Kate Morton - The Distant Hours

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.’