Kate Morton - The Distant Hours

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.’