She lifted her head and smiled across the table as she set her saucer straight. ‘Well now,’ she said. ‘Milderhurst Castle. And how was it?’
‘It was… big.’ I work with words and that was the best I could come up with. It was the surprise, of course; the utter transformation I’d just witnessed. ‘Like something out of a fairy tale.’
‘A tour, did you say? I didn’t realize one could do such a thing. That’s our modern times, I suppose.’ She waved a hand. ‘Everything for a price.’
‘It was informal,’ I said. ‘One of the owners took me. A very old lady called Persephone Blythe.’
‘Percy?’ A tiny tremble in her voice; the only prick in her composure. ‘Percy Blythe? She’s still there?’
‘They all are, Mum. All three. Even Juniper, who sent you the letter.’
Mum opened her mouth as if to speak; when no words came out she closed it again, tightly. She laced her fingers in her lap, sat as still and as pale as a marble statue. I sat too, but the silence took on weight and it became more than I could bear.
‘It was eerie,’ I said, picking up my teapot. I noticed that my hands were shaking. ‘Everything was dusty and dim and to see them all sitting in the parlour together, the three of them in that big, old house – it felt a little like I’d stumbled inside a doll’s-’
‘Juniper, Edie – ’ Mum’s voice was strange and thin and she cleared her throat – ‘how was she? How did she seem?’
I wondered where to start: the girlish joy, the dishevelled appearance, the final scene of desperate accusations. ‘She was confused,’ I said. ‘She was wearing an old-fashioned dress and she told me she was waiting for someone, a man. The lady at the farmhouse where I stayed said that she isn’t well, that her sisters look after her.’
‘She’s ill?’
‘Dementia. Sort of.’ I continued carefully: ‘Her boyfriend left her years ago and she never fully recovered.’
‘Boyfriend?’
‘Fiance to be precise. He stood her up and people say it drove her mad. Literally mad.’
‘Oh, Edie,’ said Mum. The slightly ill look on her face resolved into the sort of smile you might give a clumsy kitten. ‘Always so full of fancy. Real life isn’t like that.’
I bristled: it gets tiresome being treated like an ingenue. ‘I’m just telling you what they said in the village. A lady there said Juniper was always fragile, even when she was young.’
‘I
She’d snapped and it had caught me unawares. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I-’
‘No.’ She lifted a palm then pressed it lightly against her forehead and stole a surreptitious glance over her shoulder. ‘No,
I was still startled by her outburst and said guardedly, ‘You mean they looked old? Grey hair and all?’
‘No. No, not that. It’s hard to say what it was. I suppose they were only in their mid-thirties at the time, but of course that meant something different back then. And I was young. Children do tend to see things differently, don’t they?’
I didn’t answer; she didn’t intend me to. Her eyes were on mine, but they had a faraway look about them, like an old-fashioned silver screen on which pictures were projected. ‘They behaved more like parents than sisters,’ she said, ‘to Juniper, I mean. They were a lot older than she was, and her mother had died when she was only a child. Their father was still alive, but he wasn’t much involved.’
‘He was a writer, Raymond Blythe.’ I said it cautiously, wary that I might be overstepping again, offering information that was hers firsthand. This time, though, she didn’t seem to mind and I waited for some indication that she knew all that the name meant, that she remembered bringing the book home from the library when I was a girl. I’d kept an eye out when I was packing up the flat; hoping I might be able to bring it to show her, but I hadn’t found it. ‘He wrote a story called
‘Yes,’ was all she said, very softly.
‘Did you ever meet him?’
She shook her head. ‘I saw him a few times, but only from a distance. He was very old by then and quite reclusive. He spent most of his time up in his writing tower and I wasn’t allowed to go up there. It was the most important rule – there weren’t many.’ She was looking down and a raised vein pulsed mauve beneath each lid. ‘They talked about him sometimes; he could be difficult, I think. I always thought of him as a little like King Lear, playing his daughters off, one against the other.’
It was the first time I’d ever heard my mother reference a character of fiction, and the effect was to derail my train of thought entirely. I wrote my honours thesis on Shakespeare’s tragedies and not once did she give any sign that she was familiar with the plays.
‘Edie?’ Mum looked up sharply. ‘Did you tell them who you were? When you went to Milderhurst. Did you tell them about me? Percy, the others?’
‘No.’ I wondered whether the omission would offend Mum; whether she’d demand to know why I hadn’t told them the truth. ‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Good,’ she said, nodding. ‘That was a good decision. Kinder. You’d only have confused them. It was such a long time ago and I was with them so briefly; they’ve no doubt quite forgotten I was there at all.’
And here was my chance; I took it. ‘That’s just it though, Mum. They hadn’t, that is, Juniper hadn’t.’
‘What do you mean?
‘She thought I was you.’
‘She…?’ Her eyes searched mine. ‘How do you know?’
‘She called me Meredith.’
Mum’s fingertips brushed her lips. ‘Did she… say anything else?’
A crossroads. A choice. And yet, it wasn’t really. I had to tread lightly: if I was to tell Mum exactly what Juniper had said, that she’d accused her of breaking a promise and ruining her life, our conversation would most certainly be ended. ‘Not much,’ I said. ‘Were you close, the two of you?’
The man sitting behind stood up then, his considerable backside nudging our table so that everything upon it quivered. I smiled distractedly at his apology, focused instead on preventing our cups and our conversation from toppling. ‘Were you and Juniper friends, Mum?’
She picked up her coffee; seemed to spend a long time running her spoon around the inside of her cup to tidy the froth. ‘You know, it’s so long ago it’s difficult to remember the details.’ A brittle, metallic noise as the spoon hit the saucer. ‘As I said, I was only there a little over a year. My father came and fetched me home in early 1941.’
‘And you never went back?’
‘That was the last I saw of Milderhurst.’
She was lying. I felt hot, light-headed. ‘You’re sure?’
A little laugh. ‘Edie – what a queer thing to say. Of course I’m sure. It’s the sort of thing one would remember, don’t you think?’
I would. I did. I swallowed. ‘That’s just it. A funny thing happened, you see. On the weekend, when I first saw the entrance to Milderhurst – the gates at the bottom of the drive – I had the most extraordinary sense that I’d been there before.’ When she said nothing, I pressed: ‘That I’d been there with you.’
Her silence was excruciating and I was aware suddenly of the murmur of cafe noise around us, the jarring thwack of the coffee basket being emptied, the grinder whirring, shrill laughter somewhere on the mezzanine. I seemed to be hearing it all at one remove, though, as if Mum and I were quite separate, encased within our own bubble.
I tried to keep the tremor from my voice. ‘When I was a kid. We drove there, you and I, and we stood at the gates. It was hot and there was a lake and I wanted to swim, but we didn’t go inside. You said it was too late.’
Mum patted her napkin to her lips, slowly, delicately, then looked at me. Just for a moment I thought I glimpsed the light of confession in her eyes, then she blinked and it was gone. ‘You’re imagining things.’
