Kate Morton - The Distant Hours

She straightened in her chair, reached for her cigarette only to find it fallen to ash. ‘The past is like that,’ she said, as she battled another from the pack. ‘Always waiting to lure you away.’ She struck the match, drew impatiently and squinted at me through the haze. ‘I’ll be more careful from here on.’ The flame extinguished swiftly, as if to underline the intention. ‘My mother had struggled to have children and when she did she was waylaid with a depression so strong she could barely raise herself from her bed. When she finally recovered, she found that her family were no longer waiting for her. Her children hid behind her husband’s legs when she tried to hold them, cried and fought if she came too close. We took to using words from other languages, too, those that Daddy had taught us, so she wouldn’t understand. He would laugh and encourage us, delighting in our precocity. How ghastly we must have been. We hardly knew her, you see. We refused to be with her, we only wanted to be with Daddy and he with us, and so she grew lonely.’

Lonely. I wasn’t certain that a word had ever sounded quite as ominous as that one did on Percy Blythe’s lips. I remembered the daguerreotype images of Muriel Blythe I’d seen in the muniment room. I’d thought it odd then that they’d been hung in such a dark, forgotten place; now it seemed positively menacing. ‘What happened?’ I asked.

She looked at me sharply. ‘All in good time.’

An explosion of thunder sounded outside and Percy glanced towards the window. ‘A storm,’ she said with disgust. ‘Just what we need.’

‘Would you like me to close the window?’

‘No, not yet. I enjoy the air.’ She frowned at the floor as she pulled on her cigarette; she was collecting her thoughts and when she found them she met my eyes. ‘My mother took a lover. Who could blame her? It was my father who brought them together – not intentionally. This isn’t that type of story – he was trying to make amends. He must’ve known he was ignoring her, and he arranged for extensive improvements to the castle and gardens. Shutters were added to the downstairs windows to remind her of those she’d admired in Europe, and work was carried out on the moat. The digging went on for such a long time, and Saffy and I used to watch from the attic window. The architect’s name was Sykes.’

‘Oliver Sykes.’

She was surprised. ‘Well done, Miss Burchill. I knew you were astute but I didn’t suspect you of such architectural erudition.’

I shook my head and explained about Raymond Blythe’s Milderhurst . What I didn’t tell her was that I also knew of Raymond Blythe’s bequest to the Pembroke Farm Institute. Which meant, of course, that he hadn’t known of the affair.

‘Daddy didn’t know,’ she said, as if reading my thoughts. ‘But we did. Children know such things. It never occurred to us to tell him, though. As far as we were concerned, we were his world and he cared as little about Mother’s activities as we did.’ She shifted slightly and her blouse rippled. ‘I do not hold stock with regrets, Miss Burchill, nonetheless we are all accountable for our actions and I’ve wondered many times since whether that was the moment when the cards fell ill for the Blythes, even those not yet born. Whether it all might have turned out differently had Saffy and I only told him about seeing Mother and that man together.’

‘Why?’ Foolish of me to break her train of thought, but I couldn’t help myself. ‘Why would it have been better if you’d told him?’ I should have remembered that the stubborn streak in Percy Blythe took interruption hard.

She stood up, pressed her palms against the small of her narrow back and bowed her pelvis forward. Took a last draw on her cigarette stub, then tapped it out in the ashtray and walked stiffly to the window. I could see from where I sat that the sky hung dark and heavy, but her eyes narrowed at the distant glare still quavering on the horizon. ‘That letter you found,’ she said, as thunder rumbled closer, ‘I didn’t realize Daddy had kept it, but I’m glad he did. It took a lot for me to write it – he was so excited by the manuscript, the story. When Daddy returned from the war he was a shadow of himself. Skinny as a stovepipe with a horrid glassy shallowness to his eyes. We were kept from visiting much of the time – too disruptive, the nurses said – but we sneaked in anyway, through the castle veins. He’d be sitting by this window, looking out yet seeing nothing, and he’d speak of a great absence within him. His mind itched, he said, to be put to creative use, yet when he held a pen nothing came. “I am empty,” he said, over and over, and he was right. He was. You can imagine then, the restorative thrill when he began work on the notes that would become the Mud Man .’

I nodded, remembering the notebooks downstairs, the changed handwriting, heavy with confidence and intent from first line until last.

Lightning struck and Percy Blythe flinched. She waited out the answering thunder. ‘The words in that book were his, Miss Burchill; it was the idea he stole.’

From whom? I wanted to shout, but I bit my tongue this time.

‘It pained me to write that letter, to dampen his enthusiasm when the project so sustained him, but I had to.’ Rain began to fall, an instant sheen. ‘Soon after Daddy returned from France, I contracted scarlet fever and was sent away to recover. Twins, Miss Blythe, do not do well with solitude.’

‘It must have been awful-’

‘Saffy,’ she continued, as if she’d forgotten I were there, ‘was always the more imaginative. We were a balanced pair in that way, illusion and reality were kept in check. Separated, though, we each sharpened to opposing points.’ She shivered and stepped back from the window; spots of rain were falling on the sill. ‘My twin suffered terribly with nightmare. The fanciful among us often do.’ She glanced at me. ‘You will notice, Miss Burchill, that I did not say night mares . There was only ever one.’

The glowering storm outside had swallowed the day’s last light and the tower room fell to darkness. Only the fire’s orange flicker provided jagged relief. Percy returned to the desk and switched on its lamp. Light shone greenly through the coloured glass shade, casting dark shadows beneath her eyes. ‘She’d been dreaming about him since she was four years old. She would wake in the night screaming, bathed in sweat, convinced that a man coated in mud had climbed from the moat to claim her.’ A slight tilt of the head and Percy’s cheekbones leaped into relief. ‘I always soothed her. I told her it was just a dream, that no harm could come while I was there.’ She exhaled thornily. ‘Which was all well and good until July 1917.’

‘When you went away with the fever.’

A nod, so slight I might have imagined it.

‘So she told your father instead.’

‘He was hiding from his nurses when she found him. She was no doubt in quite a state – Saffy was never one for reserve – and he asked her what was wrong.’

‘And then he wrote it down.’

‘Her demon was his saviour. In the beginning, anyway. The story fired him: he sought her out, hungry for details. His attention flattered her, I’m sure, and by the time I returned from hospital things were very different. Daddy was bright, recovered, delirious almost, and he and Saffy shared a secret. Neither of them mentioned the Mud Man to me. It wasn’t until I saw proof copies of The True History of the Mud Man , on this desk right here, that I guessed what had happened.’

The rain was teeming now, and I got up to close the window so that I could hear. ‘And so you wrote the letter.’

‘I knew, of course, that for him to publish such a thing would be terrible for Saffy. He wouldn’t be convinced though, and he lived with the consequences for the rest of his life.’ Her attention drifted to the Goya again. ‘The guilt of what he’d done, his sin.’