I stopped finding pleasure in it. I settled down with your father and concentrated on the future instead.’

She glanced again at the manuscript, held a sheet of paper aloft and smiled fleetingly at whatever was written there. ‘It
was
such a pleasure,’ she said. ‘Taking something abstract, like a thought or a feeling or a smell, and capturing it on paper. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it.’

‘It’s never too late to start again.’

‘Edie, love,’ she smiled with fond regret. ‘I’m sixty-five years old. I haven’t written more than a shopping list in decades. I think it’s safe to say that it’s too late.’

I was shaking my head. I met people of all ages, every day of my working life, who were writing just because they couldn’t stop themselves.

‘It’s never too late, Mum,’ I said again, but she was no longer listening. Her attention had drifted over my shoulder and back towards the castle. With one fine hand she drew her cardigan closed across her breasts. ‘You know, it’s a funny thing. I wasn’t sure quite how I’d feel, but now that I’m here, I don’t know that I can go back. I don’t know that I want to.’

‘You don’t?’

‘I have a picture in my mind. A very happy picture; I don’t want for that to change.’

Perhaps she thought I might try to convince her otherwise, but I didn’t. The castle was a sad place now, fading and falling to pieces, a little like its three inhabitants. ‘I can understand that,’ I said. ‘It’s all looking a bit tired.’

‘
You’re
looking a bit tired, Edie.’ She frowned at my face as if she’d only just noticed.

As she said it, I began to yawn. ‘Well, it
was
an eventful night. I didn’t get much sleep.’

‘Yes, Mrs Bird mentioned there was quite a storm – I’m very content to stroll around the garden. I’ve lots to keep me busy.’ Mum fingered the edge of her manuscript. ‘Why don’t you go and have yourself a little lie-down?’

I was halfway up the first flight of stairs when Mrs Bird caught my attention. Standing on the next landing, waving something over the rail and asking whether she could borrow me for a minute. She was so emphatically eager that, although I agreed, I couldn’t help but feel a certain amount of trepidation.

‘I have something to show you,’ she said, darting a glance over her shoulder. ‘It’s a bit of a secret.’

After the twenty-four hours I’d had, this did not thrill me.

She pressed a greyish envelope into my hands when I reached her and said, in a stage whisper, ‘It’s one of the letters.’

‘Which letters?’ I’d seen a few over the past few months.

She looked at me as if I’d forgotten which day of the week it was. Which, come to think of it, I had. ‘The letters I was telling you about, of course, the love letters sent to Mum by Raymond Blythe.’

‘Oh! – Those letters.’

She nodded eagerly, and the cuckoo clock hanging on the wall behind her chose that moment to spit out its pair of dancing mice. We waited out the jig then I said, ‘You want me to look at it?’

‘You needn’t read it,’ said Mrs Bird, ‘not if you feel uncomfortable. It’s just that something you said the other evening got me thinking.’

‘It did?’

‘You said that you were going to be seeing Raymond Blythe’s notebooks and it occurred to me that you’d probably have a very good idea by now of what his handwriting looks like.’ She drew breath and then said, all in a rush, ‘I wondered, that is, I hoped . . .’

‘That I could take a look and let you know.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Sure, I guess—’

‘Wonderful!’ She clapped her hands together lightly beneath her chin as I slid the sheet of paper from within its envelope.

I knew at once that I was going to disappoint her, that the letter hadn’t been written by Raymond Blythe at all. Reading his notebook so closely, I’d become very familiar with his sloping handwriting, the long looping tails when he wrote G or J, the particular type of R he used to sign his name. No, this letter had been written by someone else.

I didn’t read the rest. I skipped over the next few paragraphs and arrived at the single initial, just as Mrs Bird had said. But as I looked at it, variables shifted by degrees and a number of things slipped into alignment. I had seen this person’s handwriting before.

I knew who had written the letter and I knew who it was that Lucy Middleton had loved above all others. Mrs Bird had been right – it was a love that flew in the face of their society’s conventions – but it hadn’t been between Raymond and Lucy. It wasn’t an R at the end of those letters, it was a P, written in an old-fashioned hand so that a small tail emerged from the curve of the letter. Easy to confuse with an R, especially if that’s what one was looking for.

‘It’s lovely,’ I said, tripping over my words because I felt forlorn, suddenly, thinking of those two young women and the long lives they’d spent apart.

‘So sad, don’t you think?’ She sighed, tucking the letter back inside her pocket, then she looked at me hopefully: ‘Such a beautifully
written
letter.’

When I’d finally extricated myself from Mrs Bird, having been as non-committal as I could, I made a beeline for my room and collapsed sideways across the bed. I closed my eyes and tried to relax my mind, but it was no use. My thoughts remained tethered to the castle. I couldn’t stop thinking of Percy Blythe, who had loved so well and so long ago; who people thought of as stiff and cold; who had spent most of her life keeping a terrible secret to protect her little sister.

Percy had told me about Oliver Sykes and Thomas Cavill on condition that I did ‘the right thing’. She’d spoken a lot about people’s closing dates, but what I couldn’t work out was why she’d needed to tell me at all; what she wanted me to do with the information that she couldn’t do herself. I was too tired that afternoon. I needed a sleep and then I was looking forward to spending the evening with Mum. So I resolved to visit the castle the following morning, to see Percy Blythe one final time.

Only I never got the chance. After dinner with Mum I fell asleep quickly and soundly but, just past midnight, I woke with a start. I lay for a moment in my bed at the farmhouse, wondering why I’d emerged from sleep, whether it was something I’d heard, some nocturnal sound that had since subsided, or whether I’d somehow dreamed myself awake. One thing I did know: the sudden wakefulness didn’t feel anywhere near as frightening as it had the previous night. I had no sense this time that there was anyone with me in the room, and I could hear nothing untoward. Yet that pull I’ve spoken of, the connection I felt towards the castle was tugging at me. I slid out of bed and went to the window, drew aside the curtains. And that’s when I saw it. Shock buckled my knees, and I was hot and cold at once. Where the dark castle should have sat, all was bright: orange flames licking at the low and heavy sky.