The Distant Hours (71 page)

The bus stopped at the side of the road and Tom hopped out. It was raining hard and his flowers lost their valiant bid for life the moment he disembarked; he debated for a second, whether ruined flowers were better than no flowers at all, before tossing the stems into the overflowing ditch. The mark of a good soldier was knowing when to call retreat, and he still had the jam, after all.

Through the dense, wet night he glimpsed a set of iron gates and laid his hand on one, pushing it open. As it gave way with a shriek beneath his weight, he tilted his face towards the black, black sky. He closed his eyes and let the rain slide clean across his cheeks; it was a bugger, but without a raincoat or umbrella, he had little choice but to surrender. He was late, he was wet, but he was here.

He closed the gate behind him, hoisted his duffel bag over his shoulder and started up the drive. By God, it was dark. The blackout was one thing in London, but in the country, and with foul weather having switched off all the stars, it was like walking through pitch. There was a looming mass to his right, blacker somehow than the rest, that he knew must be Cardarker Wood. The wind had picked up and the treetops gnashed their teeth as he watched. He shivered and turned away, thought of Juniper, waiting for him in the warm, dry castle.

One drenched foot after another, he kept on. He rounded a bend, crossed a bridge, water gushing fast beneath it, and still the drive wound on ahead.

A flash of jagged lightning then, and Tom stopped in wonder. It was magnificent. The world was drenched in silvery white light – a great heaving wrangle of trees, a pale stone castle on the hill, the winding driveway carving on ahead through shivering fields – before falling unevenly back to black. Imprints of the lit-up image remained, like a photographic negative, and that’s how Tom knew he was not alone in the dark and the wet. Someone else, a thin but mannish figure, was making its way up the driveway ahead of him.

Tom wondered idly why anyone else would venture out in such a night; whether perhaps there was another guest expected at the castle, someone else as late as he was, also caught in the rain. His spirits rose on the back of such a notion, and he considered calling out – it was better, surely, to arrive in tandem with another tardy fellow? – but the clap of murderous thunder decided him against trying. He pressed on, eyeing the spot in the darkness where he knew the castle stood.

Tom saw it only when he drew near; a tiny relief in the darkness. He frowned, then blinked; realized he wasn’t imagining things. There was a small patch of golden light ahead, a chink in the fortress wall. He pictured it as Juniper waiting for him, like a mermaid in one of the old stories, holding out a lantern to bring her lover in from the storm. Filled with ardent determination, he walked towards it.

As Percy and Tom climb through the rain, deep within Milderhurst Castle all is still. High in the attic room, Juniper is darkly dreaming; down in the good parlour, her sister Saffy reclines on the chaise longue, drifting on the verge of sleep. Behind her, a room with a crackling fire; before her, a door opening onto a picnic by the lake. A perfect day in the late spring of 1922, warmer perhaps than expected, the sky as blue as fine Venetian glass. People have been swimming and are sitting now on blankets, drinking cocktails and eating dainty sandwiches.

A few young people break away and the dreaming Saffy follows; watches in particular the young pair at the back, the boy called Matthew and a pretty girl of sixteen whose name is Seraphina. They have known one another since they were children, he is a family friend of her strange cousins from the north and has thus been deemed acceptable by Daddy; over the years they have chased one another through countless fields, fished generations of trout from the brook, sat wide-eyed by annual harvest bonfires; something, though, has changed between them. She has found herself on this visit tongue-tied in his presence; has caught him watching her, eyes heavy with something like intent; has felt her own cheeks warming in response. They haven’t exchanged more than three words since he arrived.

The group the pair are trailing stop; blankets are spread with an extravagant lack of care beneath the trees, a ukulele is produced, cigarettes and banter lit; he and she remain on the fringe. They neither speak nor look at one another. Each sits, pretending interest in the sky, the birds, the sunlight playing on the leaves, while thinking only of the inch between her knee and his thigh. The pulse of electricity that fills the space. Wind whispers, leaves spiral, a starling calls . . .

She gasps. Covers her mouth lest anyone else should notice.

His fingertips have grazed the very edge of her hand. So lightly she mightn’t have felt them had her attention not been focused with mathematical precision on the distance between them, his breath-stopping proximity . . . At this moment, the dreamer merges with her young self. She no longer watches the lovers from afar, but sits cross-legged on the blanket, arm stretched out behind her, heart pounding in her chest with all the unblemished joy and expectation of youth.

Saffy doesn’t dare look at Matthew. She glances quickly around the group, shocked that no one else appears to have noticed what is happening; that the world has swung on its pendulum and everything is different, yet nothing around them seems to have been altered.

She lets her gaze drop then, lets it skim down the length of her arm, past her wrist, and onto her supporting hand. There. His fingertips. His skin on hers.

She is gathering the courage to lift her eyes, to cross the bridge he’s made between them and allow her gaze to complete its journey, to trace its way along his hand, across his wrist and all the way up his arm to where she knows his eyes will be waiting to meet her own, when something else catches her attention. A darkness on the hill behind them.

Her father, always protective, has followed and is watching now from the crest. She feels his eyes on her, knows that he is watching her especially; knows, too, that he has seen Matthew’s fingers move against her own. She lets her gaze drop; her cheeks flare and something moves deep and low within her belly. Somehow, though she’s not at all sure why, Daddy’s expression, his presence on the hill, bring her recent feelings into sharp focus. She realizes that her love for Matthew, for that, of course, is what she feels – love – is curiously similar to her passion for Daddy; the desire to be treasured, to captivate, the fierce need to be thought amusing and clever . . .

Saffy was fast asleep on the chaise longue by the fire, an empty glass on her lap, a small, sleepy smile on her lips, and Percy breathed a sigh of relief. That was something; the shutter was hanging loose, there’d been no sign yet of whatever it was that had caused Juniper to lose time, but all was at least quiet on the domestic front.

She climbed down from the window ledge and jumped the final distance off the capping stones, bracing for the sodden landing, the old moat, drenched through and rising fast, well over her ankles already. It was as she’d thought; she would need the correct tools to secure the shutter properly.

Percy trudged around the side of the castle to the kitchen door, heaved it open and fell through, out of the rain. The contrast was breathtaking. The warm, dry kitchen with its meaty steam, its humming electric light, was a picture of such easy domesticity that she was almost winded by a desire to shed her soaked clothing, the gumboots and slimy socks, and curl up on the mat by the stove, leaving all that had to be done, undone. To sleep with the childlike certainty of knowing that there was someone else to do them.

She smiled, catching such serpentine thoughts by the tail and tossing them aside. This was no time to be fantasizing about sleep and certainly not about curling up on the kitchen floor. She blinked widely as drips rolled down her face, and started for the toolbox. She’d hammer the shutter closed tonight and make proper repairs by daylight.

Saffy’s dream has twisted like a ribbon; the place, the time, have changed but the central image remains, like a dark shape on the retina when one’s eyes are closed against the sun.

Daddy.

Saffy is younger now, a girl of twelve. She is climbing a set of stairs, stone walls rise on either side of her, and she is glancing over her shoulder because Daddy has told her that the nurses will stop the visits if they find out. It is 1917 and there’s a war on; Daddy has been away but now he’s back from the Front and also, as they’ve been told by countless nurses, from the brink of death. Saffy is walking up the stairs because she and Daddy have a new game. A secret game in which she tells him things that frighten her when she’s alone but that make his eyes light up with glee. They’ve been playing it for five days now.

Suddenly, within the dream, it is days before. Saffy is no longer climbing the cold stone stairs, but lying in her bed. She wakes with a start. Alone and afraid. She reaches for her twin, as she always does when the nightmare comes, but the sheet beside her is bare and cold. She spends the morning drifting through the corridors trying to fill days that have lost all shape and meaning, trying to escape the nightmare.

And now she sits with her back against the wall in the chamber beneath the spiral stairs. It is the only place where she feels safe. Sounds waft down from the tower, the stones sigh and sing, and as she closes her eyes she hears it. A voice, whispering her name.

For a single joyous instant she thinks it is her twin returned. Then, through the haze, she sees him. Sitting on a wooden bench by the far window, a cane across his lap. Daddy, though, much changed, no longer the strong young man who went away to war three years ago.

He beckons her and she is helpless to refuse.

She goes slowly, wary of him and his new shadows.

‘I’ve missed you,’ he says as she reaches his side. And something in his voice is so familiar that all the longing she’s bottled up while he was gone begins to swell. ‘Sit beside me,’ he says, ‘and tell me why it is you look so scared.’

And she does. She tells him everything. All about the dream, the man who is coming for her, the fearsome man who lives in the mud.

Finally, Tom reached the castle and saw that it wasn’t a lamp at all. The glow he had been following, the beacon bringing sailors safely home, was actually electric light, spilling from a window in one of the castle’s rooms. A shutter, he noticed, was hanging loose, breaking the blackout.

He’d offer to fix it when he went inside. Juniper had told him that her sisters were keeping the whole place running themselves, having lost what little help they’d had to the war. Tom wasn’t much when it came to mechanics, but he knew his way around a hammer and nails.

Feeling a little brighter, he waded across a patch of water in the low-lying land around the castle and climbed the front stairs. Stood a moment by the entrance taking stock. His hair, his clothes, his feet could not be wetter had he swum the Channel to get there; but get there he had. He slid his duffel bag off his shoulder and dug inside, looking for the jam. There it was. Tom pulled the glass jar clear and held it close, ran his fingers over it to check there’d been no breakage.

It felt perfect. Perhaps his luck was on the rise. With a smile, Tom ran a palm across his hair in an attempt to order it; knocked on the door, and waited, jam in hand.

Percy cursed and brought her palm down hard on the toolbox lid. For the love of God, where was the bloody hammer? She racked her brain, trying to remember the last time she’d used it. There’d been the repair work on Saffy’s chicken run; the boards that had come loose on the sill in the yellow parlour; the balustrade on the tower staircase . . . She didn’t have a clear memory of returning the hammer to the box, but Percy was sure she must have. She was mindful of that sort of thing.

Damn it.

Percy felt her sides, fiddled a path between the buttons of her raincoat to dig inside her trouser pocket; clutched the pouch of tobacco with relief. She stood and smoothed out a cigarette paper, held it clear of the drips that were falling still from her sleeves, her hair, her nose. She sprinkled tobacco along its crease, then licked and sealed it; rolled the cylinder between her fingers. She struck a match and drew hard. Breathed in glorious tobacco, breathed out frustration.

A missing hammer was the last thing she needed tonight. On top of Juniper’s return, the mysterious blood all over her shirt, the news that she intended marriage, not to mention the afternoon’s encounter with Lucy . . .

Percy drew again, wiped something from her eye as she exhaled. Saffy didn’t mean it, she knew nothing of what had happened with Lucy, of the love and the loss that Percy had endured. Percy had been careful about that. It was always possible, she supposed, that her twin had heard or seen or somehow intuited that which she should not, but even so. Saffy surely wasn’t one to rub Percy’s nose in her misery. She, of all people, knew how it felt to be robbed of one’s love.

A noise and Percy drew breath, listened hard. Heard nothing more. She had an image of Saffy, asleep in the chair, the empty whisky glass precarious on her lap. She’d moved, perhaps, and it had fallen to the ground. Percy scanned the ceiling, waited another half a minute, then decided that was all it had been.

Regardless, there was no time to be standing around lamenting what had been and gone. Cigarette clamped between her lips, she returned to digging through the tools.

Tom knocked again, and set the jar down by the door so he could rub his hands together. It was a big place, he supposed; who knew how long it might take a person to get from top to bottom? A minute or so passed and he turned away from the door, watching the rain tumble over the eaves, wondering at the odd fact that one might feel colder being wet and sheltered than when one was standing beneath the rain’s full force.