‘Promise you won’t breathe a word of it?’
‘I promise.’
‘I’ve told him yes, but shhh – ’ a finger pressed against her smiling lips – ‘my sisters don’t know yet. He’s coming soon to have dinner.’ She grinned, old lady teeth in a powder-smooth face. ‘We’re going to announce our engagement.’
I saw then that she wore something around her finger. Not a ring, not a real one. This was a crude impostor, silver but dull, lumpy, like a piece of aluminium foil rolled and pressed into shape.
‘And then we’re going to dance, dance, dance…’ She started to sway, humming along to music that was playing, perhaps, in her head. It was the same tune I’d heard earlier, floating in the cold pockets of the corridors. The name eluded me then, no matter how tantalizingly close it came. The recording, as it must have been, had stopped some time ago, but Juniper listed regardless, her eyelids closed, her cheeks coloured with a young woman’s anticipation.
I worked on a book once for an elderly couple writing a history of their life together. The woman had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s but was yet to begin the final harrowing descent, and they’d decided to record her memories before they blew away like bleached leaves from an autumn tree.
The project took six months to complete, during which time I watched her slip helplessly through forgetting towards emptiness. Her husband became ‘that man over there’ and the vibrant, funny woman with the fruity language, who’d argued and grinned and interrupted, was silenced.
No, I’d seen dementia, and this wasn’t it. Wherever Juniper was, it wasn’t empty, and she’d forgotten very little. Yet there was something the matter; she clearly wasn’t well. Every elderly woman I’ve known has told me, at some point, and with varying degrees of wistfulness, that she’s eighteen years old on the inside. But it isn’t true. I’m only thirty and I know that. The stretch of years leaves none unmarked: the blissful sense of youthful invincibility peels away and responsibility brings its weight to bear.
Juniper wasn’t like that, though. She genuinely didn’t realize she was old. In her mind the war still raged and, judging by the way she was swaying, so did her hormones. She was such an unnatural hybrid, old and young, beautiful and grotesque, now and then. The effect was breathtaking and it was eerie and I suffered a sudden surge of revulsion, followed immediately by deep shame at having felt such an unkind thing-
Juniper seized my wrists; her eyes had reeled wide open. ‘But of course!’ she said, catching a giggle in a net of long, pale fingers. ‘You already know about Tom. If it weren’t for you, he and I would never have met!’
Whatever I might have said in reply was swallowed then as every clock within the castle began to chime the hour. What an uncanny symphony it was, room after room of clocks, calling to one another as they marked the passing time. I felt those chimes deep within my body and the effect spread icy and instant across my skin, utterly unnerving me.
‘I really do have to go now, Juniper,’ I said, when finally they stopped. My voice, I noticed, was hoarse.
A slight noise behind me and I glanced over my shoulder, hoping to see Percy returning.
‘Go?’ Juniper’s face sagged. ‘But you’ve just arrived. Where are you going?’
‘Back to London.’
‘London?’
‘Where I live.’
‘London.’ A change came over her then, swift as a storm cloud and just as dark. She reached out, gripping my arm with surprising strength and I saw something I hadn’t before: spider-web scars, silvered with age, scribbled along her pale wrists. ‘Take me with you.’
‘I… I can’t do that.’
‘But it’s the only way. We’ll go and find Tom. He might be there, up in his little flat, sitting by the windowsill…’
‘Juniper -’
‘You said you’d help me.’ Her voice was tight, hateful. ‘Why didn’t you help me?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t-’
‘You’re supposed to be my friend; you said you’d help me. Why didn’t you come?’
‘Juniper, I think you’re confusing me-’
‘Oh, Meredith,’ she whispered, her breath smoky and ancient. ‘I’ve done a terrible, terrible thing.’
Hurried footsteps and the dog appeared, followed closely by Saffy. ‘Juniper! Oh, June, there you are.’ Her voice was drenched with relief as she reached her sister’s side. She wrapped Juniper in a gentle embrace, drawing back at length to scan her face. ‘You mustn’t run off like that. I’ve been so worried; I looked everywhere. I didn’t know where you’d got to, my little love.’
Juniper was shaking; I expect I was too.
As Saffy brushed stray hair from Juniper’s forehead, Percy arrived. She stopped abruptly, leaning on her cane for support as she surveyed the scene. The twins exchanged a glance, similar to the one I’d witnessed earlier in the yellow parlour that had so perplexed me: this time, however, it was Saffy who broke away first. She’d managed, somehow, to penetrate the knot of Juniper’s arms and was holding her little sister’s hand tightly in her own. ‘Thank you for staying with her,’ she said to me, voice quavering. ‘It was kind of you, Edith – ’
‘E-dith,’ Juniper echoed, but she didn’t look my way.
‘ – she gets confused and wanders sometimes. We watch her closely, but…’ Saffy shook her head shortly, the gesture communicating the impossibility of living one’s life for another.
I nodded, unable to find the right words to reply.
‘E-dith,’ said Juniper again. ‘E-dith, E-dith…’
‘Yes, darling,’ said Saffy, ‘that’s Edith, isn’t it? She’s come to visit.’
I knew then what I’d suspected all along. Mum had been lying when she told me Juniper’s message was little more than a greeting, just as she’d lied about our visit to Milderhurst. But why? What had happened between Mum and Juniper Blythe? If Juniper was to be believed, Mum had made a promise that she’d failed to keep; something to do with Juniper’s fiance, with Thomas Cavill. If that was the case, and if the truth really was as dreadful as Juniper suggested, the letter might have been an accusation. Was that it? Was it suppressed guilt that had made my mother cry?
For the first time since I’d arrived at Milderhurst I longed to be free of the house and its old sorrow, to see the sun and feel the wind on my face and smell something other than rancid mud and mothballs. To be alone with this new puzzle, so that I might begin to unpick it.
‘I hope she didn’t offend you…’ Saffy was still speaking; I could hear her through my own reeling thoughts as though she was far away, on the other side of a thick and heavy door. ‘Whatever she said, she didn’t mean it. She says things sometimes, funny things, meaningless things…’
Her voice tapered off but the silence left behind it was unsettled. She was watching me, unspoken sentiments in her eyes, and I realized that it wasn’t concern alone that weighted her features. There was something else hiding in her face, particularly when she glanced again at Percy. Fear, I realized. They were frightened, both of them.
I looked at Juniper, hiding behind her own crossed arms. Did I imagine she was standing especially still, listening carefully, waiting to see how I’d answer, what I’d tell them?
I braved a smile, hoping against hope that it might pass for casual. ‘She didn’t say anything,’ I said, then shrugged my shoulders for good measure. ‘I was just admiring her pretty dress.’
The surrounding air seemed to shift with the force of the twins’ relief. Juniper’s profile registered no change, and I was left with a strange, creeping sensation, the vague awareness that I’d somehow made a mistake. That I ought to have been honest, to have told the twins all that Juniper had said, the cause of her upset. But having failed thus far to mention my mum and her evacuation, I wasn’t sure that I could find the necessary words-
‘Marilyn Bird has arrived,’ said Percy bluntly.
‘Oh, but things do have a habit of happening all at once,’ said Saffy.
‘She’s come to drive you back to the farmhouse. You’re due in London, she says.’
