The Distant Hours (28 page)

‘It’s a good thing the ambulance got there so soon. You did well to call it in time.’

I was aware of soft hiccuping noises next to me and I realized Mum’s eyes were leaking again.

‘We’ll see how his recovery progresses, but at this stage angioplasty is unlikely. He’ll need to stay in for a few days longer so we can monitor him, but his recovery after that can be done at home. You’ll have to watch him for moods: cardiac patients often struggle with feelings of depression. The nurses will be able to help you further with that.’

Mum was nodding with grateful fervour. ‘Of course, of course,’ and scrabbling, as was I, for the right words to convey our gratitude and relief. In the end she went with plain old, ‘Thank you, doctor,’ but he’d already withdrawn behind the untouchable screen of his white coat. He merely bobbed his head in a disconnected way, as if he had another place to be, another life to save, both of which he no doubt did, and had already forgotten quite who we were and to which patient we belonged.

I was about to suggest that we go in and see Dad when she began to cry – my mother, who never cries – and not just a few tears wiped away against the back of her hand; great big racking sobs that reminded me of the time in my childhood when I was upset about one trifling thing or another and Mum told me that while some girls were fortunate to look pretty when they cried – their eyes widened, their cheeks flushed, their pouts plumped – neither she nor I were among them.

She was right: we’re ugly criers, both of us. Too blotchy, too snarly, too loud. But seeing her standing there, so small, so impeccably dressed, so distressed, I wanted to wrap her in my arms and hold on until she couldn’t help but stop. I didn’t though. I dug inside my bag and found her a tissue.

She took it but she didn’t stop crying, not right away, and after a moment’s hesitation, I reached out to touch her shoulder, turned it into a sort of pat, then rubbed the back of her cashmere cardigan. We stood like that, until her body yielded a little, leaning in to me like a child seeking comfort.

Finally, she blew her nose. ‘I was so worried, Edie,’ she said, wiping beneath her eyes, one after the other, checking the tissue for mascara.

‘I know, Mum.’

‘I just don’t think that I could . . . If anything were to happen . . . If I lost him—’

‘It’s OK,’ I said firmly. ‘He’s OK. Everything’s going to be all right.’

She blinked at me like a small animal for whom the light is too bright. ‘Yes.’

I obtained his room number from a nurse and we negotiated the fluorescent corridors until we found it. As we drew close, Mum stopped.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘I don’t want your father upset, Edie.’

I said nothing, wondering how on earth she thought I might be planning to do such a thing.

‘He’d be horrified to learn that you were sleeping on a sofa. You know how he worries about your posture.’

‘It won’t be for long.’ I glanced towards the door. ‘Really, Mum, I’m working on it. I’ve been checking the rentals but there’s nothing suitable—’

‘Nonsense.’ She straightened her skirt and drew a deep breath. Didn’t quite meet my eyes as she said, ‘You’ve a perfectly suitable bed at home.’

Which is how, at the age of thirty, I came to be a single woman living with my parents in the house in which I’d grown up. In my very own childhood bedroom, in my very own five-foot bed, beneath the window that overlooked Singer & Sons Funeral Home. An improvement, one might add, on my most recent situation: I adore Herbert and I’ve a lot of time for dear old Jess, but Lord spare me from ever having to share her sofa again.

The move itself was relatively painless; I didn’t take much with me. It was a temporary arrangement, as I told anyone who’d listen, so it made far more sense to leave my boxes at Herbert’s. I packed myself a single suitcase and arrived back home to find everything pretty much as I’d left it a decade before.

Our family house in Barnes was built in the sixties, purchased brand new by my parents when Mum was pregnant with me. What makes it particularly striking is that it’s a house with no clutter. Really, none at all. There’s a system for everything in the Burchill household: multiple baskets in the laundry; colour-coded cloths in the kitchen; a notepad by the telephone with a pen that never seems to wander, and not one envelope lying around with doodles and addresses and the half-scribbled names of people whose calls have been forgotten. Neat as a pin. Little wonder I’d suspected adoption when I was growing up.

Even Dad’s attic clear-out had generated a polite minimum of mess; two dozen or so boxes with their lists of contents Sellotaped on the lids, and thirty years’ worth of superseded electronic appliances, still housed in their original packaging. They couldn’t live in the hallway forever, though, and with Dad recuperating and my weekends tumbleweed clear, I was a natural to take over the job. I worked like a soldier, falling prey to distraction only once, when I stumbled upon the box marked Edie’s Things and couldn’t resist ripping it open. Inside lay a host of forgotten items: macaroni jewellery with flaking paint, a porcelain trinket box with fairies on the side, and, deep down, amongst assorted bits and bobs and books – I gasped – my illicitly obtained, utterly cherished, hitherto misplaced copy of the
Mud Man
.

Holding that small, time-worn book in my grown-up hands, I was awash with shimmering memories; the image of my ten-year-old self, propped up on the lounge sofa, was so lucent I could almost reach across the years to poke ripples in it with my finger. I could feel the pleasant stillness of the glass-filtered sunlight and smell the reassuring warm air: tissues and lemon barley and lovely doses of parental pity. I saw Mum, then, coming through the doorway with her coat on and her string bag filled with groceries. Fishing something from within the bag, holding it out to me, a book that would change my world. A novel written by the very gentleman to whom she’d been evacuated during the Second World War . . .

I rubbed my thumb thoughtfully across the embossed type on the cover: Raymond Blythe.
Perhaps this will cheer you up
, Mum had said.
It’s for slightly older readers, I think
,
but you’re a clever girl; with a bit of effort I’m sure you’ll be fine.
My entire life, I’d credited the librarian Miss Perry with setting me on my proper path, but as I sat there on the wooden floor of the attic, the
Mud Man
in my hands, another thought began to coalesce in a thin streak of light. I wondered whether it was possible that I’d been wrong all this time; whether perhaps Miss Perry had done little more than locate and lend the title and it had been my mother who’d known to give me the perfect book at the perfect time. Whether I dared ask.

The book had been old when it came to me, and passionately well loved since, so its state of déshabillé was to be expected. Within its crumbling binding were stuck the very pages I’d turned when the world they described was new: when I didn’t know how things might end for Jane and her brother and the poor, sad man in the mud.

I’d been longing to read it again, ever since I returned from my visit to Milderhurst, and with a swift intake of breath, I opened the book randomly, letting my eyes alight in the middle of a lovely, foxed page:
The carriage that took them to live with the uncle they’d never met set off from London in the evening and travelled through the night, arriving at last at the foot of a neglected drive while dawn was breaking.
I read on, bumping in the back of that carriage beside Jane and Peter. Through the weary, whiney gates we went, up the long and winding path, until finally, at the top of the hill, cold in the melancholy morning light, it appeared. Bealehurst Castle. I shivered with anticipation at what I might find inside. The tower broke through the roofline, windows dark against the creamy stone, and I leaned out with Jane, laid my hand beside hers on the carriage window. Heavy clouds fleeted across the pale sky, and when the carriage finally stopped with a clunk we clambered out to find ourselves standing by the rim of an ink-black moat. A breeze then, from nowhere, rippling the water’s surface, and the driver gestured towards a wooden drawbridge. Slowly, silently, we walked across it. Just as we reached the heavy door, a bell rang, a real one, and I almost dropped the book.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned the bell yet. While I was returning boxes to the attic, Dad had been set up to convalesce in the spare room, a pile of
Accountancy Today
journals on the bedside table, a cassette player loaded with Henry Mancini, and a little butler’s bell for summoning attention. The bell had been his idea, a distant memory from a bout of fever as a boy and, after a fortnight during which he’d done little more than sleep, Mum had been so pleased to see a return of spirit that she’d happily gone along with the suggestion. It made good sense, she’d said, failing to anticipate for a moment that the small, decorative bell might be commandeered for such nefarious use. In Dad’s bored and grumpy hands, it became a fearful weapon, a talisman in his reversion to boyhood. Bell in fist, my mild-mannered, number-crunching father became a spoiled and imperious child, full of impatient questions as to whether the postman had been, what Mum was doing with her day, what time he might expect his next cup of tea to be served.

On the morning that I found the box with the
Mud Man
inside, however, Mum was at the supermarket and I was officially on Dad-watch. At the sound of the bell, the world of Bealehurst withered, the clouds receded quickly in all directions, the moat, the castle vanished, the step on which I stood turned to dust so that I was falling, with nothing but black text floating in the white space around me, dropping through the hole in the middle of the page to land with a bump back in Barnes.

Shameful of me, I know, but I sat very still for a few moments, waiting it out in case I earned a reprieve. Only when the bell’s tinkle came a second time did I tuck the book inside my cardigan pocket and clamber, with regrettable reluctance, down the ladder.

‘Hiya, Dad,’ I said, brightly – it is not kind to resent intrusions from a convalescent parent – arriving at the spare-room door. ‘Everything all right?’

He’d slumped so far he’d almost disappeared inside his pillows. ‘Is it lunchtime yet, Edie?’

‘Not yet.’ I straightened him up a bit. ‘Mum said she’d fix you some soup as soon as she got in. She’s made a lovely pot of—’

‘Your mother’s still not back?’

‘Shouldn’t be long.’ I smiled sympathetically. Poor Dad had been through an awful time: it isn’t easy for anyone being bed-bound weeks on end, but for someone like him, with no hobbies and no talent whatsoever for relaxing, it was torture. I freshened his water glass, trying not to finger the top of the book protruding from my pocket. ‘Is there anything I can fetch you in the meantime? A crossword? A heat pad? Some more cake?’

He let out a forebearing sigh. ‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

My hand was on the
Mud Man
again, my mind had taken guilty leave to debate the particular merits of the daybed in the kitchen and the armchair in the lounge, the one by the window that spends the afternoon drenched in sunlight. ‘Well then,’ I said sheepishly, ‘I guess I’ll get back to it. Chin up, eh, Dad . . .’

I was almost at the door when, ‘What’s that you’ve got there, Edie?’

‘Where?’

‘There, sticking out of your pocket.’ He sounded so hopeful. ‘Not the post, is it?’

‘This? No.’ I patted my cardigan. ‘It’s a book from one of the attic boxes.’

He pursed his lips. ‘The whole point is to stow things away, not to dig them out again.’

‘I know, but it’s a favourite.’

‘What’s it all about then?’

I was stunned; I couldn’t think that my dad had ever asked me about a book before. ‘A pair of orphans,’ I managed. ‘A girl called Jane and a boy called Peter.’

He frowned impatiently. ‘A little more than that, I should say. By the looks of it, there’s a lot of pages.’

‘Of course – yes. It’s about far more than that.’ Oh, where to start! Duty and betrayal, absence and longing, the lengths to which people will go to protect the ones they cherish, madness, fidelity, honour, love . . . I glanced again at Dad and decided to stick with the plot. ‘The children’s parents are chargrilled in a ghastly London house fire and they’re sent to live with their long-lost uncle in his castle.’

‘His castle?’

I nodded. ‘Bealehurst. Their uncle’s a nice enough fellow, and the children are delighted by the castle at first, but gradually they come to realize that there’s more going on than meets the eye; that there’s a deep, dark secret lurking beneath it all.’

‘Deep
and
dark, eh?’ He smiled a little.

‘Oh yes. Both. Very terrible indeed.’

I’d said it quickly, excitedly, and Dad leaned closer, easing himself onto his elbow. ‘What is it then?’

‘What’s what?’

‘The secret. What is it?’

I looked at him, dumbfounded. ‘Well, I can’t just . . . tell you.’

‘Of course you can.’

He crossed his arms like a cranky child and I scrabbled for the words to explain to him the contract between reader and writer, the dangers of narrative greed. The sacrilege of just blurting out what had taken chapters to build; secrets hidden carefully by the author behind countless sleights of hand. All I managed was, ‘I’ll lend it to you if you like?’