The Distant Hours

I couldn’t stop thinking about Thomas Cavill and Juniper Blythe. It was such a melancholy story; I made it my melancholy story. I returned to London, I got on with my life, but a part of me remained tethered to that castle. On the brink of sleep, in a moment of daydream, the whispers found me. My eyes fell closed and I was right back in that cool, shadowy, corridor, waiting alongside Juniper for her fiancé to arrive. ‘She’s lost in the past,’ Mrs Bird had told me as we drove away, as I watched through the rear-view mirror, the woods drawing their wings around the castle, a dark, protective shroud: ‘That same night in October 1941, over and over; a record player with a stuck needle.’

The proposition was just so terribly sad – an entire life spoiled in an evening – and it filled me with questions. How had it been for her that night when Thomas Cavill failed to show for dinner? Had all three sisters waited in a room done up specially for the occasion? I wondered at what point had she begun to worry; whether she’d thought at first that he’d been injured, that there’d been an accident; or whether she’d known at once she’d been forsaken? ‘He married another woman,’ Mrs Bird had told me when I asked, ‘engaged himself to Juniper then ran off with someone else. Nothing but a letter to break off their affair.’

I held the story in my hands, turned it over, looked at it from every angle. Envisaged, amended, replayed. I suppose the fact that I’d been similarly betrayed might have had a little to do with it, but my obsession – for, I confess, that’s what it became – was fed by more than empathy. It concerned itself particularly with the final moments of my encounter with Juniper; the transition I’d witnessed when I mentioned my return to London; the way the young woman waiting longingly for her lover had been replaced by a tense and wretched figure, begging me for help, berating me for having broken a promise. Most of all, I fixated on the moment she’d looked me in the eye and accused me of having failed her in some grave manner, the way she’d called me Meredith.

Juniper Blythe was old, she was unwell, and her sisters had been at great pains to warn me that she often spoke of things she didn’t understand. Nonetheless, the more I considered it the more awfully certain I became that Mum had played some part in her fate. It was the only thing, surely, that made any sense. It explained Mum’s reaction to the lost letter, the cry – for it had been of anguish, hadn’t it? – when she saw from whom it came, the same cry I’d heard as we drove away from Milderhurst when I was small. That secret visit, decades before, when Mum had taken my hand and wrenched me from the gate, forced me back into the car, saying only that she’d made a mistake, that it was too late.

But too late for what? To make amends, perhaps; to repair some long-ago transgression? Had it been guilt that took her back to the castle and then drove her away again before we passed through the gates? It was possible. And if it were true would certainly explain her distress. It might also account for why she’d kept the whole thing secret in the first place. For it was the secrecy as much as the mystery that struck me then. I don’t believe in an obligation of full disclosure, yet in this case I couldn’t shake off the sense that I’d been lied to. More than that: that I was somehow affected directly. Something sat in my mother’s past, something she’d made every attempt to hide, and it refused to stay there. An action, a decision, a mere moment, perhaps, when she was just a girl; something that had cast its shadow, long and dark, into Mum’s present, and therefore right across mine too. And, not just because I was nosy, not just because I was coming to empathize so strongly with Juniper Blythe, but because in some way that was difficult to explain, this secret had come to represent a lifetime’s distance between my mother and me – I needed to know what had happened.

‘I should say that you do,’ Herbert had agreed, when I said as much to him. We’d spent the afternoon squeezing my boxes of books and other assorted household items into storage in his cluttered attic, and had just headed out for a stroll through Kensington Gardens. The walks are a daily habit of ours, begun at the vet’s behest; they’re supposed to help with Jess’s digestion, the regular activity giving her metabolism a little boost, but she approaches the event with spectacularly bad grace. ‘Come along, Jessie,’ said Herbert, tapping his shoe against a stubborn bottom, which had affixed itself rather firmly to the concrete. ‘We’re nearly at the ducks, old lovely.’

‘But how am I going to find out?’ There was Auntie Rita, of course, but Mum’s fraught relationship with her elder sister made that idea seem particularly sneaky. I pushed my hands deep into my pockets, as if the answer might be found amongst the lint. ‘What should I do? Where should I start?’

‘Well now, Edie.’ He handed over Jess’s lead while he fussed a cigarette from his pocket and cupped his hand to light it. ‘It seems to me there’s only one place to start.’

‘Oh?’

He exhaled a theatrical stream of smoke. ‘You know as well as I, my love; you need to ask your mother.’

You would be forgiven for thinking that Herbert’s suggestion was obvious, and I must take some of the blame for that. I suspect I’ve given you entirely the wrong impression about my family, beginning as I did with that long-lost letter. It’s where this story starts, but it’s not where my story starts; or rather, it’s not where the story of Meredith and Edie starts. Coming into our family that Sunday afternoon, you’d be forgiven for thinking we were a rather expansive pair, that we chatted and shared easily. However nice that might sound, it was not the case. There are any number of childhood experiences I could submit in evidence to demonstrate that ours was not a relationship marked by conversation and understanding: the unexplained appearance in my drawer of a military-style bra when I turned thirteen; my reliance on Sarah for all but the most basic information regarding birds and bees and everything in between; the ghostly brother my parents and I pretended not to see.

But Herbert was right: this was my mother’s secret, and if I wanted to know the truth, to learn more about that little girl who’d shadowed me around Milderhurst Castle, it was the only proper place to begin. As good luck would have it, we’d arranged to meet for coffee the following week in a patisserie around the corner from Billing & Brown. I left the office at eleven o’clock, found a table in the back corner and placed our order, as per habit. The waitress had just brought me a steaming pot of Darjeeling when there came a blurt of road noise and I looked up to see the patisserie door was open and Mum was standing tentatively, just inside, bag and hat in hand. A spirit of defensive caution had taken hold of her features as she surveyed the unfamiliar, decidedly modern cafe, and I glanced away, at my hands, the table, fiddled with the zip on my bag, anything to avoid bearing witness. I’ve noticed that look of uncertainty more often lately, and I’m not sure whether it’s because she’s getting older, or because I am, or because the world really is speeding up. My reaction to it dismays me, for surely a glimpse of my mother’s weakness should engender pity, make her more lovable to me, but the opposite is true. It frightens me, like a tear in the fabric of normality that threatens to render everything unlovely, unrecognizable, not as it should be. All my life my mother has been an oracle, a brick wall of propriety, so to see her unsure, particularly in a situation that I meet without a wrinkle, tilts my world and makes the solid ground swirl like clouds beneath me. So I waited, and only when enough time had passed did I look up again, catch her eye, sure again now, confident, and wave with candour, as if only in that moment had I realized she was there.

She negotiated the crowded cafe cautiously, guarding her bag from bumping people’s heads in an ostentatious way that managed somehow to convey disapproval at the seating arrangements. I, meanwhile, busied myself making sure no one had left spilled sugar granules or cappuccino froth or pastry flakes on her side of the table. These semi-regular coffee dates of ours were a new thing, instituted a few months after Dad’s retirement started. They were a little awkward for both of us, even when I wasn’t hoping to undertake a delicate excavation of Mum’s life. I stood halfway out of my seat when she reached the table, my lips met the air near her proffered cheek, then we both sat down, smiling with excessive relief because the public greeting was over.

‘Warm out, isn’t it?’

I said, ‘Very,’ and we were back in motion down a comfortable road: Dad’s current home-improvement obsession (tidying the boxes in the attic), my work (supernatural encounters on Romney Marsh), and Mum’s bridge club gossip. Then a pause while we smiled at each other, both waiting for Mum to falter beneath the weight of her routine enquiry: ‘And how’s Jamie?’

‘He’s well.’

‘I saw the recent write up in The Times. The new play’s been well received.’

‘Yes.’ I’d seen the review, too. I didn’t go hunting, I really didn’t; it just jumped out at me when I was looking for the letting pages. A very good review, as it happens. Damn paper: no suitable flats to rent either.

Mum paused while the cappuccino I’d ordered for her arrived at the table. ‘And tell me,’ she said, laying a paper napkin between her cup and saucer to soak up the slopped milk, ‘what’s next on his agenda?’

‘He’s working on his own script. Sarah has a friend, a film director, who’s promised to read it when he’s done.’

Her mouth formed a silent, cynical ‘Oh’ before she managed to utter some positive noises. The last of these was drowned when she took a sip of coffee, flinched at the bitter taste, and, blessedly, changed the subject. ‘And how’s the flat? Your father wants to know whether that tap in the kitchen’s still giving you trouble. He’s had another idea he thinks will fix it once and for all.’

I pictured the cold and empty flat I’d left for the final time that morning, phantom memories sealed within the collection of brown cardboard boxes my life had become, then crammed into Herbert’s attic. ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘The flat’s fine, the tap’s fine. Tell him he really doesn’t need to worry any more.’

‘I don’t suppose there’s anything else that needs attention?’ A faint pleading note had crept into her voice. ‘I thought I might send him around on Saturday to do some general maintenance.’

‘I told you. Everything’s fine.’

She looked surprised and hurt and I knew I’d spoken brusquely, only these dreadful conversations in which I pretended all was going swimmingly were wearing me down. Despite my willingness to disappear inside story books, I’m not a liar and I don’t cope well with subterfuge. Under ordinary circumstances this might have been the perfect time for me to break the news about Jamie – but I couldn’t, not when I wanted to steer us back to Milderhurst and Juniper Blythe. In any case, the man at the next table chose that very instant to turn around and ask whether he could borrow our salt shaker.

As I handed it to him, Mum said, ‘I have something for you.’ She pulled out an old M &S bag, folded over to protect whatever was inside. ‘Don’t get too excited,’ she added, passing it to me. ‘It’s nothing new.’

I opened the bag, slipped out the contents and stared in puzzlement for a moment. People are often giving me things they think are worth publishing, but I couldn’t believe anyone could be that far off the mark.

‘Don’t you remember?’ Mum was looking at me as if I’d forgotten my own name.

I gazed again at the stapled wad of paper, the child’s drawing on the front, the ill-formed words at the top of the page: The Book of Wet Animals, Written and Illustrated by Edith Burchill. A little arrow had been inserted between of and Wet and the word Magical added in a different-coloured pen.

Mum said, ‘You wrote it. Don’t you remember?’

‘Yes,’ I lied. Something in Mum’s expression told me it was important to her that I did, and besides – I ran my thumb over an inky blob made by a pen allowed to rest too long between strokes – I wanted to remember.

‘You were so proud of it.’ She tilted her head to look at the little bundle in my hands. ‘You worked on it for days, crouched over on the floor beneath the dressing table in the spare room.’

Now that was familiar. A delicious memory of being tucked in the warm, dark space withdrew itself from long-term storage and my body tingled with its release: the smell of dust in the circular rug, the crack in the plaster just large enough to store a pen, the hardness of wooden boards beneath my knees as I watched the sunlight sweep across the floor.

‘You were always working on one story or another, scribbling away in the dark. Your father worried sometimes that you were going to turn out shy, that you’d never make any friends, but there was nothing we could do to dampen your enthusiasm.’

I remembered reading but I didn’t remember writing. Still, Mum’s talk of dampening my enthusiasm struck a nerve. Distant memories of Dad shaking his head incredulously when I returned from the library, asking me over dinner why I wasn’t borrowing from the non-fiction shelves, what I wanted with all that fairy nonsense, why I didn’t want to learn about the real world.

‘I’d forgotten that I wrote stories,’ I said, turning the book over and smiling at the pretend publisher’s logo I’d drawn on the back.

‘Well.’ She wiped an old crumb from the table. ‘Anyway, I thought you should have it. Your father’s been pulling boxes down from the attic, that’s how I came to find it. No point leaving it for the silverfish, is there? You never know, you may even have your own daughter to show it to one day.’ She straightened in her seat and the rabbit hole to the past closed behind her. ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘How was your weekend? Did you do anything special?’

And there it was. The perfect window, curtains drawn wide. I couldn’t have constructed a better opening for myself if I’d tried. And as I looked down at The Book of Magical Wet Animals in my hand, the time-dusted paper, the imprints from felt pens, the childish shading and colouring; as I realized that my mum had kept it all this time, that she’d wanted to save it despite her misgivings about my wasteful occupation, that she’d chosen today, of all days, to remind me of a part of myself I’d quite forgotten; I was overcome by a sudden swelling desire to share with her everything that had happened to me at Milderhurst Castle. A sweet sense that it would all work out for the best.

‘Actually,’ I said. ‘I did.’

‘Oh?’ She smiled brightly.

‘Something very special.’ My heart had begun to gallop ahead; I was watching myself from the outside, wondering, even as I teetered on the cliff edge, whether I was really going to jump. ‘I went for a tour,’ said a faint voice rather like my own, ‘inside Milderhurst Castle.’

‘You… You what?’ Mum’s eyes widened. ‘You went to Milderhurst?’ Her gaze held mine as I nodded, then it dropped. She shifted her cup on the saucer, swivelled it by its dainty handle, this way and that, and I watched with cautious curiosity, unsure what was about to happen, eager and loath, in equal measure, to find out.

I ought to have had more faith. Like a brilliant sunrise clarifying the clouded horizon, dignity reasserted itself. 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?’

‘Fiancé 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 ingénue. ‘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 knew her, Edie; I don’t need you telling me what she was like when she was young.’

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’m sorry. I can’t think what came over me.’ She sighed, smiled a little shakily. ‘It’s the surprise, I expect. To think that they’re all still alive; all of them at the castle. Why – they must be so old.’ She frowned, affecting great interest in the mathematical puzzle. ‘The other two were old when I knew them – at least they seemed that way.’

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 The True History of the Mud Man.’

‘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.’

I shook my head slowly.

‘All those gates look alike,’ she continued. ‘You’ve seen a picture somewhere, sometime – a film – and become confused.’

‘But I remember-’

‘I’m sure it seems that way. Just like when you accused Mr Watson from next door of being a Russian spy, or the time you became convinced you were adopted – we had to show you your birth certificate, do you remember?’ Her voice had taken on a note I recalled only too well from my childhood. The infuriating certainty of someone sensible, respectable, powerful; someone who wouldn’t listen no matter how loudly I spoke. ‘Your father had me take you to the doctor about the night terrors.’

‘This is different.’

She smiled briskly. ‘You’re fanciful, Edie. You always have been. I don’t know where you get it from – not from me. Certainly not from your father.’ She reached down to reclaim her handbag from the floor. ‘Speaking of whom, I ought to be getting home.’

‘But Mum – ’ I could feel the chasm opening between us. A gust of desperation spurred me on. ‘You haven’t even finished your coffee.’

She glanced at her cup, the cooling grey dribble at the bottom. ‘I’ve had enough.’

‘I’ll get you another, my shout-’

‘No,’ she said. ‘What do I owe you for the first?’

‘Nothing, Mum. Please stay.’

‘No.’ She laid a five-pound note by my saucer. ‘I’ve been out all morning and your father’s by himself. You know what he’s like: he’ll have the house dismantled if I don’t get back soon.’

A press of her cheek, clammy against mine, and she was gone.

A Suitable Strip Club and Pandora’s Box

For the record it was Auntie Rita who made contact with me, not the other way round. It so happened that while I was floundering, trying without success to find out what had happened between Mum and Juniper Blythe, Auntie Rita was getting revved up to host a hen night for my cousin Samantha. I wasn’t sure whether to be offended or flattered when she phoned the office to ask me the name of an upmarket male strip club, so I went with bemused, and ultimately, because I can’t seem to help myself, useful. I told her I didn’t know off the top of my head but that I’d do some research, and we agreed to meet in secret at her salon the following Sunday so I could pass on my reconnaissance. It meant skipping Mum’s roast again, but it was the only time Rita was free; I told Mum I was helping with Sam’s wedding and she couldn’t really argue.

Classy Cuts squats behind a tiny shopfront on the Old Kent Road, breath held to fit between an indie record outlet and the best chippie in Southwark. Rita’s as old school as the Motown records she collects and her salon does a roaring trade specializing in finger waves, beehives and blue rinses for the bingo set. She’s been around long enough to be retro without realizing it and likes to tell anyone who’ll listen how she started out at the very same salon as a skinny sixteen-year-old when the war was still raging; how she’d watched through those very front windows on VE Day when Mr Harvey from the milliner’s across the road stripped off his clothes and started dancing down the street, nothing to know him by but his finest hat.

Fifty years in the one spot. It’s no wonder she’s wildly popular in her part of Southwark, the busy chattering stalls set apart from the glistening dress circle of Docklands. Some of her oldest clients have known her since the closest she got to a pair of scissors was the broom cupboard out back, and now there’s no one else they’d trust to set their lavender perms. ‘People aren’t daft,’ Auntie Rita says, ‘give ’em a bit of love and they’ll never stray.’ She has an uncanny knack for picking winners from the local form guide, too, which can’t be bad for business.

I don’t know much about siblings, but I’m quite sure no two sisters have ever been less alike. Mum is reserved, Rita is not; Mum favours neat-as-a-pin court shoes, Rita serves breakfast in heels; Mum is a locked vault when it comes to family stories, Rita is the willing font of all knowledge. I know this firsthand. When I was nine and Mum went to hospital to have her gallstones removed, Dad packed me a bag and sent me to Rita’s. I’m not sure whether my aunt somehow intuited that the sapling in the doorway was way out of touch with her roots, or whether I besieged her with questions, or whether she just saw it as a chance to aggravate Mum and strike a blow in an ancient war, but she took it upon herself that week to fill in many blanks.

She showed me yellowed photographs on the wall, told me funny stories of the way things had been when she was my age, and painted a vivid picture with colours and smells and long-ago voices that made me starkly aware of something I’d already opaquely known. The house where I lived, the family in which I was growing up, was a sanitary, lonely place. I remember lying on the small spare mattress at Rita’s house as my four cousins filled the room with their soft snores and fidgety sleep noises, wishing she were my mother instead; that I lived in a warm, cluttered house stretching at the seams with siblings and old stories. I remember, too, the instant rush of liquid guilt as the thought formed in my mind; screwing my eyes tight shut and picturing my disloyal wish as a piece of knotted silk, untying it in my mind then conjuring a wind to blow it away as if it had never been.

But it had.

Anyway. It was early July and hot the day I reported in; the sort of hot you carry in your lungs. I knocked on the glass door and, as I did so, caught a glimpse of my own tired reflection. Let me just say, carving out sofa real-estate with a flatulent dog does nothing for one’s complexion. I peered beyond the ‘Closed’ sign and saw Auntie Rita sitting at a card table in the back, cigarette dangling from her bottom lip as she examined something small and white in her hands. She waved me in. ‘Edie, luvvie,’ she said over the welcome bell and The Supremes, ‘lend me your eyes, will you, poppet?’

It’s a little like stepping back in time, visiting Auntie Rita’s shop. The black and white chessboard tiles, the bank of leather-look lounge chairs with lime-green cushions, the pearly eggcup hairdriers on retractable arms. Posters of Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross and The Temptations framed behind glass. The unchanging smell of peroxide and next-door’s chip grease, locked in mortal combat.

‘I’ve been trying to thread this blasted thing through there and there,’ Rita said around her cigarette, ‘but as if it’s not bad enough that my fingers have turned to thumbs, the bloody ribbon’s upped and grown a mind of its own.’

She thrust it towards me and with a bit of squinting I realized it was a small lacy bag with holes in the top where a drawstring should be.

‘They’re favours for Sam’s hens,’ Auntie Rita said, nodding at a box of identical bags by her feet. ‘Well, they will be once we’ve made ’em up and filled ’em with goodies.’ She dumped the ash from her cigarette. ‘Kettle’s just boiled, but I’ve got some lemonade in the fridge if you’d rather?’

My throat contracted at the mere suggestion. ‘I’d love one.’

It’s not a word you’d normally think to associate with your mother’s sister, but it’s true so I’ll say it: she’s saucy, my auntie Rita. Watching her as she poured our lemonades, rounded bottom stretching her skirt in all the right places, waist still small despite four babies more than thirty years ago, I could well believe the few anecdotes I’d gleaned from Mum over the years. Without exception these had been delivered in the form of warnings about the things good girls didn’t do, however they’d had a rather unintended effect: cementing for me the admirable legend of Auntie Rita, rabble-rouser.

‘Here you are then, luvvie.’ She handed me a martini glass spitting bubbles and harrumphed into her own chair, prodding at her beehive with both sets of fingers. ‘Phew,’ she said, ‘what a day. Lord – you look as tired as I feel!’

I swallowed a glorious lemon sip, fierce bubbles singeing my throat. The Tempations started crooning ‘My Girl’ and I said, ‘I didn’t think you opened Sundays?’

‘I don’t, not as a habit, but one of my old dears needed a rinse and set for a funeral – not her own, mercifully – and I didn’t have the heart to turn her away. You do what you must, don’t you? Like family some of them.’ She inspected the bag I’d threaded, tightened the drawstring, loosened it again, long pink fingernails clacking together. ‘Good girl. Only twenty more to go.’

I saluted as she handed me another.

‘Anyway, gives me a chance to get a bit of work in for the wedding: away from prying eyes.’ She widened her own briefly before narrowing them like shutters. ‘That Sam of mine’s a nosey one, always was, even as a girl. Used to scale the cupboards looking for where I’d stashed the Christmas goodies, then she’d dazzle her brothers and sisters by guessing what was wrapped beneath the tree.’ She drew a fresh cigarette from the packet on the table, said; ‘Little beggar,’ and struck a match. The cigarette tip flared hopefully then settled. ‘How about you then? Young girl like you oughta have better things to be doing with her Sunday.’

‘Better than this?’ I held up my second little white bag, ribbon in place. ‘What could be better than this?’

‘Cheeky mare,’ she said, and her smile reminded me of Gran in a way that Mum’s never does. I’d adored Gran with a might that belied any suspicions I’d had growing up that I must surely be adopted. She’d lived alone for as long as I’d known her, and though, as she was quick to point out, she’d had her share of offers, she refused to remarry and be an old man’s slave when she knew what it was to be a young man’s darling. There was a lid for each pot, she’d told me often and soberly, and she thanked God she’d found her lid in my grandfather. I never met Gran’s husband, Mum’s father, not that I remembered: he died when I was three and on the few occasions I thought to ask about him, Mum, with her distaste for rehashing the past, had always been quick to skim the subject’s surface. Rita, thank goodness, had been more forthcoming. ‘So,’ she said, ‘how’d you get on then?’

‘I got on very well.’ I fossicked inside my bag for my notes, unfolded them and read out the name Sarah had given me: ‘The Roxy Club. Phone number’s on here, too.’ Auntie Rita wriggled her fingers at me and I handed her the paper. She puckered her lips as tight as the top of the little drawstring bags. ‘The Roxy Club,’ she repeated. ‘And it’s a nice place? Classy?’

‘According to my sources.’

‘Good girl.’ She refolded the paper, tucked it into her bra strap and winked at me. ‘Your turn next, eh, Edie?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Down the aisle.’

I smiled weakly, lifted a shoulder to flick away the comment.

‘How long’s it been now, you and your fellow – six, is it?’

‘Seven.’

‘Seven years.’ She cocked her head. ‘He’d be wanting to make an honest woman of you soon else you’ll be getting the itch and moving on. Doesn’t he know what a fine catch he’s got? You want me to have a good talk to him?’

Even if not for the fact that I was trying to conceal a break-up, it was a scary thought. ‘Actually, Auntie Rita – ’ I wondered how best to put her off without revealing too much – ‘I’m not sure either one of us is the marrying kind.’

She drew on her cigarette, one eye narrowing slightly as she considered me. ‘That right?’

‘Afraid so.’ This was a lie. Partly. I was, and remain, most definitely the marrying kind. My acceptance, throughout our relationship, of Jamie’s sneering scepticism towards wedded bliss was at complete odds with my naturally romantic sensibilities. I offer no defence other than to say that, in my experiences when you love someone you’ll do just about anything to keep them.

On the back of a slow exhalation Rita’s gaze seemed to shift gears, from disbelief, through perplexity, arriving finally at weary acceptance. ‘Well, maybe you’ve got the right idea. It just happens to you, life, you know; happens while you’re not watching. You meet someone, you go riding in his car, you marry him and have a batch of children. Then one day you realize you’ve got nothing in common. You know you used to, you must have – why else would you have married the fellow? – but the sleepless nights, the disappointments, the worry. The shock of having more life behind than in front. Well – ’ she smiled at me as if she’d given me a recipe for pie rather than the desire to stick my head in an oven – ‘that’s life, isn’t it?’

‘That’s glorious, Auntie Rita. Make sure you put that in your wedding speech.’

‘Cheeky thing.’

With Auntie Rita’s pep talk still hanging in the smoky haze, we each engaged in private struggle with a tiny white bag. The record player kept spinning, Rita hummed as a man with a molten voice urged us to take a good look at his smile, and finally I could stand it no longer. Much as I enjoy seeing Rita, I’d come with an ulterior motive. Mum and I had barely spoken since our meeting at the patisserie; I’d cancelled our next scheduled coffee date, pleading a backlog at work, and even found myself screening her phone calls when she rang my machine. I suppose my feelings were hurt. Does it sound hopelessly juvenile to say so? I hope not because it’s true. Mum’s continued refusal to trust me, her adamant denial that we’d visited the castle gates, her insistence that it was I who had invented the whole thing, caused a small spot inside my chest to ache, and made me more determined than ever to learn the truth. And now I’d skipped the family roast again, put Mum’s nose even further out of joint, ventured across town in shoe-melting heat: I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, I mustn’t leave without some gold. ‘Auntie Rita?’ I said.

‘Hmm?’ She scowled at the ribbon that had knotted itself in her fingers.

‘There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.’

‘Hmm?’

‘About Mum.’

A look so sharp it scratched. ‘She all right?’

‘Oh yes, fine. It’s nothing like that. I’ve just been thinking a bit about the past.’

‘Ah. That’s different then, isn’t it, the past. Which particular bit of the past were you thinking of?’

‘The war.’

She set down her little bag. ‘Well now.’

I proceeded with caution. Auntie Rita loves to talk but this, I knew, was a touchy subject. ‘You were evacuated, you and Mum and Uncle Ed.’

‘We were. Briefly. Ghastly experience it was, too. All that talk of clean air? Load of bollocks. No one tells you about the stink of the countryside, the piles of steaming shite every place you care to tread. And they called us dirty! I’ve never been able to look at cows or country folk the same way since; couldn’t wait to get back and take my chances with the bombs.’

‘How about Mum? Did she feel the same way?’

A swift, suspicious flicker. ‘Why? What’s she told you?’

‘Nothing. She’s told me nothing.’

Rita returned her attention to the little white bag, but there was a self-consciousness in her downturned eyes. I could almost see her biting her tongue to stop the flow of things she wanted to say but suspected she shouldn’t.

Disloyalty burned in my veins but I knew it was my best chance. Each of my next words singed a little: ‘You know what she’s like.’

Auntie Rita sniffed sharply and caught the whiff of allegiance. She pursed her lips and regarded me a sidelong moment before inclining her head towards mine. ‘She loved it, your mum. Didn’t want to come home again.’ Bewilderment glistened in her eyes and I knew I’d struck an old and aching nerve. ‘What kind of a child doesn’t want to be with her own parents, her own people? What kind of a child would rather stay with another family?’

A child who felt out of place, I thought, remembering my own guilty whispers into the dark corners of my cousins’ bedroom. A child who felt as if they were stuck somewhere they didn’t belong. But I didn’t say anything. I had a feeling that for someone like my aunt who’d had the good fortune to find herself exactly where she fitted, no explanation would make sense. ‘Maybe she was frightened of the bombs,’ I said eventually. My voice was rocky and I coughed a little to clear the gravel. ‘The Blitz?’

‘Pah. She wasn’t frightened, no more than the rest of us. Other kids wanted to be back in the thick of things. All the kids in our street came home, went down into the shelters together. Your uncle?’ Rita’s eyes took on a reverence befitting the mention of my feted Uncle Ed. ‘Thumbed his way back from Kent, he did; he was that keen to get home once the action started. Arrived on the doorstep in the middle of a raid, just in time to shepherd the simple lad from next door to safety. But not Merry, oh no. She was the opposite. Wouldn’t come home until our dad went down there himself and dragged her back. Our mum, your gran, she never got over it. Never said as much, that wasn’t her way, she pretended like she was glad Merry was safe and sound in the countryside, but we knew. We weren’t blind.’

I couldn’t meet my aunt’s fierce gaze: I felt tarred by the brush of disloyalty, guilty by association. Mum’s betrayal of Rita was real still, an enmity that burned across the fifty-year gulf between then and now. ‘When was that?’ I said, starting on a new white bag, innocent as you please. ‘How long had she been away?’

Auntie Rita drilled her bottom lip with a long baby-pink talon, a butterfly painted on the tip. ‘Let me see now, the bombs had been going a while but it wasn’t winter because my dad brought primroses back with him; he was that keen to soften your gran up, make everything go as easy as it could. That was Dad.’ The fingernail tapped a thinking rhythm. ‘Must’ve been sometime in 1941. March, April, thereabouts.’

She’d been honest in that, then. Mum had been gone for just over a year and had come home from Milderhurst six months before Juniper Blythe suffered the heartbreak that destroyed her, before Thomas Cavill promised to marry her then left her stranded. ‘Did she ever-’

A blast of ‘Hot Shoe Shuffle’ drowned me out. Auntie Rita’s novelty stiletto telephone jittered away on the counter.

Don’t answer it, I pleaded silently, desperate that nothing be allowed to disturb our conversation now that it was finally up and flying.

‘That’s as like to be Sam,’ said Rita, ‘spying on me.’

I nodded and the two of us sat out the last few bars, after which I wasted no time steering us back on track. ‘Did Mum ever talk about her time at Milderhurst? About the people she’d been staying with? The Blythe sisters?’

Rita’s eyes rolled like a pair of marbles. ‘It was all she’d talk about at first. Gave us the pip, I can tell you. Only time I saw her looking happy was when a letter arrived from that place. All secretive she was; refused to open them until she was alone.’

I remembered Mum’s account of being left by Rita in the evacuation line at the hall in Kent. ‘You and she weren’t close as kids.’

‘We were sisters – there’d have been something wrong if we didn’t fight now and then, living on top of each other like we did in Mum and Dad’s little house… We got on all right, though. Until the war, that is, until she met that lot.’ Rita speared the last cigarette from the packet, lit up and shot a jet of smoke doorwards. ‘She was different after she got back and not just the way she spoke. She’d got all sorts of ideas, up there in her castle.’

‘What kind of ideas?’ I asked, but I already knew. A defensiveness had crept into Rita’s voice that I recognized: the hurt of a person who feels themselves to have suffered by unfair comparison.

‘Ideas.’ The pink fingernails of one hand frisked the air near her beehive and I feared she’d said all she was going to. She contemplated the door, lips moving as they chewed over the various answers she could give. After what seemed an age, she met my eyes again. The cassette had finished and the salon was unusually quiet; rather, the absence of music gave the building space to hiss and creak, to complain wearily about the heat, the smell, the slow toll of the passing years. Auntie Rita set her chin and spoke in a slow, clear voice: ‘She came back a snob. There, I’ve said it. She went away one of us and she came back a snob.’

Something I’d always sensed was made solid: my dad, the way he felt about my aunt and cousins and even my gran, hushed conversations between him and Mum, my own observations of the different ways things were done at our place and at Rita’s. Mum and Dad were snobs and I felt embarrassed for them and embarrassed for me, and then, confusingly, angry with Rita for saying it and ashamed of myself for encouraging her to do so. My vision blurred as I pretended to focus on the white bag I was threading.

Auntie Rita, conversely, was lightened. Relief spilled across her face and seemed to radiate beyond. The untold truth was a wound that had waited decades for someone to lance. ‘Book learning,’ Rita spat, crushing her cigarette butt, ‘that’s all she wanted to talk about once she got back. Walked into our house, turned her nose up at the small rooms and our dad’s labouring songs, and took up residence at the lending library. Hid in corners with one book or another when she should’ve been helping out. Talked a lot of bosh about writing for the newspapers, too. Sent things off and all! Can you imagine?’

My mouth actually fell open. Meredith Burchill did not write; she certainly did not send things off to the newspapers. I’d have assumed Rita was embellishing, only the news was so perfectly confounding it simply had to be true. ‘Were they published?’

‘Of course not! And that’s just what I’m saying: that’s the sort of mumbo-jumbo they put in her head. Gave her ideas above her station, they did, and there’s only one place those ideas take you.’

‘What were they like, the things she wrote? What were they about?’

‘I wouldn’t know. She never showed them to me. Probably thought I wouldn’t understand. Anyway, I wouldn’t have had the time: I’d met Bill by then, and I’d started here. There was a war on, you know.’ Rita laughed, but sourness deepened the lines around her mouth; I’d never noticed them before.

‘Did any of the Blythes come to visit Mum in London?’

Rita shrugged. ‘Merry was awful secretive once she got back, ducking off on errands without saying where she was going. She could’ve been meeting anyone.’

Was it something in the way she said it, the shadow of insinuation clinging to her words? Or was it the way she glanced away from me as she spoke? I’m not sure. Whatever the case, I knew immediately that there was more to her comment than met the eye. ‘Like who?’

Rita squinted at the box of lace bags, inclining her head as if there’d never been anything as interesting as the way they sat together in little white and silver rows.

‘Auntie Ri-ta?’ I dragged it out, ‘Who else would she have been meeting?’

‘Oh, all right.’ She folded her arms so that her boobs perked together then looked directly at me. ‘He was a teacher, or he had been before the war; back at Elephant and Castle.’ She made a show of fanning her peachy cleavage. ‘Ooh la la. Very good-looking, he was – he and his brother both: like film stars, those strong, silent types. His family lived a few streets over from us and even your gran used to find a reason to come out on the step when he was passing by. All the young girls had crushes on him, including your mum.

‘Anyway,’ Rita continued with another shrug, ‘one day I saw them together.’

You know that expression ‘her eyes goggled’? Mine did. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Where? How?’

‘I followed her.’ Justification trounced any embarrassment or guilt she might have felt: ‘She was my little sister, she wasn’t behaving normally, it was a dangerous time. I was just making sure she was all right.’

I couldn’t have cared less why she followed Mum; I wanted to know what she’d seen. ‘But where were they? What were they doing?’

‘I only saw from a distance but it was enough. They were sitting together on the grass in the park, side by side, tight as you please. He was talking and she was listening – real intent, you know – then she handed him something and he…’ Rita rattled her empty packet of cigarettes. ‘Bloody things. I swear they smoke themselves.’

‘Auntie Ri-ta!’

A brisk sigh. ‘They kissed. She and Mr Cavill, right there in the park for all the world to see.’

Worlds collided, fireworks exploded, little stars shot up the black corners of my mind. ‘Mr Cavill?’

‘Keep up Edie, luvvie: your mum’s teacher, Tommy Cavill.’

Words were beyond me, words that made any sense. I must’ve made some sort of noise because Rita held a hand to her ear and said, ‘What’s that?’ but I couldn’t manage it a second time. My mother, my teenage mother, had sneaked away from home for secret meetings with her teacher, Juniper Blythe’s fiancé, a man she’d had a crush on; meetings that involved the handing over of items and, more to the point, kissing. And all this had happened in the months leading up to his desertion of Juniper.

‘You look peaky, love. Would you like another lemonade?’

I nodded; she fetched; I gulped.

‘You know, if you’re so interested you should read your mum’s letters from the castle yourself.’

‘Which letters?’

‘The ones she wrote back to London.’

‘She’d never let me.’

Rita inspected a dye-stain on her wrist. ‘She wouldn’t need to know.’

My look, I’m sure, said, Huh?

‘They were amongst Mum’s things,’ Rita explained, ‘came to me after she passed away. Kept them all those years, the sentimental old girl, never matter that they hurt her so. Superstitious, she was, didn’t believe in throwing letters away. I’ll dig ’em out, eh?’

‘Oh… I don’t know, I’m not sure that I should-’

‘They’re letters,’ said Rita, with a dip of her chin that made me feel daft in a Pollyanna sort of way. ‘They were written to be read, weren’t they?’

I nodded. Tentatively.

‘Might help you to understand what it was your mum was thinking up there in her fancy castle.’

The thought of reading Mum’s letters without her knowledge plucked at my guilt strings, but I silenced them. Rita was right: the letters might have been written by Mum, but they’d been addressed to her family back in London. Rita had every right to pass them on to me, and I had every right to read them.

‘Yes,’ I said, only it sounded more like a squeak. ‘Yes, please.’

The Weight of the Waiting Room

And because that’s the way life seems to work sometimes, it was while I sat unpicking Mum’s secrets with the sister from whom she most wished to keep them, that my dad had his heart attack.

Herbert was waiting with the message when I got home from Rita’s; he took both my hands and told me what had happened. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said, ‘I’d have let you know sooner only I didn’t know how.’

‘Oh…’ Panic throbbed in my chest. I pivoted towards the door, then back. ‘Is he-?’

‘He’s at the hospital; stable, I believe. Your mother didn’t say much.’

‘I should-’

‘Yes. Come on; I’ll hail you a cab.’

I made small talk with the driver all the way. A short man with very blue eyes and brown hair beginning to rust towards silver, a father of three young children. And while he told stories of their mischief and shook his head with that mask of mock exasperation parents of small children adopt to degloss their pride, I smiled and asked questions, and my voice sounded ordinary, light even. We came closer to the hospital, and it wasn’t until I’d handed him a tenner and told him to keep the change and to enjoy his daughter’s dance recital, that I realized it had started to rain and I was standing on the pavement outside the hospital in Hammersmith without an umbrella, watching a cab disappear into the dusk while my father lay somewhere inside, his heart all broken.

Mum looked smaller than usual, alone at one end of a bank of plastic chairs, drab blue hospital wall glooming over her shoulder. She’s always well turned out, my mum, dressing from a different age: hats and gloves that match, shoes kept swaddled in their shop boxes, a shelf full of different handbags jostling together, awaiting promotion to complete the day’s outfit. She wouldn’t dream of setting foot outside the house without her powder and lipstick in place, even when her husband’s gone ahead in an ambulance. What a loping disappointment I must be, inches too tall, far too frizzy, lips stained with whichever gloss I happen to excavate first from the detritus of loose change, dusty breath mints and random stuff that live in the depths of my faded tote.

‘Mum.’ I went straight to her, kissed a cheek made deathly cool by the air-conditioning and slid into the bucket seat beside her. ‘How is he?’

She shook her head and fear of the worst lodged lumplike in my throat. ‘They haven’t said. All sorts of machines, doctors coming and going.’ She let her lids fall briefly closed. She was still shaking her head, softly, from habit. ‘I don’t know.’

I swallowed hard and decided not knowing was preferable to knowing the worst, but I thought better of sharing this platitude. I wanted to say something original and reassuring, something to alleviate her worry, make it all OK, but Mum and I had no experience down this road of suffering and consolation, so I said nothing.

She opened her eyes and looked at me, reached to hook a fuzzy curl behind my ear, and I wondered whether perhaps it didn’t matter, that she knew already what I was thinking, how earnestly I wanted to make it better. That there was no need to say anything because we were family, mother and daughter, and some things were understood without being spoken-

‘You look dreadful,’ she said.

I stole a sideways glance and caught my shadowy reflection in a glossy NHS poster. ‘It’s raining out.’

‘Such a big bag,’ she said with a wistful smile, ‘and no room for a little umbrella.’

I shook my head lightly and it turned into a shiver and I realized suddenly that I was cold.

You have to do something in hospital waiting rooms or else you find yourself waiting, which can lead to thinking, which in my experience can be a bad idea. As I sat silently beside my mum, worrying about my dad, making a note to buy an umbrella, listening to the wall clock sweep away the seconds, a horde of lurking thoughts seeped along the wall to brush my shoulders with their tapered fingers. Before I knew what was happening, they’d taken my hand and led me places I hadn’t been for years.

I was standing against the wall of our bathroom, watching my four-year-old self tightrope-walk along the bath tub. The little naked girl wants to run away with the gypsies. She’s not sure exactly who they are or where to seek them, but knows they’re her best bet for finding a circus to join. That’s her dream and it’s why she’s practising her balancing act. She’s almost across to the other side when she slips. Falls forwards, winds herself, lands with her face beneath the water. Sirens, bright lights, strange faces…

I blinked and the image dispersed, only to be replaced by another. A funeral, my gran’s. I’m sitting in the front pew beside my mum and dad, only half listening as the rector describes a different woman from the one I knew. I’m distracted by my shoes. They’re new, and although I know I should be listening better, focusing on the casket, thinking serious thoughts, I can’t stop looking at those patent leather shoes, turning them back and forth to admire the sheen. My dad notices, shoulders me gently, and I wrestle my attention forwards. There are two pictures on top of the coffin: one of the Gran I knew, the other of a stranger, a young woman sitting on a beach somewhere, leaning away from the camera, smile hooked as if she were about to open her mouth and make a quip at the cameraman’s expense. The minister says something then and Auntie Rita starts to wail, mascara spilling black across her cheeks, and I watch my mum expectantly, waiting for a matched response. Her gloved hands are folded in her lap, her attention is fixed on the casket, but nothing happens. Nothing happens and I catch my cousin Samantha’s eyes. She has been watching my mum too and I am suddenly ashamed…

I stood decisively, catching the black thoughts by surprise and sending them scuttling to the floor. My pockets were deep and I plunged my hands down to their seams firmly enough to convince myself I had a purpose, then I paced the corridor paying museum attention to the faded posters touting immunization schedules that were two years out of date; anything to stay here and now and far away from then.

I turned another corner into a brightly lit alcove and found a hot drinks machine nudging the wall. The sort with a platform for the cup and a nozzle that shoots out chocolate powder, coffee granules or boiling water, depending on your predilection. There were tea bags in a plastic tray and I draped a couple into Styrofoam cups, one for Mum and one for me. I watched a while as the bags bled rusty ribbons into the water, then took my time over stirring in the powdered milk, letting the grains dissolve fully before carrying them back down the corridor.

Mum took hers wordlessly, used an index finger to catch a drip as it rolled down the side. She held the warm cup between her hands but didn’t drink. I sat beside her and thought about nothing. Tried to think about nothing while my brain ticked ahead of me, wondering how it was I had so few memories of my dad. Real ones, not the sort stolen from photographs and family stories.

‘I was angry with him,’ Mum said finally. ‘I raised my voice. I’d finished the roast and laid it on the table for carving and even though it was getting cool sitting out, I decided that it would serve him right to eat a cold dinner. I thought about going to fetch him myself, but I was sick and tired of calling to no avail. I thought: see how you like a cold roast.’ She rolled her lips together the way people do when the threat of tears makes talking difficult and they’re hoping to cover the fact. ‘He’d been up in the roof again all afternoon, pulling down boxes, cluttering the hallway – God knows how they’ll get back up again, he’ll be in no fit state – ’ She looked, unseeing, into her tea. ‘He’d gone into the bathroom to wash before dinner and that’s where it happened. I found him lying beside the tub, right where you fainted that time, when you were small. He’d been washing his hands, there was soap all over them.’

Silence ensued and I itched to fill it. There’s something reassuring about conversation; its ordered pattern provides an anchor to the real world: nothing terrible or unexpected can happen, surely, when the rational exchange of dialogue is taking place. ‘And so you called the ambulance,’ I prompted, my tone that of a nursery-school teacher.

‘They came quickly; that was lucky. I sat with him and wiped the soap away, and then it seemed that they were there. Two of them, a man and a woman. They had to do CPR, and use one of those electric shock machines.’

‘A defibrillator,’ I said.

‘And they gave him something, some medicine to dissolve any clots.’ She studied her upturned hands. ‘He was still wearing his undershirt, and I remember thinking I should go and bring him a clean one.’ She shook her head and I wasn’t sure whether it was with regret that she hadn’t, or astonishment that such a thing had occurred to her while her husband lay unconscious on the floor, and I decided that it didn’t really matter right now and that I was in no position to judge anyway. Don’t think it had escaped my notice that I’d have been there to help if I hadn’t been probing Auntie Rita at the time, lifting stories from my mum’s past.

A doctor came down the corridor towards us and Mum knotted her fingers. I half stood, but he didn’t slow, striding across the waiting room to disappear through another door.

‘Won’t be long now, Mum.’ The weight of unspoken apology curled my words and I felt utterly helpless.

There’s only one photograph from my mum and dad’s wedding. I mean, presumably there are more, gathering dust somewhere in a forgotten white album, but there’s only one image I know of that’s survived the passage of years.

It’s just the two of them in it, not one of those typical wedding photos where the bride and groom’s families fan out in either direction providing wings to the couple in the centre; unbalanced wings so you suspect the creature would never be able to fly. In this photo their mismatched families have melted away and it’s just the two of them, and the way she’s staring at his face it’s like she’s enraptured. As if he glows, which he sort of does: an effect of the old lights photographers used back then, I suppose.

And he’s so impossibly young, they both are; he still has hair, right across the top of his head, and no idea that it’s not going to stick around. No idea that he will have a son, then lose him; that his future daughter will so bewilder him and that his wife will come to ignore him, that one day his heart will seize up and he’ll be taken to hospital in an ambulance and that same wife will sit in the waiting room with the daughter he can’t understand, waiting for him to wake up.

None of that is present in the photo, not even a hint. That photo is a frozen moment; their whole future lies unknown and ahead, just as it should. But at the same time, the future is in that photo, a version of it at any rate. It’s in their eyes, hers especially. For the photographer has captured more than two young people on their wedding day, he’s captured a threshold being crossed, an ocean wave at the precise moment before it turns to foam and begins its crash towards the ground. And the young woman, my mum, is seeing more than just the young man standing beside her, the fellow she’s in love with, she’s seeing their whole life together, stretching out ahead…

Then again, perhaps I’m romanticizing; perhaps she’s just admiring his hair, or looking forward to the reception, or the honeymoon… You create your own fiction around photos like that, images that become iconic within a family, and I realized as I sat there in the hospital that there was only one way of knowing for sure how she’d felt, what she’d hoped for when she looked at him that way; whether her life was more complicated, her past more complex, than her sweet expression suggests. And all I had to do was ask; strange that I’d never thought of it before. I suppose it’s the light on my father’s face that’s to blame. The way Mum’s looking at him draws the attention his way, so it’s easy to dismiss her as a young and innocent girl of unremarkable origins whose life is only just now beginning. It was a myth Mum had done her best to propagate, I realized; for whenever she spoke of their lives before they met it was always my dad’s stories she told.

But as I conjured the image to mind, fresh from my visit to Rita, it was Mum’s face I brought into focus; back in the shadows, a little smaller than his. Was it possible that the young woman with the wide eyes had a secret? That a decade before her wedding to the solid, glowing man beside her, she’d enjoyed a furtive love affair with her school teacher, a man engaged to her older friend? She’d have been fifteen or so at the time, and Meredith Burchill was certainly not the kind of woman to have a teenage love affair, but what about Meredith Baker? When I was growing up one of Mum’s favourite lectures was on the sorts of things good girls did not do: was it possible she’d been speaking from experience?

I was sunk then by the sense that I knew everything and nothing of the person sitting next to me. The woman in whose body I had grown and whose house I’d been raised was in some vital ways a stranger to me; I’d gone thirty years without ascribing her any more dimension than the paper dollies I’d played with as a girl, with the pasted-on smiles and the folding-tab dresses. What was more, I’d spent the past few months recklessly seeking to unlock her deepest secrets when I’d never really bothered to ask her much about the rest. Sitting there in the hospital, though, as Dad lay in an emergency bed somewhere, it suddenly seemed very important that I learn more about them. About her. The mysterious woman who made allusions to Shakespeare, who’d once sent articles to newspapers for publication.

‘Mum?’

‘Hmm?’

‘How did you and Dad meet?’

Her voice was brittle from lack of use and she cleared her throat before saying, ‘At the cinema. A screening of The Holly and the Ivy. You know that.’

A silence.

‘What I mean is, how did you meet? Did you see him? Did he see you? Who spoke first?’

‘Oh, Edie, I can’t remember. Him; no, me. I forget.’ She moved the fingers of one hand a little, like a puppeteer dangling stars on strings. ‘We were the only two there. Imagine that.’

A look had come upon Mum’s face as we spoke, a distance, but a fond one, a release almost from the discombobulating present, where her husband was clinging to life in a nearby room. ‘Was he handsome?’ I prodded gently. ‘Was it love at first sight?’

‘Hardly. I mistook him for a murderer at first.’

‘What? Dad?’

I don’t think she even heard me, so lost was she in her own memory. ‘It’s spooky being in a cinema by yourself. All those rows of empty seats, the darkened room, the enormous screen. It’s designed to be a communal experience and the effect when it’s not is uncannily detaching. Anything could happen when it’s dark.’

‘Did he sit right by you?’

‘Oh no. He kept a polite distance – he’s a gentleman, your father – but we started talking afterwards, in the foyer. He’d been expecting someone to meet him-’

‘A woman?’

She paid undue attention to the fabric of her skirt and said, with gentle reproach, ‘Oh, Edie.’

‘I’m only asking.’

‘I believe it was a woman, but she didn’t show. And that – ’ Mum pressed her hands against her knees, lifted her head with a delicate sniff – ‘was that. He asked me out to tea and I accepted. We went to the Lyons Corner House in the Strand. I had a slice of pear cake and I remember thinking it was very fancy.’

I smiled. ‘And he was your first boyfriend?’

Did I imagine the hesitation? ‘Yes.’

‘You stole another woman’s boyfriend.’ I was teasing, trying to keep things light, but the moment I said it I thought of Juniper Blythe and Thomas Cavill and my cheeks burned. I was too flustered by my own faux pas to pay much attention to Mum’s reaction, hurrying on before she had time to reply: ‘How old were you then?’

‘Twenty-five. It was 1952 and I’d just turned twenty-five.’

I nodded like I was doing the maths in my head, when really I was listening to the little voice that whispered: Might this not be a good time, seeing as we’re on the subject, to ask a little more about Thomas Cavill? Wicked little voice and shameful of me to pay it any heed; while I’m not proud of it, the opportunity was just too tempting. I told myself I was taking my mum’s mind off Dad’s condition, and with barely a pause, I said, ‘Twenty-five. That’s sort of late for a first boyfriend, isn’t it?’

‘Not really.’ She said it quickly. ‘It was a different time. I had been busy with other things.’

‘But then you met Dad.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you fell in love.’

Her voice was so soft I read her lips rather than heard her when she said, ‘Yes.’

‘Was he your first love, Mum?’

She inhaled a sharp little breath and her face looked as if I’d slapped her. ‘Edie – don’t!’

So. Auntie Rita had been right, he wasn’t.

‘Don’t talk about him in the past tense like that.’ Tears were brimming over the folds around her eyes. And I felt as bad as if I had slapped her, especially when she started to weep quietly against my shoulder, leaking more than crying, because crying isn’t something she does. And although my arm was pressed hard against the plastic edge of the chair, I didn’t move a muscle.

Outside, the distant tide of traffic continued to drift, in and out, punctuated occasionally by sirens. There’s something about hospital walls; though only made of bricks and plaster, when you’re inside them the noise, the reality of the teeming city beyond, disappears; it’s just outside the door, but it might as well be a magical land, far, far away. Like Milderhurst, it occurred to me; I’d experienced the same dislocation there, an overwhelming sense of envelopment as I passed through the front door, as if the world without had turned to grains of sand and fallen away. I wondered vaguely what the Sisters Blythe were doing, how they’d filled their days in the weeks since I’d left them, the three of them together in that great, dark castle. My imaginings came one after the other, a series of snapshots: Juniper drifting the corridors in her grubbied silk dress; Saffy appearing from nowhere to lead her gently back; Percy frowning by the attic window, surveying her estate like a ship’s captain keeping watch…

Midnight passed, the duty nurses shuffled, new faces brought with them the same old banter. Laughing and bustling around the illuminated medical station: an irresistible beacon of normality, an island across an unpassable sea. I tried to doze, using my bag as a pillow, but it was no use. My mum, beside me, was so small and alone, and older somehow than the last time I’d seen her, and I couldn’t stop my mind from racing ahead to paint detailed scenes of her life without Dad. I saw it so clearly: his empty armchair, the quiet meals, the cessation of all DIY hammering. How lonely the house would be, how still, how swamped by echoes.

It would be just the two of us if we lost my dad. Two is not a large number; it leaves no reserves. It’s a quiet number that makes for neat and simple conversations where interruption is not required; is not really possible. Or necessary, for that matter. Was that our future, I wondered? The two of us passing sentences back and forth, speaking around our opinions, making polite noises and telling half-truths and keeping up appearances? The notion was unbearable and I felt, suddenly, very, very alone.

It’s when I’m at my loneliest that I miss my brother most of all. He would be a man by now, with an easy manner and a kind smile and a knack for cheering our mother up. The Daniel in my mind always knows exactly what to say; not remotely like his unfortunate sister who suffers terribly with being tongue-tied. I glanced at Mum and wondered whether she was thinking of him, too; whether being in the hospital brought back memories of her little boy. I couldn’t ask, though, because we didn’t talk about Daniel, just as we didn’t talk about her evacuation, her past, her regrets. We never had.

Perhaps it was my sadness that secrets had simmered for so long beneath our family’s surface; perhaps it was a type of penance for upsetting her with my earlier probing; perhaps there was even a tiny part of me that wanted to provoke a reaction, to punish her for keeping memories from me and robbing me of the real Daniel: whatever the case, the next thing I knew I’d drawn breath and said, ‘Mum?’

She rubbed her eyes and blinked at her wristwatch.

‘Jamie and I broke up.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes.’

‘Today?’

‘Well, no. Not exactly. Around Christmastime.’

A tiny utterance of surprise, ‘Oh,’ and then she frowned, confused, calculating the months that had passed. ‘But you didn’t mention-’

‘No.’

This fact and its implications brought a sag to her face. She nodded slowly, remembering, no doubt, the fifty small and smaller enquiries she’d made after Jamie in that time; the answers I’d given, all lies.

‘I’ve had to let the flat go,’ I said, clearing my throat. ‘I’m looking for a bedsit. A little place of my own.’

‘That’s why I couldn’t reach you; after your father – I tried all the numbers I could think of, even Rita’s, until I got on to Herbert. I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘Well,’ I said, a strange artificial brightness in my tone, ‘as it happens that was the perfect thing to do. I’ve been staying with Herbert.’

She looked baffled. ‘He has a spare room?’

‘A sofa.’

‘I see.’ Mum’s hands were clasped in her lap, held together as if she sheltered a little bird inside, a precious bird she was determined not to lose. ‘I must post Herbert a note,’ she said, her voice threadbare. ‘He sent some of his blackberry jam at Easter and I can’t think that I remembered to write.’

And like that it was over, the conversation I’d been dreading for months. Relatively painless, which was good, but also somehow soulless, which wasn’t.

Mum stood then, and my first thought was that I’d been wrong, it wasn’t over and there was going to be a scene after all; but when I followed the direction of her eyes I saw that a doctor was coming towards us. I stood too, trying to read his face, to guess which way the penny was about to drop, but it was impossible. His expression was the sort that could be read to fit each scenario. I think they learn how to do that at medical school.

‘Mrs Burchill?’ His voice was clipped, faintly foreign.

‘Yes.’

‘Your husband’s condition is stable.’

Mum let out a noise, like air being pushed from a small balloon.

‘It’s a good thing the ambulance got there so soon. You did well to call it in time.’

I was aware of soft hiccuping noises next to me and I realized Mum’s eyes were leaking again.

‘We’ll see how his recovery progresses, but at this stage angioplasty is unlikely. He’ll need to stay in for a few days longer so we can monitor him, but his recovery after that can be done at home. You’ll have to watch him for moods: cardiac patients often struggle with feelings of depression. The nurses will be able to help you further with that.’

Mum was nodding with grateful fervour. ‘Of course, of course,’ and scrabbling, as was I, for the right words to convey our gratitude and relief. In the end she went with plain old, ‘Thank you, doctor,’ but he’d already withdrawn behind the untouchable screen of his white coat. He merely bobbed his head in a disconnected way, as if he had another place to be, another life to save, both of which he no doubt did, and had already forgotten quite who we were and to which patient we belonged.

I was about to suggest that we go in and see Dad when she began to cry – my mother, who never cries – and not just a few tears wiped away against the back of her hand; great big racking sobs that reminded me of the time in my childhood when I was upset about one trifling thing or another and Mum told me that while some girls were fortunate to look pretty when they cried – their eyes widened, their cheeks flushed, their pouts plumped – neither she nor I were among them.

She was right: we’re ugly criers, both of us. Too blotchy, too snarly, too loud. But seeing her standing there, so small, so impeccably dressed, so distressed, I wanted to wrap her in my arms and hold on until she couldn’t help but stop. I didn’t though. I dug inside my bag and found her a tissue.

She took it but she didn’t stop crying, not right away, and after a moment’s hesitation, I reached out to touch her shoulder, turned it into a sort of pat, then rubbed the back of her cashmere cardigan. We stood like that, until her body yielded a little, leaning in to me like a child seeking comfort.

Finally, she blew her nose. ‘I was so worried, Edie,’ she said, wiping beneath her eyes, one after the other, checking the tissue for mascara.

‘I know, Mum.’

‘I just don’t think that I could… If anything were to happen… If I lost him-’

‘It’s OK,’ I said firmly. ‘He’s OK. Everything’s going to be all right.’

She blinked at me like a small animal for whom the light is too bright. ‘Yes.’

I obtained his room number from a nurse and we negotiated the fluorescent corridors until we found it. As we drew close, Mum stopped.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘I don’t want your father upset, Edie.’

I said nothing, wondering how on earth she thought I might be planning to do such a thing.

‘He’d be horrified to learn that you were sleeping on a sofa. You know how he worries about your posture.’

‘It won’t be for long.’ I glanced towards the door. ‘Really, Mum, I’m working on it. I’ve been checking the rentals but there’s nothing suitable-’

‘Nonsense.’ She straightened her skirt and drew a deep breath. Didn’t quite meet my eyes as she said, ‘You’ve a perfectly suitable bed at home.’

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Jig

Which is how, at the age of thirty, I came to be a single woman living with my parents in the house in which I’d grown up. In my very own childhood bedroom, in my very own five-foot bed, beneath the window that overlooked Singer & Sons Funeral Home. An improvement, one might add, on my most recent situation: I adore Herbert and I’ve a lot of time for dear old Jess, but Lord spare me from ever having to share her sofa again.

The move itself was relatively painless; I didn’t take much with me. It was a temporary arrangement, as I told anyone who’d listen, so it made far more sense to leave my boxes at Herbert’s. I packed myself a single suitcase and arrived back home to find everything pretty much as I’d left it a decade before.

Our family house in Barnes was built in the sixties, purchased brand new by my parents when Mum was pregnant with me. What makes it particularly striking is that it’s a house with no clutter. Really, none at all. There’s a system for everything in the Burchill household: multiple baskets in the laundry; colour-coded cloths in the kitchen; a notepad by the telephone with a pen that never seems to wander, and not one envelope lying around with doodles and addresses and the half-scribbled names of people whose calls have been forgotten. Neat as a pin. Little wonder I’d suspected adoption when I was growing up.

Even Dad’s attic clear-out had generated a polite minimum of mess; two dozen or so boxes with their lists of contents Sellotaped on the lids, and thirty years’ worth of superseded electronic appliances, still housed in their original packaging. They couldn’t live in the hallway forever, though, and with Dad recuperating and my weekends tumbleweed clear, I was a natural to take over the job. I worked like a soldier, falling prey to distraction only once, when I stumbled upon the box marked Edie’s Things and couldn’t resist ripping it open. Inside lay a host of forgotten items: macaroni jewellery with flaking paint, a porcelain trinket box with fairies on the side, and, deep down, amongst assorted bits and bobs and books – I gasped – my illicitly obtained, utterly cherished, hitherto misplaced copy of the Mud Man.

Holding that small, time-worn book in my grown-up hands, I was awash with shimmering memories; the image of my ten-year-old self, propped up on the lounge sofa, was so lucent I could almost reach across the years to poke ripples in it with my finger. I could feel the pleasant stillness of the glass-filtered sunlight and smell the reassuring warm air: tissues and lemon barley and lovely doses of parental pity. I saw Mum, then, coming through the doorway with her coat on and her string bag filled with groceries. Fishing something from within the bag, holding it out to me, a book that would change my world. A novel written by the very gentleman to whom she’d been evacuated during the Second World War…

I rubbed my thumb thoughtfully across the embossed type on the cover: Raymond Blythe. Perhaps this will cheer you up, Mum had said. It’s for slightly older readers, I think, but you’re a clever girl; with a bit of effort I’m sure you’ll be fine. My entire life, I’d credited the librarian Miss Perry with setting me on my proper path, but as I sat there on the wooden floor of the attic, the Mud Man in my hands, another thought began to coalesce in a thin streak of light. I wondered whether it was possible that I’d been wrong all this time; whether perhaps Miss Perry had done little more than locate and lend the title and it had been my mother who’d known to give me the perfect book at the perfect time. Whether I dared ask.

The book had been old when it came to me, and passionately well loved since, so its state of déshabillé was to be expected. Within its crumbling binding were stuck the very pages I’d turned when the world they described was new: when I didn’t know how things might end for Jane and her brother and the poor, sad man in the mud.

I’d been longing to read it again, ever since I returned from my visit to Milderhurst, and with a swift intake of breath, I opened the book randomly, letting my eyes alight in the middle of a lovely, foxed page: The carriage that took them to live with the uncle they’d never met set off from London in the evening and travelled through the night, arriving at last at the foot of a neglected drive while dawn was breaking. I read on, bumping in the back of that carriage beside Jane and Peter. Through the weary, whiney gates we went, up the long and winding path, until finally, at the top of the hill, cold in the melancholy morning light, it appeared. Bealehurst Castle. I shivered with anticipation at what I might find inside. The tower broke through the roofline, windows dark against the creamy stone, and I leaned out with Jane, laid my hand beside hers on the carriage window. Heavy clouds fleeted across the pale sky, and when the carriage finally stopped with a clunk we clambered out to find ourselves standing by the rim of an ink-black moat. A breeze then, from nowhere, rippling the water’s surface, and the driver gestured towards a wooden drawbridge. Slowly, silently, we walked across it. Just as we reached the heavy door, a bell rang, a real one, and I almost dropped the book.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned the bell yet. While I was returning boxes to the attic, Dad had been set up to convalesce in the spare room, a pile of Accountancy Today journals on the bedside table, a cassette player loaded with Henry Mancini, and a little butler’s bell for summoning attention. The bell had been his idea, a distant memory from a bout of fever as a boy and, after a fortnight during which he’d done little more than sleep, Mum had been so pleased to see a return of spirit that she’d happily gone along with the suggestion. It made good sense, she’d said, failing to anticipate for a moment that the small, decorative bell might be commandeered for such nefarious use. In Dad’s bored and grumpy hands, it became a fearful weapon, a talisman in his reversion to boyhood. Bell in fist, my mild-mannered, number-crunching father became a spoiled and imperious child, full of impatient questions as to whether the postman had been, what Mum was doing with her day, what time he might expect his next cup of tea to be served.

On the morning that I found the box with the Mud Man inside, however, Mum was at the supermarket and I was officially on Dad-watch. At the sound of the bell, the world of Bealehurst withered, the clouds receded quickly in all directions, the moat, the castle vanished, the step on which I stood turned to dust so that I was falling, with nothing but black text floating in the white space around me, dropping through the hole in the middle of the page to land with a bump back in Barnes.

Shameful of me, I know, but I sat very still for a few moments, waiting it out in case I earned a reprieve. Only when the bell’s tinkle came a second time did I tuck the book inside my cardigan pocket and clamber, with regrettable reluctance, down the ladder.

‘Hiya, Dad,’ I said, brightly – it is not kind to resent intrusions from a convalescent parent – arriving at the spare-room door. ‘Everything all right?’

He’d slumped so far he’d almost disappeared inside his pillows. ‘Is it lunchtime yet, Edie?’

‘Not yet.’ I straightened him up a bit. ‘Mum said she’d fix you some soup as soon as she got in. She’s made a lovely pot of-’

‘Your mother’s still not back?’

‘Shouldn’t be long.’ I smiled sympathetically. Poor Dad had been through an awful time: it isn’t easy for anyone being bed-bound weeks on end, but for someone like him, with no hobbies and no talent whatsoever for relaxing, it was torture. I freshened his water glass, trying not to finger the top of the book protruding from my pocket. ‘Is there anything I can fetch you in the meantime? A crossword? A heat pad? Some more cake?’

He let out a forebearing sigh. ‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

My hand was on the Mud Man again, my mind had taken guilty leave to debate the particular merits of the daybed in the kitchen and the armchair in the lounge, the one by the window that spends the afternoon drenched in sunlight. ‘Well then,’ I said sheepishly, ‘I guess I’ll get back to it. Chin up, eh, Dad…’

I was almost at the door when, ‘What’s that you’ve got there, Edie?’

‘Where?’

‘There, sticking out of your pocket.’ He sounded so hopeful. ‘Not the post, is it?’

‘This? No.’ I patted my cardigan. ‘It’s a book from one of the attic boxes.’

He pursed his lips. ‘The whole point is to stow things away, not to dig them out again.’

‘I know, but it’s a favourite.’

‘What’s it all about then?’

I was stunned; I couldn’t think that my dad had ever asked me about a book before. ‘A pair of orphans,’ I managed. ‘A girl called Jane and a boy called Peter.’

He frowned impatiently. ‘A little more than that, I should say. By the looks of it, there’s a lot of pages.’

‘Of course – yes. It’s about far more than that.’ Oh, where to start! Duty and betrayal, absence and longing, the lengths to which people will go to protect the ones they cherish, madness, fidelity, honour, love… I glanced again at Dad and decided to stick with the plot. ‘The children’s parents are chargrilled in a ghastly London house fire and they’re sent to live with their long-lost uncle in his castle.’

‘His castle?’

I nodded. ‘Bealehurst. Their uncle’s a nice enough fellow, and the children are delighted by the castle at first, but gradually they come to realize that there’s more going on than meets the eye; that there’s a deep, dark secret lurking beneath it all.’

‘Deep and dark, eh?’ He smiled a little.

‘Oh yes. Both. Very terrible indeed.’

I’d said it quickly, excitedly, and Dad leaned closer, easing himself onto his elbow. ‘What is it then?’

‘What’s what?’

‘The secret. What is it?’

I looked at him, dumbfounded. ‘Well, I can’t just… tell you.’

‘Of course you can.’

He crossed his arms like a cranky child and I scrabbled for the words to explain to him the contract between reader and writer, the dangers of narrative greed. The sacrilege of just blurting out what had taken chapters to build; secrets hidden carefully by the author behind countless sleights of hand. All I managed was, ‘I’ll lend it to you if you like?’

He pouted unbecomingly. ‘Reading makes my head ache.’

A silence settled between us, tending towards uncomfortable as he waited for me to concede and I – of course, for what choice did I have? – refused. Finally, he gave a forlorn sort of sigh. ‘Never mind,’ he said, waving his fingers disconsolately. ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter.’

But he looked so glum, and the memory came upon me so intensely of how I’d fallen into the world of the Mud Man when I was laid up with mumps or whatever it was, that I couldn’t help saying, ‘If you really want to know, I suppose I could read it to you.’

The Mud Man became our habit; something I looked forward to every day. As soon as dinner was over, I helped Mum with the kitchen, cleared Dad’s tray, then he and I would pick up wherever we’d left off. He couldn’t fathom that a made-up story could interest him so avidly. ‘But it must be based on true events,’ he said repeatedly, ‘an old kidnapping case. Like that Lindbergh fellow, the child taken from his bedroom window?’

‘No, Dad, Raymond Blythe just invented it.’

‘But it’s so vivid, Edie; I can see it in my head when you’re reading, as if I were watching it happen; as if I knew the story already.’ And he would shake his head with a wonder that made me warm to the tips of my toes with pride, even though I’d taken no part, myself, in the Mud Man’s creation. On days when I stayed late at work he became fidgety, grouching at Mum all evening, listening for my key in the door, then ringing his little bell and feigning surprise when I answered: ‘Is that you, Edie?’ he’d say, lifting his brows as if confused. ‘I was just going to ask your mother to plump my pillows. I say – seeing as you’re here, we might as well take a look at what’s happening at the castle.’

And perhaps it was the castle, even more than the story, that had really won him over. His jealous respect for grand family estates was as close as Dad came to having a general interest and once I let slip that Bealehurst was based heavily on Raymond Blythe’s real ancestral home, his interest was assured. He asked copious questions, some of which I could answer from memory or existing knowledge, others that were so specific I had no choice but to produce my copy of Raymond Blythe’s Milderhurst for him to pore over; sometimes even reference books I’d borrowed from Herbert’s enormous collection and brought home from work. Thus it was that Dad and I fanned each other’s infatuation and, for the first time ever, the pair of us found ourselves with something in common.

There was only one sticking point in our happy formation of the Burchill family Mud Man fan club, and that was Mum. No matter that our Milderhurst habit had arisen quite innocently, the fact that Dad and I were sitting together behind closed doors, bringing to life a world Mum resolutely refused to speak about, and over which she had greater claim than either of us, felt sneaky. I knew I was going to have to talk to her about it; I also knew the conversation was going to be prickly.

Since I’d moved back home, things between Mum and me had continued as they always had. Somewhat naively, I think I’d half expected that the two of us might undergo a miraculous renaissance of affection; that we might slip into a routine together, fall easily and often into conversation; that Mum might even bare her soul and divulge her secrets to me. I suppose that’s what I’d hoped might happen. Needless to say, it didn’t. In fact, although I think Mum was pleased to have me there, grateful that I was helping out with Dad and far more tolerant of our differences than she had been in the past, in other respects she seemed more distant than ever, distracted and vague and very, very quiet. I’d assumed, at first, that it was a result of Dad’s heart attack, that the worry followed hotly by relief had thrown her into a tumble of re-evaluation; but as the weeks went by and things didn’t improve, I began to wonder. I found her sometimes paused in the middle of an activity, standing with her hands in the sudsy kitchen sink, staring blankly through the window. And the expression on her face was so faraway, so knotted and confused, it was as if she’d forgotten where and who she was.

It was in just such inclination that I found her on the evening I came to fess up about the reading.

‘Mum?’ I said. She didn’t seem to hear and I went a little closer, stopping by the corner of the table. ‘Mum?’

She turned from the glass. ‘Oh, hello, Edie. It’s pretty this time of year, isn’t it. The long, late sunsets.’

I joined her by the window, watching the last glaze of peach darken from the sky. It was pretty, though perhaps not sufficiently to warrant the ardent attention she was paying it.

After a time, in which Mum said nothing further, I cleared my throat. I told her I’d been reading the Mud Man to Dad, then I very carefully explained the circumstances that had led to such a thing, in particular that it hadn’t been planned. She barely seemed to hear me, a slight nod when I mentioned Dad’s fascination with the castle the only sign that she was listening. When I’d reported everything I considered of consequence, I stopped and waited, steeled myself a little for whatever might be coming.

‘It’s kind of you to read to your dad, Edie. He’s enjoying it.’ It was not exactly the response I’d expected. ‘That book is becoming something of a tradition in our family.’ The flicker of a smile. ‘A companion in times of ill health. You probably don’t remember. I gave it to you when you were home with mumps. You were so miserable, it was all I could think to do.’

So. It had been Mum all along. She, and not Miss Perry, had chosen the Mud Man. The perfect book, the perfect time. I found my voice. ‘I remember.’

‘It’s good that your father has something to think about while he’s lying in bed. Better still that he has you to share it with. He hasn’t had many visitors, you know. Other people lead busy lives, the fellows from his work. Most of them sent cards, and I suppose since he retired… well, time marches on, doesn’t it? It just… it isn’t easy for a person to feel they’ve been forgotten.’

She turned her face away then, but not before I’d noticed her lips pressed hard together. I had a feeling we were no longer speaking only of my dad, and because all roads of thought led me at that time to Milderhurst, to Juniper Blythe and Thomas Cavill, I couldn’t help wondering whether Mum was mourning an old love affair; a relationship from long before she met my dad, when she was young and impressionable and easily wounded. The more I pondered it, the longer I stood there stealing glances at her pensive profile, the angrier I felt. Who was this Thomas Cavill who had skipped off during the war, leaving a spill of broken hearts behind him. Poor Juniper, wasting away in her family’s crumbly castle, and my own mother, nursing her private sorrow decades after the fact.

‘There’s one thing, Edie – ’ Mum was back to facing me now, her sad eyes searching mine – ‘I’d rather your father didn’t know about my evacuation.’

‘Dad doesn’t know you were evacuated?’

‘He knows that it happened, but not where I went. He doesn’t know about Milderhurst.’

She suddenly paid great attention to the back of her hands, lifting each finger in turn, adjusting her fine gold wedding band.

‘You do realize,’ I said gently, ‘that he’d think you a person of inestimable fabulousness if he knew you’d lived there once?’

A slight smile ruffled her composure, but her attention didn’t leave her hands.

‘I’m serious. He’s smitten with the place.’

‘Nevertheless,’ she said, ‘I’d prefer it this way.’

‘OK. I understand.’ I didn’t, but I think we’ve established that already, and the way the streetlight was now caressing her cheekbones made her look vulnerable, like a different kind of woman, younger and more breakable somehow, so I didn’t press further. I continued to watch her, though; her attitude was one of such keen contemplation that I couldn’t look away.

‘You know, Edie,’ she said softly, ‘when I was a girl my mother used to send me out around this time of night to fetch your grandfather back from the pub.’

‘Really? By yourself?’

‘It wasn’t uncommon back then, before the war. I’d go and wait by the door of the local and he’d see me and wave and finish his drink and then we’d walk home together.’

‘The two of you were close?’

She tilted her head a little. ‘I perplexed him, I think. Your grandmother, too. Did I ever tell you that she wanted me to become a hairdresser when I left school?’

‘Like Rita.’

She blinked at the night-black street outside. ‘I don’t think I’d have been much good at it.’

‘I don’t know. You’re pretty handy with the secateurs.’

There was a pause and she smiled sideways at me, but not completely naturally, and I had the feeling there was something more she wanted to say. I waited, but whatever it was, she decided against it, soon turning back to stare at the glass pane.

I made a half-hearted attempt to engage her in further conversation about her school days, hoping, I suppose, that it might lead to mention of Thomas Cavill, but she didn’t take the bait. She said only that she’d enjoyed school well enough and asked me whether I’d like a cup of tea.

The single virtue of Mum’s abstraction at that time, was that I was spared having to discuss my break-up with Jamie. Repression being something of a family hobby, Mum didn’t ask for details; neither did she drown me in platitudes. She kindly let us both cling to the myth that I’d made a purely selfless decision to come home and help her with Dad and the house.

The same, I’m afraid, could not be said of Rita. Bad news travels swiftly and my aunt is nothing if not a foul-weather friend, so I expect I shouldn’t have been surprised when I arrived at the Roxy Club for Sam’s hen night only to be accosted at the door. Rita tucked her arm through mine and said, ‘Darling, I’ve heard. Now don’t you worry; you’re not to think it means you’re old and unattractive and destined to be alone for the rest of your life.’

I waved to let the waiter know I was ready to place a rather stiff drink order and realized, with a vague sinking sensation, that I was actually envying my mother her evening at home with Dad and his bell.

‘Lots of people meet “the one” in their later years,’ she continued, ‘and they’re made very happy indeed. Just look at your cousin over there.’ Rita pointed at Sam, who was grinning at me past the G-string of a bronzed stranger. ‘Your turn will come.’

‘Thanks, Auntie Rita.’

‘Good girl.’ She nodded in approval. ‘You have a good time now and put it all behind you.’ And she was about to move on to spread her cheer elsewhere when she grabbed my arm. ‘Almost forgot,’ she said, ‘I’ve brought something for you.’ She dug inside her tote and pulled out a shoebox. The picture on the side was of an embroidered pump slipper, the sort my gran would have cherished, and although it seemed rather an unlikely gift, I had to admit they looked comfy. And not impractical: I was, after all, spending a lot of nights in these days.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘How kind.’ And then I lifted the lid and saw that the box didn’t contain slippers at all, but was half-filled with letters.

‘Your mum’s,’ said Auntie Rita with a devilish smile. ‘Just like I promised. You have a good old read of those, won’t you? Cheer yourself up.’

And although I was thrilled by the letters, I felt a curl of dislike for my Auntie Rita then, on behalf of the small girl whose handwriting swirled and looped in earnest lines across the fronts of the envelopes. The young girl whose older sister had deserted her during the evacuation, slinking off to be housed with a friend, leaving little Meredith to fend for herself.

I put the lid back on, anxious suddenly to get the letters out of that club. They didn’t belong there amidst the bump and grind; the unedited thoughts and dreams of a little girl from long ago; the same young girl who’d walked beside me in the corridors of Milderhurst; whom I hoped to know better one day. When the novelty straws appeared, I made my excuses and took the letters home to bed.

All was black as pitch when I arrived and I tiptoed carefully up the stairs, fearful of waking the sleeping bell-ringer. My desk lamp imparted a dusky glow, the house made queer nocturnal noises and I sat on the edge of the bed, shoebox on my lap. This was the moment, I suppose, when I might have done things differently. Two roads forked away from me and I could have followed either. After the merest hesitation, I lifted the lid and pulled the envelopes from within, noticing as I leafed through that they were arranged carefully by date. A photograph dropped loose onto my knees, two girls grinning at the camera. The smaller, darker one I recognized as my mother – earnest brown eyes, bony elbows, hair cut in the short, sensible style my gran favoured – the other, an older girl with long blonde hair. Juniper Blythe, of course. I remembered her from the book I’d bought in Milderhurst village; this was the child with the luminous eyes, all grown up. With a surge of determination, I put the photograph and letters safely back into the box, all except the first, which I unfolded. The letter was dated September 6th, 1939; neat printing in the top right-hand corner.

Dear Mum and Dad, it began, in large, rounded handwriting,

I miss you both lots and lots. Do you miss me? I’m in the country now and things are very different. There are cows for one thing – did you know they really do say ‘moo’? Very loudly. I almost jumped out of my skin, the first one I heard.

I am living in a castle, a real one, but it doesn’t look the way you might imagine. There is no drawbridge, but there is a tower, and three sisters and an old man who I don’t see, ever. I only know he’s there because the sisters talk about him. They call him Daddy and he’s a writer of books. Real ones, like in the lending library. The youngest sister is called Juniper, she’s seventeen and very pretty with big eyes. She’s the one who brought me to Milderhurst. Did you know that’s what gin is made from, by the way – juniper berries?

There is a telephone here, too, so maybe if you have the time and Mr Waterman at the shop doesn’t mind, you could…

I’d reached the end of the first page but didn’t turn it over. I sat motionless, as if I were listening very carefully to something. And I was, I suppose; for the little girl’s voice had drifted from the shoebox and was echoing now in the shadow-hung hollows of the room. I’m in the country now… they call him Daddy… there is a tower, and three sisters… Letters are special like that. Conversations waft away the moment they’ve been had, but the written word prevails. Those letters were little time travellers; fifty years they’d lain patiently in their box, waiting for me to find them.

The headlights from a car in the street outside threw slivers between my curtains, tinsel shards slid across the ceiling. Silence, dimness again. I turned the page and read on, and as I did so a pressure built behind my chest, as if a warm, firm object were being pushed hard from within against my ribs. The sensation was a little like relief and, oddly, the quenching of a strange sort of homesickness. Which made no sense, only that the girl’s voice was so familiar that reading the letters was a little like re-meeting an old friend. Someone I’d known a long time ago…

ONE

London, September 4th, 1939

Meredith had never seen her father cry. It wasn’t something fathers did, not hers certainly (and he wasn’t actually crying, not yet, but it was close), and that’s how she knew for sure that it was wrong what they’d been saying, that this was no adventure they were going on and it wouldn’t be over soon. That this train was waiting to take them away from London and everything was about to change. The sight of Dad’s big, square shoulders shaking, the strong face knotted queerly, his mouth pulled so tight that his lips threatened to disappear, and she wanted to wail just as hard as Mrs Paul’s baby when he needed feeding. But she didn’t, she couldn’t, not with Rita sitting right there at her side just waiting for another reason to pinch her. Instead, she lifted a hand and her father did the same, then she pretended someone was calling her and turned around so that she didn’t have to watch him any longer, so they could both stop being so horribly brave.

There’d been drills at school in the summer term and Dad had been talking the whole thing up at night, telling them over and over about the times he’d gone down to Kent as a boy, hop-picking with his family: the sunny days, the campfire songs in the evening, how beautiful the countryside was, how green and sweet and endless. But although Meredith had enjoyed his stories, she’d also thrown a glance or two Mum’s way, and that had got the lump of foreboding roiling in her stomach. Mum had been hunched over the sink, all sharp hips and knees and elbows, exercising the same fierce attention to scrubbing pans spotless that always presaged grim times ahead.

Sure enough, a few nights after the stories started, Meredith heard the first argument. Mum saying they were a family and they ought to stay together and take their chances as one, that a family broken apart could never be put back together quite the same. Dad had spoken then, calmer, telling her it was like the posters said, that kids had a better chance out of the city, that it wouldn’t last for long and then they’d all be back together. Things had gone quiet for a moment after that, and Meredith had strained to hear, then Mum had laughed, but not happily. She hadn’t come down in the last shower, she said; if there was one thing she knew it was that governments and men in fancy suits couldn’t be trusted, that once the kids were taken God only knew when they’d get them back and in what sort of condition they’d be, and she’d shouted some of the words Rita got regular swipes for using, and said that if he loved her he wouldn’t send her children away, and Dad had shushed her and there’d been sobbing and no more talking and Meredith had put her pillow over her head, as much to drown out Rita’s snoring as anything else.

There’d been no more talk of evacuation after that, not for days, until one afternoon Rita came running home to tell them that the public swimming baths were closed and there were big new notices out front. ‘There’s one on each side,’ she’d said, eyes widened by the press of portentous news: ‘The first says “Women Contaminated”, the second says “Men Contaminated”.’ And Mum had knotted her hands and Dad had said only, ‘Gas,’ and that was that. Next day Mum pulled down the only suitcase they owned and any pillowcases she could spare and started filling them with things on the list from school – just in case: a change of knickers, a comb, handkerchiefs, and a brand-new nightdress each for Rita and Meredith, the necessity of which Dad had gently queried and Mum had justified with a fierce scowl. ‘You think I’m letting my children go with threadbare clothing into the homes of strangers?’ Dad had stayed quiet after that and even though Meredith knew her parents would be paying for the new items until Christmas, she couldn’t help taking guilty delight in the nightie, which was crisp and white and the first she’d ever owned that hadn’t been Rita’s first…

And now they were being sent away and Meredith would have done anything to take back her wish. Meredith wasn’t brave, not like Ed, and she wasn’t loud and confident like Rita. She was shy and awkward, and utterly different from everyone else in her family. She shifted in her seat, lined her feet up together on her suitcase and considered the gleam of her shoes, then blinked away the image of Dad polishing them the night before, setting them down when he’d finished only to wander the room a few idle minutes, hands in pockets, before starting the whole process again. As if by applying polish, driving it deep into the leather and buffing until it shone, he could somehow ward off the untold dangers that lay ahead.

‘Mu-mmy, Mu-mmy!’

The shriek came from across the carriage and Meredith glanced up to see a little boy, not much more than a baby, clinging to his sister and pawing the glass. Tears had snaked down his dirty cheeks and the skin beneath his nose was shiny. ‘I want to stay with you, Mummy,’ he cried. ‘I want to get killed with you!’

Meredith concentrated on her knees, rubbed at the red marks her gas-mask box had made as it banged against her legs on the walk from school. Then she looked again through the train’s window, she couldn’t help herself; peered up at the railing above the station where the adults were crowded together. He was still there, still watching them, the stranger’s smile still twisting up his normal Dad-face, and Meredith found it difficult suddenly to breathe and her spectacles were starting to fog, and even as she wished the earth would open up and swallow her so it would all be over, a small part of her mind remained detached, wondering which words she’d use, if asked to describe the way fear was making her lungs constrict. As Rita squealed with laughter at something her friend Carol had whispered in her ear, Meredith closed her eyes.

It had begun at precisely eleven fifteen the previous morning. She’d been sitting at the front of the house, legs stretched out along the top step, taking notes as she watched Rita across the road making eyes at that ghastly Luke Watson with his big yellow teeth. The announcement had come in distant strains from the wireless next door, Neville Chamberlain talking in that slow, solemn voice of his, telling them there’d been no response to the ultimatum and that they were now at war with Germany. Then had come the national anthem, after which Mrs Paul appeared on the neighbouring doorstep, spoon still dripping with Yorkshire pudding batter, with Mum close behind her, and householders all the way along the street doing the same. Everyone stood where they were, looking one to the other, bewilderment, fear and uncertainty written loud on their faces, as mutterings of ‘It’s happened’ began to pass along the street in a great disbelieving wave.

Eight minutes later, the air-raid siren clattered and all hell broke loose. Old Mrs Nicholson ran up and down the street in hysterics alternating the Lord’s Prayer with panicked declarations of their impending doom; Moira Seymour, who was the local ARP warden, got excited and started twirling the heavy rattle signalling a gas attack and people scattered in the hunt for their masks; and Inspector Whitely wove his bicycle through the mayhem wearing a cardboard placard over his body that read ‘Take Cover’.

Meredith had watched, wide-eyed, drinking in the mayhem, then stared up at the sky, waiting for the enemy planes, wondering how they’d look, how their appearance might make her feel, whether she was able to write fast enough to jot it all down as it was happening, when all of a sudden Mum had clutched her arm and dragged her and Rita down the street towards the trench shelter in the park. Meredith’s notebook had dropped in the rush and been trampled and she’d wrenched her arm free and stopped to pick it up, and Mum had shouted that there wasn’t time and her face had been white, almost angry-looking, and Meredith had known she’d get a tongue-lashing later, if not worse, but she’d had no choice. There’d been no question of leaving it behind. She’d run back, ducked beneath the crowd of frightened neighbours, seized her notebook – worse for wear, but still intact – and returned to her furious mother, face no longer white but red as Heinz tomato ketchup. By the time they got to the shelter and realized they’d forgotten their gas masks, the All Clear had sounded, Meredith had earned a smack across the legs, and Mum had resolved to evacuate them the next day.

‘Hey there, kiddo.’

Meredith opened moist eyes to see Mr Cavill standing in the aisle. Her cheeks warmed instantly and she smiled, cursing the image that came to mind of Rita leering at Luke Watson.

‘Mind if I take a look at your name tag?’

She wiped beneath her specs, and leaned closer so he could read the cardboard tag around her neck. There were people everywhere, laughing, crying, shouting, swirling round and round, but for a moment she and Mr Cavill were alone in the middle of it all. Meredith held her breath, conscious of the way her heart had started to hammer, watching his lips as he mouthed the words written there, her very own name, his smile when he’d verified they were all correct.

‘You’ve got your suitcase, I see. Did your mother make sure to include everything on the list? Is there anything you need?’

Meredith nodded; then shook her head. Blushed as words she would never, ever, dare to speak popped into mind: I need you to wait for me, Mr Cavill. Wait for me to get a little older – fourteen maybe, fifteen – and then the two of us can get married.

Mr Cavill marked something down on his paper form and capped his pen. ‘We might be on the train a while, Merry. Have you brought something to keep you busy?’

‘I brought my notebook.’

He laughed then, for he was the one who’d given it to her, a reward for doing so well in her exams. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘That’s perfect. Make sure you write it all down, now. Everything you see and think and feel. Your voice is your own; it matters.’ And he gave her a chocolate bar and a wink, and she smiled broadly as he continued up the aisle, leaving her heart swelling as big as a melon in her chest.

The notebook was Meredith’s most treasured possession. The first proper journal she’d ever owned. She’d had it for twelve months now but she hadn’t written a single word inside, not even her name. How could she? Meredith loved the smart little book so well, the smooth leather cover and the perfect neat lines across each page, the ribbon stitched into the binding for use as a bookmark, that to spoil it with her own penmanship, her own dull sentences about her own dull life, seemed too great a sacrilege. She’d pulled it from hiding many times only to sit with it on her knee for a while, drawing great pleasure simply from owning such a thing, before tucking it away again.

Mr Cavill had tried to convince her that what she wrote about wasn’t nearly as important as the way she wrote it. ‘No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Don’t approximate. Don’t settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching instead for those that explain exactly what you think. What you feel.’ And then he’d asked if she understood what he meant, and his dark eyes had been filled with such intensity, such earnest desire that she should see things as he did, and she’d nodded and just for a moment it was as if a door had opened up to a place that was very different from the one in which she lived…

Meredith sighed fervently and sneaked a sideways glance at Rita, who was combing her fingers through her ponytail, pretending not to notice that Billy Harris was making moon eyes at her from across the aisle. Good. The last thing she needed was for Rita to guess how she felt about Mr Cavill; thankfully, Rita was far too wrapped up in her own world of boys and lipstick to bother with anyone else’s. A fact Meredith counted on in order to write her daily journal. (Not the real journal, of course; in the end, she’d struck a compromise, collecting spare paper from wherever she could find it and keeping it folded within the front cover of the precious book. She wrote her reports on that, telling herself that one day, maybe, she’d broach the real thing.)

Meredith risked another peek at her dad then, ready to look away before she caught his eye, but as she skimmed the faces, searched for his familiar bulk, cursorily at first, then with rising panic in her throat, she discovered he wasn’t there. The faces had changed; mothers were still crying, some waved handkerchiefs, others smiled with grim determination, but there was no sign of him. Where he’d been standing was a gap that filled and shuffled as she watched, and as she searched the crowd she realized that he’d really gone. That she’d missed seeing him go.

And although she’d held it in all morning, although she’d schooled herself away from sadness, Meredith felt so sorry then, so small and frightened and alone, that she started to cry. A great rush of feeling rose from within her, warmly and wetly, and her cheeks were instantly drenched. The awful thought that he might have been standing there all that time, that he might have been watching her as she watched her shoes, spoke with Mr Cavill, thought about her notebook, and willing her to look up, to smile, to wave goodbye; that eventually he must have given up and gone home, believing that she didn’t care at all-

‘Oh, shut up,’ said Rita beside her. ‘Don’t be such a blubbering baby. For goodness’ sake, this is fun!’

‘My mum says not to look out the window or you’ll get your head chopped off by a passing train.’ This was Rita’s friend, Carol, who was fourteen and as big a know-it-all as her mother. ‘And not to give anyone directions. They’re just as likely to be German spies looking for Whitehall. They murder children, you know.’

So Meredith hid her face behind her hand, allowed herself a few more silent sobs, then wiped her cheeks dry as the train jerked and they were off. The air filled with the shouts of parents outside and children inside and steam and smoke and whistles and Rita laughing beside her, and then they pulled out of the station. Rattled and clattered along the lines, and a group of boys, dressed in their Sunday best although it was Monday, ran up the corridor from window to window, drumming on the glass and whooping and waving, until Mr Cavill told them to sit down and not to open the doors. Meredith leaned against the glass and, rather than meet the sad grey faces that lined the roadsides, weeping for a city that was losing its children, she watched with wonder as great silver balloons began slowly to rise all around, drifting in the light currents above London like strange and beautiful animals.

TWO

Milderhurst Village, September 4th, 1939

The bicycle had been gathering cobwebs in the stables for almost two decades and Percy was in little doubt that she looked a sight riding it. Hair tied back with an elastic band, skirt gathered and tucked between locked knees: her modesty might have survived the ride intact, but she was under no illusion that she cut a stylish figure.

She had received the Ministry warning about the risk of bicycles falling into enemy hands, but she’d gone ahead and resurrected the old thing anyway. If there was any truth to the rumours flying about, if the government really was planning for a three-year war, fuel was sure to be rationed and she’d need a way of getting about. The bicycle had been Saffy’s once, long ago, but she had no use for it now; Percy had dug it out of storage, dusted it off, and ridden it round and round at the top of the driveway until she could balance with some reliability. She hadn’t expected to enjoy it so much and couldn’t for the life of her remember why she’d never got one of her own all those years ago, why she’d waited until she was a middle-aged woman with hair starting to grey before discovering the pleasure. And it was a pleasure, particularly during this remarkable Indian summer, to feel the breeze rush against her warm cheeks as she whizzed along beside the hedgerow.

Percy crested the hill and leaned into the next dip, a smile spreading wide across her face. The entire landscape was turning to gold, birds twittered in the trees, and summer’s heat lingered in the air. September in Kent and she could almost convince herself she’d dreamed the announcement of the day before. She took the shortcut through Blackberry Lane, traced her way around the lake’s edge, then jumped off to walk her bicycle through the narrow stretch bordering the brook.

Percy passed the first couple shortly after she’d started through the tunnel; a boy and girl, not much older than Juniper, matching gas masks slung over their shoulders. They held hands and their heads were bowed so close as they conferred in earnest, low voices, that they barely registered her presence.

Soon a second, similarly arranged pair came into view, then a third. Percy nodded a greeting to the latter then wished immediately that she hadn’t; the girl smiled back shyly and leaned into the boy’s arm and they exchanged a glance of such youthful tenderness that Percy’s own cheeks flushed and she knew at once her blundering intrusion. Blackberry Lane had been a favourite spot for courting couples even when she was a girl, no doubt long before that. Percy knew that better than most. Her own love affair had been conducted for years beneath the strictest veil of secrecy, not least because there was no chance that it might ever be validated by marriage.

There were simpler romantic choices she could have made, suitable men with whom she might have fallen in love, with whom she could have conducted a courtship openly and without risk of exposing her family to derision, but love was not wise, not in Percy’s experience: it was unmindful of social strictures, cared not for lines of class or propriety or plain good sense. And no matter that she prided herself on her pragmatism Percy had been no more able to resist its call when it came than to stop herself from drawing breath. Thus, she had submitted, resigning herself to a lifetime of layered glances, smuggled letters and rare, exquisite assignations.

Percy’s cheeks warmed as she walked; it was little wonder she felt such special affinity with these young lovers. She kept her head down thereafter, focused on the leaf-strewn ground, ignoring all further passersby until she emerged at the roadside, remounted, and began to coast down into the village. She wondered, as she rode, how it was possible that the great machine of war might be grinding its wheels when the world was still so beautiful, when birds were in the trees and flowers in the fields, when lovers’ hearts still heaved with love.

The first inkling that Meredith needed to wee came when they were still amongst the grey and sooty buildings of London. She pressed her legs together and shuffled her suitcase hard onto her lap, wondered where precisely they were going and how much longer they had to wait before they got there. She was sticky and tired; she’d already eaten her way through her entire packed lunch of marmalade sandwiches and wasn’t remotely hungry, but she was bored and uncertain and she was sure she remembered seeing Mum tuck a pound of chocolate digestive biscuits into the suitcase that morning. She opened the spring locks and lifted the lid a crack: peered inside the dark cavity then threaded her hands in so she could rummage about. She could have lifted the lid entirely, of course, but it was best not to alert Rita with any sudden movements.

There was the topcoat Mum had sat up nights finishing; further to the left a tin of Carnation milk Meredith was under strict instructions to present to her hosts on arrival; behind it, a half-dozen bulky terry towels Mum had insisted she bring, in a mortifying conversation that had made Meredith cringe with embarrassment. ‘There’s every chance you’ll become a woman while you’re away, Merry,’ her mum had said. ‘Rita will be there to help, but you need to be prepared.’ And Rita had grinned and Meredith had shuddered and wondered at the slim chance that she might prove a rare biological exception. She ran her fingers around her notebook’s smooth cover, then – Bingo! Beneath it she found the paper bag filled with biscuits. The chocolate had melted a little, but she managed to liberate one. Turned her back on Rita as she nibbled her way around the edges.

Behind her one of the boys had started singing a familiar rhyme -

‘Under the spreading chestnut tree,

Neville Chamberlain said to me:

If you want to get your gas mask free,

Join the blinking ARP!’

– and Meredith’s eyes dropped to her own gas mask. She stuffed the rest of the biscuit in her mouth and brushed crumbs from the top of the box. Stupid thing with its horrid rubbery smell, the ghastly ripping sensation as it pulled off her skin. Mum had made them promise they’d wear their masks while they were away, that they’d carry them always, and Meredith, Ed and Rita had all given grudging agreement. Meredith had later heard Mum confessing to Mrs Paul next door that she’d sooner die of a gas attack than bear the horrid feeling of suffocation beneath the mask, and Meredith planned to lose hers just as soon as she was able.

There were people waving to them now, standing in their small backyards watching as the train steamed past. Out of nowhere, Rita pinched her arm and Meredith squealed. ‘Why’d you do that?’ she asked, slapping her hand over the stinging spot and rubbing it fiercely.

‘All those nice people out there just lookin’ for a show.’ Rita jerked her head towards the window. ‘Be a sport now, Merry; give ’em a few sobs, eh?’

Eventually, the city disappeared behind them and green was everywhere. The train clattered along the railway line, slowing occasionally to pass through stations, but the signs had all been removed so there was no way of knowing where they were. Meredith must have slept for a time because the next she knew the train was screeching to a halt and she was jerked awake. There was nothing new to see, nothing but more green, clumps of trees on the horizon, occasional birds cutting across the clear blue sky. For one brief elated moment after they’d stopped, Meredith thought they might be turning around, going home already. That Germany had recognized that Britain was not to be trifled with after all, the war was over, and there was no longer any need for them to go away.

But it wasn’t to be. After another lengthy wait, during which Roy Stanley managed to vomit yet more tinned pineapple through the window, they were all ordered out of the carriage and told to stand in line. Everyone received an injection, their hair was checked for lice, then they were told to get back on board and sent on their way. There wasn’t even an opportunity to use a toilet.

The train was quiet for a while after that; even the babies were too worn out to cry. They travelled and they travelled, on and on, for what seemed like hours and Meredith began to wonder how big England was; when, if ever, they’d reach a cliff. And it occurred to her that perhaps the whole thing was really a great big conspiracy, that the train driver was a German, and it was all part of some devious plot to abscond with England’s children. There were problems with the theory, holes in its logic – what, for instance, could Hitler possibly want with thousands of new citizens who couldn’t be relied on not to wet their beds? – but by then Meredith was too tired, too thirsty, too utterly miserable, to fill them, so she squeezed her legs together even tighter and started counting fields instead. Fields and fields and fields, leading her to God knew what or where.

All houses have hearts; hearts that have loved, hearts that have billowed with contentment, hearts that have been broken. The heart at the centre of Milderhurst was larger than most and it beat more powerfully. It thumped and paused, raced and slowed, in the small room at the top of the tower. The room where Raymond Blythe’s many times greatgrandfather had sweated over sonnets for Queen Elizabeth; from which a great-aunt had escaped to sweet sojourn with Lord Byron; and upon whose brick ledge his mother’s shoe had caught as she leaped from the little archer’s window to meet her death in the sun-warmed moat below, her final poem fluttering behind her on a sheet of fine paper.

Standing at the great oak desk, Raymond loaded his pipe bowl with a fresh pinch of tobacco, then another. After his littlest brother Timothy died, his mother had retreated to the room, cloaked in the black singe of her own sorrow. He’d glimpsed her by the window when he was down at the grotto, or in the gardens, or on the edge of the woods, the dark shape of her small, neat head facing out towards the fields, the lake: the ivory profile, so like that on the brooch she wore, passed down from her mother before her, the French countess Raymond had never met. Sometimes he’d stayed outside all day, darting in and out of the hop vines, scaling the barn roof, in the hope that she would notice him, worry for him, shout him down. But she never did. It was always Nanny who called him in when the day was spent.

But that was long ago and he a foolish old man becoming lost amidst fading memories. His mother was little more than a distantly revered poetess around whom myths were beginning to form as myths were wont to do – the whisper of a summer’s breeze, the promise of sunlight against a blank wall – Mummy… He wasn’t even sure he could still remember her voice.

The room belonged to him now: Raymond Blythe, King of the Castle. He was his mother’s eldest son, her heir and, along with the poems, her greatest legacy. An author in his own right, commanding respect and – it was only honest, he countered when a wave of humility threatened – a certain fame, just as she had done before him. Had she known, he often wondered, when she’d bequeathed the castle to him along with her passion for the written word, that he would rise to meet her expectations? That he would one day do his bit to further the family’s reach in literary circles?

His bad knee seized suddenly and Raymond clutched it hard, stretching his foot in front of him until the tension eased. He hobbled to the window and leaned against the ledge while he struck a match. It was a damn near perfect day and as he sucked on his pipe to get it smoking, he squinted across the fields, the driveway, the lawn, the quivering mass of Cardarker Wood. The great wild woods of Milderhurst that had brought him home from London, that had called to him from the battlefields of France, that had always known his name.

What would become of it all when he was gone? Raymond knew his doctor spoke the truth; he wasn’t stupid, only old. And yet it was impossible to believe that a time was coming in which he would no longer sit by this window and look out across the estate, master of all that he surveyed. That the Blythe family name, the family legacy, would die with him. Raymond’s thoughts faltered; the responsibility to avoid this had been his. He ought to have remarried, perhaps, tried again to find a woman who could deliver him a son. The matter of legacy had been very much on his mind of late.

Raymond drew on his pipe and puffed with soft derision, just as he might in company with an old friend whose familiar ways were becoming tiresome. He was being melodramatic, of course, a sentimental old fool. Perhaps every man liked to believe that without his presence the great foundations would crumble? Every man as proud as he, at any rate. And Raymond knew he ought to tread more carefully, that pride comes before a fall, as the Bible warned. Besides, he had no need of a son: he had a choice of successors, three daughters, none of them of the marriageable type; and then there was the church, his new church. His priest had spoken to him recently of the eternal rewards awaiting men who saw fit to honour the Catholic brethren in such a generous way. Canny Father Andrews knew Raymond could use all the heavenly goodwill he could arrange.

He took in a mouthful of smoke, held it a moment before exhaling. Father Andrews had explained it to him, the reason for the haunting, what must be done to exorcise Raymond’s demon. He was being punished, he knew now, for his sin. His sins. To repent, to confess, even to self-flagellate had not been enough; Raymond’s crime was greater than that.

But could he really hand his castle over to strangers, even to smite the wretched demon? What would become of all the whispering voices, the distant hours, caught within her stones? He knew what Mother would say: the castle must stay within the Blythe family. Could he really bear to disappoint her? Especially when he had such a fine natural successor: Persephone, the eldest and most reliable of his children. He’d watched her leave by bicycle that morning, watched as she stopped by the bridge to check its footings, just as he’d once shown her. She was the only one amongst them whose love for the castle came close to matching his own. A blessing that she’d never found a husband, and wouldn’t now, certainly. She’d become a castle fixture, as much his own possession as the statues in the yew hedge; she could be trusted never to do wrong by Milderhurst. Indeed, Raymond sometimes suspected she, like he, would strangle a man with her bare hands if he so much as threatened to remove a stone.

He noticed then the noise of an engine, a motorcar, somewhere below. As quickly as it had started it stopped, a door slammed, heavy, metallic, and Raymond craned to see over the stone windowsill. It was the big old Daimler; someone had driven it from the garage to the top of the driveway, only to abandon it. His attention caught on a moving figment. A pale sprite, his youngest, Juniper, skipping from the front stairs to the driver’s door. Raymond smiled to himself, bemusement and pleasure combined. She was a scatty waif, that was certain, but what that thin, loopy child could do with twenty-six simple letters, the arrangements she could make, were breathtaking. If he a were a younger man, he might have been jealous-

Another noise. Closer. Inside.

Hush… Can you hear him?

Raymond froze, listening.

The trees can. They are the first to know that he is coming.

Footsteps on the landing below. Climbing, climbing towards him. He laid his pipe down on the flat stone. His heart had begun to kick.

Listen! The trees of the deep, dark wood, shivering and jittering their leaves… whispering that soon it will begin.

He exhaled as steadily as he could; it was time. The Mud Man had come at last, seeking his revenge. Just as Raymond had known he must.

He couldn’t escape the room, not with the demon on the stairs. The only other option was through the window. Raymond glanced over the sill. Straight down like an arrow just as his mother had done.

‘Mr Blythe?’ A voice drifted up the stairs. Raymond readied himself. The Mud Man could be clever; he had many tricks. Every inch of Raymond’s skin crawled; he strained to hear over his own rough breaths.

‘Mr Blythe?’ The demon spoke again, closer this time. Raymond ducked behind the armchair. Crouched, quivering. A coward to the very end. The footsteps came steadily. At the door. On the carpet. Closer, closer. He screwed shut his eyes, hands over his head. The thing was right above him.

‘Oh, Raymond, you poor, poor man. Come along; give Lucy your hand. I’ve brought you some lovely soup.’

On the outskirts of the village, either side of the High Street, the twin lines of poplars stood as ever, like weary soldiers from another time. They were back in uniform now, Percy noted as she whizzed by, new white stripes of paint around their trunks; the kerbs had been painted, too, and the wheel rims of many cars. After much talk, the blackout order had finally come into effect the night before: half an hour past sundown the streetlights had been extinguished, no car headlights were allowed, and all windows had been curtained with heavy black cloth. After Percy had checked on Daddy, she’d climbed the stairs to the top of the tower and looked out across the village in the direction of the Channel. The moon had cast the only light and Percy had experienced the eerie sensation of feeling what it must have been like hundreds of years before, when the world was a far darker place, when armies of knights thundered across the land, horses’ hooves thrummed the hard soil, castle guards stood poised and ready- She swerved as old Mr Donaldson drove along the street seemingly right at her, steering wheel gripped tight, elbows stuck out to the sides, face held in a grimace as he squinted through his specs at the road ahead. He brightened when he made out who she was, lifted his hand to wave and dragged his car even closer to the road’s edge. Percy waved back from the safety of the grass, following his progress with a barb of concern as he zigzagged towards his home at Bell Cottage. What would he be like once night fell? She sighed; bombs be damned, it was the darkness that was going to kill people around here.

To a casual observer, unaware of the previous day’s announcement, it might have appeared that all was unchanged in the heart of Milderhurst village. People were still going about their business, shopping for groceries, chatting in small groups outside the post office, but Percy knew better. There was no wailing or gnashing of teeth, it was more subtle than that and perhaps the sadder for it. Impending war was evidenced by the faraway expression in the older villagers’ eyes, the shadows on their faces, not of fear but of sorrow. Because they knew; they had lived through the last war and they remembered the generation of young men who had marched away so willingly and never come back. Those too, like Daddy, who had made it home but left in France a part of themselves that they could never recover. Who surrendered to moments, periodically, in which their eyes filmed and their lips whitened, and their minds gave over to sights and sounds they wouldn’t share but couldn’t shake.

Percy and Saffy had listened together to Prime Minister Chamberlain’s announcement on the wireless the day before and had sat through the national anthem in deep thought.

‘I suppose we shall have to tell him now,’ Saffy had said eventually.

‘I suppose so.’

‘You’ll do it, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘Choose your moment carefully? Find a way to keep him sensible?’

‘Yes.’

For weeks they’d put off mentioning to Daddy the likelihood of war. His most recent descent into delusion had further ruptured the tissue connecting him to reality and he’d been left swinging between extremes like the pendulum in the grandfather clock. One moment he seemed perfectly reasonable, speaking to her intelligently of the castle and of history and the great works of literature, the next he was hiding behind chairs, sobbing in fear of imagined spectres, or giggling like a cheeky schoolboy, begging Percy to come paddling with him in the brook, telling her he knew the best place for collecting frogspawn, that he’d show her if only she knew how to keep a secret.

When they were eight years old, in the summer before the Great War started, she and Saffy had worked with Daddy on making their own translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He would read the original Middle English poetry and Percy would close her eyes as the magical sounds, the ancient whispers, surrounded her.

‘Gawain felt etaynes that hym anelede,’ Daddy would say: ‘the giants blowing after him, Persephone. Do you know how that feels? Have you ever heard the voices of your ancestors breathing from the stones?’ And she would nod, and curl up tighter beside him, and close her eyes while he continued…

Things had been so uncomplicated then, her love for Daddy had been so uncomplicated. He’d been seven foot tall and fashioned of steel and she’d have done and thought anything to be approved of by him. So much had happened since, though, and to see him now, his old face adopting the avid expressions of childhood, was almost too much for Percy to bear. She would never have confessed it to anyone, certainly not to Saffy, but Percy could hardly stand to look at Daddy when he was in one of what the doctor called his ‘regressive phases’. The problem was the past. It wouldn’t leave her alone. Nostalgia was threatening to be her ball and chain, which was an irony because Percy Blythe did not go in for sentimentality.

Netted by unwanted melancholy, she wheeled her bicycle the final short distance to the church hall and propped it against the wooden face of the building, careful not to squash the vicar’s garden bed.

‘Good morning, Miss Blythe.’

Percy smiled at Mrs Collins. The old dear who, in some inexplicable curvature of time, had seemed ancient for at least three decades, had a knitting bag strung over one arm and was clutching a fresh-baked victoria sponge. ‘Oh, but Miss Blythe,’ she said with a woeful shake of her fine silvery curls, ‘did you ever think it would come to this? Another war?’

‘I hoped it wouldn’t, Mrs Collins, I really did. But I can’t say I’m surprised, human nature being what it is.’

‘But another war.’ The curls shivered again. ‘All those young boys.’

Mrs Collins had lost both her sons to the Great War, and although Percy had no children of her own, she knew what it was to love so fiercely that it burned. With a smile, she took the cake from her old friend’s trembling grasp and hooked one of Mrs Collins’s arms over her own. ‘Come on, my dear. Let’s go inside and find ourselves a seat, shall we?’

The Women’s Voluntary Service had decided to meet in the church hall for their sewing bee after certain vocal members of the group had declared the larger village hall, with its wide wooden floor and lack of ornamental detail, a far more suitable site for the processing of evacuees. As Percy took in the huge crowd of eager women clustered around the assembled tables, however, setting up sewing machines, rolling out great swathes of fabric from which to make clothing and blankets for the evacuees, bandages and swabs for the hospitals, she thought that it might have been a foolish choice. She wondered too how many of this number would drop away after the initial excitement wore off, then chastised herself for being uncharitably sour. Not to mention hypocritical, for Percy knew she’d be the first to make her excuses just as soon as she found another way to contribute to the war effort. She was no use with a needle and had come today simply because, while it was the duty of all to do what they could, it was the duty of Raymond Blythe’s daughters to give what they couldn’t a damn good go.

She helped Mrs Collins into a seat at the knitting table, where conversation, as might be expected, was about the sons and brothers and nephews who were set to join up, then delivered the victoria sponge to the kitchen, careful to avoid Mrs Caraway, who was wearing the same dogged expression that always presaged delivery of a particularly nasty task.

‘Well now, Miss Blythe.’ Mrs Potts from the post office reached out to accept the offering, held it up for inspection. ‘And what a lovely rise you’ve managed here.’

‘The cake comes courtesy of Mrs Collins. I’m merely its courier.’ Percy attempted a swift escape, but Mrs Potts, practised in conversational entrapment, cast her net too fast.

‘We missed you at ARP training on Friday.’

‘I was otherwise engaged.’

‘What a pity. Mr Potts always says what a wonderful casualty you make.’

‘How kind of him.’

‘And there’s no one can wield a stirrup pump with quite so much verve.’

Percy smiled thinly. Sycophancy had never been so tiresome.

‘And tell me, how’s your father?’ A thick layer of hungry sympathy coated the question and Percy fought the urge to plant Mrs Collins’s marvellous sponge right across the postmistress’s face. ‘I hear he’s taken a bad turn?’

‘He’s as well as might be expected, Mrs Potts. Thank you for asking.’ An image came to her of Daddy some nights ago, running down the hallway in his gown, cowering behind the stairs and crying like a frightened child, sobbing that the tower was haunted, that the Mud Man was coming for him. Dr Bradbury had been called in and had left stronger medicine for them to administer, but Daddy had quivered for hours, fighting against it with all he had, until finally he fell into a dead sleep.

‘Such a pillar of the community.’ Mrs Potts affected a sorrowful tremor. ‘Such a shame when their health begins to slide. But what a blessing he has someone like you to carry on his charitable works. Especially in a time of national emergency. People around here do look to the castle when times are uncertain – they always have.’

‘Very kind of you, Mrs Potts. We all do our best.’

‘I expect we’ll be seeing you over at the village hall this afternoon, helping the evacuation committee?’

‘You will.’

‘I’ve already been over there this morning, arranging the tins of condensed milk and corned beef: we’re sending one of each with every child. It isn’t much, but with hardly a scrap of assistance from the authorities it was the best we could offer. And every little bit helps, doesn’t it? I hear you’re planning on taking in a child yourself. Very noble of you: Mr Potts and I talked about it of course, and you know me, I’d dearly love to help, but my poor Cedric’s allergies – ’ she raised an apologetic shoulder heavenwards – ‘well, they’d never stand it.’ Mrs Potts leaned in closer and tapped the end of her nose. ‘Just a little warning: those living in the East End of London have entirely different standards from our own. You’d be well advised to get in some Keating’s and a good-quality disinfectant before you let one of them set foot inside the castle.’

And although Percy harboured her own grim fears as to the character of their soon-to-be lodger, Mrs Potts’s suggestion was so distasteful that she plucked a cigarette from the case in her handbag and lit it, just to be spared answering.

Mrs Potts carried on undeterred. ‘And I suppose you’ve heard the other exciting news?’

Percy shifted her feet, keen to pursue alternative occupation. ‘What’s that, Mrs Potts?’

‘Why, you must know all about it, up there at the castle. You probably have far more of the details than any of us.’

Naturally at that moment silence had fallen and the entire group turned to regard Percy. She did her best to ignore them. ‘The details of what, Mrs Potts?’ Irritation lengthened her spine a good inch. ‘I have no idea of what you’re speaking.’

‘Why.’ The gossip’s eyes widened and her face brightened with the realization that she was a star performer with a new audience: ‘The news about Lucy Middleton, of course.’

THREE

Milderhurst Castle, September 4th, 1939

Evidently there was a trick to applying the glue and plastering the fabric strip without gumming up the glass. The perky woman in the illustrated guide didn’t seem to be having any difficulty reinforcing her windows; indeed she looked positively chipper about the whole prospect, tiny waist, neat haircut, bland smile. No doubt she’d be equal to the bombs, too, when they fell. Saffy, by contrast, was flummoxed. She’d started on the windows back in July when the pamphlets first arrived, but despite the sage advice in the Ministry’s pamphlet number two: ‘Do not leave things to the last!’, she’d slackened somewhat when it looked as if war might yet be averted. With Mr Chamberlain’s ghastly announcement, however, she was back at it. Thirty-two windows crisscrossed, a mere hundred left to go. Why she hadn’t just used tape, she’d never know.

She pasted the last corner of cloth into place and climbed down off the chair, stepping back to observe her handiwork. Oh dear; she tilted her head a little and frowned at the skewed cross. It would hold, just, but it was no work of art.

‘Bravo,’ said Lucy, coming through the door just then with the tray of tea. ‘X marks the spot, don’t they say?’

‘I certainly hope not. Mr Hitler should be warned: he’ll have Percy to answer to if his bombs so much as graze the castle.’ Saffy swiped the towel against her sticky hands. ‘I’m afraid this glue has quite set against me; I can’t think what I’ve done to offend it, but offend it I have.’

‘Glue with a mood. How terrifying!’

‘It’s not the only one. Forget the bombs, I’m going to need a good nerve tonic after dealing with these windows.’

‘Tell you what – ’ Lucy was pouring from the pot and she let the phrase hang while she finished the second cup – ‘I’ve taken your father his lunch already; why don’t I lend you a hand here?’

‘Oh, Lucy darling, would you? What a brick! I could weep with gratitude.’

‘No need for all that.’ Lucy fought back a glad smile. ‘I’ve just finished my own house and it turns out I have a way with glue. Shall I paste while you cut?’

‘Perfect!’ Saffy tossed the towel back onto the chair. Her hands were still tacky but they’d do. When Lucy handed her a cup, she took it gratefully. They stood for a moment, sharing the companionable silence as each savoured a first sip. It had become something of a habit, taking tea together like this. Nothing fancy: they didn’t stop their daily tasks or lay the best silver; they just managed to be busy together in the same place at the right time of day. Percy, had she known, would’ve been horrified; she’d have come over all frowns and glowers, pursed her lips and said things like, ‘It isn’t proper,’ and, ‘Standards should be maintained.’ But Saffy liked Lucy – they were friends, after a fashion, and she couldn’t see that sharing tea could do any harm at all. Besides, what Percy didn’t know couldn’t hurt her.

‘And tell me, Lucy,’ she said, breaking the silence and thereby signalling that they might both resume their work, ‘how’s the house going?’

‘Very well indeed, Miss Saffy.’

‘You’re not too lonely there by yourself?’ Lucy and her mother had lived together always in the little cottage on the village’s outskirts. Saffy could only imagine what a gap the old woman’s death must have left.

‘I keep myself busy.’ Lucy had balanced her teacup on the windowsill while she ran the glue-laden brush diagonally across the pane. For a moment Saffy thought she detected a sadness in the housekeeper’s face, as if she’d been about to confess some deep feeling but had thought better of it.

‘What is it, Lucy?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing.’ She hesitated. ‘Only that, I miss Mother, of course…’

‘Of course.’ Lucy was discreet (to a fault, the nosier part of Saffy sometimes thought), but over the years Saffy had gleaned enough to know that Mrs Middleton was not an easy person. ‘But?’

‘But I do quite enjoy my own company.’ She glanced sideways at Saffy. ‘If that doesn’t sound too awful?’

‘Not awful at all,’ Saffy said with a smile. Truthfully, she thought it sounded wonderful. She began to picture her own little dream flatlet in London, then stopped herself. On a day when she was pillar to post with chores it was foolish to become distracted. She sat on the floor and set about running the scissors through the fabric, making strips. ‘Things all right upstairs, are they, Lucy?’

‘The room looks lovely; I’ve aired it and changed the linen, and I hope you don’t mind,’ she smoothed out a piece of fabric, ‘but I’ve put away your grandmother’s Chinese vase. I can’t think how I missed it when we were wrapping and storing the precious items last week. It’s safe and sound now, tucked away in the muniment room with the others.’

‘Oh,’ Saffy’s eyes widened, searching Lucy’s face, ‘but you don’t think we’ll get a little wretch, do you? Intent on breaking things and wreaking havoc?’

‘Not at all. I just thought it was as well to be safe rather than sorry.’

‘Yes.’ Saffy nodded as the housekeeper took up a new piece of fabric. ‘Very wise, Lucy, and of course you’re right. I should have thought of it myself. Percy will be pleased.’ She sighed. ‘All the same; I thought we might put a little bunch of fresh flowers on the nightstand. Raise the poor little mite’s spirits? Perhaps a glass vase from the kitchen?’

‘Far more suitable. I’ll find one, shall I?’

Saffy smiled agreement, but as she pictured the child’s arrival her smile staled and she shook her head. ‘Oh, but isn’t it ghastly, Lucy?’

‘I’m sure no one expects you to offer your best crystal.’

‘No, I mean the whole thing. The proposition itself. All those frightened children, their poor mothers back in London having to smile and wave as they watch their babies disappear into the great unknown. And for what? All to clear the stage for war. So young men can be forced to kill other young men in far-off places.’

Lucy turned to look at Saffy, surprise in her eyes, some concern mixed in. ‘You mustn’t go getting yourself all upset now.’

‘I know, I know. I won’t.’

‘It’s up to us to keep morale high.’

‘Of course.’

‘It’s lucky there are people like you willing to take the poor little wretches in. What time are you expecting the child?’

Saffy set down her empty teacup and took up the scissors again. ‘Percy says the buses arrive sometime between three and six; she couldn’t be any more specific than that.’

‘She’s making the selection then?’ Lucy’s voice had caught a little, and Saffy knew what she was thinking: Percy was hardly the obvious choice when it came to maternal matters.

As Lucy shifted the chair to the next window, Saffy scampered along the floor to keep up. ‘It was the only way I could get her to agree – you know how she is about the castle; she has images of some unholy terror snapping curlicues off the banisters, scribbling on the wallpaper, setting the curtains on fire. I have to keep reminding her that these walls have stood for hundreds of years, that they’ve survived invasions by the Normans, the Celts, and Juniper. One poor child from London isn’t going to make any difference.’

Lucy laughed. ‘Speaking of Miss Juniper, will she be in for lunch? Only I thought I saw her leaving in your father’s car earlier?’

Saffy waved the scissors in the air. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. The last time I knew Juniper’s mind was…’ She thought for a moment, chin on her knuckles, then released her arms theatrically. ‘You know, I can’t remember a single time.’

‘Miss Juniper has talents other than predictability.’

‘Yes,’ said Saffy with a fond smile. ‘She certainly has.’

Lucy hesitated then, climbed back down to the ground and drew slim fingers across her forehead. A funny, old-fashioned motion, a little like a damsel contemplating a fainting spell; it amused Saffy and she wondered whether she could incorporate the endearing habit into her novel – it seemed just the sort of thing that Adele might do when made nervous by a man…

‘Miss Saffy?’

‘Mmm?’

‘There is something rather serious I wanted to talk to you about.’

Lucy exhaled but didn’t continue and Saffy wondered for a terrible, hot instant whether she might be ill. Whether there’d been bad news from the doctor: it would explain Lucy’s reticence and, come to think of it, her recent habit of distraction. Why, just the other morning, Saffy had come into the kitchen to see Lucy watching unseeingly from the back door, across the kitchen garden and beyond, whilst Daddy’s eggs continued to boil far beyond his usual soft preference.

‘What is it, Lucy?’ Saffy stood up, gesturing that Lucy should join her in the sitting area. ‘Is everything all right? You’re peaky. Shall I fetch you a glass of water?’

Lucy shook her head but glanced about for something to lean on, choosing the back of the nearest armchair.

Saffy sat on the chaise longue and waited; and in the end, when Lucy’s news finally burst forth, she was glad that she was seated.

‘I’m going to be married,’ said Lucy. ‘That is, someone has asked me to marry him and I’ve said yes.’

For a moment Saffy wondered if the housekeeper was delusional, or at least playing a trick. Quite simply, it made no sense: Lucy, dear reliable Lucy, who had never once in all the years she’d worked at Milderhurst so much as mentioned a male companion, let alone stepped out with a fellow, was to be married? Now, out of the blue like this, and at her age? Why, she was a few years older than Saffy, surely nearing forty years old.

Lucy shifted where she stood and Saffy realized that silence had fallen rather heavily between them and it was her turn to speak. Her tongue moved around some words, but she couldn’t seem to utter them.

‘I’m getting married,’ said Lucy again, more slowly this time, and with the sort of caution that suggested she was still getting used to the notion herself.

‘But Lucy, that’s wonderful news,’ said Saffy, all in a rush. ‘And who is the lucky fellow? Where did you meet him?’

‘Actually,’ Lucy flushed. ‘We met here, at Milderhurst.’

‘Oh?’

‘It’s Harry Rogers. I’m marrying Harry Rogers. He’s asked me and I’ve said yes.’

Harry Rogers. The name was familiar, vaguely; Saffy felt sure she should know the gentleman, but she couldn’t find a face to match the name. But how embarrassing! Saffy could feel her cheeks reddening and she covered her dilemma by planting a broad smile on her face, hoped it was sufficient to convince Lucy of her delight.

‘We’d known one another for years, of course, what with him visiting so regularly at the castle, but we only started walking out together a couple of months ago. It was right after the grandfather clock began playing up, back in spring.’

Harry Rogers. But not, surely, the hirsute little clock man? Why, he was neither handsome nor gallant nor, from what Saffy had observed, remotely witty. He was a common man, interested only in chatting with Percy about the state of the castle and the inside workings of clocks. Obliging enough, as far as Saffy could tell, and Percy had always spoken kindly of him (until Saffy chided that he’d be sweet on her if she weren’t careful); nonetheless, he wasn’t at all the right man for Lucy with her pretty face and easy laugh. ‘But how did this happen?’ The question had risen and bubbled out before Saffy could even think to stem it. Lucy didn’t appear to take offence, answering directly, almost too quickly, Saffy thought; as if she herself needed to hear the words spoken in order to understand how such a thing could have occurred.

‘He’d been up to see about the clock and I was leaving early on account of Mother being poorly, and it just so happened that we bumped into one another on our way out of the door. He offered me a lift home and I took it. We struck up a friendship and then, when Mother passed away… Well, he was very kind. Quite a gentleman.’

There fell then a pall of silence in which the scenario played out variously in each of their minds. Saffy, though surprised, was also curious. It was the writer in her, she supposed: wondering at the type of conversation the two might have had in Mr Rogers’s little motorcar; how, exactly, one thoughtful lift home had blossomed into a love affair. ‘And you’re happy?’

‘Oh yes.’ Lucy smiled. ‘Yes, I’m happy.’

‘Well.’ Saffy forced strength into her own smile, ‘Then I’m enormously happy for you. And you must bring him up for tea. A little celebration!’

‘Oh no.’ Lucy shook her head. ‘No. It’s kind of you, Miss Saffy, but I don’t think that would be wise.’

‘Why ever not?’ said Saffy, though as she said it she knew perfectly well why not, and suffered a wave of embarrassment for not having found a smarter way to extend the invitation. Lucy was far too proper to entertain the notion of dining with her employers. With Percy, especially.

‘We’d rather not make a fuss,’ she said. ‘We’re neither of us young. There won’t be a long engagement; there’s no point in waiting, what with the war.’

‘But surely at his age Harry won’t be going-?’

‘Oh no, nothing like that. He’ll be doing his bit though, with Mr Potts’s mob. He was in the first war, you know; at Passchendaele. Alongside my brother – alongside Michael.’

There was a new expression on Lucy’s face then – a type of pride, Saffy realized, a tentative pleasure shot through with mild self-consciousness. It was the novelty, of course, the recent change in circumstance. Lucy was still becoming used to this new persona, that of a woman soon to be married, a woman who was part of a couple, who had a male counterpart through whom she might be clothed in reflected glory. Saffy warmed a little vicariously; she couldn’t think of anyone she knew who deserved happiness as much as Lucy. ‘Well, of course, that all makes very good sense,’ she said. ‘And you must certainly take a few days for yourself either side of the wedding. Perhaps I could-’

‘Actually.’ Lucy pressed her lips together and concentrated on the patch of space above Saffy’s left shoulder. ‘That’s the thing I really must talk to you about.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes,’ Lucy smiled, but not easily and not happily, then the smile fell away leaving only a slight sigh in its place. ‘It’s rather awkward you see, but Harry would prefer… that is, he thinks that once we’re married it would be best if I stay at home; look after his house and do my bit for the war effort.’ Perhaps Lucy felt as keenly as Saffy that further explanation was required for she went on to say, quickly, ‘And in case we should be blessed with children.’

And then Saffy understood; it was as if a great veil had been lifted. Everything that had been blurred came into focus: Lucy wasn’t in love with Harry Rogers any more than Saffy was, she merely yearned for a baby. It was a wonder Saffy hadn’t figured it out straightaway; it was so plain now that she knew. It was, in fact, the only explanation. Harry had offered her that one last chance; what woman in Lucy’s position wouldn’t make the same decision? Saffy fingered her locket, ran a thumb over the snib, and felt a surge of kinship with Lucy, a flush of sisterly affection and understanding so strong that she was overcome with a sudden desire to tell Lucy everything, to explain that she, Saffy, knew exactly how she felt.

She opened her mouth to do just that, but found no words had come. She smiled slightly, blinked and was astonished to feel a wave of warm tears threatening to spill. Lucy, meanwhile, had turned away, was searching her pockets for something, and Saffy, recovering her composure as best she could, glanced surreptitiously towards the window, watching as a single black bird sailed an invisible current of warm air.

She blinked again and everything took on a misty veneer. But how ridiculous it was to cry! It was the war of course, the uncertainty, the wretched, hateful windows!

‘I’m going to miss you too, Miss Saffy. All of you. I’ve spent over half my life here at Milderhurst; I always assumed I’d end my days here too.’ A slight hesitation. ‘If that doesn’t sound too morbid?’

‘Terribly morbid.’ Saffy smiled through tears, pinching the locket again beneath her fingers. Lucy would be dreadfully missed, but that wasn’t the only reason Saffy wept. She didn’t open the locket any more; she didn’t need the photograph to see his face. The young man with whom she’d been in love, who’d been in love with her. The future had stretched ahead, anything had been possible, everything. Before it was all stolen from her-

But Lucy knew none of that, and if she did, if over the years she’d gathered threads here and there, connected them to form a rueful picture, she was polite enough never to mention it. Even now. ‘The wedding will be in April,’ she continued softly, handing Saffy an envelope she’d drawn from her pocket. Her letter of resignation, Saffy realized. ‘Spring. In the village church, just a small wedding. Nothing fancy. I’d be very happy to stay on until then, but I understand if…’ There were tears in her eyes now. ‘I’m so sorry, Miss Saffy, not to give you more notice. Especially at a time like this, with help so difficult to find.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Saffy. She shivered, aware suddenly of a draught, crisp against her damp cheeks. She pulled out her handkerchief and dabbed, noticed the smudges of face powder on the cloth. ‘Oh goodness,’ she said, pulling a face of mock horror, ‘what a mess I must look.’ She smiled at Lucy. ‘Now, never mind your apologies. You’re not to give it another thought, and you’re certainly not to do any more crying. Love is a thing to be celebrated, not wept over.’

‘Yes,’ said Lucy, looking anything but a woman in love. ‘Well then.’

‘Well then.’

‘I should get on.’

‘Yes.’ Saffy didn’t smoke, she couldn’t stand the smell or the taste of tobacco, but at that moment she wished she did. Something settling to do with her hands. She swallowed, straightened a little, drew strength as she often did by pretending to be Percy…

Oh dear. Percy.

‘Lucy?’

The housekeeper turned from where she was collecting the empty teacups.

‘What about Percy? Does she know about Harry? That you’re leaving us?’

The housekeeper’s face paled as she shook her head.

Unease set up camp in Saffy’s stomach. ‘Perhaps I ought to-?’

‘No,’ said Lucy, with a small, brave smile. ‘No. It’s something I must do.’

FOUR

Percy didn’t go home. Neither did she go on to the village hall to assist with the arrangement of corned beef tins. Saffy would later accuse her of forgetting to collect an evacuee on purpose, of never having wanted one in the first place; but although there was an element of truth in the latter accusation, Percy’s failure to show up at the hall had nothing to do with Saffy and everything to do with Mrs Potts’s gossip. Besides, as she reminded her twin, everything had worked out in the end: Juniper, unpredictable, beloved Juniper, had happened by the village hall quite by chance and Meredith had thus been plucked for the castle. Percy, meanwhile, having left the WVS meeting in something of a daze, had forgotten about her bicycle, turning to walk instead along the High Street, head held high, gait assured, looking for all the world like someone with a list in her pocket of a hundred tasks to be met by dinnertime. Giving no hint at all that she was the walking wounded, a ghostly echo of her former self. How she found herself at the hair salon she would never know, but that is precisely where her numb feet took her.

Percy’s hair had always been long and blonde, though never so long as Juniper’s nor so golden as Saffy’s. Percy didn’t mind either of these things; she’d never been the sort to pay much attention to her crowning glory. While Saffy left her hair long because she was vain and Juniper ignored hers because she wasn’t, Percy kept it that way for the simple reason that Daddy preferred it. He believed that girls should be pretty; that his daughters, especially, should have long fair hair that fell in waves down their backs.

Percy flinched as the hairdresser wetted and combed her hair until it was dishwater-dark and lank. Metal blades whispered cool against the back of her neck and the first hank dropped to the floor, where it lay still, a dead thing. She felt light.

The hairdresser had been shocked when Percy made the request, had asked her over and again if she were sure. ‘But your curls are so pretty,’ she’d said sadly; ‘do you really want them all off?’

‘All of them.’

‘But you won’t recognize yourself.’

No, Percy thought, and the notion had pleased her. When she’d sat in the chair, still in something of a dream, Percy had looked and met her own image in the mirror; caught herself in a moment of introspection. What she’d seen had disquieted her. A woman of increasing years, still wrapping her hair in rags at night to affect the girlish curls that nature had forgotten. Such fussing was all well and good for Saffy, who was a romantic, refusing even now to let go of old dreams and accept that her knight in shining armour was not coming, that her place was, and would always be, at Milderhurst; but it was laughable in Percy. Percy the pragmatist, Percy the planner, Percy the protector.

She should have cut off her hair years ago. The new style was trim and spare and although she couldn’t claim to look better, it was enough to know that she looked different. With each snip something inside her released, an old idea to which she’d been clinging without knowing it, so that finally, when the young hairdresser lay down the scissors and said, a little greenly, ‘There you are then, dear. Don’t you look neat?’ Percy had ignored the infuriating condescension to agree with some surprise that yes, she did indeed look neat.

Meredith had been waiting for hours, first standing, then sitting, now slouching on the wooden floor of Milderhurst village hall. As time stretched out, and the stream of farmers and local ladies dried completely, and the dark started to hover outside the windows, Meredith let herself wonder what dreadful fate might await her if she weren’t chosen at all, if nobody wanted her. Would she spend the next few weeks living here, alone, in the draughty hall? The very thought made her spectacles mist so that everything was blurred.

And it was then, at that precise moment, that she arrived. Swept in, like a resplendent angel, like something out of a made-up story, and rescued Meredith from the cold, hard floor. As if she knew somehow, through some sort of magic or sixth sense – something science was yet to explain – that she was needed.

Meredith didn’t see the actual entrance, she was too busy cleaning her spectacle lenses on the hem of her skirt but she did feel a crackle in the air and perceived the unnatural silence when it fell amongst the chirruping women.

‘Why, Miss Juniper,’ one of them said, as Meredith fumbled her spectacles back onto her nose and blinked towards the refreshments table. ‘What a surprise. And how may we be of assistance? Are you looking for Miss Blythe, because it’s quite a curious thing, but we haven’t seen her since midday-’

‘I’ve come for my evacuee,’ said the girl who must be Miss Juniper, cutting the woman off with a wave of her hand. ‘Don’t get up. I see her.’

And she started walking, passing the children in the front row, and Meredith blinked a few more times, looked over her shoulder and realized there was no one remaining there, then turned back just in time to find that splendid person standing directly above her. ‘Ready?’ the stranger said. Casually, lightly, as if they were old friends and the whole thing had been planned in advance.

Later, after Percy had lost hours somehow by the brook, sat cross-legged on a smooth-washed stone, built childish boats from whatever came to hand, she returned to the church hall to collect her bicycle. After such a warm day the evening had come in cool, and by the time Percy started for the castle, the falling dusk had shadowed the hills.

Despair had tangled Percy’s thoughts and she tried, as she pedalled, to straighten them. The engagement itself was devastating, but it was the duplicity that cut deepest. All this time – for there must have been a period of courtship leading to the proposal – Harry and Lucy had been sneaking behind her back, conducting their affair beneath her nose as if she were nothing to either of them, neither lover nor employer. The betrayal was like a hot iron to her chest; she wanted to scream, to tear at her own face, and his, and hers, to scratch and harm them both as they had wounded her. To bellow until her voice failed, to be beaten until she no longer felt pain, to close her eyes and never have to open them again.

But she would do none of those things. Percy Blythe did not behave in such a way.

Over the treetops, the oncoming darkness continued to bruise the distant fields and a flock of black birds took flight towards the Channel. The moon’s pale casing, as yet unlit, hung lifeless in the shadows. Percy wondered, idly, whether the bombers would come tonight.

With a short sigh she lifted one hand to press the newly exposed skin at the nape of her neck, then, as the breath of evening brushed her face, she pedalled harder. Harry and Lucy were to be married and nothing Percy did or said would change that fact. Crying would not help, neither would reproach. What was done was done. All that remained was for Percy to formulate and follow a new plan. To do what needed to be done, just as she always had.

When finally she reached the gates of Milderhurst, she swerved across the road and the rickety footbridge, and jumped off her bicycle. Although she’d done little more than sit all day, she was tired, and strangely so. Tired to the ends of her fingers. Her bones, her eyes, her arms, all airy, as if they were made up of grains. Like a rubber band that had been wound too tightly and unravelled now to find itself stretched and frayed, weak and shapeless. She fumbled with her handbag until she found a cigarette.

Percy walked the final mile, pushed the bicycle beside her as she smoked, stopping only when the castle came into view. Barely visible, a black armoury against the navy sky, not a chink of light showed. The curtains were drawn, the shutters were closed, the blackout was being followed to the letter. Good. The last thing she needed was for Hitler to set his sights on her castle.

She rested her bicycle on the ground and lay beside it on the night-cooled grass. Smoked another cigarette. Then another, her last. Percy curled onto her side and pressed her ear to the ground, listened as Daddy had shown her. Her family, her home, was built on a foundation of words, he’d said, time and again; the family tree laced together with sentences in place of limbs. Layers of expressed thought had soaked into the soil of the castle gardens so that poems and plays, prose and political treatises, would always whisper to her when she needed them. Ancestors she would never meet, who had lived and died before her birth, left behind them words, words, words, chattering to one another, to her, from beyond the grave, so she was never lonely, never alone.

After a time Percy stood, picked up her things and continued in silence towards the castle. Dusk had been swallowed by dark and the moon had arrived, the beautiful, traitorous moon, stretching her pale fingers over the landscape. A brave harvest mouse fled across a silver spill of lawn, fine grass quivered on the gentle rises of the fields, and beyond the woods shrugged blackly.

She could hear voices inside as she drew nearer: Saffy’s and Juniper’s, and another, a child’s voice, a girl. Allowing herself a moment’s hesitation, Percy climbed the first step, then the next, remembering the thousands of times she’d run through the door, in a hurry to get to the future, to whatever was coming next, to this moment.

As she stood there, hand poised to open the door of her home, as the tallest trees of Cardarker Wood bore witness, she made a promise: she was Persephone Blythe of Milderhurst Castle. There were other things in life she loved – not many, but there were some: her sisters, her father, and their castle, of course. She was the eldest – if only by a matter of minutes – she was Daddy’s heir, the only one of his children who shared his love for the stones, the soul, the secrets of their home. She would pick herself up and carry on. And she would make it her duty, from this moment forth, to ensure no harm befell any of them, that she did whatever was necessary to keep them all safe.