The Distant Hours

by Kate Morton

  ‘Perhaps he’s playing somewhere,’ I suggested. ‘In the woods or the gardens?’ Even as I said it, I remembered the way he’d looked the day before, the shortness of breath, the sagging shoulders, the ridge of grey along his spine, and I knew it wasn’t so.

  Sure enough, Saffy shook her head: ‘No. No, he wouldn’t, you see. He rarely strays from Juniper, and then only ever to sit by the front stairs, watching for visitors. Not that we ever have any. Present company excepted.’ She smiled slightly, almost apologetically, as if she feared I might have taken offence. ‘This is different, though. We’re all terribly worried. He hasn’t been well and he’s not been acting himself. Percy had to go looking for him yesterday, and now this.’ Her fingers knotted together at her belt, and I wished there was something I could do to help. There are certain people who exude vulnerability, whose pain and discomfort are particularly difficult to witness, and for whom you would endure almost any inconvenience if it promised to ease their suffering. Saffy Blythe was one of them.

  ‘Why don’t I go and have a look at the spot where I saw him yesterday?’ I said, starting for the door. ‘Perhaps he’s gone back there for some reason.’

  ‘No – ’

  She said it so sharply that I turned immediately; one of her hands reached out to me, the other worried the neckline of her knitted cardigan against her fragile skin.

  ‘What I mean is – ’ her outstretched arm dropped to her side – ‘how kind it is of you to offer, but that it’s unnecessary. Percy’s on the telephone right now, calling Mrs Bird’s nephew so that he might come around and help us search . . . I’m sorry. I’m not being very clear. Forgive me, but I’m rather flummoxed, only – ’ she glanced beyond me, at the door – ‘I had hoped that I might catch you like this.’

  ‘You had?’

  She pressed her lips together, and I saw that she wasn’t merely worried for Bruno’s safety, she was nervous about something else. ‘Percy will be along in a minute,’ she said softly. ‘She’s going to take you to see the notebooks, just as she promised – but before she comes, before you go with her, there’s something I need to explain.’

  Saffy looked so serious then, so vexed, that I went to her, placed a hand on the side of her birdlike shoulder. ‘Here,’ I said, leading her to the sofa, ‘come and sit down. Is there something I can get for you? A cup of tea while we wait?’

  Her smile was lit with the gratitude of a person unused to being the recipient of kindness. ‘Bless you, but no. There isn’t time. Sit with me, please.’

  A shadow shifted by the doorway and she stiffened slightly, listening. There was nothing but silence. Silence and the odd corporeal noises to which I was growing accustomed: the gurgle of something behind the pretty ceiling cornice, the gentle breathing of the shutters against the window pane, the grinding of the house’s bones.

  ‘I feel I must explain,’ she said in an undertone, ‘about Percy, about yesterday. When you asked about Juniper, when you mentioned him, and Percy was such a tyrant.’

  ‘You really don’t need to explain.’

  ‘But I do, I must, only it isn’t easy to find a private moment – ’ a grim smile – ‘such an enormous house and yet one is never really alone.’

  Her nervousness was contagious and although I was doing nothing wrong a strange feeling came over me. My heart had started to race and I matched her subdued voice. ‘Is there somewhere else we could meet? The village perhaps?’

  ‘No.’ She said it quickly, shook her head. ‘No. I couldn’t do that. It isn’t possible.’ Another glance at the empty doorway and she said, ‘It’s best if we speak here.’

  I nodded agreement and waited as she gathered her thoughts carefully, like a person collecting scattered pins. When she had them together, she told her story quickly, in a low, determined voice. ‘It was a terrible thing,’ she said. ‘A terrible, terrible thing. Over fifty years ago now, yet I remember the evening as if it were yesterday. Juniper’s face as she came through the door that night. She was late, she’d lost her key, so she knocked and we answered and in she came, dancing across the threshold – she never walked, not like an ordinary person – and her face – I’ll never stop seeing it when I close my eyes at night. That instant. It was such a relief to see her. A terrible storm had blown up during the afternoon, you see. It was raining and the wind was howling, the buses were running late . . . We’d been so worried.

  ‘We thought it was him when we heard the knock. I was nervous about that, too; worried about Juniper, nervous about meeting him. I’d guessed, you see, that they were in love, that they planned to marry. She hadn’t told Percy – Percy, like Daddy, had rather fixed opinions about such things – but Juniper and I were always very close. And I desperately wanted to like him; I wanted him to be worthy of her love. I was curious, too, on that count: Juniper’s love was not easily won.

  ‘We sat together for a time in the good parlour. We talked at first, of trivial things, Juniper’s life in London, and we told each other that he’d been held up on the bus, that transport was the culprit, the war was to blame, but at some point we stopped.’ She glanced sideways at me and memory shadowed her eyes. ‘The wind was blowing, the rain was hammering against the shutters, and the dinner was spoiling in the oven . . . the smell of rabbit – ’ her face turned at the thought – ‘it was everywhere. I’ve never been able to stomach it since. It tastes like fear to me. Lumps of horrid, charred, fear . . . I was so frightened, seeing Juniper like that. It was all we could do to stop her from running out into the storm, searching for him. Even when midnight passed and it was clear he wasn’t coming, she wouldn’t give up. She became hysterical, we had to use Daddy’s old sleeping pills to calm her – ’

  Saffy broke off; she’d been speaking very quickly, trying to get her story told before Percy arrived, and her voice had dwindled. She coughed against a delicate lace handkerchief she’d pulled from her sleeve. There was a jug of water on the table near Juniper’s chair and I poured her some. ‘It must have been awful,’ I said, handing her the glass.

  She sipped gratefully, then cradled the glass in both hands on her lap. Her nerves were stretched taut it seemed, the skin around her jaw appeared to have contracted during the telling and I could see the blue veins beneath.

  ‘And he never came?’ I prompted.

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you never knew why? There was no letter? No telephone call?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘And Juniper?’

  ‘She waited and waited. She waits still. Days went by, then weeks. She never gave up hope. It was dreadful. Dreadful.’ The last word Saffy allowed to hang between us. She was lost in that time, all those years ago, and I didn’t probe further.

  ‘Madness isn’t sudden,’ she said eventually. ‘It sounds so simple – “she fell into madness” – but it isn’t like that. It was gradual. First she withdrew. She showed signs of recovery, she talked about going back to London, but only vaguely, and she never went. She stopped writing, too; that’s when I knew that something fragile, something precious, had been broken. Then one day she threw everything out of the attic window. All of it: books, papers, a desk, even the mattress . . .’ She tailed off and her lips moved silently around things she thought better of adding. With a sigh, she said, ‘The papers blew far and wide, down the hillsides, into the lake, like discarded leaves, their season ended. Where did they all go, I wonder?’

  I shook my head: she was asking the whereabouts of more than papers, I knew, and there was nothing I could think to say. I couldn’t imagine how difficult it must have been to see a beloved sibling regress in such a way; to watch countless layers of potential and personality, talent and possibility, disintegrate, one by one. How hard it must have been to witness, especially for someone like Saffy, who, according to Marilyn Bird, had been more like a mother to Juniper than a sister.

  ‘The furniture remained in a broken heap on the lawn. We none of us had the heart to carry it back upstairs, and Juniper didn’t w
ant it. She took to sitting by the cupboard in the attic, the one with the hidden doorway, convinced that she could hear things on the other side. Voices calling to her, though of course they were in her head. The poor love. The doctor wanted to send her away when he heard that, to an asylum . . .’ Her voice caught on the ghastly word, her eyes implored me to find in it the same horror she did. She’d started kneading the white handkerchief with a balled hand, and I reached out to touch her forearm very gently.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

  She was trembling with anger, with distress. ‘We wouldn’t hear a word of it; I wouldn’t hear a word of it. There was no way I was letting him take her from me. Percy spoke to the doctor, explained that such things were not done at Milderhurst Castle, that the Blythe family looked after its own. Eventually he agreed – Percy can be very persuasive – but he insisted on leaving stronger medicine for Juniper.’ She pressed the painted fingernails of her hand against her legs, like a cat, releasing tension, and I saw in the set of her features something I hadn’t noticed before. She was the softer twin, the submissive twin, but there was strength there, too. When it came to Juniper, when it came to fighting for the little sister whom she loved, Saffy Blythe was rock hard. Her next words shot like steam from a kettle, so hot they scalded: ‘Would that she’d never gone to London, never met that fellow. The greatest regret of my life is that she went away. Everything was ruined afterwards. Nothing was ever the same; not for any of us.’

  And that’s when I began to glimpse her purpose in telling me this story, why she thought it might help to explain Percy’s brusqueness; the night Thomas Cavill failed to arrive had been life-altering for all of them. ‘Percy,’ I said, and Saffy gave a slight nod. ‘Percy was different afterwards?’

  There came a noise then in the corridor, the deliberate gait, the unmistakable beating of Percy’s cane; as if she’d heard her name, intuited somehow that she was the subject of an illicit conversation.

  Saffy used the arm of the sofa to push herself to standing. ‘Edith has just arrived,’ she said quickly, as Percy appeared at the door. She gestured towards me with the hand which held her handkerchief. ‘I was telling her about poor Bruno.’

  Percy looked between us: from me, still seated on the sofa, to Saffy, standing right beside me.

  ‘Did you reach the young man?’ Saffy pressed on, her voice wavering a little.

  A short nod. ‘He’s on his way. I’m going to meet him at the front door; give him some idea of where to look. ’

  ‘Yes,’ said Saffy, ‘good. Good.’

  ‘Then I’ll take Miss Burchill downstairs.’ She met my unspoken query. ‘The muniment room. As promised.’

  I smiled, but instead of continuing the search for Bruno, as I’d expected, Percy walked into the parlour and went to stand by the window. She made a show of scrutinizing its wooden frame, scratching at a mark on the glass, leaning closer, but it was apparent that the impromptu inspection was a ruse so she might remain in the room with us. I realized then that Saffy had been right. For some reason Percy Blythe didn’t want me to be alone with her twin, and I returned to my suspicion of the day before – that Percy was worried Saffy might tell me something she shouldn’t. The control Percy wielded over her sisters was astonishing; it intrigued me, it caused a small voice inside my head to urge prudence, but more than anything it made me greedy to hear the conclusion of Saffy’s story.

  The five or so minutes that followed, in which Saffy and I made small talk about the weather, and Percy continued to glare at the glass and prod at the dusty sill, were amongst the longest I’d experienced. At last, relief, as the sound of a car motor came closer. We all gave up our performances, falling instead into stillness and silence.

  The motor grew very near and stopped. A heavy clunk as the car door closed. Percy exhaled. ‘That will be Nathan.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Saffy.

  ‘I’ll be back in five minutes.’

  And then, finally, she left. Saffy waited, and only when the footsteps had receded completely did she sigh, once, shortly, and swivel in her seat to face me. She smiled, and in it I read apology and discomfort. When she picked up the thread of her story, there was a new determination to her voice. ‘Perhaps you can tell,’ she began, ‘Percy is the strongest of us. She’s always seen herself as a protector, even when we were girls. For the most part I’ve been glad. A champion can be a very fortunate thing to have.’

  I couldn’t help but notice the way her fingers were moving against one another, the way she continued to glance towards the doorway. ‘Not always though,’ I said.

  ‘No. Not always. Not for me, and not for her either. The attribute has been a great burden in her life, not least after Juniper was . . . after it happened. We both took it hard, Juniper was our baby sister, is still our baby sister, and to see her like that,’ her head was shaking as she spoke, ‘it was unspeakably difficult. But Percy – ’ Saffy’s gaze picked at the space above my head, as if she might find there the words she sought to explain – ‘Percy was in such a black mood afterwards. She’d been crotchety in the lead up – my twin was one of those women who found purpose during the war and when the bombs stopped falling, when Hitler turned his sights on Russia, she was rather disappointed – but after that evening, it was different. She took the young man’s desertion of Juniper personally.’

  This was a curious turn. ‘Why would that have been?’

  ‘It was strange, almost as if she felt responsible in some way. She wasn’t, of course, and there was nothing she could have done that would have made things turn out differently. But that’s Percy: she blamed herself because that’s what Percy does. One of us was hurt and there was nothing she could do to fix it.’ She sighed, folding her handkerchief over and over to form a small, neat triangle. ‘And I suppose that’s why I’m telling you all this, though I fear I’m doing it all wrong. I want you to understand that Percy’s a good person, that despite the way she is, the way she comes across, she has a good heart.’

  It was important to Saffy, I could tell, that I should not think poorly of her twin, so I returned the smile she’d given me. But she was right – there was something about her story that didn’t make sense. ‘Why, though?’ I said. ‘Why would she have felt responsible? Did she know him? Had she met him before?’

  ‘No, never.’ She looked at me searchingly. ‘He lived in London; that’s where he and Juniper met. Percy hadn’t been to London since before the war.’

  I was nodding, but I was thinking, too, about my mum’s journal, the entry she’d made in which she mentioned that her teacher, Thomas Cavill, had come to visit her at Milderhurst in September 1939. That was the first time Juniper Blythe had met the man she would one day fall in love with. Percy might not have been to London, but there was every possibility that she’d met Thomas Cavill while he was here, in Kent. Though Saffy, it was evident, had not.

  A cool gust crept into the room and Saffy pulled her cardigan closer. I noticed that the skin across her collarbone had reddened, she was flushed; she regretted saying as much as she had, and she moved quickly now to sweep her indiscreet comments back beneath the rug. ‘My point is only that Percy took it very hard, that it changed her. I was glad when the Germans started with the doodlebugs and V2s because it gave her something new to worry about.’ Saffy laughed, but it had a hollow ring. ‘She’d have been happiest, I sometimes think, had the war continued indefinitely.’

  She was uncomfortable and I felt bad for her; sorry, too, that it was my probing that had caused her this new worry. She’d only meant to assuage any bruised feelings I’d suffered the day before and it seemed cruel to saddle her with a new social anxiety. I smiled and tried to change the subject. ‘And what about you? Did you work during the war?’

  She cheered up a little. ‘Oh, we all did our bit; I didn’t do anything as exciting as Percy, of course. She’s the better suited to heroics. I sewed and cooked and made do; knitted a thousands socks. Though not particularly well in some cases.�
� She was poking fun at herself and I smiled with her, an image coming to mind of a young girl shivering in the castle’s attic, shrunken socks layering both ankles and the hand that didn’t hold her pen. ‘I almost spent it employed as a governess, you know.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. A family of children who went to America for the duration. I received the offer of employment but had to turn it down.’

  ‘Because of the war?’

  ‘No. The letter arrived at the same time as Juniper’s great disappointment. Now, don’t you look like that. No need for a long face on my account. I don’t believe in regrets, not generally, there’s not much point, is there? I couldn’t have taken it, not then. Not when it took me so far away, not with Juniper. How could I have left her?’

  I didn’t have siblings; I wasn’t sure how these things worked. ‘Percy couldn’t have—?’

  ‘Percy has many gifts, but caring for children and invalids has never been among them. It takes a certain – ’ her fingertips fussed, and she searched the antique firescreen as if the words she sought might be written there – ‘softness, I suppose. No. I couldn’t have left Juniper with only Percy to care for her. So I wrote a letter, turning the position down.’

  ‘It must have been very difficult.’

  ‘One doesn’t have a choice when it comes to family. Juniper was my baby sister. I wasn’t about to leave her, not like that. And besides, even if the fellow had come as he was supposed to, if they’d married and moved away, I probably wouldn’t have been able to leave anyway.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She turned her elegant neck, didn’t meet my eye.

  A noise in the corridor, just as before, a muffled cough and the sharp beat of a cane coming towards us.