The Distant Hours

Wood, I knew that a blow had been struck. A fierce blow. I knew too, that Percy did not want me to see those notebooks. Her reluctance only fed my desire, my need, to take them in my hands, and I held my breath as the twins continued their dance.

‘Go on, Percy,’ said Saffy, blinking widely and allowing her smile to wilt a little at the corners, as if perplexed, as if she couldn’t understand why Percy needed prodding. She sneaked the briefest glance at me, sufficient only for me to know that we were allies. ‘Show her the muniment room.’

The muniment room. Of course that’s where they were! It was just like a scene from the Mud Man itself: Raymond Blythe’s precious notebooks, concealed within the room of secrets.

Percy’s arms, the cage of her torso, her chin: all were rigid. Why didn’t she want me to see those books? What was inside them that she feared?

‘Percy?’ Saffy softened her tone the way one might with a child who needs cajoling to speak up. ‘Are the notebooks still there then?’

‘I expect so. I certainly haven’t moved them.’

‘Well then?’ The tension between them was so thick I could barely stand to breathe as I watched and hoped. Time stretched painfully; a gust of wind outside made the shutters vibrate against the glass. Juniper stirred. Saffy spoke again. ‘Percy?’

‘Not today,’ Percy said finally, driving her spent cigarette into the little crystal ashtray. ‘The dark comes in quickly now. It’s almost evening.’

I glanced at the window and saw that she was right. The sun had slid away quickly and the cool night air was sifting into place. ‘When you come tomorrow, I’ll show you the room.’ Her eyes were hard on mine. ‘And Miss Burchill?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ll hear no more from you about Juniper or him.’

ONE

London, June 22nd, 1941

It was a small flat, little more than a pair of tiny rooms at the top of a Victorian building. The roof sloped on one side until it met the wall that someone, at some time, had erected so that one draughty attic might become two, and there was no kitchen to speak of, only a small sink beside an old gas cooker. It wasn’t Tom’s flat, not really; he hadn’t a place of his own because he’d never needed one. He’d lived with his family near Elephant and Castle until the war began, and then with his regiment as it dwindled to a small band of stragglers on their way to meet the coast. After Dunkirk, he’d slept in a bed at Chertsey Emergency Hospital.

Since his discharge, though, he’d been drifting from this spare room to that, waiting for his leg to heal and his unit to recall him. There were places empty all over London so it was never hard to find a new abode. It seemed that everything had been shuffled by the war – people, possessions, affections – and there was no longer one right way of doing things. This particular flat, this plain room that he would remember specially to his dying day, that was soon to become the repository for his life’s best and brightest memories, belonged to a friend with whom he’d studied at teacher training college, in a different version of his life, long ago.

It was early still, but Tom had already walked to Primrose Hill and back. He didn’t sleep late any more, nor deeply. Not after the months in France, living by his wits, in retreat. He woke with the birds, the sparrows in particular, a family of whom had taken up digs on his sill. It had been a mistake, perhaps, to feed them, but the bread had been mouldy to begin with and the fellow down at the Salvage Department fierce that it shouldn’t be thrown away. It was the heat of the room and the steam from the boiler turning Tom’s bread to mould. He kept the window open but the day’s sun accumulated in the flats beneath, spread up the staircase and shrugged through the floorboards, before hitting his ceiling and stretching out with proprietorial ease to shake hands with the steam. It had been just as well to accept it: the mould was his, as were the birds. He woke early, he fed them, he walked.

The doctors had said that walking was the best thing for his leg, but Tom would’ve done so regardless. There was something restless living inside him now, something he’d gained in France that needed to be exorcised daily. Each footfall on the pavement helped a little, and he was glad for the release, even though he knew it to be temporary. That morning, as he’d stood at the top of Primrose Hill and watched the dawn roll up its sleeves, he’d picked out the Zoo and the BBC and, in the distance, the dome of St Paul’s, rising clear of its blitzed surroundings. Tom had been in hospital during the worst of the raids and Matron had arrived on the thirtieth of December, The Times in hand (he’d been allowed the newspaper by then). She’d stood beside the bed, po-faced but not unkind, as he began to read, and before he’d finished the headline, she’d declared it an act of God. Although Tom had agreed that the dome’s survival was a wonder, he’d thought it had a bit more to do with luck than Lord. He had trouble with God, with the notion that a divine being might save a building when all of England was bleeding to death. To Matron, however, he’d nodded agreement: blasphemy would’ve been just the sort of thing to get her whispering to the doctor about worrying states of mind.

A mirror had been propped on the ledge of the narrow casement window and Tom, dressed in his undershirt and trousers, leaned towards it, rolling the stub of shaving soap across his cheeks. He watched dispassionately the mottled reflection in the stippled glass, the young man cocking his head so that milky sunlight lay across his cheek, running the razor carefully along his jaw, stroke by stroke, flinching as he negotiated the territory around his earlobe. The fellow in the mirror rinsed the razor in the shallow water, shook it a little, and started on the other side, just as a man might when he was tidying himself up to visit his mother on her birthday.

Tom caught himself drifting and sighed. He laid the razor gently on the sill and rested both hands on the outer curve of the basin. Screwed his eyes shut, beginning the familiar count to ten. This dislocation had been happening a lot lately, since he returned from France but even more so after leaving the hospital. It was as if he were outside himself, watching, unable quite to believe that the young man in the mirror with the amiable face, the mild expression, the day stretching ahead, could possibly be him. That the experiences of the past eighteen months, the sights and sounds – that child, dear God, lying dead, alone, on the road in France – could possibly live behind that still-smooth face.

You are Thomas Cavill, he told himself firmly when he’d reached ten; you are twenty-five years old, you are a soldier. Today is your mother’s birthday and you are going to visit her for lunch. His sisters would be there, the eldest with her baby son, Thomas – named for him – and his brother Joey, too; though not Theo, who’d been sent up north with his regiment for training and wrote cheery letters home about butter and cream and a girl named Kitty. They would be their usual rowdy selves, the wartime version of themselves, at any rate: never questioning, hardly complaining, and then only ever in a jocular fashion about the difficulties of obtaining eggs and sugar. Never doubting that Britain could take it. That they could take it. Tom could vaguely remember feeling the same way himself.

Juniper took out the piece of paper and checked the address once more. Turned it sideways, twisted her head, then cursed herself for her appalling handwriting. Too quick, too careless, too eager always to move on to the next idea. She looked up at the narrow house, spotted the number on the black front door. Twenty-six. This was it. It had to be.

It was. Juniper decisively shoved the paper in her pocket. Number and street name aside, she recognized this house from Merry’s stories as vividly as she would Northanger Abbey or Wuthering Heights. With a skip in her step, she climbed the concrete stairs and knocked on the door.

She had been in London for exactly two days and still she couldn’t quite believe it. She felt like a fictional character who’d escaped the book in which her creator had carefully and kindly trapped her; taken a pair of scissors to her outline and leaped, free, into the unfamiliar pages of a story with far more dirt and noise and rhythm. A story she adored already: the shuffling, the mess, the disorder, the things and people she didn’t understand. It was exhilarating, just as she’d always known it would be.

The door opened and a scowling face caught her off guard, a person younger than she was but also somehow older. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’ve come to see Meredith Baker.’ Juniper’s voice was strange to her own ears, here in this other story. An image came to her of Percy, who always knew precisely how to behave out in the world, but it merged with another