The Distant Hours (72 page)

His attention fell to the ground and he noticed the way water was gathering deeper round the castle rim than it was further out. One day in London, when they were lying in bed together and he was asking all about the castle, Juniper had told him there had once been a moat at Milderhurst, that their father had ordered it filled in after his first wife died.

‘It must have been grief,’ Tom had said, well able to understand when he looked across at Juniper, allowed himself to imagine the gaping horror of her loss, what such an absence might drive a man to do.

‘Not grief,’ she’d replied, threading the end of her hair through her fingers. ‘More like guilt.’

He’d wondered what she’d meant, but she’d smiled and swivelled to sit on the side of the bed, her naked back smooth and just begging him to stroke it, and his questions had fallen away. It hadn’t occurred to him again until now. Guilt – for what? He made a mental note to ask her later; when he’d met the sisters, when Juniper and he had broken their news, when they were together, alone.

A triangle of light caught Tom’s attention then, shining on the watery surface. It was coming from the window with the broken shutter. Tom wondered whether the repair might be a simple matter of hooking it up on an existing catch, and whether he ought to attempt it now.

The window wasn’t high. He could be up and down in no time. It would save him coming out again once he was clean and dry, and it might just win the sisters’ hearts.

With a grin, Tom set his bag down by the door and headed back out into the rain.

Since the moment she’d turned her back on the crackling fire of the good parlour, Saffy has been dreaming her way inwards along the ripples of her mind’s pool. Now she reaches its centre. The place of stillness from which all dreams flow; to which all return. The site of her old familiar.

She has dreamed it countless times before, has been dreaming it since she was a child. It never changes; like an old piece of film footage, the spool rewound, ready to play again. And no matter that she’s been there before, the dream is always fresh, the terror as raw as ever.

The dream begins with her waking; thinking that she’s woken to the real world, then noticing the strange quality of silence that surrounds her. It is cold and Saffy is alone; she slides across the white sheet and puts her feet on the wooden floor. Her nurse is sleeping in the little room nearby, slow, steady breaths that should suggest safety but in this world signal only unbridgeable distance.

Saffy walks slowly to the window. She is drawn there.

She climbs atop the bookcase; gathers her nightdress round her legs against a sudden deathly chill. Lifts a hand to touch the misted glass and peers out into the night . . .

Percy found the hammer. It took much hunting and a fair amount of cursing, but finally her hand closed round the smooth wooden handle that years of varied use had rubbed clean of splinters. With a huff of jubilant frustration, she yanked it from amongst the spanners and screwdrivers and laid it on the floor beside her. Opened the glass jar of nails and shook a dozen or so into her hand. She held one up against the light, studied it, and figured two and a half inches in length had to be enough to do the trick, at least for the night. She tucked the clutch of nails inside the pocket of her raincoat, snatched up the hammer and stalked back across the kitchen to the door.

He hadn’t got off to the best of starts and that was a fact. Misjudging a stone and slipping back into the muddy moat had been a rude shock and certainly not part of the plan, but after swearing like a soldier – which, of course, he was – Tom had picked himself up, dragged the back of his wrist across his eyes so he could see, and attacked the wall with more determination than ever.

Never say die
, as his commanding officer had shouted at them when they were fighting their way across France.
Never say die
.

Now, finally, he’d reached the window ledge. By happy chance, there was a groove between two stones where mortar had long since dropped away, leaving the perfect cavity for him to wedge his boots. The light from the room was a blessing and it didn’t take long for Tom to see that the shutter was going to need more than he could offer it right now.

He’d been so intent on the shutter, that he’d paid no attention to the room inside. But now, he looked through the window and saw that the scene was one of quintessential warmth and comfort. A pretty woman, asleep by the fire. He thought at first that it was Juniper.

The woman flinched, though, and her features tightened, and he knew then that it wasn’t Juniper but one of the sisters: Saffy, he guessed, based on the stories Juniper had told him; the maternal one, the twin who Juniper said had stepped in when her mother died to raise her; the one who suffered with panic and wasn’t able to leave the castle.

She opened her eyes as he watched, a sudden movement, and he almost lost his grip with surprise. She turned her head towards the window and their gaze met.

Percy saw the man at the window as soon as she turned the corner. The light from the window illuminated him; a dark figure, like a gorilla, climbing the wall, clinging to the stones, peering into the good parlour. The room in which Saffy was sleeping. Something inside Percy began to pulse; all her life she had known it her duty to protect her sisters, and her hand tightened around the hammer’s wooden handle. Nerves on fire, she began to run through the rain towards the man.

To appear like a mud-bathed peeping Tom at the window was about as far from the impression he’d hoped to make on Juniper’s sisters as was possible.

But Tom had been seen now. He couldn’t just jump down and hide, pretend it hadn’t happened. He smiled tentatively; lifted a hand to wave, to signal good intentions, but dropped it again when he realized it was coated in mud.

Oh God. She was standing and she wasn’t smiling.

She was coming towards him.

A small part of him could see beyond the mortification, could glimpse that by sheer virtue of its preposterousness, this moment was destined to become a favourite anecdote.
Remember the night we met Tom? He appeared at the window covered in mud and waved hello?

But not yet. For now, he had little choice but to watch as she walked towards him, slowly, almost as if in a dream, shaking a little, as if she were as icy cold as he had been in the rain.

She reached to unlatch the window, he searched for words to explain, and then she picked something up from the sill.

Percy stopped dead. The man was gone. Right before her eyes, he’d toppled and fallen to the ground. She glanced up at the window and saw Saffy, shaking, the wrench held tightly in her hands.

A sharp crack, and he wondered what it was. Movement, his own, sudden and surprising.

Falling.

Something cold against his face, wet.

Noises, birds perhaps, crying, shrieking. He flinched and tasted mud. Where was he? Where was Juniper?

Rain drops pounded his head, he felt each one separately, like music, strings being plucked, a complex tune being played. They were beautiful, and he wondered why he’d never known that before. Individual drops, perfect, each one of them. Falling to earth and soaking into the ground, so that rivers could form, and oceans could fill, and people, animals, plants might have water to drink – it was all so simple.

He remembered a rainstorm when he was a boy, when his father was still alive. Tom had been frightened. It was dark and loud and he’d hidden under the table in the kitchen. He’d cried and screwed shut his eyes and his fists. He’d been crying so hard, his own sorrow so loud in his ears that he hadn’t noticed when his father came into the room. The first he’d known was when the great bear scooped him up and lifted him into his big, broad arms and held him close; and then he told Tom that everything was all right, and the sweet, sour lovely smell of tobacco on his breath had made it so. On his father’s lips those words had been an incantation. A promise. And Tom had not been frightened any more . . .

Where had he put the jam?

The jam was important. The man in the basement flat had said it was his best batch yet; that he’d gathered the blackberries himself and used months of rationed sugar. But Tom couldn’t remember where he’d put it. He’d had it, he knew that. He’d brought it from London in his bag, but then he’d taken it out and put it down. Had he left it under the table? When he hid from the rain, had he taken the jam jar with him? He supposed he should get up and look for it, and he would. He had to, the jam was a gift. He’d go and find it in just a minute, and then he’d laugh that he could have lost it at all. He’d just take a little rest first.

He felt tired. So tired. It had been such a long journey. The stormy night, the trudge up the drive, the day of trains and buses and near misses, but more than that, the journey that had led him to her. He’d walked so far; he’d read and taught and dreamed and wished and hoped so much. It was natural that he should need to rest, that he might just close his eyes now and take a moment; just rest a little, so that when he saw her again, he would be ready . . .

Tom closed his eyes and there were millions of tiny stars, twinkling, shifting, and they were so beautiful and he wanted only to watch them. It seemed to him that there was nothing he wanted more in the world than to lie there and watch those stars. So he did, he watched them as they drifted and sifted, he wondered if he might even be able to reach them, to hold out a finger and catch one on it, and then finally he saw there was something hiding amongst them. A face, Juniper’s face. His heart shook its wings. She had arrived then, after all. She was close by, leaning to lay her hand on his shoulder, to speak softly against his ear. Words that described it all so perfectly that when he tried to clutch them, to repeat them to himself, they turned to water in his hands, and there were stars in her eyes and stars on her lips and little shimmery lights hanging in her hair; and he couldn’t hear her any more, even though her lips were moving and the stars were winking, because she was fading now, turning into black; and he was fading too.

‘June – ’ he whispered, as the last little lights began to tremble, to switch off one by one, as thick mud filled his throat and his nose and his mouth, as the rain beat down on his head, as his lungs were finally starved of air; he smiled as her breath caressed his neck . . .

Juniper woke with a start to a throbbing headache and the muddy mouth of unnatural sleep. The surface of her eyes felt grazed. Where was she? It was dark, night-time, but a faint light crept in from somewhere. She blinked and registered a ceiling high above her. Its marks, its rafters, were familiar, and yet it wasn’t right somehow. It didn’t fit. What had happened?

Something, she knew that; she could feel it. But what?

I can’t remember.

She turned her head – slowly – letting the clutter of loose, nameless objects inside tumble over. She scanned the space beside her for clues; saw nothing but an empty sheet, a jumbled shelf beyond, the merest strip of light spilling in from a door that was ajar.

Juniper knew this place. This was the attic at Milderhurst. She was lying in her own bed. She hadn’t been here in a long time. There had been another attic, a sunny place, not like this at all.

I can’t remember.

She was alone. The thought came to her as solidly as if she’d read it, in black text on white paper, and the absence was a pain, an aching wound. She’d expected there to be someone else with her. A man, she realized. She’d expected a man.

A strange wave of misgiving then; not to remember what had happened during the lost time was normal, but there was something else. Juniper was lost within the dark wardrobe of her mind, but although she couldn’t see what lay around her, she was filled with a certainty, a heavy dread, that there was something terrible locked inside there with her.

I can’t remember.

She closed her eyes and strained to hear, cast about for anything that might help. There was none of the bustle of London, the buses, the people on the street below, the murmurs from other flats; but the veins of the house were creaking, the stones were sighing, and there was another persistent noise. Rain – it was light rain on the roof.

Her eyes opened. She remembered rain.

She remembered a bus stopping.

She remembered blood.

Juniper sat up suddenly, too focused on this fact, this small glimmer of light, of remembrance, to mind the pain in her head. She remembered blood.

But whose blood?

The dread shifted, stretched out its legs.

She needed air. The attic was stifling, suddenly; warm and moist and thick.

She placed her feet on the wooden floor. Things, her things lay everywhere, yet she felt disconnected from them. Someone had attempted to clear a space, a passage through the jumble.

She stood. She remembered blood.

What made her look at her hands then? Whatever it was, she recoiled. There was something on them. She brushed quickly on her shirt and the gesture caused a rippling of familiarity beneath her skin. She lifted her palms closer to her face and the marks fled. Shadows. They were only shadows.

Disconcerted, relieved, she went shakily to the window. Pulled aside the blackout curtain and opened the sash. A light cool film of fresh air brushed her cheeks.