The Distant Hours (54 page)

One thing was certain. Her sisters would never have agreed to let her go alone.

Juniper and Meredith lay side by side on the sun-bleached grass of the park, slivers of light playing hide and seek within the glancing leaves above. They’d hunted for deckchairs but most had been broken, left to lean against tree trunks in the hope that someone might find and fix them. Juniper didn’t mind: the day was sweltering and the cool of the grass, the earth beneath it, was a welcome pleasure. She lay with one arm folded behind her head. In the other hand she held a cigarette, smoking slowly, closing her left eye in a wink, then her right, watching as the foliage shifted against the sky, listening as Meredith outlined the progress of her manuscript.

‘So,’ she said, when her friend had finished, ‘when are you going to show it to me?’

‘I don’t know. It’s nearly ready. Nearly. But . . .’

‘But what?’

‘I don’t know. I feel so . . .’

Juniper turned her head sideways, sliding her palm flat across her eyes to block the glare. ‘So what?’

‘Nervous.’

‘Nervous?’

‘What if you hate it?’ Meredith sat up suddenly.

Juniper did the same, crossing her legs. ‘I’m not going to hate it.’

‘But if you do, I’ll never, ever write another thing again.’

‘Well then, little chicken – ’ Juniper pretended to be stern, furrowing her brow and feeling like Percy – ‘if that’s the case you might just as well stop immediately.’

‘Because you think you
will
hate it!’ Meredith’s face took on the shadows of despair and Juniper was caught unawares. She’d only been fooling, making fun as they always had. She’d expected Merry to laugh and adopt the same strict tones, to say something equally meaningless. Met with such a confusing response, Juniper’s own expression faltered and she let the imperious facade drop away.

‘That’s not what I mean at all,’ she said, laying a hand flat on her friend’s blouse, near enough her heart that she could feel its beat beneath her fingertips. ‘Write what’s in here because you must, because it pleases you, but never because you want someone else to like what you’ve said.’

‘Even you?’

‘Especially me! God, Merry – what on earth would I know?’

Meredith smiled and the desolation faded, and she began to speak with abrupt energy about a hedgehog that had turned up in her family’s Anderson shelter. Juniper listened and laughed and left only the smallest part of her attention free to circle the strange new tension in her friend’s face. Had she been a different sort of person, someone for whom made-up people and places didn’t present so easily, for whom words sometimes refused to form, she might have understood Merry’s anxiety better. But she wasn’t, and she didn’t, and after a time she let it go. To be in London, to be free, to be sitting on the grass with the sun now creeping up her back, was all that mattered.

Juniper extinguished her cigarette and saw that a button had loosened on Meredith’s blouse. ‘Here,’ she said, reaching out, ‘you’re coming all undone, chicken. Let me get you sorted.’

Tom decided to walk towards the Elephant and Castle. He didn’t like the tube; the trains travelled too deeply underground and made him feel nervous and enclosed. It seemed a lifetime ago that he’d taken Joey to sit on the platform and listen for the oncoming roar. He unballed the fists that hung now by his sides and remembered how it had felt to hold that plump little hand – sweating, always sweating with the thrill and the heat – as they peered into the tunnel together, awaiting the glow of headlights, the stale and dusted fist of wind that announced the train’s arrival. He remembered especially looking down at Joey’s face, as joyous each time as it had been the first.

Tom paused a moment and closed his eyes, letting the memory fray and fade. When he opened them again he almost stepped into the path of three young women, younger than him, surely, but so neat in their utility suits, walking with such smart purpose, that they made him feel foolish and wrong-footed by comparison. They smiled as he stepped aside and each girl lifted a hand to form a victory sign with her fingers as she passed. Tom smiled back, a little too stiffly, a little too late, and then continued on towards the bridge. Behind him the girls’ laughter, coy and bubbling like a cool drink before the war, the brisk tapping of their shoes, receded, and Tom had the vague sense that he’d missed an opportunity, though for what he couldn’t say. He didn’t stop and he didn’t see them glance over their shoulders, heads close together as they sneaked another look at the tall young soldier, commented on his handsome face and serious dark eyes. Tom was too busy walking, one foot after the other – just as he’d done in France – and thinking about that symbol. The V sign. It was everywhere, and he wondered where it had started, who had decided what it meant, and how everyone seemed to know to do it.

As he crossed Westminster Bridge and came closer to his mother’s house, Tom allowed himself to notice something he’d been trying to avoid. The restless feeling was back again, the gnawing absence beneath his rib cage. It had been smuggled in on the back of his memories of Joey. Tom drew a deep breath and walked faster, though he knew he had more chance that way of outrunning his shadow. It was strange, the experience of something that was missing; odd that a vacancy might exert as much pressure as a solid object. The effect was a little like homesickness, a fact which perplexed him; first, because he was a grown man and should surely be beyond such feelings; second, because he was at home.

He had thought – lying on the wet wooden boards of the boat that brought him back from Dunkirk, in the crisp-sheeted hospital bed, in the first borrowed flat in Islington – that the sensation, the dull, unquenchable ache, would be alleviated when he set foot again inside his family home; the instant his mother wrapped her arms around him and wept against his shoulder and told him that he was home now and everything would be all right. It hadn’t, though, and Tom knew why. The hunger wasn’t really homesickness at all. He’d used the term lazily, perhaps even hopefully, to describe the feeling, the awareness that something fundamental had been lost. It wasn’t a place that he was missing, though; the reality was far worse than that. Tom was missing a layer of himself.

He knew where he’d left it. He’d felt it happen on that field near the Escaut Canal, when he’d turned and met the eyes of the other soldier, the German fellow with his gun pointed straight at Tom’s back. He’d felt panic, a hot liquid surge, and then his load had lightened. A layer of himself, the part that felt and feared, had peeled away like a piece of tobacco paper in his father’s tin and fluttered to the ground, been left discarded on the battlefield. The other part, the hard remaining kernel called Tom, had put his head down and run, thinking nothing, feeling nothing, aware only of the rasping breaths, his own, in his ears.

The separation, Tom knew, the dislocation, had made him a better soldier but it had left him an insufficient man. It was the reason he no longer lived at home. He looked at things and people now as if through smoky glass. He could see them, but not clearly, and he certainly couldn’t touch them. The doctor had explained it to him in the hospital, told him that he’d seen other fellows with the same complaint, which was all very well but didn’t make it any less terrifying when Tom’s mum smiled at him as she had when he was a boy, when she insisted that he pull off his socks and let her at them with her needle, and all he felt was emptiness. When he drank from his pa’s old cup; when his little brother Joey – a large man now, yet always his little brother Joey – let out a yelp and came at him with a clumsy gallop, the tattered copy of
Black Beauty
clutched to his chest; when his sisters arrived and started fussing over how much weight he’d lost and how they were going to pool their rations and fatten him up. Tom felt nothing and the fact made him want to –

‘Mr Cavill!’ His father’s name and Tom’s heart skipped a beat. In the electric instant that followed, he sickened with relief because it meant his father was still alive and well and things might therefore be mended. These past weeks, when he’d glimpsed the old man walking down the London street towards him, waving across the battlefield, reaching down to grip Tom’s hand on that boat crossing the channel, he hadn’t been imagining things at all. That is, he had, but not the things he’d thought: this world, this place of bombs and bullets, and a gun in his hands, leaky boat trips across the sly, dark Channel, and months languishing in hospitals where excessive cleanliness masked the smell of blood, of children left dead on blast-scorched roads; this was the horrid invention. In the real world, he realized with the swelling, sudden, giddy gladness of a boy, everything was well because his father was still alive. He must be, for someone was calling him. ‘Mr Cavill!’

Tom turned and saw her then, a girl, waving her hand; a familiar face coming towards him. A girl walking in the way of young girls who long to be older – shoulders back, chin set, wrists turned out – yet hurrying like an excited child from a seat in the park, through the barrier where the iron railings used to stand, railings that were being turned now into rivets and bullets and aeroplane wings.

‘Hello, Mr Cavill,’ she said breathlessly, arriving right before him. ‘You’re back from the war!’

The expectation of meeting his father deflated; hope, joy, relief leaked like air from a thousand pin pricks in his skin. Tom perceived with a winded sigh that he was Mr Cavill, and this girl in the middle of the pavement, blinking through her spectacles, expecting something from him, was a pupil of his; had been a pupil of his, once. Before, when he’d had such things, when he’d spoken with trite authority of grand concepts he hadn’t begun to understand. Tom winced to remember himself back then.

Meredith. It came to him suddenly and certainly. That was her name, Meredith Baker, but she’d grown since last they met. She was less of a girl, taller, stretched, anxiously filling her extra inches. He felt himself smile, managed the word hello, and was visited by a pleasant sensation he couldn’t immediately place, something connected to the girl, to Meredith, and to the last time he’d seen her. Just as he was beginning to frown, to wonder, the memory to which the feeling was attached surfaced: a hot day, a circular pool, a girl.

And then he saw her. The girl from the pool, right there in the London street, plain as day, and for a moment he knew he must be imagining things. How could it be otherwise? The girl from his dreams, whom he’d seen sometimes while he was away, radiant, hovering, smiling, as he traipsed across France; when he’d collapsed beneath the weight of his mate Andy – dead over his shoulder for how long before Tom knew? – as the bullet struck and his knee gave way and his blood began to stain the soil near Dunkirk –

Tom stared and then shook his head a little, beginning the silent count to ten.

‘This is Juniper Blythe,’ said Meredith, fingering a button near her collar as she grinned up at the girl; Tom followed her gaze. Juniper Blythe. Of course that was her name.

She smiled then with astonishing openness, and her face was utterly transformed. It made
him
feel transformed, as if, for a split second, he really was that young man again, standing by a glittering pool on a hot day before the war got started. ‘Hello,’ she said.

Tom nodded in reply, words still too slippery to manage.

‘Mr Cavill was my teacher,’ said Meredith. ‘You met him once at Milderhurst.’

Tom sneaked another glance while Juniper’s attention was on Meredith. She was no Helen of Troy; it wasn’t the face itself that drove him to distraction. On any other woman, the features would’ve been considered pleasant but flawed: the too-wideset eyes, the too-long hair, that gap between her front teeth. On her, though, they were an abundance, an extravagance of beauty. It was her peculiar form of animation that distinguished her, he decided. She was an unnatural beauty, and yet she was entirely natural. Brighter, more lustrous than everything else.

‘By the pool,’ Meredith was saying. ‘Remember? He came to check where I was living.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said the girl, said Juniper Blythe, turning back to Tom so that something inside him folded over. His breath snagged when she smiled. ‘You were swimming in my pool.’ She was teasing and he longed to say something light in return, to banter as he might once have done.

‘Mr Cavill is a poet, too,’ said Meredith, her voice seeming to come from somewhere else, a long way away.

Tom tried to focus. A poet. He scratched his forehead. He no longer thought of himself as that. He distantly remembered going to war to gain experience, believing he might unlock the secrets of the world, see things in a new, more vivid way. And he had. He did. Only the things he saw, the things that he had seen, did not belong in poems.

‘I don’t write much any more,’ he said. It was the first sentence he’d managed and he felt bound to improve it. ‘I’ve been busy. With other things.’ He was looking only at Juniper now. ‘I’m in Notting Hill,’ he said.

‘Bloomsbury,’ she answered.

He nodded. Seeing her here, like this, after imagining her so many times and in so many different ways, was almost embarrassing.

‘I don’t know many people in London,’ she continued, and he couldn’t decide whether she was artless or entirely aware of her charm. Whatever the case, something in the way she said it made him bold.

‘You know me,’ he said.

She looked at him curiously, inclined her head as though listening to words he hadn’t said, and then smiled. She took a notepad from her bag and wrote something. When she handed it to him her fingers brushed his palm and he experienced a jolt, as if from electricity. ‘I know you,’ she agreed.