Kate Morton - The Distant Hours

When was the last time he’d been swimming? Not through all of the summer, that was certain; a group of friends had borrowed a car and taken off for the sea, a week in Devon during the hottest August any of them could remember, and he’d been all set to join them until Joey took his fall and the nightmares started and the poor kid wouldn’t go to sleep unless Tom sat by the bed and made up stories about the Underground. He’d lain in his own narrow bed afterwards, heat thickening in the room’s corners as he dreamed of the sea, but he hadn’t minded; not really, not for long. There wasn’t much he wouldn’t do for Joey – poor kid, with his big man’s body turning to flab and his little boy laugh; the cruel music of that laugh made Tom ache and knot inside for the kid Joey’d been, the man he ought to have become.

He shrugged out of his shirtsleeves and slipped his belt free, shed the sad old thoughts, then his trousers too. A big black bird coughed above him and Tom stood for a moment, craned to glimpse the clear blue sky. The sun blazed and he squinted, following the bird as it glided in graceful silhouette towards a distant wood. The air was sweet with the scent of something he stood no chance of recognizing but knew he liked. Flowers, birds, the distant burble of water scooting over stones; pastoral smells and sounds straight from the pages of Hardy, and Tom was high on the knowledge that they were real and he was amongst them. That this was life and he was in it. He laid a hand flat on his chest, fingers spread; the sun was warm on his bare skin, everything was ahead of him, and it felt good to be young and strong and here and now. He wasn’t religious, but this moment certainly was.

Tom checked over his shoulder, but lazily and without expectation. He wasn’t a rule breaker by nature; he was a teacher, he owed his students an example, and he took himself seriously enough to attempt to set them one. But the day, the weather, the newly arrived war, the smell he couldn’t name that sat on the breeze like that, all of it made him bold. He was a young man, after all, and it didn’t take much for a young man to find himself infused with a fine, free sense that the earth and its pleasures were his to be taken where found; that rules of possession and prevention, though well intentioned, were theoretical dictates that belonged only in books and on ledgers and in the conversations of dithering white-bearded lawyers at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Trees encircled the clearing, a changing room stood silent nearby, and the hint of a stone staircase led somewhere beyond. Across it all lay a spill of sunlight and birdsong. With a deep, contented sigh, Tom decided the time was upon him. There was a diving board and the sun had warmed the wood so that as he stepped onto it his feet burned; he stood for a moment, enjoying the pain, letting his shoulders bake, the skin tighten, until finally he could stand it no longer and took off with a grin, jumping at the end, drawing his arms back and launching, cutting like an arrow through the water. The cold was a vice around his chest and he gasped as he came to the surface, his lungs as grateful for air as a baby’s on drawing first breath.

He swam for some minutes, dived deeply, emerged again and again, then he lay on his back and let his limbs drift out from his body to form a star. This, he thought, is it , perfection. The moment Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley were on about: the sublime. If he were to die right now, Tom was sure, he would die content. Not that he wanted to die, not for at least seventy years. Tom calculated quickly: the year 2009, that would do nicely. An old man living on the moon. He laughed, backstroked idly, then resumed his floating, closed his eyes so that his lids warmed. The world was orange and star-shot, and within it he saw his future glowing.

He would be in uniform soon; the war was waiting for him and Thomas Cavill couldn’t wait to meet it. He wasn’t naive, his own father had lost a leg and parts of his mind in France and he entertained no illusions as to heroics or glory; he knew war was a serious matter, a dangerous one. Neither was he one of those fellows keen to escape his present situation, quite the opposite: as far as Tom could see, the war offered a perfect opportunity for him to better himself, as a man and as a teacher.

He’d wanted to be a teacher ever since he realized he’d grow up one day to be an adult, and had dreamed about working in his old London neighbourhood. Tom believed he could open the eyes and minds of kids like he’d once been, to a world far beyond the grimy bricks and laden laundry lines of their daily experience. The goal had sustained him right through teacher-training college and into the first years of Prac until finally, through some silver-tongued talking and good old-fashioned luck, he’d arrived exactly where he wanted to be.

As soon as it had become clear that war was coming, Tom had known he’d sign up. Teachers were needed at home, it was a reserved occupation, but what sort of an example would that set? And his reasoning was more selfish too. John Keats had said that nothing became real until it was experienced and Tom knew that to be true. More than that, he knew it was precisely what he was missing. Empathy was all well and good, but when Tom spoke of history and sacrifice and nationality, when he read to his students the battle cry of Henry V, he scraped against the shallow floor of his own limited experience. War, he knew, would give him the depth of understanding he craved, which was why as soon as he was sure his evacuees were safely settled with their families he was heading back to London; he’d signed up with the 1st Battalion of the East Surrey regiment and with any luck he’d be in France by October.

He turned his fingers idly in the warm surface water and sighed so deeply that he sank a little lower. Perhaps it was the awareness that he would be in uniform next week that made this day somehow more vivid, more real than those that fanned out on either side. For there was definitely some unreal force at work. It wasn’t a simple matter of the warmth or the breeze itself, or the smell he couldn’t name, but a strange blend of condition, climate and circumstance; and although he was keen to line up and take his turn, although his legs ached sometimes at night with impatience, right now, at this very moment, he wished only for time to slow, that he might remain here floating like this forever…

‘How’s the water?’ The voice when it came was startling. Perfect solitude, shattered like a golden eggshell.

Later, on the many occasions he was to replay the memory of their first meeting, it was her eyes he would remember clearest of all. And the way she moved – be honest: the way her hair hung long and messy around her shoulders, the curve of her small breasts, the shape of her legs, oh God, those legs. But before and above all those, it was the light in her eyes; those cat’s eyes. Eyes that knew things and thought things that they shouldn’t. In the long days and nights that were to come, and when he finally reached the end, it was her eyes he would see when he closed his own.

She was sitting on the swing, bare feet on the ground, watching him. A girl – a woman? He wasn’t sure; not at first – dressed in a simple white sundress, watching him while he floated in the pool. Any number of casual rejoinders came to mind, but something in the quality of her expression tied his tongue and all he managed was, ‘Warm. Perfect. Blue.’ Her eyes were blue, almond-shaped, a little too far apart, and they widened slightly when he uttered his three words. No doubt wondering what sort of simpleton she’d stumbled across making free with her pool.

He paddled awkwardly, waited for her to ask him who he was, what he was doing, what business he had swimming there at all, but she didn’t, she asked none of those questions, merely pushed off lazily so the swing travelled in a shallow arc across the edge of the pool and back. Keen to establish himself as a man of more than three words, he answered them anyway: ‘I’m Thomas,’ he said, ‘Thomas Cavill. Sorry to use your pool like this but the day was so hot. I couldn’t help myself.’ He grinned up at her and she leaned her head against the rope, and he half wondered whether she might be trespassing as well. Something in the way she looked, a cut-out quality as if she and the environment in which he found her were not natural companions. He wondered vaguely where it was she might fit, a girl like this, but he drew a blank.