The Distant Hours (18 page)

There was another bicycle leaning against the front steps, where Percy had taken to leaving her own when she was too tired, too lazy, or too plain rushed to put it in the stables. Which was often. This was unusual – Saffy hadn’t mentioned guests other than Juniper and the fellow, Thomas Cavill, each of whom would be arriving off buses and definitely not by bicycle.

Percy climbed the stairs and dug about in her satchel, searching for the key. Saffy had become very particular about keeping the doors locked since war started, convinced that Milderhurst would be circled in red on Hitler’s invasion map and the Blythe sisters marked out for arrest, which was fine with Percy except for the fact that her front-door key seemed always intent on hiding from her.

Ducks spluttered on the pond behind; the dark mass of Cardarker Wood quivered; thunder grumbled, closer now; and time seemed to stretch like elastic. Just as she was about to give up and start pounding on the door, it swung open and Lucy Middleton was there, a scarf over her hair and a weak-beamed bicycle lamp in her hand.

‘Oh my!’ The former housekeeper’s free hand leaped to her chest. ‘You frightened me.’

Percy opened her mouth, but finding no words closed it again. She stopped rummaging and swung her satchel over her shoulder. Still no words.

‘I – I’ve been helping in the kitchen.’ Lucy’s face was flushed. ‘Miss Saffy gave me a ring. On the telephone, earlier. Neither of her dailies was available.’

Percy cleared her throat and regretted the action immediately. The resulting croak connoted nervousness, and Lucy Middleton was the very last person before whom she wished to seem uncertain. ‘Everything’s set then, is it? For tonight?’

‘The pie’s in the oven and I’ve left Miss Saffy with instructions.’

‘I see.’

‘The dinner will cook slowly. I’d be expecting Miss Saffy to boil over first.’

It was a joke, an amusing one, but Percy left it too long to laugh. She sought something else to say, but there was too much and too little and Lucy Middleton, who had been standing, waiting for something further, must have realized that it wasn’t coming because she moved now, somewhat awkwardly, around Percy to retrieve her bicycle.

No, it wasn’t Middleton any more. Lucy Rogers. It had been over a year since she and Harry had wed. Almost eighteen months.

‘Good day, Miss Blythe.’ Lucy climbed onto her bicycle.

‘Your husband?’ said Percy quickly, despising herself as she did so. ‘Is he well?’

Lucy didn’t meet her eyes. ‘He is.’

‘And you too, of course?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the babe.’

Almost a whisper: ‘Yes.’

Her posture was that of a child expecting to be scolded or, worse, thrashed, and Percy was overcome with the sudden, hot desire to fulfil the expectation. She didn’t, of course, adopting instead a casual tone, less precipitate than before, almost light, and saying, ‘You might mention to your husband that the grandfather in the hall is still gaining. We arrive at the hour ten minutes sooner than we should.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘I don’t think I imagined that he bore some special sentiment towards our old clock?’

Lucy refused to meet her eyes but uttered a vague reply before mounting her bicycle and pushing off towards the top of the driveway, lamplight scribbling a shaky message on the ground before her.

At the shudder of the front door downstairs Saffy clapped the journal shut. Her blood thrummed warm beneath her temples, her cheeks, the skin stretched taut above her breasts. Her pulse beat faster than a small bird’s heart. Well. She stood shakily, pushing herself up from the ground. That certainly took away some of the guesswork: the mystery of the evening ahead, the alteration of the dress, the young male guest. Not a gallant stranger at all. No. Not a stranger.

‘Saffy?’ Percy’s voice cut sharp and angry through the layers of floorboards.

Saffy pressed a hand to her forehead, steeling herself to the task ahead. She knew what she had to do: she needed to get herself dressed and downstairs, she needed to assess how much cajoling Percy was going to require, then she needed to make sure the evening was a great success. And there was the grandfather chiming six o’clock so she had to do it at once. Juniper and her young man – whose name, Saffy was sure she remembered correctly, was the same as that she’d glimpsed in the journal entry – would be arriving within the hour, the strength with which Percy had slammed the front door foretold a dark mood, and Saffy herself was still dressed like someone who’d spent the day digging for victory.

Pile of liberated crockery forgotten, she waded hurriedly through the paper so she could close the remaining windows and draw the blackout curtains. Movement on the driveway caught her eye – Lucy crossing the first bridge on her bicycle – but Saffy looked away. A flock of birds soared across the distant sky, way over by the hop fields, and she watched them go. ‘Free as a bird’ was the expression, and yet they weren’t free at all, not as far as Saffy could tell: they were bound to one another by their habits, their seasonal needs, their biology, their nature, their birth. No freer than anyone else. Still, they knew the exhilaration of flight. What Saffy wouldn’t give sometimes to spread her wings and fly, right now, drifting from the window to soar above the fields, over the top of the woods, following the planes towards London.

She’d tried once, when she was a girl. She’d climbed out of the attic window, walked along the ridge of the roof, and scrambled down to the ledge below Daddy’s tower. She’d made herself a pair of wings first, the most glorious pair of silken wings, bound with twine to fine, light sticks she’d salvaged from the woods; she’d even sewn elastic loops on the back so she could wear them. They’d been so beautiful – neither pink nor red but vermilion, gleaming in the sun, just like the plumage on real birds – and for a few seconds after she’d launched herself into the air she’d really flown. The wind had buffeted her from beneath, whipping up through the valley to push her arms behind her, and everything had slowed, slowed, slowed, briefly but brilliantly, and she’d glimpsed what heaven it was to fly. Then things had begun to speed up, her descent had been rapid, and when she’d hit the ground, her wings and her arms had been broken.

‘Saffy?’ The shout came again. ‘Are you hiding from me?’

The birds disappeared into the swollen sky and Saffy pulled the window shut, sealing the blackouts so not a chink of light would be seen. Outside, the storm clouds rumbled like a full stomach, the gluttonous belly of a gentleman who’d escaped the frugalities of a rationed pantry. Saffy smiled, amusing herself, and made a mental note to jot down the description in her journal.

It was quiet inside, too quiet, and Percy’s lips tightened with familiar agitation; Saffy had always been the sort to hide when confrontation reared its bitter head. Percy had been fighting her twin’s battles all their lives, something she excelled at and actually quite enjoyed, and which worked very well indeed until dispute arose between them and Saffy, woefully out of practice, was ill equipped to meet it. Incapable of fight, she was left with only two options: flight or abject denial. In this instance, judging by the emphatic silence which met Percy’s attempts to find her, Saffy had chosen the former. Which was frustrating, exceedingly frustrating, for there was a fierce, spiky ball inside Percy, just waiting to get out. With no one to scowl at or take to task, however, Percy was stuck nursing it, and the fierce, spiky ball wasn’t the sort of affliction to shrivel of its own accord. With nowhere to fling it, she would need to seek satisfaction elsewhere. Whisky perhaps would help: it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

There was a moment each afternoon at which the sun reached a particular low point in the sky and light vanished, immediately and drastically, from within the castle. That moment passed as Percy went down the corridor from the entrance hall. When she emerged in the yellow parlour it was almost too dark to see her way across the room, which might have been hazardous had Percy not been able to navigate the castle blindfolded. She edged around the sofa into the bay window, pulled the blackout curtains across the glass and switched on the table lamp. As usual it made no practicable dent in the gloom. She pulled out a match to light the paraffin lamp’s wick but found, with mild surprise and strong annoyance, that after the encounter with Lucy her hand was shaking too much to strike it.

Ever the opportunist, the mantel clock chose that moment to step up its ticking. Percy had never liked that damned clock. It had been Mother’s and Daddy had insisted it was dear to him; thus its tenure was secure. There was something in the nature of its tick, though, that set Percy’s teeth on edge, a malicious suggestion that it took far more joy than a china object should at sweeping aside the passing seconds. This afternoon her dislike verged on hatred.

‘Oh, shut up, you stupid bloody clock,’ said Percy. Forgetting about the lamp, she tossed the unspent match into the bin.

She’d pour herself a drink, roll a cigarette, and then she’d head outside before the rain came, make sure there was sufficient firewood in the pile; see if she couldn’t rid herself of that spiky ball in the process.

Despite the turmoil of the day, Saffy had left a small portion of her brain free to devote itself to wardrobe rummaging; sorting through the options in her head so that come evening she wouldn’t be waylaid by indecision and forced to make a careless choice. Truthfully, it was one of her favourite pastimes even when she wasn’t hosting a special dinner: she visualized first this dress, with those shoes and that necklace, and then started again, cycling blissfully through the countless permutations. Today, combination after combination had presented itself only to be dismissed because it didn’t meet the final, essential criterion. Which was probably where she ought to have started, only it would have limited so direly the options. The winning outfit was always going to be the one that worked best with her finest nylon stockings: that was, the only pair whose six darned holes could happily be concealed by careful selection of the right shoes and a dress of the right length and persuasion. Cue the peppermint silk Liberty gown.

Back in the order and cleanliness of her own bedroom, as Saffy climbed out of her pinafore and did battle with her underwear, she was glad she’d already made the difficult decisions. She had neither the time nor the focus to make them now. As if deciphering the implications of Juniper’s journal entry wasn’t enough to contend with, Percy was downstairs and she was angry. As always, the whole house glowered with her; the slam of the front door had travelled all the way along the house’s veins, up four storeys and into Saffy’s own body. Even the lights – never bright – seemed to be sulking in sympathy, and the castle cavities were dirty with shadows. Saffy reached into the very back corner of the top drawer and retrieved her best stockings. They were tucked inside their paper packaging, wrapped inside a piece of tissue paper, and she unfolded them carefully, running her thumb lightly over the most recent repair.

The problem, as Saffy saw it, was that the nuances of human affection were lost on Percy, who was far more sympathetic to the needs of the walls and floors of Milderhurst than to those of her fellow inhabitants. They’d both been sorry to see Lucy go, after all; and it was Saffy who was more apt to feel her absence, alone in the house all day, washing and scrubbing and patching meals together with only Clara or half-witted Millie for company. But while Saffy understood that a woman, given the choice between her work and her heart, would always choose the latter, Percy had refused to accept the changed household with any grace. She’d taken Lucy’s marriage as a personal slight and there was no one like Percy for holding a grudge. Which was why Juniper’s journal entry and what it might portend was so disquieting.

Saffy slowed in her inspection of the stocking. She wasn’t naive and she wasn’t a Victorian; she’d read
Third Act in Venice
and
Cold Comfort Farm
and
The Thinking Reed
, and she knew about sex. Nothing she’d read before, though, had prepared her for Juniper’s thoughts on the matter. Typically frank; visceral, but lyrical too; beautiful and raw and frightening. Saffy’s eyes had raced across the page, taking the whole lot in at once, an enormous glass of water tossed at her face. It was unsurprising, she supposed, given the pace at which she’d read, her confusion at meeting such vivid sentiments, that she couldn’t now bring to mind a single line; only fragments of feeling, unwanted images, occasional forbidden words and the hot shock of having met them.

Perhaps it hadn’t been the words themselves that had so astonished Saffy as much as to whom they belonged. Not only was Juniper her far younger sister, but she was a person who had always seemed emphatically sexless; her burning talent, her eschewal of all things feminine, her just plain oddness – all seemed to elevate Juniper above such basic human desires. What was more, and perhaps it was this which stung most, Juniper had never so much as hinted to Saffy that she was contemplating a love affair. Was the young male guest this evening the man in question? The journal entry had been penned six months ago, before June went to London, and yet the name Thomas had been mentioned. Was it possible that Juniper had met him earlier, at Milderhurst? That there had been more to her leaving than met the eye? And if so, were they still, after all this time, in love? Such a brilliant and exciting development in her little sister’s life, and not a word had been shared. Saffy knew why, of course: Daddy, if he were alive, would be furious – sex too often led to children, and Daddy’s theories on the incompatibility of art and child-rearing were no secret. Percy, as his self-elected emissary, must therefore remain none the wiser; Juniper had been right in that. But not to tell Saffy? Why, she and Juniper were close, and as secretive as Juniper was, they’d always been able to talk. This matter should be no different. She rolled the stocking off her hand, resolving to rectify matters as soon as Juniper arrived and they could snatch a few private moments together. Saffy smiled; the evening wasn’t merely a welcome home, or a show of gratitude. Juniper had a
special
friend.