The Distant Hours

‘Fancy your chances?’

I shifted my hand like a puppeteer.

‘Well,’ said Herbert, passing me Jess’s lead while he dug out his cigarettes. ‘Your boss may not be able to stretch to a pay rise, but he might have had an idea.’

I raised a brow. ‘What sort of an idea?’

‘Rather a good one, I should think.’

‘Oh?’

‘All in good time, Edie, my love.’ He winked over the top of his cigarette. ‘All in good time.’

We turned the corner into Herbert’s street to find the postman poised to feed some letters through the door. Herbert tipped his hat and took the clutch of envelopes beneath his arm, unlocking the door to let us in. Jess, as per habit, went straight for the cushioned throne beneath Herbert’s desk, arranging herself artfully before fixing us with a look of wounded indignation.

Herbert and I have our own post-walk habit, so when he closed the door behind him and said, ‘Potlatch or post, Edie?’, I was already halfway to the kitchen.

‘I’ll make the tea,’ I said. ‘You read the mail.’

The tray had been set up earlier in the kitchen – Herbert is very fastidious about such things – and a fresh batch of scones was cooling beneath a checked tea towel. While I scooped cream and homemade jam into small ramekins, Herbert read out snippets of import from the day’s correspondence. I was juggling the tray into the office when he said, ‘Well, well.’

‘What is it?’

He folded the letter in question towards him and peered over its top. ‘An offer of work, I believe.’

‘From whom?’

‘A rather large publisher.’

‘How cheeky!’ I handed him a cup. ‘I trust you’ll remind them that you already have a perfectly good job.’

‘I would, of course,’ he said, ‘only the offer isn’t for me. It’s you they want, Edie. You and no one else.’

The letter, as it turned out, was from the publisher of Raymond Blythe’s Mud Man. Over a steaming cup of Darjeeling and a jam-laden scone, Herbert read it aloud to me; then he read it again. Then he explained its contents in rather basic terms because, despite a decade in the publishing industry, the surprise had rendered me temporarily incapable of understanding such things myself: to wit, there was a new edition of the Mud Man being printed the following year to coincide with its seventy-fifth anniversary. Raymond Blythe’s publishers wanted me to write a new introduction to celebrate the occasion.

‘You’re having a joke…’ He shook his head. ‘But that’s just… far too unbelievable,’ I said. ‘Why me?’

‘I’m not sure.’ He turned over the letter, saw that the other side was blank. Gazed up at me, eyes enormous behind his glasses. ‘It doesn’t say.’

‘But how peculiar.’ A ripple beneath my skin as the threads that had tied themselves to Milderhurst began to tremble. ‘What shall I do?’

Herbert handed me the letter. ‘I should think you might start by giving this number a ring.’

My conversation with Judith Waterman, publisher at Pippin Books, was short and not unsweet. ‘I’ll be honest with you,’ she said, when I told her who I was and why I was calling: ‘we’d employed another writer to do it and we were very happy with him. The daughters though, Raymond Blythe’s daughters, were not. The whole thing’s become rather a grand headache; we’re publishing early next year, so time is of the essence. The edition’s been in development for months: our writer had already conducted preliminary interviews and got some way into his draft, then out of the blue we received a phone call from the Misses Blythe letting us know they were pulling the plug.’

That I could imagine. It was not difficult to envisage Percy Blythe taking great pleasure in such contrary behaviour.

‘We’re committed to the edition, though,’ Judith continued. ‘We’ve a new imprint starting, a series of classics with memoir-esque opening essays, and The True History of the Mud Man, as one of our most popular titles, is the ideal choice for summer publication.’

I realized I was nodding as if she were with me in the room. ‘I can understand that,’ I said, ‘I’m just not sure how I can-’

‘The problem,’ Judith pressed on, ‘would appear to be with one of the daughters in particular.’

‘Oh?’

‘Persephone Blythe. Which is an unexpected nuisance seeing as the proposal came to us in the first instance from her twin sister. Whatever the case, they weren’t happy, we can’t do anything without permission due to a complicated copyright arrangement, and the whole thing is teetering. I went down there myself a fortnight ago and mercifully they agreed to allow the project to go ahead with a different writer, someone of whom they approved – ’ She broke off and I heard her gulping a drink at the other end of the line. ‘We sent them a long list of writers, including samples of their work. They sent them all back to us unopened. Persephone Blythe asked for you instead.’

A hook of niggling doubt snagged my stomach lining. ‘She asked for me?’

‘By name. Quite assuredly.’

‘You know I’m not a writer.’

‘Yes,’ said Judith. ‘And I explained that to them, but they didn’t mind at all. Evidently they already know who you are and what you do. More to the point, it would appear you’re the only person they’ll tolerate, which reduces our options rather dramatically. Either you write it, or the entire project collapses.’

‘I see.’

‘Look – ’ the busy sound of papers being moved across a desk – ‘I’m convinced you’ll do a good job. You work in publishing, you know your way around sentences. I’ve contacted some of your former clients and they all spoke very highly of you.’

‘Really?’ Oh, frightful vanity, fishing for a compliment! She was right to ignore me.

‘And all of us at Pippin are looking at this as a positive. We’re wondering whether perhaps the sisters have been so specific because they’re ready, finally, to talk about the inspiration behind the book. I don’t need to tell you what a terrific coup that would be, to discover the true history behind the book’s creation!’

She did not. My dad was doing a brilliant job of that already.

‘Well then. What do you say?’

What did I say? Percy Blythe had requested me personally. I was being asked to write about the Mud Man, to speak again with the Sisters Blythe, to visit them in their castle. What else was there to say? ‘I’ll do it.’

‘I was at the opening night of the play, you know,’ said Herbert when I’d finished relaying the conversation.

‘The Mud Man play?’

He nodded as Jess took up her position on his feet. ‘Have I never mentioned it?’

‘No.’ That he hadn’t was not as strange as it might seem. Herbert’s parents were theatre people and much of his childhood had been spent knocking about behind the proscenium arch.

‘I was twelve, or thereabouts,’ he said, ‘and I remember it because it was one of the most astonishing things I’d ever seen. Marvellous in many ways. The castle had been constructed in the centre of the stage, but they’d built it on a disc, raised and inclined, so that the tower pointed towards the audience and we could look right through the attic window into the room where Jane and her brother slept. The moat was on the very rim of the disc and the lights came from behind, so that when the Mud Man finally emerged, when he began his climb up the stones of the castle, long shadows fell into the audience, as if the mud of the story, the damp and the dark and the monster himself, were reaching out to touch one.’

I shivered theatrically and earned a suspicious look from Jess. ‘Sounds the stuff of nightmares. No wonder you remember it so well.’

‘Quite, although there was more to it than that. I remember that night specially because of the kerfuffle in the audience.’

‘Which kerfuffle?’

‘I was watching from the wings, so I was well placed to see it when it happened. A commotion, up in the writer’s box, people standing, a small child crying, someone ailing. A doctor was called and some of the family