by Kate Morton
Seized by an idea, Meredith leaped off the bed and pulled her collection of cheap notebooks out from the hiding spot at the bottom of the wardrobe. Her story didn’t have a title yet, but she knew it must be given one before she handed it over to Juniper. Typing it up like a proper manuscript wouldn’t hurt either – Mr Seebohm at number fourteen had an old typewriter; perhaps if Meredith were to offer to fetch him lunch he might be induced to let her use it?
Kneeling on the floor, she hurried her hair behind her ears and flicked through the books, reading a few lines here, a few there, tensing as even those she’d been most proud of wilted under the imagined scrutiny of Juniper. She deflated. The whole story was too starchy by half, Meredith could see that now. Her characters spoke too much and felt too little and didn’t seem to know what it was they wanted from life. Most importantly, there was something vital missing – an aspect of her heroine’s existence, that she suddenly understood must be fleshed out. What a wonder that she hadn’t realized it before!
Love, of course. That’s what her story needed. For it was love, wasn’t it – the glorious lurching of a spring-loaded heart – that made the world go round?
THREE
London, October 17th, 1941
The windowsill in Tom’s attic was wider than most, which made it perfect for sitting on. It was Juniper’s favourite place to perch, a fact that she refused to believe had anything to do with her missing the attic roof at Milderhurst. Because she didn’t. She wouldn’t. In fact, during the months that she’d been gone, Juniper had resolved never to go back.
She knew now about her father’s will, the things he’d wanted for her and the lengths to which he’d been prepared to go to get his way. Saffy had explained it all in a letter, her intention not to make Juniper feel bad, only to agonize about Percy’s ill-humour. Juniper had read the letter twice, just to make sure she properly understood its meaning, and then she’d drowned it in the Serpentine, watching as the fine paper submerged and the ink ran blue and her temper finally subsided. It was precisely the sort of thing Daddy had always done, she could see that clearly from this distance, and it was just like the old man to try to pull his daughters’ strings from beyond the grave. Juniper, though, refused to let him. She wasn’t prepared to let even thoughts of Daddy bring black clouds upon her day. Today of all days was to be only sunshine – even if there wasn’t much of the real thing about.
Knees drawn up, back arched against the render, smoking contentedly, Juniper surveyed the garden below. It was autumn and the ground was thick with leaves, the little cat in raptures. He’d been busy for hours down there, stalking imaginary foes, pouncing and disappearing beneath the drifts, hiding in the dusk of dappled shadows. The lady from the ground-floor flat, whose life had gone up in flames in Coventry, was there too, putting down a saucer of milk. There wasn’t much to spare these days, not with the new register, but between them there was always enough to keep the stray kitten happy.
A noise came from the street and Juniper craned her neck to see. There was a man in uniform walking towards the building and her heart began its race. Only a second passed before she knew it wasn’t Tom, and she drew on her cigarette, suppressing a pleasant shiver of anticipation. Of course it wasn’t him, not yet. He’d be another thirty minutes at least. He was always an age when he visited his family, but he’d be back soon, full of stories, and then she would surprise him.
Juniper glanced inside at the small table by the gas cooker, the one they’d bought for a pittance and convinced a taxi driver to help them transport back to the flat in exchange for a cup of tea. Spread across its top was a feast fit for a king. A king on rations, anyway. Juniper had found the two pears at Portobello market. Lovely pears, and at a price they’d been able to pay. She’d polished them carefully and set them out alongside the sandwiches and the sardines and the newspaper-wrapped parcel. In the centre, standing proud atop an up-turned bucket, was the cake. The first that Juniper had ever baked.
The idea had come to her weeks ago that Tom must have a birthday cake and that she ought to make it for him. The plan had faltered, though, when Juniper realized that she hadn’t a clue how to go about doing such a thing. She’d also come to entertain serious doubts about the ability of their tiny gas cooker to cope with such a mighty task. Not for the first time, she’d wished that Saffy were in London. And not only to help with the cake; although Juniper didn’t mourn the castle, she found she missed her sisters.
In the end, she’d knocked on the door of the basement flat, hoping to find that the man who lived there – whose flat feet had kept him out of the army, much to the local canteen’s gain – would be at home. He was, and when Juniper explained to him her plight, he’d been delighted to lend a hand, drawing up a list of things they’d need to procure, almost seeming to relish the restraints that rationing imposed. He’d even donated one of his very own eggs to the cause, and as she was leaving, handed her something wrapped in newspaper, tied with twine – ‘A present for the two of you to share.’ There’d been no sugar for icing, of course, but Juniper had written Tom’s name on top with spearmint toothpaste and it really didn’t look half bad.
He’d been trying to leave for forty minutes, politely of course, and it wasn’t proving easy. His family were so happy to see him returned somewhat to normal, acting like ‘our Tom’, that they’d taken to directing each morsel of conversation his way. Never mind that his mother’s tiny kitchen was stretched to the seams with assorted Cavills, every question, every joke, every statement of fact hit Tom right between the eyes. His sister was talking now about a woman she knew, killed during the blackout by a double-decker bus. Shaking her head at Tom and tutting, ‘Such a shock, Tommy. Only stepped out to deliver a bundle of scarves for the service men.’
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 vaguel
y 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.
‘You’re wet,’ Tom had said, his back against the door he’d just slammed shut. He was staring at her flimsy frock, the way it clung to her legs.
‘Wet?’ she said. ‘I’m soaked enough to benefit from a good wringing.’
‘Here,’ he slid his spare shirt from the hook behind the door and tossed it to her, ‘put this on while you dry.’
And she’d done as he suggested, pulling off her dress and slipping her arms inside his sleeves. Tom had turned away, pretending business at the small porcelain sink, but when she’d looked, interested to know what he was doing, she’d caught his eyes in the mirror. She’d held them just a moment longer than was usual, long enough to notice when something in them changed.
The rain continued, the thunder too, and her dress dripped in the corner where he’d hung it to dry. The two of them gravitated towards the window and Juniper, who didn’t usually suffer from shyness, said something pointless about the birds and where they went in the rain.
Tom didn’t answer. He reached out his hand, bringing his palm to rest on the side of her face. The touch was only light, but it was enough. It silenced her and she inclined towards it, turning just enough so that her lips grazed his fingers. Her eyes remained on his, she couldn’t have moved them if she’d tried. And then his fingers were on the shirt buttons, her stomach, her breasts, and she was aware, suddenly, that her pulse had shattered into a thousand tiny balls, all of them spinning now in concert, right throughout her body.
They’d sat together on the windowsill afterwards, eating the cherries they’d bought at the market and dropping the stones onto the puddled ground below. Neither of them spoke, but they caught one another’s attention occasionally, smiling almost smugly, as if they, and they alone, had been let in on a mighty secret. Juniper had wondered about sex, she’d written about it, the things she’d imagined she might do and say and feel. Nothing, though, had prepared her for the fact that love might follow it so closely. To fall in love.
Juniper understood why people referred to it as a fall. The brilliant, swooping sensation, the divine imprudence, the complete loss of free will. It had been just like that for her, but it had also been much more. After a lifetime spent shrinking away from physical contact, Juniper had finally connected. When they lay together in that sultry dusk, her face pressed warm against his chest, and she listened to his heart, absorbed its regular beat, she’d felt her own, calming to meet it. And Juniper had understood, somehow, that in Tom she’d found the person who could balance her, and that more than anything, to fall in love was to be caught, to be saved . . .
The front door shut with a bang, and there was noise then on the stairs, Tom’s footfalls winding up an
d up towards her, and with a sudden rush of blinding desire Juniper forgot about the past, she turned away from the garden, from the stray cat with his leaves and the sad old lady crying for Coventry Cathedral, the war outside the window, the city of stairs that led to nowhere, portraits on walls without ceilings, and kitchen tables of families who no longer needed them, and she flitted across the floor and back to bed, shedding Tom’s shirt on the way. In that moment, as his key turned in the door, there was only him and her and this small, warm flat with a birthday dinner laid out.
They’d eaten the cake in bed, two enormous slices each, and there were crumbs everywhere. ‘It’s because there’s not a lot of egg,’ said Juniper, sitting with her back against the wall and surveying the mess with a philosophical sigh. ‘It isn’t easy to make things stick together, you know.’
Tom grinned up at her from where he lay. ‘How knowledgeable you are.’
‘I am, aren’t I?’
‘And talented, of course. A cake like that one belongs in Fortnum & Mason.’
‘Well, I can’t tell a lie, I did have a little help.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Tom, rolling onto his side, stretching as far as he could towards the table and capturing the newspaper-wrapped parcel – just – within his fingertips. ‘Our resident cook.’
‘You know he’s not a cook, really, he’s a playwright. I heard him speaking with a man the other day who’s going to put on one of his plays.’
‘Now, Juniper,’ said Tom, carefully unwrapping the paper to reveal a jar of blackberry jam inside. ‘What business does a playwright have making anything as beautiful as this?’