The Distant Hours (10 page)

‘I suppose that’s common for twins.’

‘Indeed.’ An almost smile. ‘Come. I’ll show you the caretakers’ door.’

The mahogany cupboard stood quietly against the far wall, in a tiny box-like room that opened out beyond the twin beds. The ceiling was so low that I had to duck to enter, and the fruity smell entrapped within the walls was almost suffocating.

Percy didn’t seem to notice, bending her wiry frame to pull at a low handle on the cupboard, creaking the mirrored door open. ‘There it is. Right in there at the back.’ She eye-balled me, hovering near the doorway, and her blade-thin brows drew down. ‘But surely you can’t see; not from all the way over there?’

Manners forbade me actually covering my nose so I took a deep breath, holding it as I moved quickly towards her. She stepped aside, indicating that I should come closer still.

Suppressing the image of Gretel at the witch’s oven, I climbed, waist-deep, into the cupboard. Through the grim darkness, I spotted the small door cut into the back. ‘Wow,’ I said on the last of my breath. ‘There it is.’

‘There it is,’ came the voice from behind me.

The smell, now I had no choice but to breathe it, didn’t seem so bad and I was able to appreciate the Narnia thrill of a hidden doorway in the back of a cupboard. ‘So that’s where the caretakers get in and out.’ My voice echoed around me.

‘The caretakers perhaps,’ said Percy wryly. ‘As to the mice, that’s another story. The little wretches have taken over; they don’t need a fancy door like that one.’

I climbed out, dusted myself off, and couldn’t help but notice the framed picture hanging on the facing wall. Not a picture: a page of religious script, I could see when I went a little closer. It had been behind me on the way in and I’d missed it. ‘What was this room?’

‘This was our nurse’s room. When we were very small,’ said Percy. ‘Back then it seemed like the nicest place on earth.’ A smile flickered briefly before failing. ‘It’s little more than a closet, though, isn’t it?’

‘A closet with a lovely outlook.’ I’d drifted towards the nearby window. The only one, I noted, whose faded curtains remained.

I drew them to one side and was struck immediately by the number of heavy-duty locks that had been fitted to the window. My surprise must have shown because Percy said, ‘My father had concerns about security. An incident in his youth that had stuck with him.’

I nodded and peered through the window, experiencing, as I did so, a frisson of familiarity; I realized that it wasn’t for something I’d seen, but for something I’d read about and envisaged. Directly below, skirting the footings of the castle and spanning twenty feet or so, was a swathe of grass, thick and lush, an entirely different green from that beyond. ‘There used to be a moat,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ Percy was beside me now, holding the curtains aside. ‘One of my earliest memories is of being unable to sleep and hearing voices down there. It was full moon and when I climbed up to look out of the window our mother was swimming on her back, laughing in the silvered light.’

‘She was a keen swimmer,’ I said, remembering what I’d read about her in
Raymond Blythe’s Milderhurst
.

Percy nodded. ‘The circular pool was Daddy’s wedding gift to her, but she always preferred the moat, so a fellow was engaged to improve it for her. Daddy had it filled in when she died.’

‘It must have reminded him of her.’

‘Yes.’ Her lips twitched, and I realized I was exploring her family’s tragedy in a rather thoughtless way. I pointed at a stone protrusion that cut into the moat’s petticoat, and changed the subject. ‘Which room’s that? I don’t remember noticing a balcony.’

‘It’s the library.’

‘And over there? What’s that walled garden?’

‘That’s not a garden.’ She let the curtain fall closed again. ‘And we should be getting on.’

Her tone and her body had stiffened beside me. I felt sure I’d offended her in some way but couldn’t think how. After scrolling quickly over our recent conversation, I decided it was far more likely she was just upset by the press of old memories. I said softly, ‘It must be incredible to live in a castle that’s belonged to your family for so long.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It hasn’t always been easy. There have been sacrifices. We’ve been forced to sell much of the estate, most recently the farmhouse, but we’ve managed to hold onto the castle.’ She very pointedly inspected the window frame, smoothed a piece of flaking paint. Her voice, when she spoke, was wooded with the effort of keeping strong emotion at bay. ‘It’s true what my sister said. I do love this house as others might love a person. I always have.’ A glance sideways. ‘I expect you find that rather peculiar.’

I shook my head. ‘No, I don’t.’

Those scar-like eyebrows arched, dubious; but it was true. I didn’t find it peculiar at all. The great heartbreak in my dad’s life was his separation from the home of his childhood. It was a simple enough story: a small boy fed on fables of his family’s grand history, an adored and moneyed uncle who made promises, a death-bed change of heart.

‘Old buildings and old families belong to one another,’ she continued. ‘That’s as it’s always been. My family lives on in the stones of Milderhurst Castle and it’s my duty to keep them. It is not a task for outsiders.’

Her tone was searing; agreement seemed to be required. ‘You must feel as if they’re still around you – ’ as the words left my lips, I had a sudden image of my mum, kneeling by the dolls’ houses – ‘singing in the walls.’

A brow leaped half an inch. ‘What’s that?’

I hadn’t realized I’d spoken the last aloud.

‘About the walls,’ she pressed. ‘You said something just now, about the walls singing. What was it?’

‘Just something my mother told me once,’ I swallowed meekly, ‘about ancient walls that sing the distant hours.’

Pleasure spread across Percy’s face in stark and brilliant contrast to her usual dour expression. ‘My father wrote that. Your mother must have read his poetry.’

I was sincerely doubtful. Mum had never gone in much for reading, and certainly never for poems. ‘Possibly.’

‘He used to tell us stories when we were small, tales of the past. He said that if he didn’t go carefully about the castle, sometimes the distant hours forgot to hide.’ As she warmed to recounting the memory Percy’s left hand drifted forth like the sail of a ship. It was a curiously theatrical movement, out of character with her thus-far clipped and efficient manner. Her way of speaking had altered, too: the short sentences had lengthened, the sharp tone softened. ‘He would come upon them, playing out in the dark, deserted corridors. Think of all the people who’ve lived within these walls, he’d say, who’ve whispered their secrets, laid their betrayals . . .’

‘Do you hear them too? The distant hours?’

Her eyes met mine, held them earnestly for just a moment. ‘Silly nonsense,’ she said, breaking into her hairpin smile. ‘Ours are
old
stones, but they’re still just stones. They’ve no doubt seen a lot but they’re good at keeping secrets.’

Something crossed her face then, a little like pain: she was thinking of her father, I supposed, and her mother, the tunnel of time and voices that must chatter to her down the ages. ‘No matter,’ she said, more for her own sake than mine. ‘It doesn’t do to brood on the past. Calculating the dead can make one feel quite alone.’

‘You must be glad to have your sisters.’

‘Of course.’

‘I’ve always imagined that siblings must be a great comfort.’

Another pause. ‘You haven’t any of your own?’

‘No.’ I smiled, shrugged lightly. ‘I’m a lonely only.’

‘Is it lonely?’ She considered me as if I were a rare specimen deserving of study. ‘I’ve always wondered.’

I thought of the great absence in my life, and then of the rare nights spent in company with my sleeping, snoring, muttering cousins, my guilty imaginings that I was one of them, that I belonged with somebody. ‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘Sometimes it’s lonely.’

‘Liberating, too, one would expect.’

I noticed for the first time a small vein quivering in her neck. ‘Liberating?’

‘There’s none like a sister for remembering one’s ancient sins.’ She smiled at me then, but its warmth fell short of transforming her sentiment to humour. She must have suspected as much, for she let the smile fall away, nodding towards the staircase. ‘Come along,’ she said. ‘Let’s go down. Careful, now. Make sure you hold the rail. My uncle died on those stairs when he was just a boy.’

‘Oh, dear.’ Hopelessly inadequate, but what else does one say? ‘How awful.’

‘A great storm blew up one evening and he was frightened, or so the story goes. Lightning sliced open the sky and struck right by the lake. The boy cried out in terror, but before his nurse could reach him, he leaped from his bed and fled the room. Silly lad: he stumbled and fell, landed at the bottom like a rag doll. We used to imagine we heard him crying in the night sometimes, when the weather was particularly bad. He hides beneath the third step, you know. Waiting to trip someone up. Hoping for someone to join him.’ She pivoted on the step below me, the fourth. ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Miss Burchill?’

‘I don’t know. Sort of.’ My gran had seen ghosts. A ghost, at any rate: my uncle Ed after he came off his motorbike in Australia.
He didn’t realize he was dead
, she’d told me.
My poor lamb. I held out my hand and told him it was all right, that he’d made it home and that we all loved him
. I shivered, remembering, and, just before she turned, Percy Blythe’s face took on a cast of grim satisfaction.

I followed Percy Blythe down flights of stairs, along gloomy corridors, then down further still. Deeper, surely, than the level from which we’d climbed initially? Like all buildings that have evolved over time, Milderhurst was a patchwork. Wings had been added and altered, had crumbled and been restored. The effect was disorientating, particularly for someone with no natural compass whatsoever. It seemed as if the castle folded inwards, like one of those drawings by Escher, where you might continue walking the stairs, round and round, for eternity, without ever reaching an end. There were no windows – not since we’d left the attic – and it was exceedingly dark. At one stage I could have sworn I heard a drifting melody skating along the stones – romantic, wistful, vaguely familiar – but when we turned another corner it was gone, and perhaps it had never been. Something I certainly did not imagine was the pungent smell, which strengthened as we descended and was saved from being unpleasant by sheer virtue of its earthiness.

Even though Percy had pooh-poohed her father’s notion of the distant hours, I couldn’t help running my hand against the cool stones as we walked, wondering about the imprints Mum might have left when she was at Milderhurst. The little girl still walked beside me but she didn’t say much. I considered asking Percy about her, but having gone this far without announcing my connection to the house, anything I thought to say carried the stench of duplicity. In the end I opted for classic passive-aggressive subterfuge. ‘Was the castle requisitioned during the war?’

‘No. Dear God. I couldn’t have borne it. The damage that was done to some of the nation’s finest houses – no.’ She shook her head vehemently. ‘Thank goodness. I’d have felt it as a pain to my own body. We did our bit though. I was with the Ambulance Service for a time, over in Folkestone; Saffy stitched clothing and bandages, knitted a thousand scarves. We took in an evacuee, too, in the early years.’

‘Oh?’ My voice trilled slightly. Beside me the little girl skipped.

‘At Juniper’s urging. A young girl from London. Goodness, I’ve forgotten her name. Isn’t that a pip? – Apologies for the smell along here.’

Something inside me clenched in sympathy for that forgotten girl.

‘It’s the mud,’ Percy went on. ‘From where the moat used to be. The groundwater rises in summer, seeps through the cellars and brings the smell of rotting fish with it. Thankfully there’s nothing down here of much value. Nothing except the muniment room, and it’s watertight. The walls and floor are lined with copper, the door is made from lead. Nothing gets in or out of there.’

‘The muniment room.’ A chill rippled fast up my neck. ‘Just like in the
Mud Man
.’ The special room, deep within the uncle’s house, the room where all the family’s documents were lodged, where he unearthed the mouldy old diary that unravelled the Mud Man’s past. The chamber of secrets in the house’s heart.

Percy paused, leaned on her cane and turned her eyes on me. ‘You’ve read it then.’

It wasn’t a question exactly, but I answered anyway. ‘I adored it growing up.’ As the words left my lips I felt a stirring of old deflation, the inability to express adequately my love for the book. ‘It was my favourite,’ I added, and the phrase hung hopefully before disintegrating into specks, powder from a puff that drifted unseen into the shadows.

‘It was very popular,’ said Percy, starting again down the corridor. No doubt she’d heard it all before. ‘It still is. Seventy-five years in print next year.’

‘Really?’

‘Seventy-five years,’ she said again, pulling open a door and issuing me up another flight of stairs. ‘I remember it like yesterday.’

‘The publication must have been very exciting.’