Kate Morton - The Distant Hours

Tom agreed that it was awful; it was awful; and he listened as his Uncle Jeff related a neighbour’s similar run-in with a bicycle, then he shuffled his feet a little before standing. ‘Look, thank you, Mum-’

‘You’re leaving?’ She held up the kettle. ‘I was just about to put it on to boil again.’

He planted a kiss on her forehead, surprised to notice how far down he had to lean. ‘There’s no one brews tea better, but I really have to go.’

His mum raised a single brow. ‘When are we going to meet her, then?’

Little brother Joey was pretending to be a train and Tom gave him a playful pat, avoiding his mother’s eyes. ‘Ah, Mum,’ he said as he swung his satchel over his shoulder, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

He walked briskly, keen to get back to the flat, to her; keen to get out of the thickening weather. It didn’t matter how fast he went, though, his mother’s words kept pace. They had claws because Tom longed to tell his family about Juniper. Every time he saw them he had to fight the urge to grab hold of their shoulders and exclaim like a child that he was in love and that the world was a wonderful place, even if young men were shooting one another and nice ladies – mothers with small children at home – were being killed by double-decker buses when they’d only set out to deliver scarves for soldiers.

But he didn’t because Juniper had made him promise not to. Her determination that nobody should know they were in love confounded Tom. The secrecy seemed an ill fit for a woman who was so forthright, so unequivocal in her opinions, so unlikely to apologize for anything she felt or said or did. He’d been defensive at first, wondering that perhaps she thought his people were beneath her, but her interest in them had quashed that notion. She talked about them, asked after them, like somebody who’d been friendly with the Cavills for years. And he’d since learned that she didn’t discriminate. Tom knew for a fact that the sisters she professed to adore were being kept just as deeply in the dark as his own family. Letters from the castle always came via her godfather (who seemed remarkably unfazed by the deception), and Tom had noticed her replies gave Bloomsbury as the return address. He’d asked her why, indirectly at first, then outright, but she’d refused to explain, speaking only vaguely about her sisters being protective and old-fashioned, and saying that it was best to wait until the time was right.

Tom didn’t like it, but he loved her so he did as she asked. For the most part. He hadn’t been able to stop himself from writing to Theo. His brother was in the north with his regiment, which seemed to make it somehow all right. Besides, Tom’s first letter about the strange and beautiful girl he’d met, the one who’d managed to mend his emptiness, had been written long before she’d asked him not to.

Tom had known from that first meeting in the street near Elephant and Castle that he must see Juniper Blythe again. He’d walked to Bloomsbury at dawn the very next day, just to look, he told himself, just to see the door, the walls, the windows behind which she was sleeping.

He’d watched the house for hours, smoking nervously, and finally she’d come out. Tom followed her a little way before he found the courage to call her name.

‘Juniper.’

He’d said it, thought it, so many times, but it was different when he called it out loud and she turned.

They spent the whole sunlit day together, walking and talking, eating the blackberries they found growing over the cemetery wall, and when evening came, Tom wasn’t ready to let her go. He suggested that she might like to come to a dance, thinking that was the sort of thing girls enjoyed. Juniper, it seemed, did not. The look of distaste that crossed her face when he said it was so guileless that Tom was momentarily stunned. He regained his composure sufficiently to ask whether there was something else she’d rather do, and Juniper replied that of course they should keep walking. Exploring, she had called it.

Tom was a fast walker but she kept up, skipping from one side of him to the other, ebullient at times, silent at others. She reminded him in certain ways of a child; there was that same air of unpredictability and danger, the uneasy but somehow seductive sense that he had joined forces with someone for whom the ordinary rules of conduct had no pull.

She stopped to look at things then ran to catch up, completely heedless, and he began to worry that she’d trip on something in the blackout, a hole in the pavement or a sandbag.

‘It’s different to the country, you know,’ he said, an old teacherly note creeping into his voice.

Juniper only laughed and said, ‘I certainly hope so. That’s exactly why I’ve come.’ She went on to explain that she had especially good eyesight, like a bird; that it was something to do with the castle and her upbringing. Tom couldn’t remember the details, he’d stopped listening by then. The clouds had shifted, the moon was almost ripe, and her hair had turned to silver in its glaze.

He’d been glad she hadn’t caught him staring. Lucky for Tom, she’d crouched on the ground and started digging about in the rubble. He went nearer, curious as to what had claimed her focus, and saw that somehow, in the jumble of London’s broken streets, she’d found a tangle of honeysuckle, fallen to the ground after its fence railings were removed but growing still. She picked a sprig and threaded it through her hair, humming a strange and lovely tune as she did so.

When the sun had begun its rise and they’d climbed the stairs to his flat, she’d filled an old jam jar with water and put the sprig in it, on the sill. For nights after, as he lay alone in the warm and the dark, unable to sleep for thoughts of her, he’d smelled its sweetness. And it had seemed to Tom, as it still seemed now, that Juniper was just like that flower. An object of unfathomable perfection in a world that was breaking apart. It wasn’t only the way she looked, and it wasn’t only the things she said. It was something else, an intangible essence, a confidence, a strength, as if she were connected somehow to the mechanism that drove the world. She was the breeze on a summer’s day, the first drops of rain when the earth was parched, light from the evening star.

Something, though Juniper wasn’t certain what, made her glance towards the pavement. Tom was there, earlier than she’d expected, and her heart skipped a beat. She waved, almost falling from the window in her gladness to see him. He hadn’t noticed her yet. His head was down, checking the post, but Juniper couldn’t take her eyes from him. It was madness, it was possession, it was desire. Most of all, though, it was love. Juniper loved his body, she loved his voice, she loved the way his fingers felt upon her skin and the space beneath his collarbone where her cheek fitted perfectly when they slept. She loved that she could see in his face all the places that he’d been. That she never needed to ask him how he felt. That words were unnecessary. Juniper had discovered she was tired of words.

It was raining now, steadily, but nothing like the way it had rained the day she fell in love with Tom. That had been summer rain, one of those sudden, violent storms that sneak in on the back of glorious heat. They’d spent the day walking, wandering through Portobello Market, climbing Primrose Hill, and then winding back to Kensington Gardens, wading in the shallows of the Round Pond.

The thunder when it came was so unexpected that people stared into the sky, fearing a brand-new form of weapon was upon them. And then had come the rain, great big sobbing drops that brought an immediate sheen to the world.

Tom grabbed Juniper’s hand and they ran together, splashing through the instant puddles, and laughing from the shock of it, all the way back to his building, up the stairs and into the dim and the dry of his room.