The Distant Hours (51 page)
Authors: Kate Morton
One afternoon I was sent to a room I’d not been inside before, through a door I’d never noticed, right at the end of the very long hallway. It was small, little more than a cupboard with lighting, and although it was painted beige and brown, there were none of the glitzy copper-tone mirror tiles and glass bookshelves of the other corporate rooms. Instead, there was a small wooden table and chair, and a thin, towering bookcase. On one of the shelves, beside the jowly accounting tomes, I spied something interesting. A snow globe: you know the sort, a wintry scene in which a small stone cottage stood bravely on a pine-planted hill, flakes of white dusting the ground.
The rules of Dad’s workplace were clear. I wasn’t supposed to touch anything, and yet I couldn’t help it. The globe transfixed me: it was a tiny splinter of whimsy in a beige-brown world, a doorway at the back of the cupboard, an irresistible emblem of childhood. Before I knew it I was on the chair, dome in hand, tipping and righting it, watching as the snowflakes fell, over and over, the world within oblivious to that without. And I remember feeling a curious longing to be inside that dome, to stand with the man and woman behind one of the gold-lit windows, or with the pair of tiny children pushing a maroon sledge, in a safe place that knew nothing of the hustle and the noise outside.
That’s what it felt like to approach Milderhurst Castle. As I walked up the hill, nearer and nearer, I could almost feel the air changing around me, as if I were crossing an invisible barrier into another world. Sane people do not speak of houses having forces, of enchanting people, of drawing them closer, but I came to believe that week, as I still do now, that there was some indescribable force at work deep within Milderhurst Castle. I’d been aware of it on my first visit, and I felt it again that afternoon. A sort of beckoning, as if the castle itself were calling to me.
I didn’t go the same way as before; I cut across the field to meet the driveway and followed it over a small stone bridge, then a slightly larger one, until finally the castle itself came into view, tall and imposing at the peak of the hill. I walked on and I didn’t stop until I reached the very top. Only then did I turn to view the direction from which I’d come. The canopy of the woods was spread out beneath me and it looked as if autumn had taken a great torch to the trees, burnishing them gold, red and bronze. I wished I’d brought a camera so I could take a shot back for Mum.
I left the driveway and skirted along a large hedge, looking up as I went at the attic window, the smaller one attached to the nurse’s room with the secret cupboard. The castle was watching me, or so it seemed, all its hundred windows glowering down from beneath their drooping eaves. I didn’t look at it again, continuing along the hedge until I reached the back.
There was an old chicken coop, empty now, and on the other side a dome-like structure. I went closer, and that’s when I recognized what it was. The bomb shelter. A rusty sign had been planted nearby – from the days of the regular tours, I supposed – labelling it ‘The Anderson’ and although the writing had faded over time, I could make out enough to see that it contained information about the role of Kent in the Battle of Britain. A bomb had landed only a mile away, it said, killing a young boy on his bicycle. This sign said that the shelter had been constructed in 1940, which meant, surely, that it was the very one in which my mum must have crouched when she was at Milderhurst during the Blitz.
There was no one around to ask, so I figured it would be OK to take a look inside, climbing down the steep stairs and beneath the corrugated iron arch. It was dim, but sufficient light slanted through the open doorway for me to see that it had been decorated like a stage set with paraphernalia from the war. Cigarette cards with Spitfires and Hurricanes on them, a small table with a vintage wood-panelled wireless in the centre, a poster with Churchill’s pointed finger warning me to ‘Deserve Victory!’ just as if it were 1940 again, the alarm had panicked, and I was waiting for the bombers to fly overhead.
I climbed out again, blinked into the glare. The clouds were skimming fast across the sky, and the sun was covered now by a bleak white sheet. I noticed then a little nook in the hedge, a raised hillock that I couldn’t resist sitting on, I pulled Mum’s journal from my bag, leaned back, and opened to the first page. It was dated January 1940.
Dearest and most lovely notebook! I have been saving you for such a long time – a whole year now, even a little bit longer – because you were a gift to me from Mr Cavill after my examinations. He told me that I was to use you for something special, that words lasted forever, and that one day I would have a story that warranted such a book. I didn’t believe him at the time: I’ve never had anything special to write about – does that sound terribly sad? I think it might and I really don’t mean it that way, I wrote it only because it’s true: I’ve never had anything special to write about and I didn’t imagine that I would. But I was wrong. Terribly, totally, wonderfully wrong. For something has happened and nothing will ever be the same again.
I suppose the first thing I should tell you is that I’m writing this in a castle. A real castle, made of stone, with a tower and lots of winding staircases, and enormous candle holders on all the walls with wax mounds, decades and decades of blackening wax, drooping from their bases. You might think that this, my living in a castle, is the ‘wonderful’ thing, and that it’s greedy to expect anything more on top, but there is more.
I’m sitting on the windowsill in the attic, the most marvellous place in the whole castle. It is Juniper’s room. Who is Juniper, you might ask, if you were able? Juniper is the most incredible person in the world. She is my best friend and I am hers. It was Juniper who encouraged me finally to write in you. She said she was tired of seeing me carrying you around like a glorified paperweight and that it was time I took the plunge and marked your beautiful pages.
She says there are stories everywhere and that people who wait for the right one to come along before setting pen to paper end up with very empty pages. That’s all writing is, apparently, capturing sights and thoughts on paper. Spinning, like a spider does, but using words to make the pattern. Juniper has given me this fountain pen. I think it might have come from the tower, and I’m a little frightened that her father will decide to go looking for whoever stole it, but I use it nonetheless. It is truly a glorious pen. I think it is quite possible to love a pen, don’t you?
Juniper suggested that I write about my life. She is always asking me to tell her stories about Mum and Dad, Ed and Rita, and Mrs Paul next door. She laughs very loudly, like a bottle that’s been shaken then opened, bubbles exploding everywhere: alarming, in a way, but lovely, too. Her laugh is not at all how you might expect. She’s so smooth and graceful, but her laugh is throaty like the earth. It’s not only her laugh that I love; she scowls, too, when I tell her the things that Rita says, scowls and spits in all the right places.
She says that I am lucky – can you imagine? Someone like her saying that of me? – that all my learning has been done in the real world. Hers, she says, was acquired from books. Which sounds like heaven to me, but evidently was not. Do you know, she hasn’t been to London since she was tiny? She went with her entire family to see the premiere of a play from the book that her father wrote,
The True History of the Mud Man
. When Juniper mentioned that book to me, she said its name as if, surely, I would be familiar with it, and I was very embarrassed to admit that I was not. Curses on my parents for having kept me in the dark about such things! She was surprised, I could tell, but she didn’t make me feel bad. She nodded, as if she quite approved, and said that it was no doubt only because I was far too busy in my real world with real people. And then she got the sad look that she gets sometimes, thoughtful and a bit puzzled, as if trying to work out the answer to a complex problem. It is the look, I think, that my mother despises when it sets in on my own face, the one that makes her point her finger and tell me to shake off the grey skies and get on with things.Oh, but I do enjoy grey skies! They’re so much more complex than blue ones. If they were people, those are the ones I’d make the time to learn about.
It’s far more interesting to wonder what might be behind the layers of clouds than to be presented always with a simple, clear, bland blue.
The sky outside today is very grey. If I look through the window it’s as if someone has stretched a great, grey blanket over the castle. It’s frosty on the ground, too. The attic window looks down upon a very special place. One of Juniper’s favourites. It’s a square plot, enclosed by hedges, with little gravestones rising from beneath the brambles, all stuck out at odd angles like rotting teeth in an old mouth.
Clementina Blythe
1 year old
Taken cruelly
Sleep, my little one, sleep
Cyrus Maximus Blythe
3 years old
Gone too soon
Emerson Blythe
10 years old
Loved
The first time I went there, I thought it was a graveyard for children, but Juniper told me they were pets. All of them. The Blythes care very much for their animals, especially Juniper, who cried when she told me about her first dog, Emerson.
Brrr
. . .
But it’s freezing cold in here! I’ve inherited an enormous assortment of knitted socks since I arrived at Milderhurst. Saffy is a great one for knitting but a terrible one for counting, the upshot of which is that a third of the socks she’s made for the soldiers are far too tight to cover so much as a burly man’s big toe, but perfect for my twiglet ankles. I have put three pairs on each foot, and another three singletons on my right arm, leaving only my left exposed so that I might hold a pen. Which explains the state of my writing. I apologize for that, dear journal. Your beautiful pages deserve better.So here I am, alone in the attic room, while Juniper is busy downstairs reading to the hens. Saffy is convinced that they lay better when they’re stimulated; Juniper, who loves all animals, says that there is nothing so clever or soothing as a hen; and I enjoy eggs very much indeed. So there. We are all happy. And I am going to start at the beginning and write as quickly as I can. For one thing, it will keep my fingers warm
Fierce barking, of the sort that makes one’s heart contract like a slingshot, and I almost jumped out of my skin.
A dog appeared above me, Juniper’s lurcher; lips pulled back, teeth bared, a low growl emanating from deep within him.
‘There, boy,’ I said, my voice tight with fear. ‘There now.’ I was debating whether to reach out and stroke him, whether he might that way be calmed, when the end of a stick appeared in the mud. A pair of brogue-clad feet followed, and I looked up to see Percy Blythe glaring at me.
I’d quite forgotten how thin and severe she was. Hunched over her cane, peering down, and dressed in much the same fashion as the last time we’d met, pale trousers and a well-cut shirt that might have seemed manly if not for her incredibly narrow frame and the dainty watch that hung loosely around her gaunt wrist.
‘It’s you,’ she said, clearly as surprised as I was. ‘You’re early.’
‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you, I—’
The dog growled again and she made an impatient noise, waving her fingers. ‘Bruno! That’s enough.’ He whimpered and slunk back to her side. ‘We were expecting you tomorrow.’
‘Yes, I know. Ten in the morning.’
‘You’re still coming?’
I nodded. ‘I arrived from London today. The weather was clear and I know it’s expected to come in rainy over the next few days so I thought I’d take a walk, make some notes, I didn’t think you’d mind, and then I found the shelter and – I didn’t mean to be a nuisance.’
At some point during my explanation her attention had waned. ‘Well,’ she said, without a whiff of gladness, ‘you’re here now. I suppose you might as well come in for tea.’
The yellow parlour seemed more down at heel than I remembered. On my previous visit I had thought the room a warm place, a patch of life and light in the middle of a dark, stone body. It was different this time, and perhaps the change of seasons was to blame, the loss of summer’s brilliance, the sneaking chill that presaged winter, for it wasn’t only the alteration in the room which struck me.
The dog was panting hard and he collapsed against the tattered screen. He, too, had aged, I realized, just as Percy Blythe had aged since May, just as the room itself had faded. The notion popped into my head then that Milderhurst really was somehow separate from the real world, a place outside the usual bounds of space and time. That it was under some enchantment: a fairy-tale castle in which time could be slowed down, speeded up, at the whim of an unearthly being.
Saffy was standing in profile, her head bent over a fine porcelain teapot. ‘Finally, Percy,’ she said, as she tried to replace the lid. ‘I was beginning to think we might need to gather a search – Oh!’ She’d looked up and seen me at her sister’s side. ‘Hello there.’
‘It’s Edith Burchill,’ said Percy, matter-of-factly. ‘She’s arrived rather unexpectedly. She’s going to join us for tea.’