The Distant Hours (11 page)

‘We were pleased to see Daddy happy.’ Did I notice the tiny hesitation then, or am I letting things learned later colour my earliest impressions?

A clock somewhere began its weary chime and I realized with a stab of regret that my hour was up. It seemed impossible, I’d have sworn black and blue that I’d only just arrived, but time is an odd, ungraspable thing. The hour that sagged between breakfast and my setting out for Milderhurst had taken an age to pass, but the sixty brief minutes I’d been granted inside the castle walls had fled like a flock of frightened birds.

Percy Blythe checked her own wristwatch. ‘I’ve dallied,’ she said with mild surprise. ‘I apologize. The grandfather is ten minutes fast, but we must get on nonetheless. Mrs Bird will be here to collect you on the hour and it’s quite a walk back to the entrance hall. There’ll be no time to see the tower, I’m afraid.’

I made a gasping noise, a cross between ‘Oh!’ and a sharp reaction to pain, and then I recovered myself: ‘I’m sure Mrs Bird won’t mind if I’m a little late.’

‘I was under the impression you had to be back in London?’

‘Yes.’ Though it seems unfathomable, for a moment I’d actually forgotten: Herbert, his car, the appointment he had to make in Windsor. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘Never mind,’ said Percy Blythe, striding after her cane. ‘You’ll see it next time. When you visit us again.’ I noticed the assumption, but I didn’t think to query it, not at the time. Indeed, I gave it little thought other than to pass it off as a rather fun and meaningless rejoinder, for as we emerged from the stairwell I was distracted by a rustling sound.

The rustling, like the caretakers, was only very faint and I wondered at first if I’d imagined it, all that talk of the distant hours, people trapped in the stones, but when Percy Blythe also glanced around, I knew that I had not.

From an adjoining corridor, the dog lumbered into view. ‘Bruno,’ said Percy, surprised, ‘what are you doing all the way down here, fellow?’

He stopped right beside me and looked up from beneath his droopy lids.

Percy leaned forward to scratch him behind the ears. ‘Do you know what the word “lurcher” means? It’s from the Romany for thief. Isn’t that right, boy? Terribly cruel name for such a good old boy as you.’ She straightened slowly, one hand in the small of her back. ‘They were bred by the gypsies originally, used for poaching: rabbits and hares, other small creatures. Pure breeds were forbidden to anyone who didn’t belong to the nobility and the penalties were severe; the challenge was to retain the hunting skills whilst breeding in sufficient variation that they didn’t look like a threat.

‘He’s my sister’s, Juniper’s. Even as a small girl she loved animals specially; they seemed to love her too. We’ve always kept a dog for her, certainly since the trauma. They say everyone needs something to love.’

As if he knew and resented being made the topic of discussion, Bruno continued on his way. In his wake, the rustling came again faintly, only to be drowned out when a nearby phone began to ring.

Percy stood very still, listening the way people do when they’re awaiting confirmation that someone else has picked up.

The ringing continued until disconsolate silence closed around its final echo.

‘Come along,’ said Percy, a note of agitation clipping her voice. ‘There’s a shortcut through here.’

The corridor was dim, but no more so than the others; indeed, now that we’d emerged from the basement, a few diffuse ribbons of light had appeared, threading their way through the castle knots to spill across the flagstones. We were two-thirds of the way along when the phone began again.

This time Percy didn’t wait. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, clearly flustered. ‘I can’t think where Saffy is. I’m expecting an important telephone call. Will you excuse me? I shan’t be a moment.’

‘Of course.’

And with a nod she disappeared, turning at the end of the corridor and leaving me stranded.

I blame what happened next on the door. The one right across the hall from me, a mere three feet away. I love doors. All of them, without exception. Doors lead to things and I’ve never met one I haven’t wanted to open. All the same, if that door hadn’t been so old and decorative, so decidedly closed, if a thread of light hadn’t positioned itself with such wretched temptation across its middle, highlighting the keyhole and its intriguing key, perhaps I might have stood a chance; remained, twiddling my thumbs, until Percy came to collect me. But it was and I didn’t; I maintain that I simply couldn’t. Sometimes you can tell just by looking at a door that there’s something interesting behind it.

The handle was black and smooth, shaped like a shin bone and cool beneath my palm. Indeed, a general coldness seemed to leach from the other side of the door; though how, I couldn’t tell.

My fingers tightened around the handle, I started to twist, then—

‘We don’t go in there.’

My stomach, I don’t mind saying, just about shot through the roof of my mouth.

I spun on my heel, scanned the gloomy space behind. I could see nothing, yet clearly I wasn’t alone. Someone, the owner of the voice, was in the corridor with me. Even if she hadn’t spoken I’d have known: I could feel another presence, something moving and hiding in the drawing shadows. The rustling was back now, too: louder, closer, definitely not in my head, definitely not mice.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the cloaked passage. ‘I—’

‘We don’t go in there.’

I smothered the panicky surge in my throat. ‘I didn’t know—’

‘That’s the good parlour.’

I saw her then, Juniper Blythe, as she stepped from the chill darkness and slowly crossed the corridor towards me.

Her dress was incredible, the sort you expect to see in films about wealthy debutantes before the war, or hidden on the racks of upmarket charity shops. It was organza, the palest of pink, or it had been once, before time and grime had got busy, laying their fingers all over it. Sheets of tulle supported the full skirt, pushing it out as it fell away from her tiny waist, wide enough for the netted hemline to rustle against the walls when she moved.

We stood facing one another across the dull corridor for what felt like a very long time. Finally, she moved. Slightly. Her arms had been hanging by her sides, resting on her skirt, and she lifted one a little, leading from the palm, a graceful movement as if an unseen thread stitched to her inner wrist had been plucked from the ceiling behind me.

‘Hello,’ I said, with what I hoped was warmth. ‘I’m Edie. Edie Burchill. We met earlier, in the yellow parlour.’

She blinked at me and tilted her head sideways. Silvered hair draped over her shoulder, long and lank; the front strands had been pinned rather haphazardly with a pair of baroque combs. The unexpected translucence of her skin, the rake-like figure, the fancy frock: all combined to create the illusion of a teenager, a young girl with gangly limbs and a self-conscious way of holding them. Not shy, though, certainly not that: her expression was quizzical, curious, as she took a small step closer into a stray patch of light.

And then it was my turn for curiosity, for Juniper must have been seventy years old and yet her face was miraculously unlined. Impossible, of course; ladies of seventy do not have unlined faces, and she was no exception – in our later meetings I would see that for myself – but in that light, in that dress, through some trick of circumstance, some strange charm, it was how she appeared. Pale and smooth, iridescent like the inside of a pearl shell, as if the same passing years that had so busily engraved deep imprints on her sisters had somehow preserved her. And yet she wasn’t timeless; there was something unmistakably olden days about her, an aspect that was utterly fixed in the past, like an old photograph viewed through protective tissue in one of those albums with the sepia-clouded pages. The image came to me again of the spring flowers pressed by Victorian ladies in their scrapbooks. Beautiful things, killed in the kindest of ways, carried forward into a time and place, a season, no longer their own.

The chimera spoke then, and the sensation was compounded: ‘I’m going in to dinner now.’ A high, ethereal voice that made the hair on my neck stand to attention. ‘Would you like to come too?’

I shook my head, coughed to clear a tickle from my throat. ‘No. No, thank you. I have to go home soon.’ My voice was not itself and I realized I was standing very rigidly, as if I was afraid. Which, I suppose, I was, though of what I couldn’t say.

Juniper didn’t seem to notice my discomfort: ‘I have a new dress to wear,’ she said, plucking at her skirts so that the top layer of organza pulled up a little at each side, like the wings of a moth, white and powdery with dust. ‘Not new exactly, no, that isn’t right, but altered. It belonged to my mother once.’

‘It’s beautiful.’

‘I don’t think you ever met her.’

‘Your mother? No.’

‘Oh, she was lovely, so lovely. Just a girl when she died, just a girl. This was her pretty dress.’ She swirled coyly this way and that, peered up at me from beneath her lashes. The glassy gaze of earlier was gone, replaced by keen blue eyes, knowing somehow, the eyes of that bright child I’d seen in the photograph, disturbed while she was playing alone on the garden steps. ‘Do you like it?’

‘I do. Very much.’

‘Saffy altered it for me. She’s a wonder with a sewing machine. If you show her any picture you fancy she can work out how it’s made, even the newest Parisian designs, the pictures in
Vogue
. She’s been working on my dress for weeks but it’s a secret. Percy wouldn’t approve, on account of the war, and on account of her being Percy, but I know you won’t tell.’ She smiled then, and it was so enigmatic that my breath caught.

‘I won’t say a word.’

We stood for a moment, each observing the other. My earlier fear had dissipated now, and for that I was glad. The reaction had been unfounded, an instinct only, and I was embarrassed by its memory. What was there to fear, after all? This lost woman in the lonely corridor was Juniper Blythe, the same person who had once upon a time chosen my mother from a clutch of frightened children, who had given her a home when the bombs were falling on London, who had never stopped waiting and hoping for a long-ago sweetheart to arrive.

Her chin lifted as I watched her, and she exhaled thoughtfully. Apparently, as I’d been reaching my conclusions she’d been drawing her own. I smiled, and it seemed to decide her in some way. She straightened, then started towards me again, slowly but with clear purpose. Feline, that’s what she was. Her every movement contained the same elastic mixture of caution and confidence, languor that masked an underlying intent.

She stopped only when she was close enough that I could smell the naphthalene on her dress, the stale cigarette smoke on her breath. Her eyes searched mine, her voice was a whisper. ‘Can you keep a secret?’

I nodded, which made her smile; the gap between her two front teeth was impossibly girlish. She took my hands in hers as if we were friends in the schoolyard, her palms were smooth and cool. ‘I have a secret but I’m not supposed to tell.’

‘OK.’

She cupped her hand like a child and leaned in close, pressing it against my ear. Her breath tickled. ‘I have a lover.’ And when she pulled away her old lips formed a youthful expression of lustful excitement that was grotesque and sad and beautiful all at once. ‘His name is Tom. Thomas Cavill, and he’s asked me to marry him.’

The sadness I felt for her came upon me in a rush, almost too great to bear, as I realized she was stuck in the moment of her great disappointment. I longed for Percy to return so that our conversation might be ended.

‘Promise you won’t breathe a word of it?’

‘I promise.’

‘I’ve told him yes, but shhh – ’ a finger pressed against her smiling lips – ‘my sisters don’t know yet. He’s coming soon to have dinner.’ She grinned, old lady teeth in a powder-smooth face. ‘We’re going to announce our engagement.’

I saw then that she wore something around her finger. Not a ring, not a real one. This was a crude impostor, silver but dull, lumpy, like a piece of aluminium foil rolled and pressed into shape.

‘And then we’re going to dance, dance, dance . . .’ She started to sway, humming along to music that was playing, perhaps, in her head. It was the same tune I’d heard earlier, floating in the cold pockets of the corridors. The name eluded me then, no matter how tantalizingly close it came. The recording, as it must have been, had stopped some time ago, but Juniper listed regardless, her eyelids closed, her cheeks coloured with a young woman’s anticipation.

I worked on a book once for an elderly couple writing a history of their life together. The woman had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s but was yet to begin the final harrowing descent, and they’d decided to record her memories before they blew away like bleached leaves from an autumn tree.

The project took six months to complete, during which time I watched her slip helplessly through forgetting towards emptiness. Her husband became ‘that man over there’ and the vibrant, funny woman with the fruity language, who’d argued and grinned and interrupted, was silenced.

No, I’d seen dementia, and this wasn’t it. Wherever Juniper was, it wasn’t empty, and she’d forgotten very little. Yet there was something the matter; she clearly wasn’t well. Every elderly woman I’ve known has told me, at some point, and with varying degrees of wistfulness, that she’s eighteen years old on the inside. But it isn’t true. I’m only thirty and I know that. The stretch of years leaves none unmarked: the blissful sense of youthful invincibility peels away and responsibility brings its weight to bear.