The Distant Hours (17 page)

Having glimpsed the clear-ish passage to the far window – a legacy of her previous expedition – Saffy started gingerly through the jumble. If Nanny could only see the place now! Gone were the clean, clear days of her reign, the supervised milky suppers, the little broomette pulled out at night for crumbs, the twin desks against the wall, the lingering scent of beeswax and Pears soap. No, Nanny’s epoch had been ended well and truly; replaced, it seemed to Saffy, by anarchy. Paper, paper everywhere, inked with odd instructions, illustrations, questions Juniper had written to herself; clusters of dust gathering contentedly, lining the skirting boards like chaperones at a dance. There were things stuck to walls, pictures of people and places and oddly assembled words that had, for some inexplicable reason, captured Juniper’s imagination; and the floor was a sea of books, articles of clothing, cups with dubiously grimy insides, makeshift ashtrays, favourite dolls with blinking eyes, old bus tickets with scribble around their edges. The whole made Saffy lightheaded and decidedly queasy. Was that a bread crust beneath the quilt? If so, it had hardened by now into a museum piece.

Though tidying up after Juniper was a nasty habit and one against which Saffy had long ago waged war and won, on this occasion she couldn’t help herself. Mess was one thing, comestibles quite another. With a shudder she reached down, wrapped the granite-hard crust in the quilt and hurried to the closest window, releasing the crust and listening for the dull thud as it hit the old moat grass below. Another shudder as she shook out the quilt, then she pulled the window closed and sealed the blackout curtains.

The tatty quilt would need washing and patching, but that was for another day; for now Saffy would have to content herself with giving it a thorough folding. Not too neatly, of course – though Juniper, it was safe to assume, would neither notice nor care – just enough to restore to it some semblance of dignity. The quilt, Saffy thought fondly, drawing the corners to arm’s length, deserved better than a four-month furlough on the floor playing shroud to a stale lump of bread. It had been a gift originally, one of the estate farmer’s wives had sewn it for Juniper many years before, that being the sort of unsolicited affection Juniper tended to inspire. Although most people would be touched by such a gesture, bound by it to take special care of the item, Juniper was not most people. She placed no greater value on the creations of others than she placed on her own. This was one of the aspects of her little sister’s character Saffy found most difficult to understand, and she sighed as she took in the autumn of discarded papers on the floor.

She looked for a place to leave the folded quilt and settled on a nearby chair. A book lay open atop a pile of others and Saffy, pathologically literate, couldn’t help flicking back to the title page to see what it was.
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
, inscribed to Juniper by T. S. Eliot after he came to visit and Daddy showed him some of June’s poems. Saffy wasn’t sure about Thomas Eliot; she admired him, of course, as a wordsmith, but there was a pessimism in his soul, a darkness in his outlook, that always left her somehow more aware of hard edges than she had been before. Not so much with the cats, who were whimsy itself, as with his other poems. His obsession with ticking clocks and passing time, it seemed to Saffy, was a recipe for depression and one she could quite do without.

Juniper’s feelings on the matter were unclear. This was not a surprise. If Juniper were a character in a book, Saffy often thought, she’d be the sort whose evocation was best limited to the reactions of others, whose point of view was impossible to enter without risk of turning ambivalence into absolutes. Words like ‘disarming’, ‘ethereal’ and ‘beguiling’ would be invaluable to the author, along with ‘fierce’ and ‘reckless’, and even on odd occasion – though Saffy knew she must never say so aloud – ‘violent’. In Eliot’s hands, she’d be Juniper, the Cat
au Contraire.
Saffy smiled, pleased by the notion, and dusted her fingers on her knees. Juniper
was
rather catlike, after all: the wide-apart eyes with their fixed gaze, the lightness of foot, the resistance to attention she hadn’t sought.

Saffy began wading through the sea of papers towards the other windows, permitting herself a brief detour past the cupboard where the Dress was hanging. She’d brought it upstairs that morning, as soon as Percy was safely out of the house; pulled the dress from its hiding place and draped it over her arms like the sleeping princess of a fairy tale. She’d had to bend a coat hanger out of shape so that the silk might swathe against the outside of the wardrobe, facing the door, but it was necessary. The dress must be the first thing Juniper saw when she pushed open the door that evening and switched on the light.

Now the dress: there was the perfect example of the unknowable Juniper. The letter, when it arrived from London, had been such a surprise that if Saffy hadn’t witnessed a lifetime of her sister’s abrupt about-turns, she’d have believed it a prank. If there was one thing about her sister she’d have put money on, it was this: Juniper Blythe did not give two hoots about clothing. She’d spent her childhood in plain white muslin and bare feet and had a curious knack for reducing any new dress, no matter how smart, into a shapeless sack within two hours of wear. Although Saffy had held out some hope, maturity had not changed her. Where other girls of seventeen longed to go up to London for their first season, Juniper hadn’t even mentioned it, shooting Saffy a stare of such withering intensity when she so much as hinted at the possibility that the after-burn had pained for weeks. Which was just as well, seeing as Daddy would never have allowed it. She was his ‘creature of the castle’, he used to say, there was no need ever for her to leave it. What would a girl like her want with a round of debutante balls anyway?

The hurried postscript in Juniper’s letter, then, asking whether Saffy minded putting a dress together, something a person might wear to a dance – wasn’t there an old frock of her mother’s somewhere, something she’d worn to London, just before she died, perhaps it could be altered? – had been utterly bemusing. Juniper had made a point of addressing the letter to Saffy alone, so although she and Percy usually worked in partnership where Juniper was concerned, Saffy had pondered the request privately. After much consideration she’d come to the conclusion that city life must have changed her little sister; she wondered whether Juniper had been changed in other ways, whether she’d want to move to London for good after the war. Away from Milderhurst, no matter what Daddy had wanted for her.

Regardless of
why
Juniper had made the request, it was Saffy’s delight to fulfil it. Along with her typewriter, Saffy’s Singer 201K – undoubtedly the finest model ever made – was her pride and joy and although she’d done copious sewing since the war began, all of it had been practical. The opportunity to set aside the stacks of blankets and hospital pyjamas for a time and work on a fashion project had been thrilling, particularly the project that Juniper had suggested. For Saffy had immediately known the dress of which her sister spoke; she’d admired it even then, on that unforgettable night in 1924 when her stepmother had worn it to the London premiere of Daddy’s play. It had been in storage ever since, down in the muniment room, which was airtight and therefore the one place in the castle where moths and rot couldn’t find it.

Saffy ran her fingertips lightly down the sides of the silk skirt. The colour really was exquisite. A lustrous almost-pink, like the underside of the wild mushrooms that grew by the mill, the sort of colour a careless glance might mistake for cream, but which rewarded close attention. Saffy had worked on the alteration for weeks, always in secret, and the duplicity, the effort, had been worth it. She lifted the hem to check again the neatness of her handiwork, then, satisfied, smoothed it. She took a small step backwards, all the better to admire the full effect. Yes, it was glorious; she’d taken an item that was beautiful but dated and, armed with favourite editions from her collection of
Vogue
magazines, turned it into a piece of art. And if that sounded immodest, so be it. Saffy was well aware that this might be her last opportunity to see the dress in all its glory (the sad truth: once Juniper took possession there was no telling what dreadful fate awaited it); she wasn’t about to waste the moment by adhering to the dreary strictures of false modesty.

With a glance behind her, Saffy slipped the gown from its hanger and felt its weight in her hands; all the best dresses had a pleasing weight. She inserted a finger beneath each of the shoulder straps and held it up in front of her, chewing her bottom lip as she regarded herself in the mirror. There she stood, head tilted to the side, a childhood mannerism she’d never managed to shed, and from this distance and in this half-light, the passage of the years might never have been. If she squinted a little, smiled more broadly, she might still be the nineteen-year-old who’d stood beside her stepmother at the London premiere of Daddy’s play, coveting the pale pink dress and promising herself that one day she too would wear such a wondrous thing, maybe even at her own wedding.

Saffy put it back on the hanger, tripping on a discarded glass tumbler in the process, one from the set Daddy and Mother had received from the Asquiths on their marriage. She sighed; Juniper’s irreverence really knew no bounds. Which was all well and good for Juniper, but Saffy, having seen the tumbler, couldn’t very well ignore it. She bent to pick it up and was halfway to standing again when she glimpsed a Limoges teacup beneath an old newspaper; before she knew it she’d trespassed all over her own golden rule and was down on all fours, cleaning. The pile of crockery she’d assembled within a minute didn’t make a dent in the clutter. All that paper, all those scribbled words.

The mess, the impossibility of ever reasserting order, of reclaiming an old thought, was almost a physical pain for Saffy. For while she and Juniper were both writers, their methods were quite opposed. It was Saffy’s habit to set aside precious hours each day in which to sit quietly, her only companions a notebook, the fountain pen Daddy had given her for her sixteenth birthday, and a freshly brewed pot of strong tea. So arranged, she would carefully, slowly, craft her words into pleasing order, writing and rewriting, editing and perfecting, reading aloud and relishing the pleasure of bringing her heroine Adele’s story to life. Only when she was absolutely happy with the day’s work would she retire to her Olivetti and type up the new paragraph.

Juniper, on the other hand, worked like someone trying to write themselves free of entanglement. She did so wherever inspiration found her, writing on the run, spilling behind her scraps of poems, fragmented images, adverbs out of place, but somehow the stronger for it; all littered the castle, dropped like breadcrumbs, leading the way to the gingerbread nursery at the top of the stairs. Saffy would find them sometimes when she was cleaning – ink-splotched pages on the floor, behind the sofa, under the rug – and she’d surrender herself to the conjured image of an ancient Roman trireme, sail hoisted, wind beating it full, an order shouted on deck whilst in the bows the secreted lovers hid, on the brink of capture . . . Only for the story then to be abandoned, victim of Juniper’s fleeting, shifting interest.

At other times, whole stories were begun and completed in wild fits of composition; manias, Saffy sometimes thought, though that was not a word any of the Blythes used lightly, certainly not in relation to Juniper. The littlest sister would fail to appear at table and light would be found streaking through the nursery floorboards, a hot strip beneath the door. Daddy would order them not to disturb her, saying that the needs of the body were secondary to the demands of genius, but Saffy always sneaked a plate up when he wasn’t looking. Not that it was ever touched; Juniper just kept scribbling all night long. Sudden, burning, like those tropical fevers people seemed always to be getting, and short-lived, so that by next day all would be calm. She would emerge from the attic: tired, dazed and emptied. Yawning and lounging in that feline manner of hers, the demon exorcised and quite forgotten.

And that was the strangest aspect of all for Saffy, who filed her own compositions – drafts and finals – in matching lidded boxes that were stacked prettily for posterity in the muniment room, who had always worked towards the thrill of binding her work and pressing it into a reader’s hands. Juniper had no interest whatsoever in whether or not her writing was read. There was no false modesty in her failure to show her work to others; she simply couldn’t have cared less. Once the thing was written, it was no longer of any interest to her. Percy, when Saffy mentioned it, had been nonplussed, but that was to be expected. Poor Percy, without a creative bone in her body—

Well, well! Saffy paused, still on hands and knees; what should appear beneath the underbrush of papers but Grandmother’s silver serving spoon! The very thing she’d spent half the day looking for. She sat back on her haunches, pressing her hands flat against her thighs, forcing the kink from her lower spine. To think that all the while, as she and Lucy had turned drawers inside out, the spoon had been tucked beneath the rubble in Juniper’s room. Saffy was about to pluck it from its resting place – there was a curious stain on the handle that would need attention – when she saw that it had been acting as a bookmark of sorts. She opened the notebook – more of Juniper’s scratchy handwriting, but this page was dated. Saffy’s eyes, trained by a lifetime of voracious reading, were faster than her manners, and within the split second it took to blink she’d discerned that the book was a journal, the entry recent. May 1941, just before Juniper left for London.

It was simply dreadful to read another person’s journal and Saffy would be mortified if her own privacy were invaded in such a fashion, but Juniper had never cared for rules of conduct and in some way that Saffy understood but couldn’t formulate into words, that fact made it all right for her to take a peek. Indeed, Juniper’s habit of leaving personal papers lying flagrantly in the open was an invitation, surely, for her older sister, a mother figure really, to ensure that all was in order. Juniper was almost nineteen, but she was a special case: not responsible for herself like most adults. How else were Saffy and Percy to act as Juniper’s guardians other than by making it their business to know hers? Nanny wouldn’t have thought twice about leafing through diaries and letters left in view by her charges, which was precisely why the twins had gone to such great lengths to rotate their hiding spots. That Juniper didn’t bother was evidence enough to Saffy that her baby sister welcomed maternal interest in her affairs. And she was here now, and Juniper’s notebook was lying right there in front of her, open to a relatively recent page. Why – it was almost uncaring, wasn’t it, not to take a tiny little peek?