slowly, craft her words into pleasing order, writing and rewriting, editing and perfecting, reading aloud and relishing the pleasure of bringing her heroine Adele’s story to life. Only when she was absolutely happy with the day’s work would she retire to her Olivetti and type up the new paragraph.
Juniper, on the other hand, worked like someone trying to write themselves free of entanglement. She did so wherever inspiration found her, writing on the run, spilling behind her scraps of poems, fragmented images, adverbs out of place, but somehow the stronger for it; all littered the castle, dropped like breadcrumbs, leading the way to the gingerbread nursery at the top of the stairs. Saffy would find them sometimes when she was cleaning – ink- splotched pages on the floor, behind the sofa, under the rug – and she’d surrender herself to the conjured image of an ancient Roman trireme, sail hoisted, wind beating it full, an order shouted on deck whilst in the bows the secreted lovers hid, on the brink of capture… Only for the story then to be abandoned, victim of Juniper’s fleeting, shifting interest.
At other times, whole stories were begun and completed in wild fits of composition; manias, Saffy sometimes thought, though that was not a word any of the Blythes used lightly, certainly not in relation to Juniper. The littlest sister would fail to appear at table and light would be found streaking through the nursery floorboards, a hot strip beneath the door. Daddy would order them not to disturb her, saying that the needs of the body were secondary to the demands of genius, but Saffy always sneaked a plate up when he wasn’t looking. Not that it was ever touched; Juniper just kept scribbling all night long. Sudden, burning, like those tropical fevers people seemed always to be getting, and short-lived, so that by next day all would be calm. She would emerge from the attic: tired, dazed and emptied. Yawning and lounging in that feline manner of hers, the demon exorcised and quite forgotten.
And that was the strangest aspect of all for Saffy, who filed her own compositions – drafts and finals – in matching lidded boxes that were stacked prettily for posterity in the muniment room, who had always worked towards the thrill of binding her work and pressing it into a reader’s hands. Juniper had no interest whatsoever in whether or not her writing was read. There was no false modesty in her failure to show her work to others; she simply couldn’t have cared less. Once the thing was written, it was no longer of any interest to her. Percy, when Saffy mentioned it, had been nonplussed, but that was to be expected. Poor Percy, without a creative bone in her body-
Well, well! Saffy paused, still on hands and knees; what should appear beneath the underbrush of papers but Grandmother’s silver serving spoon! The very thing she’d spent half the day looking for. She sat back on her haunches, pressing her hands flat against her thighs, forcing the kink from her lower spine. To think that all the while, as she and Lucy had turned drawers inside out, the spoon had been tucked beneath the rubble in Juniper’s room. Saffy was about to pluck it from its resting place – there was a curious stain on the handle that would need attention – when she saw that it had been acting as a bookmark of sorts. She opened the notebook – more of Juniper’s scratchy handwriting, but this page was dated. Saffy’s eyes, trained by a lifetime of voracious reading, were faster than her manners, and within the split second it took to blink she’d discerned that the book was a journal, the entry recent. May 1941, just before Juniper left for London.
It was simply dreadful to read another person’s journal and Saffy would be mortified if her own privacy were invaded in such a fashion, but Juniper had never cared for rules of conduct and in some way that Saffy understood but couldn’t formulate into words, that fact made it all right for her to take a peek. Indeed, Juniper’s habit of leaving personal papers lying flagrantly in the open was an invitation, surely, for her older sister, a mother figure really, to ensure that all was in order. Juniper was almost nineteen, but she was a special case: not responsible for herself like most adults. How else were Saffy and Percy to act as Juniper’s guardians other than by making it their business to know hers? Nanny wouldn’t have thought twice about leafing through diaries and letters left in view by her charges, which was precisely why the twins had gone to such great lengths to rotate their hiding spots. That Juniper didn’t bother was evidence enough to Saffy that her baby sister welcomed maternal interest in her affairs. And she was here now, and Juniper’s notebook was lying right there in front of her, open to a relatively recent page. Why – it was almost uncaring, wasn’t it, not to take a tiny little peek?
FIVE
There was another bicycle leaning against the front steps, where Percy had taken to leaving her own when she was too tired, too lazy, or too plain rushed to put it in the stables. Which was often. This was unusual – Saffy hadn’t mentioned guests other than Juniper and the fellow, Thomas Cavill, each of whom would be arriving off buses and definitely not by bicycle.
Percy climbed the stairs and dug about in her satchel, searching for the key. Saffy had become very particular about keeping the doors locked since war started, convinced that Milderhurst would be circled in red on Hitler’s invasion map and the Blythe sisters marked out for arrest, which was fine with Percy except for the fact that her front-door key seemed always intent on hiding from her.
Ducks spluttered on the pond behind; the dark mass of Cardarker Wood quivered; thunder grumbled, closer now; and time seemed to stretch like elastic. Just as she was about to give up and start pounding on the door, it swung open and Lucy Middleton was there, a scarf over her hair and a weak-beamed bicycle lamp in her hand.
‘Oh my!’ The former housekeeper’s free hand leaped to her chest. ‘You frightened me.’
Percy opened her mouth, but finding no words closed it again. She stopped rummaging and swung her satchel over her shoulder. Still no words.
‘I – I’ve been helping in the kitchen.’ Lucy’s face was flushed. ‘Miss Saffy gave me a ring. On the telephone, earlier. Neither of her dailies was available.’
Percy cleared her throat and regretted the action immediately. The resulting croak connoted nervousness, and Lucy Middleton was the very last person before whom she wished to seem uncertain. ‘Everything’s set then, is it? For tonight?’
‘The pie’s in the oven and I’ve left Miss Saffy with instructions.’
‘I see.’
‘The dinner will cook slowly. I’d be expecting Miss Saffy to boil over first.’
It was a joke, an amusing one, but Percy left it too long to laugh. She sought something else to say, but there was too much and too little and Lucy Middleton, who had been standing, waiting for something further, must have realized that it wasn’t coming because she moved now, somewhat awkwardly, around Percy to retrieve her bicycle.
No, it wasn’t Middleton any more. Lucy Rogers. It had been over a year since she and Harry had wed. Almost eighteen months.
‘Good day, Miss Blythe.’ Lucy climbed onto her bicycle.
‘Your husband?’ said Percy quickly, despising herself as she did so. ‘Is he well?’
Lucy didn’t meet her eyes. ‘He is.’
‘And you too, of course?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the babe.’
Almost a whisper: ‘Yes.’
Her posture was that of a child expecting to be scolded or, worse, thrashed, and Percy was overcome with the sudden, hot desire to fulfil the expectation. She didn’t, of course, adopting instead a casual tone, less precipitate than before, almost light, and saying, ‘You might mention to your husband that the grandfather in the hall is still gaining. We arrive at the hour ten minutes sooner than we should.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘I don’t think I imagined that he bore some special sentiment towards our old clock?’
Lucy refused to meet her eyes but uttered a vague reply before mounting her bicycle and pushing off towards the top of the driveway, lamplight scribbling a shaky message on the ground before her.
At the shudder of the front door downstairs Saffy clapped the journal shut. Her blood thrummed warm beneath her temples, her cheeks, the skin stretched taut above her breasts. Her pulse beat faster than a small bird’s heart. Well. She stood shakily, pushing herself up from the ground. That certainly took away some of the guesswork: the mystery of the evening ahead, the alteration of the dress, the young male guest. Not a gallant stranger at all. No. Not a stranger.
