Kate Morton - The Distant Hours

‘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.’