Chapter 2 #2
“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 anymore,” 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.
Love, unfortunately, had not softened her.
She’d been waiting when Meredith got home that afternoon, demanding to know who the woman was at the door that morning, where they’d gone in such a hurry, what Meredith was up to.
Meredith hadn’t told her, of course. She hadn’t wanted to. Juniper was her own secret.
“Just someone I know,” she’d said, trying not to seem at all mysterious.
“Mum won’t be happy when I tell her you’ve been shirking your chores and walking about with Lady Muck.”
But Meredith, for once, had possessed her own shot to fire. “Nor Dad when I tell him what you and the sausage man have been doing in the Anderson.”
Rita’s face had flushed with indignation and she’d thrown something, which turned out to be her shoe, and left a nasty bruise above Meredith’s knee, but she hadn’t mentioned Juniper to Mum.
Meredith finished her sentence, made an emphatic full stop, and then sucked thoughtfully on the end of her pen.
She’d reached the moment in which she and Juniper had come across Mr. Cavill, walking along the pavement, frowning at the ground with as much concentration as if he’d been counting his footsteps.
From across the park Meredith’s body had known that it was him before her brain caught up.
Her heart had lurched inside her, as if spring-loaded, and she’d remembered at once the childish crush she used to harbor.
The way she’d watched him and hung on his every word and imagined that one day they might even be married.
It made her cringe to remember! Why, she’d only been a kid back then. What on earth had she been thinking?
How strange it was, though, how unfathomable, how wonderful, that Juniper and he should both rematerialize on a single day; the two people who had been most instrumental in helping her discover the path she wished to follow through life.
Meredith knew herself to be fanciful, her mum was always accusing her of daydreaming, but she couldn’t help but feel it meant something.
That there was an element of fate in their twined arrival back in her life. Of destiny.
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?