Kate Morton - The Distant Hours

‘Mr Cavill!’ His father’s name and Tom’s heart skipped a beat. In the electric instant that followed, he sickened with relief because it meant his father was still alive and well and things might therefore be mended. These past weeks, when he’d glimpsed the old man walking down the London street towards him, waving across the battlefield, reaching down to grip Tom’s hand on that boat crossing the channel, he hadn’t been imagining things at all. That is, he had, but not the things he’d thought: this world, this place of bombs and bullets, and a gun in his hands, leaky boat trips across the sly, dark Channel, and months languishing in hospitals where excessive cleanliness masked the smell of blood, of children left dead on blast-scorched roads; this was the horrid invention. In the real world, he realized with the swelling, sudden, giddy gladness of a boy, everything was well because his father was still alive. He must be, for someone was calling him. ‘Mr Cavill!’

Tom turned and saw her then, a girl, waving her hand; a familiar face coming towards him. A girl walking in the way of young girls who long to be older – shoulders back, chin set, wrists turned out – yet hurrying like an excited child from a seat in the park, through the barrier where the iron railings used to stand, railings that were being turned now into rivets and bullets and aeroplane wings.

‘Hello, Mr Cavill,’ she said breathlessly, arriving right before him. ‘You’re back from the war!’

The expectation of meeting his father deflated; hope, joy, relief leaked like air from a thousand pin pricks in his skin. Tom perceived with a winded sigh that he was Mr Cavill, and this girl in the middle of the pavement, blinking through her spectacles, expecting something from him, was a pupil of his; had been a pupil of his, once. Before, when he’d had such things, when he’d spoken with trite authority of grand concepts he hadn’t begun to understand. Tom winced to remember himself back then.

Meredith. It came to him suddenly and certainly. That was her name, Meredith Baker, but she’d grown since last they met. She was less of a girl, taller, stretched, anxiously filling her extra inches. He felt himself smile, managed the word hello, and was visited by a pleasant sensation he couldn’t immediately place, something connected to the girl, to Meredith, and to the last time he’d seen her. Just as he was beginning to frown, to wonder, the memory to which the feeling was attached surfaced: a hot day, a circular pool, a girl.

And then he saw her. The girl from the pool, right there in the London street, plain as day, and for a moment he knew he must be imagining things. How could it be otherwise? The girl from his dreams, whom he’d seen sometimes while he was away, radiant, hovering, smiling, as he traipsed across France; when he’d collapsed beneath the weight of his mate Andy – dead over his shoulder for how long before Tom knew? – as the bullet struck and his knee gave way and his blood began to stain the soil near Dunkirk -

Tom stared and then shook his head a little, beginning the silent count to ten.

‘This is Juniper Blythe,’ said Meredith, fingering a button near her collar as she grinned up at the girl; Tom followed her gaze. Juniper Blythe. Of course that was her name.

She smiled then with astonishing openness, and her face was utterly transformed. It made him feel transformed, as if, for a split second, he really was that young man again, standing by a glittering pool on a hot day before the war got started. ‘Hello,’ she said.

Tom nodded in reply, words still too slippery to manage.

‘Mr Cavill was my teacher,’ said Meredith. ‘You met him once at Milderhurst.’

Tom sneaked another glance while Juniper’s attention was on Meredith. She was no Helen of Troy; it wasn’t the face itself that drove him to distraction. On any other woman, the features would’ve been considered pleasant but flawed: the too-wideset eyes, the too-long hair, that gap between her front teeth. On her, though, they were an abundance, an extravagance of beauty. It was her peculiar form of animation that distinguished her, he decided. She was an unnatural beauty, and yet she was entirely natural. Brighter, more lustrous than everything else.

‘By the pool,’ Meredith was saying. ‘Remember? He came to check where I was living.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said the girl, said Juniper Blythe, turning back to Tom so that something inside him folded over. His breath snagged when she smiled. ‘You were swimming in my pool.’ She was teasing and he longed to say something light in return, to banter as he might once have done.

‘Mr Cavill is a poet, too,’ said Meredith, her voice seeming to come from somewhere else, a long way away.

Tom tried to focus. A poet. He scratched his forehead. He no longer thought of himself as that. He distantly remembered going to war to gain experience, believing he might unlock the secrets of the world, see things in a new, more vivid way. And he had. He did. Only the things he saw, the things that he had seen, did not belong in poems.

‘I don’t write much any more,’ he said. It was the first sentence he’d managed and he felt bound to improve it. ‘I’ve been busy. With other things.’ He was looking only at Juniper now. ‘I’m in Notting Hill,’ he said.

‘Bloomsbury,’ she answered.

He nodded. Seeing her here, like this, after imagining her so many times and in so many different ways, was almost embarrassing.

‘I don’t know many people in London,’ she continued, and he couldn’t decide whether she was artless or entirely aware of her charm. Whatever the case, something in the way she said it made him bold.

‘You know me,’ he said.

She looked at him curiously, inclined her head as though listening to words he hadn’t said, and then smiled. She took a notepad from her bag and wrote something. When she handed it to him her fingers brushed his palm and he experienced a jolt, as if from electricity. ‘I know you,’ she agreed.

And it seemed to him then, and every time thereafter that he replayed the conversation, that no three words had ever been finer, contained more truth, than those.

‘Are you going home, Mr Cavill?’ This was Meredith. He’d forgotten she was there.

‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘it’s Mum’s birthday.’ He glanced at his wristwatch, the numbers made no sense. ‘I should be getting on.’

Meredith grinned and held up two fingers in the V symbol; Juniper only smiled.

Tom waited until he was on his mother’s street before opening the piece of paper, but by the time he reached the front door, he’d committed the Bloomsbury address to memory.

Not until late that night was Meredith finally alone and able to write it all down. The evening had been torturous: Rita and Mum had argued all through dinner, Dad had made them sit together and listen to Mr Churchill’s announcement on the wireless about the Russians, and then Mum – still punishing Meredith for her betrayal at the castle – had found a huge pile of socks that needed darning. Consigned to the kitchen, which always sweltered in summer, Meredith had run the day over and over in her mind, determined not to forget a single detail.

And now, at long last, she’d escaped to the quiet of the room she shared with Rita. She was sitting on the bed, her back against the wall; her journal, her precious journal, resting on her knees as she scribbled furiously across its pages. It had been wise to wait, torture or not; Rita was particularly obnoxious at the moment and the consequences if she were to find the journal would be dire. Thankfully, the coast was clear for the next hour or so. Through some black magic Rita had managed to get the assistant from the butcher’s across the way to pay her notice. It must be love: the fellow had taken to putting sausages aside and giving them to Rita on the sly. Rita, of course, considered herself the bee’s knees and was quite convinced that marriage would be next.