The Distant Hours (27 page)

A doctor came down the corridor towards us and Mum knotted her fingers. I half stood, but he didn’t slow, striding across the waiting room to disappear through another door.

‘Won’t be long now, Mum.’ The weight of unspoken apology curled my words and I felt utterly helpless.

There’s only one photograph from my mum and dad’s wedding. I mean, presumably there are more, gathering dust somewhere in a forgotten white album, but there’s only one image I know of that’s survived the passage of years.

It’s just the two of them in it, not one of those typical wedding photos where the bride and groom’s families fan out in either direction providing wings to the couple in the centre; unbalanced wings so you suspect the creature would never be able to fly. In this photo their mismatched families have melted away and it’s just the two of them, and the way she’s staring at his face it’s like she’s enraptured. As if he glows, which he sort of does: an effect of the old lights photographers used back then, I suppose.

And he’s so impossibly young, they both are; he still has hair, right across the top of his head, and no idea that it’s not going to stick around. No idea that he will have a son, then lose him; that his future daughter will so bewilder him and that his wife will come to ignore him, that one day his heart will seize up and he’ll be taken to hospital in an ambulance and that same wife will sit in the waiting room with the daughter he can’t understand, waiting for him to wake up.

None of that is present in the photo, not even a hint. That photo is a frozen moment; their whole future lies unknown and ahead, just as it should. But at the same time, the future
is
in that photo, a version of it at any rate. It’s in their eyes, hers especially. For the photographer has captured more than two young people on their wedding day, he’s captured a threshold being crossed, an ocean wave at the precise moment before it turns to foam and begins its crash towards the ground. And the young woman, my mum, is seeing more than just the young man standing beside her, the fellow she’s in love with, she’s seeing their whole life together, stretching out ahead . . .

Then again, perhaps I’m romanticizing; perhaps she’s just admiring his hair, or looking forward to the reception, or the honeymoon . . . You create your own fiction around photos like that, images that become iconic within a family, and I realized as I sat there in the hospital that there was only one way of knowing for sure how she’d felt, what she’d hoped for when she looked at him that way; whether her life was more complicated, her past more complex, than her sweet expression suggests. And all I had to do was ask; strange that I’d never thought of it before. I suppose it’s the light on my father’s face that’s to blame. The way Mum’s looking at him draws the attention his way, so it’s easy to dismiss her as a young and innocent girl of unremarkable origins whose life is only just now beginning. It was a myth Mum had done her best to propagate, I realized; for whenever she spoke of their lives before they met it was always my dad’s stories she told.

But as I conjured the image to mind, fresh from my visit to Rita, it was Mum’s face I brought into focus; back in the shadows, a little smaller than his. Was it possible that the young woman with the wide eyes had a secret? That a decade before her wedding to the solid, glowing man beside her, she’d enjoyed a furtive love affair with her school teacher, a man engaged to her older friend? She’d have been fifteen or so at the time, and Meredith Burchill was certainly not the kind of woman to have a teenage love affair, but what about Meredith Baker? When I was growing up one of Mum’s favourite lectures was on the sorts of things good girls did not do: was it possible she’d been speaking from experience?

I was sunk then by the sense that I knew everything and nothing of the person sitting next to me. The woman in whose body I had grown and whose house I’d been raised was in some vital ways a stranger to me; I’d gone thirty years without ascribing her any more dimension than the paper dollies I’d played with as a girl, with the pasted-on smiles and the folding-tab dresses. What was more, I’d spent the past few months recklessly seeking to unlock her deepest secrets when I’d never really bothered to ask her much about the rest. Sitting there in the hospital, though, as Dad lay in an emergency bed somewhere, it suddenly seemed very important that I learn more about them. About her. The mysterious woman who made allusions to Shakespeare, who’d once sent articles to newspapers for publication.

‘Mum?’

‘Hmm?’

‘How did you and Dad meet?’

Her voice was brittle from lack of use and she cleared her throat before saying, ‘At the cinema. A screening of
The Holly and the Ivy
. You know that.’

A silence.

‘What I mean is,
how
did you meet? Did you see him? Did he see you? Who spoke first?’

‘Oh, Edie, I can’t remember. Him; no, me. I forget.’ She moved the fingers of one hand a little, like a puppeteer dangling stars on strings. ‘We were the only two there. Imagine that.’

A look had come upon Mum’s face as we spoke, a distance, but a fond one, a release almost from the discombobulating present, where her husband was clinging to life in a nearby room. ‘Was he handsome?’ I prodded gently. ‘Was it love at first sight?’

‘Hardly. I mistook him for a murderer at first.’

‘What?
Dad
?’

I don’t think she even heard me, so lost was she in her own memory. ‘It’s spooky being in a cinema by yourself. All those rows of empty seats, the darkened room, the enormous screen. It’s designed to be a communal experience and the effect when it’s not is uncannily detaching. Anything could happen when it’s dark.’

‘Did he sit right by you?’

‘Oh no. He kept a polite distance – he’s a gentleman, your father – but we started talking afterwards, in the foyer. He’d been expecting someone to meet him—’

‘A woman?’

She paid undue attention to the fabric of her skirt and said, with gentle reproach, ‘Oh, Edie.’

‘I’m only asking.’

‘I believe it was a woman, but she didn’t show. And that – ’ Mum pressed her hands against her knees, lifted her head with a delicate sniff – ‘was that. He asked me out to tea and I accepted. We went to the Lyons Corner House in the Strand. I had a slice of pear cake and I remember thinking it was very fancy.’

I smiled. ‘And he was your first boyfriend?’

Did I imagine the hesitation? ‘Yes.’

‘You stole another woman’s boyfriend.’ I was teasing, trying to keep things light, but the moment I said it I thought of Juniper Blythe and Thomas Cavill and my cheeks burned. I was too flustered by my own faux pas to pay much attention to Mum’s reaction, hurrying on before she had time to reply: ‘How old were you then?’

‘Twenty-five. It was 1952 and I’d just turned twenty-five.’

I nodded like I was doing the maths in my head, when really I was listening to the little voice that whispered:
Might this not be a good time, seeing as we’re on the subject, to ask a little more about Thomas Cavill?
Wicked little voice and shameful of me to pay it any heed; while I’m not proud of it, the opportunity was just too tempting. I told myself I was taking my mum’s mind off Dad’s condition, and with barely a pause, I said, ‘Twenty-five. That’s sort of late for a first boyfriend, isn’t it?’

‘Not really.’ She said it quickly. ‘It was a different time. I had been busy with other things.’

‘But then you met Dad.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you fell in love.’

Her voice was so soft I read her lips rather than heard her when she said, ‘Yes.’

‘Was he your first love, Mum?’

She inhaled a sharp little breath and her face looked as if I’d slapped her. ‘Edie – don’t!’

So. Auntie Rita had been right, he wasn’t.

‘Don’t talk about him in the past tense like that.’ Tears were brimming over the folds around her eyes. And I felt as bad as if I had slapped her, especially when she started to weep quietly against my shoulder, leaking more than crying, because crying isn’t something she does. And although my arm was pressed hard against the plastic edge of the chair, I didn’t move a muscle.

Outside, the distant tide of traffic continued to drift, in and out, punctuated occasionally by sirens. There’s something about hospital walls; though only made of bricks and plaster, when you’re inside them the noise, the reality of the teeming city beyond, disappears; it’s just outside the door, but it might as well be a magical land, far, far away. Like Milderhurst, it occurred to me; I’d experienced the same dislocation there, an overwhelming sense of envelopment as I passed through the front door, as if the world without had turned to grains of sand and fallen away. I wondered vaguely what the Sisters Blythe were doing, how they’d filled their days in the weeks since I’d left them, the three of them together in that great, dark castle. My imaginings came one after the other, a series of snapshots: Juniper drifting the corridors in her grubbied silk dress; Saffy appearing from nowhere to lead her gently back; Percy frowning by the attic window, surveying her estate like a ship’s captain keeping watch . . .

Midnight passed, the duty nurses shuffled, new faces brought with them the same old banter. Laughing and bustling around the illuminated medical station: an irresistible beacon of normality, an island across an unpassable sea. I tried to doze, using my bag as a pillow, but it was no use. My mum, beside me, was so small and alone, and older somehow than the last time I’d seen her, and I couldn’t stop my mind from racing ahead to paint detailed scenes of her life without Dad. I saw it so clearly: his empty armchair, the quiet meals, the cessation of all DIY hammering. How lonely the house would be, how still, how swamped by echoes.

It would be just the two of us if we lost my dad. Two is not a large number; it leaves no reserves. It’s a quiet number that makes for neat and simple conversations where interruption is not required; is not really possible. Or necessary, for that matter. Was that our future, I wondered? The two of us passing sentences back and forth, speaking around our opinions, making polite noises and telling half-truths and keeping up appearances? The notion was unbearable and I felt, suddenly, very, very alone.

It’s when I’m at my loneliest that I miss my brother most of all. He would be a man by now, with an easy manner and a kind smile and a knack for cheering our mother up. The Daniel in my mind always knows exactly what to say; not remotely like his unfortunate sister who suffers terribly with being tongue-tied. I glanced at Mum and wondered whether she was thinking of him, too; whether being in the hospital brought back memories of her little boy. I couldn’t ask, though, because we didn’t talk about Daniel, just as we didn’t talk about her evacuation, her past, her regrets. We never had.

Perhaps it was my sadness that secrets had simmered for so long beneath our family’s surface; perhaps it was a type of penance for upsetting her with my earlier probing; perhaps there was even a tiny part of me that wanted to provoke a reaction, to punish her for keeping memories from me and robbing me of the real Daniel: whatever the case, the next thing I knew I’d drawn breath and said, ‘Mum?’

She rubbed her eyes and blinked at her wristwatch.

‘Jamie and I broke up.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes.’

‘Today?’

‘Well, no. Not exactly. Around Christmastime.’

A tiny utterance of surprise, ‘Oh,’ and then she frowned, confused, calculating the months that had passed. ‘But you didn’t mention—’

‘No.’

This fact and its implications brought a sag to her face. She nodded slowly, remembering, no doubt, the fifty small and smaller enquiries she’d made after Jamie in that time; the answers I’d given, all lies.

‘I’ve had to let the flat go,’ I said, clearing my throat. ‘I’m looking for a bedsit. A little place of my own.’

‘That’s why I couldn’t reach you; after your father – I tried all the numbers I could think of, even Rita’s, until I got on to Herbert. I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘Well,’ I said, a strange artificial brightness in my tone, ‘as it happens that was the perfect thing to do. I’ve been staying with Herbert.’

She looked baffled. ‘He has a spare room?’

‘A sofa.’

‘I see.’ Mum’s hands were clasped in her lap, held together as if she sheltered a little bird inside, a precious bird she was determined not to lose. ‘I must post Herbert a note,’ she said, her voice threadbare. ‘He sent some of his blackberry jam at Easter and I can’t think that I remembered to write.’

And like that it was over, the conversation I’d been dreading for months. Relatively painless, which was good, but also somehow soulless, which wasn’t.

Mum stood then, and my first thought was that I’d been wrong, it wasn’t over and there was going to be a scene after all; but when I followed the direction of her eyes I saw that a doctor was coming towards us. I stood too, trying to read his face, to guess which way the penny was about to drop, but it was impossible. His expression was the sort that could be read to fit each scenario. I think they learn how to do that at medical school.

‘Mrs Burchill?’ His voice was clipped, faintly foreign.

‘Yes.’

‘Your husband’s condition is stable.’

Mum let out a noise, like air being pushed from a small balloon.