The Distant Hours (58 page)

Mrs Bird was nonplussed, but in a kind sort of way. ‘Well, that’s nice, dear. You don’t mind if I . . . ?’ She patted the chair across from me.

‘Of course not.’

She sat with a heavy lady’s huff, flattening a hand across her stomach as she righted herself against the table edge. ‘Well now, that feels a bit better. I’ve been run off my feet all day.’ She nodded at my notes. ‘But I see you’re working late, too.’

‘Trying. I’m a bit distracted though.’

‘Oh.’ Her eyebrows arrowed. ‘Handsome fellow, is it?’

‘Something like that. Mrs Bird, I don’t suppose there were any phone calls for me today?’

‘Phone calls? Nothing I can think of. Were you expecting one? The young fellow you’re mooning over?’ Her eyes brightened as she said, ‘Your publisher, perhaps?’

She looked so hopeful that it felt rather cruel to disappoint her. Nonetheless, for clarity’s sake: ‘My mum, actually. I had hoped she might make it down for a visit.’

A particularly large gust of wind rattled along the window locks and I shivered, from pleasure more than chill. There was something about the atmosphere that night, something enlivening. Mrs Bird and I were the only two remaining in the dining room, and the log in the fire had been honeycombed so that it glowed red, popping occasionally and spitting bits of gold against the bricks. I’m not sure whether it was the warm, smoky room itself, its contrast with the wet and the wind outside; or a reaction to the pervasive atmosphere of knots and secrets I’d encountered at the castle; or even just a sudden desire to have a normal conversation with another human being. Whatever the case, I felt expansive. I closed my notebook and pushed it aside. ‘My mother came here as an evacuee,’ I said. ‘During the war.’

‘To the village?’

‘To the castle.’

‘No! Really? Stayed there with the sisters?’

I nodded, pleased out of all proportion by her reaction. Wary, too, as a little voice inside my head whispered that my pleasure stemmed from the sense of possession Mum’s link with Milderhurst conferred onto me. A sense of possession that was most misplaced, and one that I’d thus far failed to mention to the Misses Blythe themselves.

‘Goodness!’ Mrs Bird was saying, clapping her fingertips together. ‘What a lot of stories she must have! The mind boggles.’

‘Actually, I have her war journal here with me—’

‘War journal?’

‘Her diary from the time. Bits and pieces about how she felt, the people she met, the place itself.’

‘Why then, there’s probably mention of my own mum in there,’ said Mrs Bird, straightening proudly.

It was my turn to be surprised. ‘Your mum?’

‘She worked at the castle. Started as a maid when she was sixteen; finished up as head housekeeper. Lucy Rogers, though it was Middleton back then.’

‘Lucy Middleton,’ I said slowly, trying to recall any mention in Mum’s journal. ‘I’m not sure; I’ll have to check.’ Mrs Bird’s shoulders had slumped a little under the weight of her disappointment and I felt personally responsible, clutching at ways to make it better. ‘She hasn’t told me much about it, you see; I only found out about her evacuation recently.’

I regretted saying it immediately. Hearing myself speak the words made me more acutely aware than ever how strange it was for a woman to have kept such a thing secret; and I felt implicated somehow, as if Mum’s silence might be due to a personal failing of mine. And I felt foolish, too, because if I’d been a little more circumspect, a little less eager to absorb Mrs Bird’s interest, I wouldn’t be in this predicament. I prepared myself for the worst, but Mrs Bird surprised me. With a knowing nod, she leaned a little closer and said, ‘Parents and their secrets, eh?’

‘Yes.’ A lump of charcoal popcorned in the hearth and Mrs Bird lifted a finger, signalling that she’d be back in just a minute; she squeezed herself out of her chair and disappeared through a concealed exit in the papered wall.

Rain blew softly against the wooden door, filling the pond outside, and I pressed my palms together, held them prayer-like against my lips, before tilting them to lean my cheek on the back of my fire-warmed hand.

When Mrs Bird returned with a bottle of whisky and two cut-glass tumblers, the suggestion so suited the moody, inclement evening that I smiled and accepted gladly.

We clinked glasses across the table.

‘My mother nearly didn’t marry,’ said Mrs Bird, pressing her lips and savouring the whisky warmth. ‘What do you think of that? I almost didn’t exist.’ She laid a hand against her brow in a performance of
quelle horreur!

I smiled.

‘She had a brother, you see, an adored older brother. The way she tells it, he was responsible for making the sun rise each morning. Their father died young and Michael – that was his name – stepped in and took over. Real man about the house, he was; even as a boy he used to work after school and at weekends, cleaning windows for tuppence. Giving the coins to his mum so she could keep the house nice. Handsome, too – hang on! I’ve a photograph.’ She hurried to the hearth, wriggled her fingers above the host of frames cluttering the mantelpiece, before diving in and fishing out a small brass square. She used the plumped-out front of her tweed skirt to wipe dust from its face before handing it to me. Three figures caught in a long-ago instant: a young man whose destiny made him handsome, an older woman on one side, a pretty girl of about thirteen on the other.

‘Michael went with all the rest of them to fight in the Great War.’ Mrs Bird was standing behind me, peering heavily over my shoulder. ‘His last request, when my mum was seeing him off on the train, was that if anything happened to him she should stay at home with their mother.’ Mrs Bird took back the photo and sat down again, straightening her glasses on her nose to look at it further as she spoke. ‘What was she to say? She assured him she’d do as he asked. She was young – I don’t suppose she thought it would come to anything. People didn’t, not really. Not at the start of the Great War. They didn’t know then.’ She pulled out the frame’s cardboard stand and set it on the table by her glass.

I sipped my whisky and waited, and at length she sighed. She met my eyes; opened her hand upwards in a sudden motion, as if to toss invisible confetti. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘history happened. He was killed and poor old Mum resigned herself to doing as he’d asked. Can’t say I’d have been so obliging, but people were different back then. They stuck by their word. Grandmother was a right old harridan, to be honest, but Mum supported them both, gave up hopes of marriage and children, accepted her lot.’

A flurry of heavy rain drops spat against the nearby window and I shivered into my cardigan. ‘And yet. Here you are.’

‘Here I am.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Grandmother died,’ said Mrs Bird, with a matter-of-fact sort of nod, ‘very precipitously in June 1939. She’d been ill for a time, something to do with her liver, so it was no surprise. Rather a relief, I’ve always gathered, though Mum was far too kind to admit such a thing. By the time the war was nine months old, Mum was married and expecting me.’

‘A whirlwind romance.’

‘Whirlwind?’ Mrs Bird bunched her lips, considering. ‘I suppose so, by today’s standards. Not at the time, though, not in a war. I’m not so sure about the “romance” part, either, to be honest. I’ve always suspected it was a practical decision on Mum’s part. She never said as much, not in so many words, but children know such things, don’t they? No matter that we’d all prefer to believe we were the product of grand love affairs.’ She smiled at me, but in a tentative way, as if she were sizing me up, wondering whether she could trust me further.

‘Did something happen?’ I asked, edging closer. ‘Something to make you feel like that?’

Mrs Bird drained the rest of her whisky and twisted the glass back and forth, making rings on the table top. She frowned then at the bottle, seemed to be engaged in some deep and silent debate; I can’t say whether she won or lost, but she took the top off and poured us each another.

‘I found something,’ she said. ‘A few years back. After Mum passed away and I was taking care of her affairs.’

Whisky hummed warm in my throat. ‘What was it?’

‘Love letters.’

‘Oh.’

‘Not from my father.’

‘Oh!’

‘Hidden in a tin at the back of her dressing-table drawer. I almost didn’t find them, you know. It wasn’t until an antiques dealer came to see about buying some of the furniture. I was showing him the pieces and I thought the drawer was stuck, so I pulled it, rather harder than I needed to, and the tin came scuttling to the front.’

‘Did you read them?’

She wouldn’t meet my eyes. ‘I opened the tin later. Terrible, I know.’ She flushed and began smoothing the hair by her temples, hiding, it seemed, behind her curled hands. ‘I just couldn’t help it. By the time I realized what I was reading, well, I had to keep on with it, didn’t I? They were lovely, you see. Heartfelt. To the point, but almost the more meaningful for their brevity. And there was something else, an air of sadness in those letters. They were all written before she married my dad – Mum wasn’t the type to play up once she was wed. No, this was a love affair from back when her own mother was still alive, when there was no chance that she might marry or move away.’

‘Who was it, do you know? Who wrote the letters?’

She left her hair alone then, flattened her hands on the table. The stillness was arresting, and when she leaned towards me, I felt myself incline to meet her. ‘I really shouldn’t say,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t like to gossip.’

‘Of course not.’

She paused and a thread of excitement plucked at her lip; she shot a surreptitious glance over each shoulder in turn. ‘I’m not one hundred per cent certain; they weren’t signed with a full name, just a single initial.’ She met my eyes, blinked, then smiled, almost slyly. ‘It was an
R
.’

‘An R.’ I echoed her accentuated pronunciation of the letter, thought about it a moment, chewed the inside of my cheek and then I gasped. ‘Why, you don’t think . . . ?’ But why not? She meant R for Raymond Blythe. The King of the Castle and his long-time housekeeper: it was almost a cliché, and clichés only got that way because they happened all the time. ‘That would explain the secrecy in the letters, the impossibility of being open about their relationship.’

‘It would explain something else, too.’

I looked at her, still dazed by the whole proposition.

‘There’s a coldness in the eldest sister, Persephone; a coldness towards
me
. It’s nothing I’ve done, certainly, and yet I’ve always felt it. Once, when I was a girl, she caught me playing by the pool, the circular one with the swing. Well – the look in her eyes; it was as if she’d seen a ghost. I half believed she might be going to throttle me, then and there. Since I found out about my mum’s affair, though, the likelihood that it was with Mr Blythe, well, I’ve wondered whether Percy might not have known; whether she might not have found out somehow and taken umbrage. Things were different back then, between the classes. And Percy Blythe is a rigid sort of person, one for rules and traditions.’

I was nodding, but slowly; it certainly didn’t sound implausible. Percy Blythe didn’t strike me as the type ever to be warm and fuzzy, but I’d noticed on my first visit to the castle that she was particularly short with Mrs Bird. And there was definitely some sort of secret being kept at the castle. Was it possible that this love affair was the very thing Saffy had wanted to tell me about; the detail she hadn’t felt comfortable discussing with Adam Gilbert? And was that why Percy was so adamant that Saffy should not be interviewed further? Because she sought to stop her twin from giving up their father’s secret, from telling me about Raymond Blythe’s longstanding relationship with his housekeeper?

But why would Percy care so much? Not from loyalty to her own mother, surely: Raymond Blythe had married more than once, so presumably Percy had come to terms with the realities of the human heart. And even if it were as Mrs Bird proposed, that Percy was old-fashioned and didn’t approve of the classes mingling romantically, I was doubtful as to whether she would care so deeply after all these decades, especially when so much else had happened to bring perspective to their lives. Could she really consider it such a travesty that her father had once been in love with his long-term housekeeper that she would fight to keep the fact forever hidden from public record? I just couldn’t see it. Whether Percy Blythe was old-fashioned or not was neither here nor there: she was a pragmatist; I had seen enough of her to realize that a flint of steely realism lay within Percy’s heart. If she was keeping secrets, it wasn’t for reasons of prudery or social morality.

‘Even more than that,’ said Mrs Bird, sensing perhaps my wavering opinion, ‘I’ve sometimes wondered whether – I mean, Mum never so much as hinted at it, but – ’ She shook her head and flapped her fingers forward, ‘No – no, it’s silly.’

She was now holding her hands clutched against her chest almost coyly, and it took me a confused moment to make out why; what it was she wanted me to think. I picked my way slowly along the prickly notion and said, ‘You believe he might have been your father?’

Her eyes met mine and I knew I’d guessed correctly. ‘Mum loved that house, the castle, all of the Blythe family. She talked about old Mr Blythe sometimes, about how clever he was, how proud she was to have worked for such a famous writer. But she was funny about it, too. Didn’t like to drive past if we could help it. Clammed up right in the middle of a story and refused to go any further, got this sad, wistful look in her eyes.’