The Secret Keeper (20 page)

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.’