Kate Morton - The Distant Hours

Taking great care to avoid the third step from the top – the last thing Saffy needed tonight was the little uncle’s ghost making mischief – she pushed open the nursery door and switched on the light. It glowed dully, as did all the Milderhurst electrics, and she paused a while in the doorway. Murky light aside, it was her custom when considering a foray into Juniper’s domain. There were few rooms on earth, Saffy suspected, where it was as prudent to plot a course before attempting entry. Squalor was perhaps going a little too far, but only a little.

The smell, she noticed, remained; the blend of stale tobacco smoke and ink, wet dog, and feral mouse, had been too stubborn for a single day’s breeze. The doggy odour was easily explained – Juniper’s mutt Poe had languished in her absence, splitting his moping between the top of the driveway and the end of her bed. As to the mice, Saffy wasn’t sure whether Juniper had been feeding them on purpose or if the little opportunists were merely benefiting from her slatternly occupation of the attic. Either was possible. And, although she wouldn’t confess it too widely, Saffy quite liked the mousy smell; it reminded her of Clementina, whom she’d bought from the Harrods pet department on the morning of her eighth birthday. Tina had been a dear little companion, right up until the unfortunate altercation with Percy’s snake, Cyrus. Rats were a much-maligned breed, cleaner than people gave them credit for and truly companionable, the nobility of the rodent world.

Having glimpsed the clear-ish passage to the far window – a legacy of her previous expedition – Saffy started gingerly through the jumble. If Nanny could only see the place now! Gone were the clean, clear days of her reign, the supervised milky suppers, the little broomette pulled out at night for crumbs, the twin desks against the wall, the lingering scent of beeswax and Pears soap. No, Nanny’s epoch had been ended well and truly; replaced, it seemed to Saffy, by anarchy. Paper, paper everywhere, inked with odd instructions, illustrations, questions Juniper had written to herself; clusters of dust gathering contentedly, lining the skirting boards like chaperones at a dance. There were things stuck to walls, pictures of people and places and oddly assembled words that had, for some inexplicable reason, captured Juniper’s imagination; and the floor was a sea of books, articles of clothing, cups with dubiously grimy insides, makeshift ashtrays, favourite dolls with blinking eyes, old bus tickets with scribble around their edges. The whole made Saffy lightheaded and decidedly queasy. Was that a bread crust beneath the quilt? If so, it had hardened by now into a museum piece.

Though tidying up after Juniper was a nasty habit and one against which Saffy had long ago waged war and won, on this occasion she couldn’t help herself. Mess was one thing, comestibles quite another. With a shudder she reached down, wrapped the granite-hard crust in the quilt and hurried to the closest window, releasing the crust and listening for the dull thud as it hit the old moat grass below. Another shudder as she shook out the quilt, then she pulled the window closed and sealed the blackout curtains.

The tatty quilt would need washing and patching, but that was for another day; for now Saffy would have to content herself with giving it a thorough folding. Not too neatly, of course – though Juniper, it was safe to assume, would neither notice nor care – just enough to restore to it some semblance of dignity. The quilt, Saffy thought fondly, drawing the corners to arm’s length, deserved better than a four-month furlough on the floor playing shroud to a stale lump of bread. It had been a gift originally, one of the estate farmer’s wives had sewn it for Juniper many years before, that being the sort of unsolicited affection Juniper tended to inspire. Although most people would be touched by such a gesture, bound by it to take special care of the item, Juniper was not most people. She placed no greater value on the creations of others than she placed on her own. This was one of the aspects of her little sister’s character Saffy found most difficult to understand, and she sighed as she took in the autumn of discarded papers on the floor.

She looked for a place to leave the folded quilt and settled on a nearby chair. A book lay open atop a pile of others and Saffy, pathologically literate, couldn’t help flicking back to the title page to see what it was. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats , inscribed to Juniper by T. S. Eliot after he came to visit and Daddy showed him some of June’s poems. Saffy wasn’t sure about Thomas Eliot; she admired him, of course, as a wordsmith, but there was a pessimism in his soul, a darkness in his outlook, that always left her somehow more aware of hard edges than she had been before. Not so much with the cats, who were whimsy itself, as with his other poems. His obsession with ticking clocks and passing time, it seemed to Saffy, was a recipe for depression and one she could quite do without.

Juniper’s feelings on the matter were unclear. This was not a surprise. If Juniper were a character in a book, Saffy often thought, she’d be the sort whose evocation was best limited to the reactions of others, whose point of view was impossible to enter without risk of turning ambivalence into absolutes. Words like ‘disarming’, ‘ethereal’ and ‘beguiling’ would be invaluable to the author, along with ‘fierce’ and ‘reckless’, and even on odd occasion – though Saffy knew she must never say so aloud – ‘violent’. In Eliot’s hands, she’d be Juniper, the Cat au Contraire. Saffy smiled, pleased by the notion, and dusted her fingers on her knees. Juniper was rather catlike, after all: the wide-apart eyes with their fixed gaze, the lightness of foot, the resistance to attention she hadn’t sought.

Saffy began wading through the sea of papers towards the other windows, permitting herself a brief detour past the cupboard where the Dress was hanging. She’d brought it upstairs that morning, as soon as Percy was safely out of the house; pulled the dress from its hiding place and draped it over her arms like the sleeping princess of a fairy tale. She’d had to bend a coat hanger out of shape so that the silk might swathe against the outside of the wardrobe, facing the door, but it was necessary. The dress must be the first thing Juniper saw when she pushed open the door that evening and switched on the light.

Now the dress: there was the perfect example of the unknowable Juniper. The letter, when it arrived from London, had been such a surprise that if Saffy hadn’t witnessed a lifetime of her sister’s abrupt about-turns, she’d have believed it a prank. If there was one thing about her sister she’d have put money on, it was this: Juniper Blythe did not give two hoots about clothing. She’d spent her childhood in plain white muslin and bare feet and had a curious knack for reducing any new dress, no matter how smart, into a shapeless sack within two hours of wear. Although Saffy had held out some hope, maturity had not changed her. Where other girls of seventeen longed to go up to London for their first season, Juniper hadn’t even mentioned it, shooting Saffy a stare of such withering intensity when she so much as hinted at the possibility that the after-burn had pained for weeks. Which was just as well, seeing as Daddy would never have allowed it. She was his ‘creature of the castle’, he used to say, there was no need ever for her to leave it. What would a girl like her want with a round of debutante balls anyway?

The hurried postscript in Juniper’s letter, then, asking whether Saffy minded putting a dress together, something a person might wear to a dance – wasn’t there an old frock of her mother’s somewhere, something she’d worn to London, just before she died, perhaps it could be altered? – had been utterly bemusing. Juniper had made a point of addressing the letter to Saffy alone, so although she and Percy usually worked in partnership where Juniper was concerned, Saffy had pondered the request privately. After much consideration she’d come to the conclusion that city life must have changed her little sister; she wondered whether Juniper had been changed in other ways, whether she’d want to move to London for good after the war. Away from Milderhurst, no matter what Daddy had wanted for her.