Eleven

London, December 1940

‘TOO HARD, SILLY GIRL. Too, damn, hard!’ The old woman brought down the handle of her cane with a thwump beside her. ‘Need I remind you I am a lady and not a plough horse in need of shodding?’

Dolly smiled sweetly and shifted back a little further on the bed, out of harm’s way. There were a number of things in her job she didn’t particularly enjoy, but it wouldn’t have taken much thought, if asked, for her to answer that the very worst part of being employed as Lady Gwendolyn Caldicott’s companion was keeping the old girl’s toenails tidy. The weekly task seemed to bring out the worst in each of them, but it was a necessary ill and thus Dolly performed it without complaint. (At the time, that is; later, in the sitting room with Kitty and the others, she complained in such lavish detail that they had to beg through tears of laughter for her to stop.)

‘There you are then,’ she said, sliding the file into its sheath and rubbing her dusty fingers together. ‘Perfect.’

‘Harrumph.’ Lady Gwendolyn straightened her turban with the heel of one hand, managing to knock ash from the wilting cigarette she’d forgotten she was holding. She peered down her nose and across the vast purple ocean of her chiffon-draped body as Dolly lifted the pair of tiny polished feet for inspection. ‘I expect they’ll have to do,’ she said, and then grumbled about it not being like the good old days when one had a proper lady’s maid at one’s beck and call.

Dolly pasted a fresh smile on her face and went to fetch the papers.

It had been a little over two years since she’d left Coventry, and the second year was shaping up to be a great improvement on the first. She’d been so green when she arrived—Jimmy had helped her find a small room of her own (in a better part of town than his, he’d said with a grin) and a job selling dresses, and then the war had started and he’d disappeared. ‘People want stories from the front line,’ he’d told her just before he left for France, when they were sitting together by the Serpentine, he sailing paper boats, she smoking moodily. ‘Somebody has to tell them.’ The closest Dolly had come to glamour that first year was the occasional glimpse of a finely dressed woman on her way past John Lewis to Bond Street, and the wide-eyed focus of her room-mates at Mrs White’s boarding house, when they gathered in the sitting room after dinner and pleaded with Dolly to tell them again how her father had shouted at her when she left home, and told her she was never to darken his doorstep again. It made her feel interesting and exciting when she described how the gate had closed behind her, the way she’d flicked her scarf over her shoulder and marched to the station—not so much as a glance back at her family home; but later, alone in the narrow bed in her tiny dark room, the memory had made her shiver a bit with the cold.

Everything had changed though, after the shop-girl job at John Lewis fell through. (A silly mix up, really, it was hardly Dolly’s fault if some people didn’t appreciate honesty, and the inalienable fact was that shorter skirts didn’t suit everyone.) It was Dr Rufus, Caitlin’s father, who’d come to her rescue. On hearing about the incident, he’d mentioned that one of his acquaintances was seeking a companion for his aunt. ‘A tremendous old lady,’ he’d said over lunch at the Savoy. He took Dolly out for a ‘treat’ each month when he came to London, usually when his wife was busy shopping with Caitlin. ‘Rather eccentric, I believe, lonely. Never recovered after her sister’s death. Do you get on with the elderly?’

‘Yes,’ said Dolly, concentrating on her champagne cocktail. It was the first time she’d had one and it made her a bit dizzy, though in a lovely unexpected way; ‘I expect so. Why not?’ Which had been good enough for the beaming Dr Rufus. He wrote her a reference and put in a word with his friend; he even offered to drive her to the interview. The nephew would have preferred to close up the ancestral house for the duration, Dr Rufus explained as they wound their way through Kensington, but his aunt had put the stopper on that. The stubborn old thing (you really did have to admire her spirit, he said) had refused to go with her nephew’s family to the safety of their country estate, digging in her heels and threatening to call her lawyer if she wasn’t left in peace.

Dolly had heard the story again many times since in the ten months she’d been working for Lady Gwendolyn. The old woman, who drew special pleasure from revisiting the slights inflicted on her by others, said that her ‘weasel’ nephew had attempted to make her leave ‘against my will’, but she’d insisted on staying ‘in the one place I’ve ever been happy. It’s where we grew up, Henny-Penny and I. They’ll have to carry me out in a coffin if they want to move me. I dare say I’ll find a way to haunt Peregrine, even then, if he dares to take it on.’ Dolly, for her part, was thrilled by Lady Gwendolyn’s stand, for it was the old girl’s insistence on staying put that had brought her to live inside the wonderful house on Campden Grove.

And oh, but it was wonderful. The outside of number 7 was classic: three storeys up and one down, white stucco render with black accents, set back from the pavement behind a small garden; the inside, however, was sublime. William Morris paper on every wall, splendid furniture that wore the divine grime of generations, shelves groaning beneath the exquisite weight of rare crystal and silver and china. It existed in stark contrast to Mrs White’s boarding house over in Rillington Place, where Dolly had handed over half her weekly shop-girl wages for the privilege of sleeping in a one-time closet that seemed always to smell of corned-beef hash. From the moment she’d first stepped through Lady Gwendolyn’s front door, Dolly had known that no matter what it took, no matter how many pounds of flesh she had to give, she must somehow come to live within its walls.

And so she had. Lady Gwendolyn had been the one fly in the ointment: Dr Rufus had been right when he said she was eccentric; he’d failed though to mention she’d been marinating in the bitter juices of abandonment for the better part of three decades. The results were somewhat frightening, and Dolly had been convinced for the first six months that her employer was on the verge of sending her off to B. Cannon & Co. to be turned into glue. She knew better now: Lady Gwendolyn could be brusque at times, but that was just her way. Dolly had also discovered recently, much to her gratification, that where the old woman’s companion was concerned, curtness masked a real affection.

‘Shall we run through the headlines then?’ said Dolly brightly, returning to perch on the end of the bed.

‘Suit yourself.’ Lady Gwendolyn gave a rubbery shrug, flap-ping one small moist paw over the other on her paunch. ‘I’m sure I don’t mind either way’

Dolly opened the latest edition of The Lady and flicked through to the Society pages; she cleared her throat, adopted a voice of fitting reverence, and began to read out the goings-on of people whose lives sounded like fantasy. It was a world Dolly had never known existed; oh, she’d seen the grand houses on the outskirts of Coventry and heard Father speak in important tones occasionally about a special order for one of the better families; but the stories Lady Gwendolyn told (when the mood took her) about the adventures she’d had with her sister, Penelope—lounging at the Cafe Royal, living together for a time in Bloomsbury, posing for a sculptor who was in love with them both— well, they were beyond Dolly’s wildest imaginings, and that really was saying something.

As Dolly read now about today’s best and brightest, Lady Gwendolyn, propped fulsomely against her satin pillows, feigned disinterest while listening intently to every word. It was always the same; her curiosity was such that she never could hold out for long.

‘Oh dear. It seems things aren’t at all well for Lord and Lady Hors- quith.’

‘Divorce, is it?’ The old woman sniffed.

‘Reading between the lines. She’s out with that other fellow again, the painter.’

‘No surprises there. No discretion at all that woman, ruled only by her ghastly—’ Lady Gwendolyn’s top lip curled as she spat out the culprit—‘passions.’ (Only she said ‘pessions’, a lovely, posh pronunciation Dolly liked to practise when she knew herself alone.) ‘Just like her mother before her.’

‘Which one was she again?’

Lady Gwendolyn raised her eyes to the Bordeaux ceiling medallion. ‘Really, I’m quite sure Lionel Rufus never said that you were slow. I might not approve entirely of smart women, but I certainly won’t abide a fool. Are you a fool, Miss Smitham?’

‘I do hope not, Lady Gwendolyn.’

‘Harrumph’ she said, with a tone that suggested she had yet to make her final ruling. ‘Lady Horsquith’s mother, Lady Prudence Dyer, was an outspoken bore who used to tire us all silly with her agitations for the female vote. Henny-Penny used to do the most amusing imitation of the woman—she could be terribly amusing when the mood took her. As tends to happen, Lady Prudence wore people to the brink of their patience until no one in Society could tolerate a minute more of her company—be selfish, be churlish, be bold or wicked, but never, Dorothy, never be tedious. After a time, she upped and disappeared.’ ‘Disappeared?’

Lady Gwendolyn gave a lazy flourish of the wrist, dropping ash like magic dust. ‘Boarded a boat for India, Tanzania, New Zealand … God only knows.’ Her mouth collapsed into a trout-like pout and she appeared to be chewing something over. Whether a small piece of lunch she’d found between her teeth, or a juicy morsel of secret intelligence, it was hard to guess. Until, finally, with a sly smile, she added: ‘God, that is, and the little birdie who told me she was holed up with a native fellow in a horror of a place called Zanzibar.’

‘Really.’

‘Quite.’ Lady Gwendolyn drew so emphatically on her cigarette that her eyes became two penny-sized slots. For a woman who hadn’t ventured from her boudoir in the thirty years since her sister left, she really was tremendously well-informed. There were very few people in the pages of the Lady she didn’t know, and she was remarkably adept at getting them to do precisely as she wished. Why, even Caitlin Rufus had married her husband at the decree of Lady Gwendolyn—an elderly chap, dull it had to be said, but stupendously wealthy. Caitlin in turn had become the worst sort of bore, spending hours complaining about how beastly it was finally to marry (‘Oh, so very well, Doll’) and acquire her own home, just as all the best wallpapers were being withdrawn from shops. Dolly had met The Husband once or twice and swiftly come to the conclusion that there had to be a better way of acquiring the finer things than marrying a man who thought a game of whist and a grope with the maid behind the dining-room curtains was jolly good sport.

Lady Gwendolyn flapped her hand impatiently for Dolly to continue, and Dolly promptly obliged. ‘Oh, now look—here’s a cheerier one. Lord Dumphee has become engaged to the Honourable Eva Hastings.’ ‘Nothing cheery about an engagement.’

‘Of course not, Lady Gwendolyn.’ It was always a subject round which to tread lightly.

‘All very well for a dull sort of girl to hitch her wheel to a man’s wagon, but consider yourself warned, Dorothy—men enjoy a bit of sport, and they all like to catch the brightest prize; but once they do? That’s when the fun and games end. His games, her fun.’ She rolled her wrist. ‘Go on then, read the rest. What does it say?’

‘There’s a party to celebrate the engagement this Saturday evening.’ That news brought a mildly interested grumble. ‘Dumphee House? Tremendous place—Henny-Penny and I went there for a grand ball once—People had taken off their shoes by the end and were dancing in the fountain … It is being held at Dumphee House I suppose?’

‘No.’ Dolly scanned the announcement, ‘it would appear not. They’re having guests to an invitation-only party at the 400 Club.’

As Lady Gwendolyn launched a rowdy tirade against the low tone of such places—‘Nightclubs!’—Dolly drifted. She’d only been to the 400 once, with Kitty and some of her soldier friends. Deep down in the cellars next door to where the Alhambra Theatre used to stand in Leicester Square, dark and intimate and deepest red as far as the eye could see: the silk on the walls, the plush banquettes with their single flickering candles, the velvet curtains that spilled like wine to meet the scarlet carpets.

There’d been music and laughter and servicemen every-where, and couples swaying dreamily on the small shadowy dance floor. And when a soldier with too much whisky under his belt and a rather uncomfortable swelling in his trousers, leaned against her and whispered wetly of all the things he’d like to do when he got her alone, Dolly had spied over his shoulder a stream of bright young things—better- dressed, more beautiful, just more, than the rest of the club-goers— slipping behind a red cord and being greeted by a small man with a long black moustache. (‘Luigi Rossi,’ Kitty had said with an authoritative nod, when they were drinking a nightcap of gin and lemon under the kitchen table back at Campden Grove. ‘Didn’t you know? He runs the whole shebang.’)

‘I’ve had enough of that now,’ said Lady Gwendolyn, squishing the butt of her cigarette into the open tub of corn ointment on the table beside her. ‘I’m tired and I’m not feeling well—I need one of my sweets. Oh, but I fear I’m not long for this world. I barely slept a wink last night, what with the noise, the terrible noise.’

‘Poor Lady Gwendolyn,’ said Dolly, putting The Lady aside and digging out the grande dame’s bag of boiled sweets. ‘We have that nasty Mr Hitler to thank for that, his bombers really are—’

‘I don’t mean the bombers, silly girl. I’m talking about them. The others, with their infernal—’ she shuddered theatrically and the timbre of her voice lowered—‘giggling.’

‘Oh,’ said Dolly. ‘Them.’

‘A ghastly lot of girls,’ declared Lady Gwendolyn, who was yet to meet any of them. ‘Office girls, at that, typing for the ministries— they’re bound to be fast. What on earth was the War Office thinking? I realise of course that they must be accommodated, but here? In my beautiful house? Peregrine is beside himself—the letters I’ve had! Can’t bear to think of such creatures living amongst the heirlooms.’ Her nephew’s displeasure threatened to bring a smile, but the profound bitterness at Lady Gwendolyn’s core quickly smothered it. She reached to grip Dolly’s wrist. ‘They’re not entertaining men in my home, are they, Dorothy?’

‘Oh no, Lady Gwendolyn. They know your feelings on the matter, I made sure of that.’

‘Because I won’t have it. I won’t have fornication under my roof.’ Dolly nodded soberly. This, she knew, was the Great Matter at the heart of her mistress’s asperity. Dr Rufus had explained all about Lady Gwendolyn’s sister, Penelope. They’d been in-separable when they were young, he said, similar enough in looks and manner that most people took them for twins, even though there were eighteen months between them. They’d gone to dances, country house weekends, always the two of them together—but then Penelope committed the crime for which her sister would never forgive her. ‘She fell in love and got married,’ Dr Rufus had said, drawing on his cigar with the story-teller’s satisfaction at having reached his punch line: ‘And, in the process, broke her sister’s heart.’

‘There, there,’ said Dolly soothingly. ‘It won’t come to that, Lady Gwendolyn. Before you know it the war will be over and they’ll all go back to wherever it is they came from.’ Dolly had no idea if that was true—for her part, she hoped it wasn’t: the big house was very quiet at night, and Kitty and the others were a bit of fun—but it was the only thing to say, especially when the old lady was so worked up. Poor thing, it must be terrible to lose one’s soulmate. Dolly couldn’t imagine life without hers.

Lady Gwendolyn fell back against her pillow. The diatribe against nightclubs and their ills, her rich imaginings of the Babylonian behaviour within, memories of her sister and the threat of fornication beneath her roof—all had taken their toll. She was weary and drawn, as crumpled as the barrage balloon that had come down over Notting Hill the other day. ‘Here now, Lady Gwendolyn,’ said Dolly. ‘Look at this lovely butterscotch I’ve found. Let’s just pop it in and put you down for a rest, shall we?’

‘Well, all right then,’ she grumbled, ‘just an hour or so, though, Dorothy. Don’t let me sleep past three—I don’t want to miss our game of cards.’

‘Perish the thought,’ Dolly said, posting the boiled sweet through her mistress’s pursed lips.

With the old girl sucking away furiously, Dolly went to the window to pull the blackout curtains shut. Her attention fell, as she unlatched the curtains from their ties, to the house opposite and what she saw made her heart leap.

Vivien was there again. Sitting at her desk behind the tape-crossed window, still as a statue but for the fingers of one hand, twisting the end of her long strand of pearls. Dolly waved eagerly, willing the other woman to see her and wave back, but she didn’t, she was lost in her own thoughts.

‘Dorothy?’

Dolly blinked. Vivien (spelled the same way as Vivien Leigh, lucky thing) was quite possibly the most beautiful woman she’d ever seen. She had a heart-shaped face, deep brown hair that gleamed in its Victory roll, and full curled lips painted scarlet red. Her eyes were wide set and framed by dramatic arched brows, just like Rita Hayworth’s or Gene Tierney’s, but it was more than that that made her beautiful. It wasn’t the fine skirts and blouses she wore, it was the way she wore them, easily, casually; it was the strings of pearls strung airily around her neck; the brown Bentley she’d used to drive before it was handed over like a spare pair of boots to the Ambulance Service. It was the tragic history Dolly had learned in dribs and drabs—orphaned as a child, raised by an uncle, married to a handsome wealthy author named Henry Jenkins, who held an important position with the Ministry of Information.

‘Dorothy? Come and put my sheets to rights and fetch my sleep mask.’

Ordinarily, Dolly might’ve been a bit envious to have a woman of that description living at such close quarters, but with Vivien it was different. All her life, Dolly had longed for a friend like her. Someone who really understood her (not like dull old Caitlin or silly frivolous Kitty), someone with whom she could stroll arm in arm down Bond Street, elegant and bouyant as people turned to look at them, whispering behind their hands about the dark leggy beauties, their careless charm. And now, finally, she’d found Vivien. From the very first time they’d passed each other walking up the Grove, when their eyes had met and they’d exchanged that smile—secretive, knowing, complicit— it had been clear to both of them that they were two of a kind and destined to be the very best of friends.

‘Dorothy!’

Dolly jumped and turned from the window. Lady Gwendolyn had managed to get herself into a frightful mess of purple chiffon and duck- down pillows, and was scowling, red-cheeked, from its centre. ‘I can’t find my sleep mask anywhere.’

‘Come along then,’ said Dolly, glancing once more at Vivien before tugging the blackouts together. ‘Let’s see if we can’t find it together.’ After a brief but successful search the mask was discovered, pressed flat and warm beneath Lady Gwendolyn’s significant left thigh. Dolly removed the silver turban and propped it atop the marble bust on the chest-of-drawers, and then rolled the satin mask onto her mistress’s head.

‘Careful,’ Lady Gwendolyn snapped. ‘You’ll stop me breathing if you hold it over my nose like that.’

‘Oh dear,’ Dolly said, ‘We wouldn’t want that now, would we?’ ‘Harrumph.’ The old woman let her head sink back so far into the pillows that her face seemed to float atop the rest of her, an island in a sea of skin folds. ‘Seventy-five years, all of them long, and what have I got to show for it? Deserted by my nearest and dearest, my closest companion a girl who takes my money for her trouble.’

‘Now, now,’ Dolly said, as if to a pouty child, ‘what’s all this about trouble? You mustn’t even joke about such a thing, Lady Gwendolyn. You know I’d care for you if I wasn’t paid a penny.’

‘Yes, yes,’ the old lady grumbled, ‘Well. That’s enough of that.’

She pulled Lady Gwendolyn’s blankets up, nice and high. The old woman adjusted her chins over the satin ribbon edging and said, ‘You know what I ought to do?’

‘What’s that, Lady Gwendolyn?’

‘I ought to leave it all to you. That would teach my scheming nephew a lesson. Just like his father, that boy—out to steal everything I hold dear. I’ve a good mind to call in my solicitor and make it official.’ Really, there was nothing to say in the face of such comments; naturally it was thrilling to know Lady Gwendolyn held her in such high esteem, but to seem pleased would have been terribly coarse. Brimming with pride and pleasure, Dolly turned away and busied herself with straightening the old woman’s turban.

It was Dr Rufus who’d first made Dolly aware of what Lady Gwendolyn was thinking. They’d been having one of their lunches a few weeks ago, and after a good long chat about Dolly’s social life (‘What about boyfriends, Dorothy? Surely a girl like you must have dozens of young men chasing her round the block? My advice? Look for an older, professional fellow—someone who can give you everything you deserve’), he’d asked about life at Campden Grove. When she told him she thought it was all going well, he’d swirled his whisky so that the ice cubes tinkled and given her a wink. ‘Better than well from what I hear. I had a letter from old Peregrine Wolsey just last week. He wrote that his aunt was so fond of “my girl”, as he put it—’ at this Dr Rufus seemed to drift into his own reverie, before remembering himself and continuing—‘that he was worried for his inheritance. He was awfully upset with me for putting you in his aunt’s path.’ He’d laughed then, but Dolly had managed only a thoughtful smile. She’d continued to think about what he’d said for the rest of that day and all through the following week.

The fact of the matter was that what Dolly had told Dr Rufus was true. After a rather shaky start, Lady Gwendolyn, widely reputed (not least by her own account) to disdain all other human beings, had taken quite a shine to her young companion. Which was all to the good. It was just a terrible shame Dolly had been forced to pay such a high price for the old woman’s affection.

The telephone call had come in November; Cook had answered and called out to Dorothy that it was for her. It stung to remember now, but Dolly had been so excited to be wanted on the telephone in such a grand house, she’d hurried down the stairs, snatched up the receiver and put on her most important voice: ‘Hello? Dorothy Smitham speaking’. And then she’d heard Mrs Potter, her mother’s friend from next door in Coven-try, shouting down the line that her family was, ‘All dead, the lot of ’em. Incendiary bomb—no time to get out to the Andy.’

A gulf had opened up inside Dolly in that moment: it felt as if her stomach had dropped, leaving a great swirling sphere of shock, loss and fear in its place. She’d let go of the phone, and stood there in the enormous entrance hall of number 7 Camp-den Grove, and she’d felt infinitesimally small and alone and at the whim of the next wind that might blow. All the parts of Dolly, the memories she had of different instances in her life, fell like a deck of cards, landing out of order, the images on them fading already. Cook’s help arrived right then, and said ‘Good morning’, and Dolly wanted to scream at her that it wasn’t a good morning at all, that everything had changed, couldn’t the stupid girl see that? But she didn’t. She’d smiled in return and said, ‘Good morning,’ and taken herself back upstairs to where Lady Gwendolyn was ringing her silver bell furiously and flapping about in search of the eyeglasses she’d lost.

Dolly didn’t speak to anyone about her family at first, not even Jimmy, who’d heard, of course, and was desperate to console her. When she told him she was all right, that there was a war on and everyone must suffer their losses, he thought she was being brave; but it wasn’t courage that kept Dolly quiet. Her feelings were so complicated, the memories of the way she’d left home so fresh, it just seemed better not to start talking for fear of what she might say and how she might feel. She hadn’t seen either of her parents since she’d gone to London: her father had forbidden her from making contact unless to say she was going to ‘start behaving properly’; but her mother had written secret letters, regularly if not warmly, her most recent hinting at a trip to London to see for herself ‘the fancy house and the grand lady you write about so often’. But it was too late for all that now. Her mother would never meet Lady Gwendolyn or step inside number 7 Campden Grove or see the great success Dolly had made of her life.

As for poor Cuthbert—Dolly could hardly bear to think of him. She remembered his last letter, too, every word of it: the way he’d described in tremendous detail the Andersen shelter they were building in the back garden, the pictures of Spitfires and Hurricanes he’d collected to decorate inside, what he was planning to do with the German pilots he captured. He’d been so proud and deluded, so excited about the part he was going to play in the war, so plump and ungainly, such a happy little baby, and now he was gone. And the sadness Dolly felt, the loneliness at knowing herself to be an orphan now, was so immense she saw nothing for it but to dedicate herself to the work she was doing for Lady Gwendolyn and say no more about it.

Until one day the old woman was ranting about the lovely voice she’d had when she was a girl, and Dolly had thought of her mother, and the blue box she’d kept hidden in the garage beneath Father’s tyre pump, filled with dreams and memories that were now nothing more than rubble, and she’d burst into tears, right there on the end of the old lady’s bed, nail file in hand.

‘Whatever’s the matter?’ Lady Gwendolyn had said, small mouth falling open to register the same amount of shock she might have felt if Dolly had taken off her clothes and started dancing round the room.

Caught in a rare unguarded moment, Dolly had told Lady Gwendolyn everything. Her mother and father and Cuthbert, what they were like, the sorts of things they’d said, the times they’d driven her mad, the way her mother used to try and brush her hair smooth and Dolly had resisted, the trips to the seaside, the cricket and the donkey. Finally, Dolly had recounted the way she’d flounced out of home when she left, barely stopping when her mother called to her—Janice Smitham who’d sooner have gone without food than raise her voice in earshot of the neighbours—and ran out wielding the book she’d bought for Dolly as a going-away present.

‘Harrumph,’ Lady Gwendolyn had said, when Dolly finished speaking. ‘It hurts, of course, but you’re not the first to lose your family.’

‘I know.’ Dolly drew in a deep breath. The room seemed to echo with the sound of her own voice of moments before, and she wondered if she was about to be let go. Lady Gwendolyn did not like outbursts (unless they were her own).

‘When Henny-Penny was taken from me I thought I’d die.’

Dolly nodded, still waiting for the axe to fall.

‘You’re young, though; you’ll make a go of it. Just look at her across the road.’

It was true, Vivien’s life had turned up roses in the end, but there were a few marked differences between them. ‘She had a wealthy uncle who took her in,’ said Dolly quietly. ‘She’s an heiress, married to a famous writer. And I’m …’ She bit her bottom lip, anxious not to start crying again. ‘I’m …’

‘Well you’re not entirely alone, are you, silly girl?’

Lady Gwendolyn had held out her bag of sweets then and for the first time ever offered one to Dolly. It had taken a moment to realise what the old woman was suggesting, but when she did, Dolly had reached tentatively inside the bag to withdraw a red and green gob- stopper. She’d held it in her hand, fingers closed around it, aware that it was melting against her warm palm. Dolly had managed a solemn whisper: ‘I have you.’

Lady Gwendolyn had sniffed and looked away. ‘We have each other, I suppose,’ she’d said, in a voice made fluty by un-expected emotion.

 

Dolly reached her bedroom and added the newest copy of The Lady to the pile of others. Later, she’d take a closer look and pull out the best pictures to glue inside her Book of Ideas, but right now she had more important things to take care of.

She hopped down on all-fours and dug about beneath her bed for the banana she’d been hoarding since Mr Hoskins the greengrocer ‘found’ it for her under the counter on Tuesday. Humming a little melody to herself, she crept back out of the door and along the corridor. Strictly, there was no reason to be creeping at all: Kitty and the others were busy stabbing at their typewriters in the War Office, Cook was standing in line at the butcher’s armed with a handful of ration cards and a foul tem-per, and Lady Gwendolyn was snoring peacefully in her bed—but it was so much more fun to creep than to walk. Especially when one had a whole glorious hour of freedom ahead.

She ran up the stairs, pulled out the little key she’d had cut, and let herself into Lady Gwendolyn’s dressing room. Not the poky little closet from which Dolly selected a flowing coverall each morning to clad the great lady’s bod; no, no, not this. The dressing room was a grand arrangement in which were housed countless gowns and shoes and coats and hats, the likes of which Dolly had rarely glimpsed outside the Society pages. Silks and furs hung side by side in huge open wardrobes, and bespoke pairs of little satin shoes sat prettily upon the mighty shelves. The circular hat boxes, stamped proudly with the names of their Mayfair milliners—Schiaparelli, Coco Chanel, Rose Valois—towered towards the ceiling in columns so high a dainty white stepladder had been furnished to enable their retrieval.

In the bow of the window, with its rich velvet curtains that brushed the carpet (drawn always now against the German planes), a turned- leg table held an oval mirror, a set of sterling silver brushes, and a host of photographs in fancy frames. Each depicted a pair of young women, Penelope and Gwendolyn Caldicott, most of them official portraits with the studio’s name in cursive at the bottom corner, but a few taken candidly while they were attending this or that Society party. There was one photograph in particular that drew Dolly’s eye every time. The two Caldicott sisters were older here—thirty-five at least—and had been photographed by Cecil Beaton on a grand spiral staircase. Lady Gwendolyn was standing with one hand low on her hip, eyeballing the camera, while her sister was glancing at something (or someone) out of shot. The photograph had been taken at the party where Penelope fell in love, the night her sister’s world came tumbling down.

Poor Lady Gwendolyn, she wasn’t to know her life was set to change that night. She looked so pretty, too: it was impossible to believe that the old woman upstairs had ever been that young or striking. (Dolly, like all the young perhaps, didn’t for a second imagine the same fate lay in store for her.) It showed, she thought sadly, how heavily loss and betrayal could weigh on a person, poisoning them within, but also without. The satin evening dress Lady Gwendolyn was wearing in the photograph was dark in colour and luminous, bias-cut so that it clung lightly to her curves. Dolly had searched high and low in the wardrobes until she finally found it, draped over a hanger amongst a host of others—imagine her pleasure to discover it was deepest red, surely the most magnificent of all colours.

It was the first of Lady Gwendolyn’s dresses she ever tried on, but certainly not the last. No, before Kitty and the others had come, when nights at Campden Grove had been her own to do with as she wished, Dolly had spent a lot of time up here, a chair jammed beneath the doorknob as she stripped down to her underwear and played at dressing up. She’d sat at the turned-leg table sometimes, too, dusting clouds of powder across her bare decolletage, sorting through the drawers of diamond clasps, and tending her hair with the boar-bristle brush—what she’d have given to own a brush like that, with her own name, Dorothy, curled along its spine …

There wasn’t time for all that today, though. Dolly sat cross-legged on the velvet settee below the chandelier and set about peeling her banana. She closed her eyes as she took a first bite, letting out a sigh of supreme satisfaction—it was true, for-bidden (or at least severely rationed) fruits really were the sweetest. She ate her way right down to the bottom, relishing every mouthful, and then draped the skin delicately along the seat beside her. Pleasantly sated, Dolly dusted off her hands and got to work. She’d made a promise to Vivien and she intended to keep it.

Down on her knees by the racks of swaying dresses, she slid the hat box from where she’d stashed it. She’d made a start the previous day, slotting the perky velvet hat in with another and using the empty box to house the small pile of clothing she’d since assembled. It was the sort of thing Dolly could imagine she might have done for her own mother if things had turned out differently. The Women’s Voluntary Service, whose ranks she’d recently joined, was collecting unwanted items to be mended, moulded and made to make do, and Dolly was anxious to do her bit. Indeed, she wanted to thrill them with her contribution and, while she was at it, help Vivien, who was organising the drive.

At the last meeting, there’d been heated discussion about all the bits and bobs that were needed now the raids had in-creased—bandages, toys for homeless children, hospital pyjamas for soldiers—and Dolly had volunteered a load of unwanted clothing to be cut up and converted as necessary. Indeed, while the old dears bickered over who was the better seam-stress, and whose pattern they ought to use for the rag dolls, Dolly and Vivien (it sometimes seemed they were the only members under the age of a hundred!) had exchanged an amused glance and quietly got on with the rest of the business, murmuring to one another when they needed more thread or another piece of material, and trying to ignore the heated squawking all around them.

It had been lovely, spending time together like that; it was one of the main reasons Dolly had joined the WVS in the first place (that, and in hopes the Labour Exchange would be less likely to conscript her into something ghastly like munitions). With Lady Gwendolyn’s recent clinginess—she refused to spare Dolly for more than one Sunday each month—and Vivien’s brisk schedule as the perfect wife and volunteer, it was virtually impossible to see one another otherwise.

Dolly worked swiftly and was inspecting a rather insipid blouse, trying to decide whether the Dior signature inside the seam should earn it a reprieve from reincarnation as a strip of bandages, when a thump downstairs made her start. The door slammed shut, promptly followed by Cook bellowing for the girl who came in of an afternoon to help with the cleaning. Dolly glanced at the wall clock—It was almost three, and time there-fore to wake the sleeping bear. She sealed the hat box and tucked it out of sight, smoothed her skirt, and prepared herself for yet another afternoon spent playing Old Maid.

 

‘Another letter from your Jimmy,’ said Kitty, waving it at Dolly when she came into the drawing room that night. She was sit-ting crosslegged on the chaise longue while Betty and Susan flicked through an old copy of Vogue beside her. They’d moved the grand piano out of the way months ago, much to Cook’s horror, and the fourth girl, Louisa, dressed only in her under-wear, was striking a series of rather perplexing callisthenics attitudes on the Bessarabian rug.

Dolly lit a cigarette and curled her legs beneath her in the old leather wingback chair. The others always saved the wingback chair for Dolly. No one ever said as much, but her position as Lady Gwendolyn’s companion conferred on her a certain status within their little household. Never mind that she’d only lived at 7 Campden Grove a month or two longer than they had, the girls were always turning to Dolly, asking all manner of questions about how things worked and whether they might be permitted to explore the nursery/servants’ rooms/kitchen. The whole thing had amused Dolly at first, but now she couldn’t think why: it seemed absolutely the right way for the girls to act.

Cigarette on her lip, she tore open the envelope. The letter was brief, written, it said, while he was standing like a pilchard in a packed troop train, and she picked through the scrawl to find the important bits: he’d been taking photographs of war damage somewhere up north, he was back in London for a few days and he was desperate to see her— was she free on Saturday night? Dolly could have squealed.

‘There’s the cat that got the cream,’ said Kitty. ‘Come on then, tell us what he says.’

Dolly kept her eyes averted. The letter wasn’t remotely juicy but it didn’t hurt to let the others think it was, especially Kitty, who was always telling them lurid details about her latest con-quest. ‘It’s personal,’ she said finally, adding a secretive smile for good measure.

‘Spoilsport.’ Kitty pouted. ‘Keeping a handsome RAF pilot all to yourself! When are we going to meet him anyway?’

‘Yes,’ Louisa chimed in, hands on her hips as she bent for-ward from the waist. ‘Bring him round one evening so we can see for ourselves that he’s the right sort of fellow for our Doll.’

Dolly eyed Louisa’s heaving bust as she bounced her hips from side to side. She couldn’t exactly remember how they’d got the impression Jimmy was with the RAF; a mix up many months ago and, at the time, Dolly had been struck by the idea. She hadn’t set them straight and now it seemed rather too late. ‘Sorry, girls,’ she said, folding the letter in half. ‘He’s far too busy at the moment—flying secret missions, war business, I’m really not at liberty to speak about the details—and even if he weren’t, you know the rules.’

‘Oh, come on,’ Kitty said, ‘the old battle axe’ll never know. She hasn’t been downstairs since horse-drawn carriages went out of fashion, and it’s not like any of us is going to tell.’

‘She knows more than you think,’ Dolly said. ‘Besides, she relies on me I’m the closest thing she has to family. She’d let me go if she even suspected I was seeing a fellow.’

‘Would that be so bad?’ Kitty said. ‘You could come and work with us. One smile and my supervisor would take you in a jiffy. Bit of a lech, but jolly good fun once you know how to handle him.’

‘Oh yes!’ said Betty and Susan, who had a curious knack for unison. They looked up from their magazine. ‘Come and work with us.’

‘And give up my daily flaying? I hardly think so.’

Kitty laughed. ‘You’re mad, Doll. Mad or brave, I’m not sure which.’ Dolly shrugged; she certainly wasn’t going to discuss her reasons for staying with a gossip like Kitty.

She took up her book instead. It was lying on the side table where she’d left it the night before. The book was new, the first she’d ever owned (except for the unread copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management her mother had thrust so hopefully into her hands). She’d gone to Charing Cross Road especially on one of her Sundays off and bought it from a bookseller there.

‘The Reluctant Muse.’ Kitty leaned forward to read the cover. ‘Haven’t you already read that one?’

‘Twice, actually.’

‘That good?’

‘’Tis, rather.’

Kitty wrinkled her pretty little nose. ‘Not much of a reader myself.’ ‘No?’ Dolly wasn’t either, not usually, but Kitty didn’t need to know that.

‘Henry Jenkins? That name’s familiar … oh now, isn’t he the fellow across the street?’

Dolly gave a vague wave of her cigarette. ‘I believe he lives around here somewhere.’ Of course, it was the very reason she’d chosen the book. Once Lady Gwendolyn had let slip that Henry Jenkins was well known in literary circles for including rather too much fact in his fiction (‘a fellow I could mention was furious to find his dirty laundry aired. Threatened to bring a lawsuit but died before he had the chance—accident prone, just like his father. Lucky for Jenkins …’), Dolly’s curiosity had worked at her like a file. After careful discussion with the bookseller, she’d divined that The Reluctant Muse was about the love affair between a handsome author and his much younger wife, and had eagerly handed over her precious savings. Dolly had spent a delicious week thereafter, eye pressed up close to the window of the Jenkins’s marriage, learning all sorts of details she’d never have dared to ask Vivien outright.

‘Terrifically handsome chap,’ Louisa said, lying prone now on the rug, arching her spine cobra-style to blink at Dolly. ‘Married to that woman with the dark hair, the one who walks around like she’s got a broomstick up her—’

‘Oh!’ Betty and Susan, wide-eyed. ‘Her.’

‘Lucky girl,’ Kitty said. ‘I’d kill for a husband like him. Have you seen the way he looks at her? Like she’s a piece of perfection and he can’t quite believe his luck.’

‘I wouldn’t mind if he glanced my way,’ said Louisa. ‘How do you think a girl meets a man like him?’

Dolly knew the answer to that—how Vivien met Henry—it was right there in the book, but she didn’t volunteer it. Vivien was her friend. To discuss her like this, to know that the others had noticed her too, that they’d speculated and wondered and drawn their own conclusions, made Dolly’s ears burn with indignation. It was as if something that belonged to her, something precious and private that she cared about deeply, was being riffled through like—well, like a hat box of salvaged clothes.

‘I heard she’s not entirely well,’ Louisa said, ‘that’s why he never takes his eyes off her.’

Kitty scoffed. ‘She doesn’t look one bit ill to me. Quite the contrary. I’ve seen her reporting to the WVS canteen round on Church Street when I’m coming home of an evening.’ She lowered her voice and the other girls leaned close to hear her. ‘I heard it was because she had a wandering eye.’

‘Ooh,’ Betty and Susan cooed together, ‘A lover!’

‘Haven’t you noticed how careful she is?’ Kitty continued, to the rapt attention of the others. ‘Always greeting him at the door when he gets home, dressed to the nines and placing a glass of whisky in his waiting hand. Please! That’s not love. It’s a guilty conscience. You mark my words—that woman’s hiding something, and I think we all know what that something is.’

Dolly had heard as much as she could stand; in fact, she found herself in rather violent agreement with Lady Gwendolyn that the sooner the girls left number 7 Campden Grove, the bet-ter. They really were an unsophisticated lot. ‘Is that the time?’ she said, clapping her book closed. ‘I’m going to go and have my bath.’

Dolly waited until the water had reached the five-inch line and turned the tap off with her foot. She poked her big toe inside the spout to stop it dripping. She knew she ought to call someone about fixing it, but who was there left nowadays? Plumbers were too busy putting out fires and turning off exploded water mains to care about a little drip and it always seemed to settle down eventually. She rested her bare neck on the tub’s cool rim and adjusted herself to keep her curlers and kirby grips from digging into her head. She’d tied the whole lot up with a scarf so the steam wouldn’t make her hair lank—wishful thinking, of course, Dolly couldn’t remember the last time her bath had been steaming.

She blinked at the ceiling as strains of dance music drifted up from the wireless downstairs. It really was a lovely room, black and white tiles and lots of silver rails and taps. Lady Gwendolyn’s ghastly nephew, Peregrine, would have a pink fit if he saw the lines strung across it with knickers and brassieres and stockings hung out to dry. The thought rather pleased Dolly.

She reached over the side of the tub and took up her cigarette in one hand, The Reluctant Muse in the other. Keeping both clear of the water (it wasn’t hard—five inches didn’t go far) she flicked through until she found the scene she was looking for. Humphrey, the clever but unhappy writer, has been invited by his old headmaster to return to his school and talk to the boys about literature, followed by dinner in his master’s private quarters. He’s just excused himself from the table and left the residence to stroll back through the darkling garden to the spot where he’s parked his car, and is thinking about the direction his life has taken, the regrets he’s acquired and the ‘cruel passing of time’, when he reaches the estate’s old lake and something catches his eye:

Humphrey dimmed his flashlight and stayed where he was, quiet and still in the shadows of the bathing house. In the nearby clearing on the bank of the lake, glass lanterns had been strung from the branches and candles flickered in the warm night air. A girl on the threshold of adulthood was standing amongst them, feet bare and only the simplest of summer dresses grazing her knees. Her dark hair fell loose in waves over her shoulders and moonlight dripped over the scene to cast silver along her profile. Humphrey could see that her lips were moving, as if she spoke the lines of a poem beneath her breath.

Her face was exquisite—cat-like eyes, arched brows, lips that were curled for singing—yet it was her hands that entranced him. While the rest of her body was perfectly still, her fingers were moving together in front of her body, the small but graceful motions of a person weaving together invisible threads. It wouldn’t have surprised Humphrey to learn that she was sending forth instructions to the sun and moon.

He had known women before, beautiful women who flattered and seduced, but this girl was different. There was beauty in her focus, a purity of purpose that reminded him of a child’s, though she was most certainly a woman. To find her in these natural surrounds, to observe the free flow of her body, the wild, romance of her face, enchanted him.

Humphrey stepped out of the shadows. The girl saw him but she didn’t start. She smiled as if she’d been expecting him and gestured towards the rippling lake, ‘There’s some-thing magical about swimming in the moonlight, don’t you think?’

It was the end of a chapter and the end of her cigarette, and Dolly disposed of both. The water was growing tepid and she wanted to wash herself before it turned any colder. She lathered her arms thoughtfully, wondering as she rinsed off the soap if that was the way Jimmy felt about her.

Dolly climbed out of the tub and slipped a towel from the rack. She caught sight of herself unexpectedly in the mirror and stopped very still trying to imagine what a stranger might see when he looked at her. Brown hair, brown eyes—not too close together thank goodness, a rather perky nose. She knew she was pretty, she’d known that since she was eleven years old and the postman began to behave strangely when he saw her in the street; but was her beauty of a different kind from Vivien’s? Would a man like Henry Jenkins have stopped, spell-bound, to watch her whisper in the moonlight?

Because, of course, Viola was Vivien. Aside from the bio-graphical similarities, there was the description of the girl standing in moonlight by the lake, her curled lips, feline eyes, the way she was staring so intently at something no one else could see. Why, it might have been written about Dolly’s view of Vivien from Lady Gwendolyn’s window.

She moved closer to the mirror. She could hear her own breathing in the still of the bathroom. What must it have been like, she wondered, for Vivien to know that she had made a man like Henry Jenkins, older, more experienced, and with an entree to literature and Society’s finest circles, so enchanted? How like a real princess must she have felt when he proposed marriage, when he swept her away from the humdrum of her normal existence and took her back to London, a life in which she blossomed from a wild young girl into a pearl-wearing, Chanel No 5-scented beauty, dashing about on her husband’s arm as the pair of them held court in the most glamorous clubs and restaurants. That was the Vivien Dolly knew; and, she suspected, the one she more resembled.

Knock, knock. ‘Anyone alive in there?’

Kitty’s voice on the other side of the bathroom door caught Dolly by surprise. ‘Just a minute,’ she called back.

‘Oh, good, you are there. I was beginning to think you might’ve drowned.’

‘No.’

‘Going to be much longer?’

‘No.’

‘Only it’s almost gone half nine, Doll, and I’m meeting a rather splendid airman at the Caribbean Club. Up from Biggin Hill for the night. I don’t suppose you fancy a dance? He said he’s going to bring some friends. One of them specially asked after you.’

‘Not tonight.’

‘Did you hear me say airmen, Doll? Brave and dashing he-roes?’

‘I already have one of those, remember? Besides, I’ve a shift at the WVS canteen.’

‘Surely the widows, virgins and spinsters can do without you for a night?’

Dolly didn’t answer and after a few moments, Kitty said, ‘Well, if you’re sure. Louisa’s keen as mustard to take your place.’

As if she ever could, thought Dolly. ‘Have fun,’ she called, and then she waited as Kitty’s footsteps retreated.

Only when she heard the other girl descending the stairs, did she untie the knot of her scarf and slip it from her head. She knew she’d have to re-do them later, but it didn’t matter. She began to unwind her curlers, dropping them into the empty sink. When they were all out, she combed her hair with her fingers, pulling it down in soft waves around her shoulders.

There now. She turned her head from side to side; she began to whisper beneath her breath (Dolly didn’t know any poems, but she figured the lyrics to ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ would do just as well); she lifted her hands and moved her fingers before her as if she were weaving invisible threads. Dolly smiled a little at what she saw. She looked just like Viola in the book.

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