The Distant Hours

I was able to glimpse through it a thick sweep of Cardarker Wood; so glorious when seen in full, yet ominous somehow in section.

Percy Blythe pushed open the narrow round-topped door. ‘The tower room.’

Once again, she stepped aside so that I might go first. I went gingerly, stopping in the centre of the small, circular room on a faded rug of sooty shades. The first thing I noticed was that the fire had been freshly set, in preparedness for our visit, I supposed.

‘There,’ she said, closing the door behind us. ‘Now we are alone.’

Which set my heart to racing, though why precisely I could not say. My fear made little sense. She was an old lady, a frail old lady who’d just employed what scant energy she had in climbing the stairs. If the two of us were to engage in a physical tussle, I was pretty sure I’d hold my own. And yet. There was something in the way her eyes still shone, a spirit that was stronger than her body. And all I could think was that it was an awfully long drop from here to the ground and that a lot of people already had died plummeting from that window right there…

Happily, Percy Blythe was unable to read my mind and see written there the sorts of horrors that belong only in melodramatic fiction. She rolled a wrist slightly and said, ‘This is it. This is where he worked.’

And hearing her say it, I was able finally to creep out from beneath my own clouded thoughts and appreciate that I was standing in the middle of Raymond Blythe’s tower. These bookshelves, built to mould against the curving walls, were where he’d kept his favourites, the fireplace had been that by which he’d sat, day and evening, working on his books. My fingers ran along the very desk at which he’d written the Mud Man.

The letter whispered against my skin. If indeed he wrote the book himself.

‘There’s a room,’ said Percy Blythe, as she struck a match and set the fire burning, ‘behind the tiny door in the entrance hall. Four storeys below, but right beneath the tower. We used to sit there sometimes, Saffy and I. When we were young. When Daddy was working.’ It was a rare moment of expansiveness, and I couldn’t help but watch her as she spoke. She was tiny, thin and wan, and yet there was something deep inside Percy Blythe, a strength – of character perhaps? – that drew one like a moth. As if sensing my interest, she withdrew her light, that twist of a smile breezed across her face, and she straightened. Nodded at me as she tossed the spent matchstick into the flames. ‘Please yourself,’ was all she said. ‘Have a look around.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t go too near the window, though. It’s a long way to fall.’

Giving her what little smile I could manage, I began to take in the details of the room. The shelves were quite empty now; most of their former contents, I supposed, were lining the walls of the muniment room; but there were still framed pictures on the wall. One in particular caught my eye. It was an image with which I was familiar: Goya’s Sleep of Reason. I paused before it, taking in the foreground human figure, slumped – in despair it seemed – over his writing desk, while a host of bat-like monsters flurried above, arising from and feeding on, his sleeping mind.

‘That was my father’s,’ said Percy. Her voice made me jump, but I didn’t turn, and when I looked again at the picture my perception had changed so that I saw my own shadowy reflection, and hers behind me, in the glass. ‘It used to frighten us terribly.’

‘I can understand why.’

‘Daddy said to fear was foolish. That we’d do better to draw a lesson.’

‘Which lesson was that?’ I turned now to face her.

She touched the chair by the window.

‘Oh no, I – ’ another weak smile – ‘I’m happy to stand.’

Percy blinked slowly and I thought for a moment that she might insist. She didn’t though, saying only, ‘The lesson, Miss Burchill, was that when reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge.’

My hands were clammy and a spreading heat was climbing up my arms. But surely she had not read my mind. She couldn’t possibly know the monstrous things I’d been imagining since I found the letter, my morbid fantasies of being pushed from the window.

‘Goya anticipated Freud by some time, in that respect.’

I smiled somewhat sickly, and then the fever hit my cheeks and I knew that I could stand the suspense, the subterfuge, no longer. I was not formed for games like these. If Percy Blythe knew what I had found in the muniment room, if she knew that I had taken it with me and that I was bound to investigate further; if this was all an elaborate ploy to have me admit to my deception, and for her to try, by whatever means she could, to prevent me from exposing her father’s lie, then I was ready. What was more, I was going to strike the first blow. ‘Miss Blythe,’ I said, ‘I found something yesterday. In the muniment room.’

A dreadful look came over her, a leaching of colour that was instant and absolute. As quickly as it had appeared she managed to conceal it again. She blinked. ‘Well? I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to guess, Miss Burchill. You’re going to have to tell me what it was.’

I reached into my jacket and retrieved the letter, tried to steady my fingers as I handed it to her. I watched as she dug reading glasses from her pocket, held them before her eyes and scanned the page. Time slowed interminably. She shifted her fingertips lightly over its surface. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I see.’ She seemed almost relieved, as if my discovery was not what she’d feared.

I waited for her to continue and when it was clear she had no intention of doing so, I said, ‘I’m rather worried – ’ it was, without doubt, the most difficult conversation I’d ever had to initiate. ‘If there’s any question, you see, that the Mud Man was – ’ I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘stolen’. ‘If there’s any chance at all that your father might have read it elsewhere first,’ I swallowed, the room was swimming a little before my eyes, ‘as this letter seems to suggest, the publishers will need to know.’

She was folding the letter very carefully and crisply, and only when she’d finished did she say, ‘Let me set your mind at ease, Miss Burchill. My father wrote every word of that book.’

‘But the letter – are you sure?’ I had made a huge mistake in telling her. What had I expected her to do? Speak honestly with me? Give me her blessing while I made enquiries that stood to strip her father of his literary credibility? It was natural, of course, for his daughter to support him, especially a daughter like Percy.

‘I am very sure, Miss Burchill,’ she said, meeting my gaze. ‘It was I who wrote that letter.’

‘You wrote it?’

A curt nod.

‘But why? Why did you write such a thing?’ Especially if it was true that every word was his.

There was fresh colour in her cheeks and her eyes were bright, her energy much improved, almost as if she were feeding in some way on my confusion. Enjoying it. She looked at me slyly, a look to which I was becoming accustomed, a look that suggested she had something more to tell me than what I’d thought to ask. ‘There comes a time in the lives of all children, I expect, when the shutters are lifted and they become aware that their parents are not immune to the worst of human frailties. That they are not invincible. That sometimes they will do things to suit themselves, to feed their own monsters. We are a selfish species by nature, Miss Burchill.’

My thoughts were swimming in a deep and clouded soup. I wasn’t quite sure how one thing related to the other, but assumed it must have something to do with the distressing consequences that her letter had prophesied. ‘But the letter-’

‘That letter is nothing,’ she snapped, with a wave of her hand. ‘Not any more. It’s an irrelevance.’ She glanced at it briefly and her face seemed to flicker like a projection screen, a film running backwards across seventy-five years. In a single sudden motion she tossed it onto the fire, where it sizzled and burned and made her flinch. ‘As it happens, I was wrong. It was his story to tell.’ She smiled then, wryly, a little biliously. ‘Even if he didn’t know it at the time.’

I was utterly confused. How could he not know that it was his story, and how could she have thought it otherwise? It made no sense.

‘I knew a girl once, in the war.’ Percy Blythe had gone to sit on the chair behind her father’s desk and she leaned back into the chair’s arms as she continued: ‘She worked in the cabinet rooms; met Churchill a number of times in the corridors. There was a sign they had hanging, one that he’d put there. It said, “Please understand there is no depression in this house, and we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.” ’ She sat for a moment, her chin lifted and her eyes slightly narrowed, her own words hanging still around her. Through the wash of smoke, with her neat haircut, her fine features, the silk blouse, she almost looked like she were back in the Second World War. ‘What do you think of that?’

I do not do well with these sorts of games; I never have, particularly riddles without even the most tenuous link