The Distant Hours (44 page)

It was Juniper’s lost letter. I took it from Mum, unable to speak, uncertain whether she meant for me to read it. I met her eyes and she nodded slightly.

Fingers trembling, I opened it and began.

I read it again, I had to, tracing the scratchy, cursive handwriting with my eyes. There was so much within the letter that made me curious, but one thing in particular to which my focus returned. Mum had shown it to me so I’d understand about Juniper, about their friendship, but all I could think of was Mum and me. My whole adult life had been spent happily immersed in the world of writers and their manuscripts: I’d brought countless anecdotes home to the dinner table even though I knew they were falling on deaf ears and I’d presumed myself since childhood an aberration. Not once had Mum even hinted that she’d harboured literary aspirations of her own. Rita had said as much, of course, but until that moment, with Juniper’s letter in hand and my mother watching me nervously, I don’t think I’d fully believed her. I handed the letter back to Mum, swallowing the clot of aggrievement that had settled in my throat. ‘You sent her a manuscript? Something you’d written?’

‘It was a childish fancy, something I grew out of.’

But I could tell by the way she wouldn’t meet my eyes that it had been far more than that. I wanted to press harder, to ask if she ever wrote now, if she still had any of her work, if she’d ever show it to me. But I didn’t. She was gazing at the letter again, her expression so sad that I couldn’t. I said instead, ‘You were good friends.’

‘Yes.’

My first and only friend, I loved her,
Mum had said, Juniper had written. And yet they’d parted in 1941 and never made contact again. I thought carefully before saying, ‘What does Juniper mean, Mum? What do you think she means when she says that something happened?’

Mum smoothed the letter. ‘I expect she means that Thomas ran off with another woman. You’re the one who told me that.’

Which was true, but only because that’s what I’d thought at the time. I didn’t think it any more, not after speaking with Theo Cavill. ‘What about that bit at the end,’ I said, ‘about being frightened? What does she mean there?’

‘That is a bit odd,’ Mum agreed. ‘I suppose she was remembering that conversation as an instance of our friendship. We spent so much time together, did so many things – I’m not sure why she’d mention that especially.’ She looked up at me and I could tell that her puzzlement was genuine. ‘Juniper was an intrepid sort of person; it didn’t occur to her to fear the things that other people do. The only thing that scared her was some notion she had that she’d turn out like her father.’

‘Like Raymond Blythe? In what way?’

‘She never told me, not exactly. He was a confused old gentleman, and a writer, as was she – but he used to believe that his characters had come to life and were going to come after him. I ran into him once, by mistake. I took a wrong turn and wound up near his tower – he was rather terrifying. Perhaps that’s what she meant.’

It was certainly possible; I cast my mind back to my visit to Milderhurst village and the stories I’d been told about Juniper. The lost time that she couldn’t account for later. Watching her father lose his mind in old age must have been particularly scary for a girl who suffered her own episodes. As it turned out, she’d been right to be afraid.

Mum sighed and ruffled her hair with one hand. ‘I’ve made a mess of everything. Juniper, Thomas – now you’re looking at the letting pages because of me.’

‘Now that’s
not
true,’ I smiled. ‘I’m looking at the letting pages because I’m thirty years old and I can’t stay at home forever, no matter how much better the tea tastes when you make it.’

She smiled too then, and I felt a tug of deep affection, a stirring sensation of something profound that had been sleeping for a very long time.

‘And I’m the one who made a mess. I shouldn’t have read your letters. Can
you
forgive
me
?’

‘You don’t need to ask.’

‘I just wanted to know you better, Mum.’

She brushed my hand with a feather-light touch and I knew she understood. ‘I can hear your stomach grumbling from here, Edie,’ was all she said. ‘Come down to the kitchen and I’ll make you something nice to eat.’

And right when I was puzzling over what had gone on between Thomas and Juniper and whether I’d ever have the chance to find out, something completely unexpected happened. It was Wednesday lunchtime and Herbert and I were returning with Jess from our constitutional around Kensington Gardens. Returning with a lot more fuss than that description suggests, mind you: Jess doesn’t like to walk and she has no difficulty making her feelings known, registering protest by stopping every fifty feet or so to snout about in the gutters, chasing one mysterious odour after another.

Herbert and I were cooling our heels during one such fossicking session, when he said, ‘And how’s life on the home front?’

‘Beginning to thaw, actually.’ I proceeded to give him the summary version of recent events. ‘I don’t want to speak too soon, but I believe we might’ve reached a new and brighter dawn.’

‘Are your plans to move on hold, then?’ He steered Jess away from a patch of suspiciously odorous mud.

‘Lord, no. My dad’s been making noises about buying me a personalized robe and putting a third hook in the bathroom once he’s able. I fear if I don’t make the break soon, I’ll be lost forever.’

‘Sounds dire. Anything in the letting pages?’

‘Loads. I’m just going to need to hit my boss for a significant pay rise to afford them.’

‘Fancy your chances?’

I shifted my hand like a puppeteer.

‘Well,’ said Herbert, passing me Jess’s lead while he dug out his cigarettes. ‘Your boss may not be able to stretch to a pay rise, but he might have had an idea.’

I raised a brow. ‘What sort of an idea?’

‘Rather a good one, I should think.’

‘Oh?’

‘All in good time, Edie, my love.’ He winked over the top of his cigarette. ‘All in good time.’

We turned the corner into Herbert’s street to find the postman poised to feed some letters through the door. Herbert tipped his hat and took the clutch of envelopes beneath his arm, unlocking the door to let us in. Jess, as per habit, went straight for the cushioned throne beneath Herbert’s desk, arranging herself artfully before fixing us with a look of wounded indignation.

Herbert and I have our own post-walk habit, so when he closed the door behind him and said, ‘Potlatch or post, Edie?’, I was already halfway to the kitchen.

‘I’ll make the tea,’ I said. ‘You read the mail.’

The tray had been set up earlier in the kitchen – Herbert is very fastidious about such things – and a fresh batch of scones was cooling beneath a checked tea towel. While I scooped cream and homemade jam into small ramekins, Herbert read out snippets of import from the day’s correspondence. I was juggling the tray into the office when he said, ‘Well, well.’

‘What is it?’

He folded the letter in question towards him and peered over its top. ‘An offer of work, I believe.’

‘From whom?’

‘A rather large publisher.’

‘How cheeky!’ I handed him a cup. ‘I trust you’ll remind them that you already have a perfectly good job.’

‘I would, of course,’ he said, ‘only the offer isn’t for me. It’s you they want, Edie. You and no one else.’

The letter, as it turned out, was from the publisher of Raymond Blythe’s
Mud Man
. Over a steaming cup of Darjeeling and a jam-laden scone, Herbert read it aloud to me; then he read it again. Then he explained its contents in rather basic terms because, despite a decade in the publishing industry, the surprise had rendered me temporarily incapable of understanding such things myself: to wit, there was a new edition of the
Mud Man
being printed the following year to coincide with its seventy-fifth anniversary. Raymond Blythe’s publishers wanted me to write a new introduction to celebrate the occasion.

‘You’re having a joke . . .’ He shook his head. ‘But that’s just . . . far too unbelievable,’ I said. ‘Why me?’

‘I’m not sure.’ He turned over the letter, saw that the other side was blank. Gazed up at me, eyes enormous behind his glasses. ‘It doesn’t say.’

‘But how peculiar.’ A ripple beneath my skin as the threads that had tied themselves to Milderhurst began to tremble. ‘What shall I do?’

Herbert handed me the letter. ‘I should think you might start by giving this number a ring.’

My conversation with Judith Waterman, publisher at Pippin Books, was short and not unsweet. ‘I’ll be honest with you,’ she said, when I told her who I was and why I was calling: ‘we’d employed another writer to do it and we were very happy with him. The daughters though, Raymond Blythe’s daughters, were not. The whole thing’s become rather a grand headache; we’re publishing early next year, so time is of the essence. The edition’s been in development for months: our writer had already conducted preliminary interviews and got some way into his draft, then out of the blue we received a phone call from the Misses Blythe letting us know they were pulling the plug.’

That I could imagine. It was not difficult to envisage Percy Blythe taking great pleasure in such contrary behaviour.

‘We’re committed to the edition, though,’ Judith continued. ‘We’ve a new imprint starting, a series of classics with memoir-esque opening essays, and
The True History of the Mud Man
, as one of our most popular titles, is the ideal choice for summer publication.’

I realized I was nodding as if she were with me in the room. ‘I can understand that,’ I said, ‘I’m just not sure how I can—’

‘The problem,’ Judith pressed on, ‘would appear to be with one of the daughters in particular.’

‘Oh?’

‘Persephone Blythe. Which is an unexpected nuisance seeing as the proposal came to us in the first instance from her twin sister. Whatever the case, they weren’t happy, we can’t do anything without permission due to a complicated copyright arrangement, and the whole thing is teetering. I went down there myself a fortnight ago and mercifully they agreed to allow the project to go ahead with a different writer, someone of whom they approved – ’ She broke off and I heard her gulping a drink at the other end of the line. ‘We sent them a long list of writers, including samples of their work. They sent them all back to us unopened. Persephone Blythe asked for you instead.’

A hook of niggling doubt snagged my stomach lining. ‘She asked for me?’

‘By name. Quite assuredly.’

‘You know I’m not a writer.’

‘Yes,’ said Judith. ‘And I explained that to them, but they didn’t mind at all. Evidently they already know who you are and what you do. More to the point, it would appear you’re the only person they’ll tolerate, which reduces our options rather dramatically. Either you write it, or the entire project collapses.’

‘I see.’

‘Look – ’ the busy sound of papers being moved across a desk – ‘I’m convinced you’ll do a good job. You work in publishing, you know your way around sentences. I’ve contacted some of your former clients and they all spoke very highly of you.’

‘Really?’ Oh, frightful vanity, fishing for a compliment! She was right to ignore me.

‘And all of us at Pippin are looking at this as a positive. We’re wondering whether perhaps the sisters have been so specific because they’re ready, finally, to talk about the inspiration behind the book. I don’t need to tell you what a terrific coup that would be, to discover the true history behind the book’s creation!’

She did not. My dad was doing a brilliant job of that already.

‘Well then. What do you say?’

What did I say? Percy Blythe had requested me personally. I was being asked to write about the
Mud Man
, to speak again with the Sisters Blythe, to visit them in their castle. What else was there to say? ‘I’ll do it.’