‘I don’t know, Ma.’ Every ounce of Laurel ached to see her mother, the ancient ailing woman who’d chased away monsters and kissed away tears, racked now by guilt and contrition. She wanted desperately to offer comfort; she wanted equally to know what her mother had done. She said gently, ‘I suppose it depends on what it is that’s stolen from us, and what it is we propose to take for ourselves in return.’
The intensity of her mother’s expression dissolved and her eyes watered now at the brightness of the window. ‘I thought that it was fair,’ she said again. ‘I thought it seemed like justice.’
Later that afternoon, Laurel sat smoking in the middle of the Greenacres attic floor. The bleached boards were smooth beneath her, solid, and the last of the late afternoon sun fell through the tiny four-paned window in the roof’s peak, landing like a spotlight on her mother’s locked trunk. Laurel drew slowly on her cigarette. She’d been sitting there for half an hour now, only her ashtray, the trunk’s key and her conscience for company. The key had been easy enough to find, tucked where Rose had said it would be, right at the back of their mother’s bedside table drawer. All Laurel had to do now was slip it into the padlock, twist, and she’d know.
But know what? More about the opportunity Dorothy had glimpsed? What it was she’d taken or done?
It wasn’t that she expected to find a full written confession inside; nothing like that. Only that it seemed an important, rather obvious place to look for clues to her mother’s mystery. Surely if she and Gerry were going to tear around the country troubling other people for information that might help fill in the blanks, it was a somewhat glaring oversight not to have done what they could at home first. And really, it was no more invasive of her mother’s privacy than the digging they’d started to do elsewhere, was it? Opening the trunk was no worse than talking to Kitty Barker, or chasing Dr Rufus’s notes, or going to the library tomorrow in search of Vivien Jenkins. It just felt worse.
Laurel eyed the padlock. With her mother out of the house, she was just about able to convince herself it was no big deal—Ma had let Rose retrieve the book for her, after all, and she didn’t play favourites (except where Gerry was concerned, and they were all guilty of that): ergo, Ma wouldn’t mind Laurel seeing inside the trunk either. A tenuous logic perhaps, but it was all she had. And once Dorothy came home to Greenacres it all turned to dust. There was no way, Laurel knew, she’d be able to go through with the search with her mother just downstairs. It was now or never.
‘Sorry, Ma,’ said Laurel, ridding herself of her cigarette with a decisive squish, ‘but I have to know.’
She stood up carefully, feeling like a giantess as she went to the sloping edge of the attic. She knelt to insert the key and crack the padlock open. That was the moment; she felt it in her heart; even if she never opened the lid the crime was already committed.
Better then, surely, to be in for a pound as for a penny? Laurel stood and started to lift the old trunk’s lid; she didn’t look though. The stiff leather hinges creaked with paucity of use, and Laurel held her breath. She was a child again, breaking a rule set in stone. Her head felt light. And now the lid was open, as far as it could go. Laurel took her hand away and the hinges strained beneath its weight. Drawing in a deep breath of resolution, she crossed the Rubicon and looked inside.
There was something on top, an envelope, old and a bit yellowed, that had been addressed to Dorothy Nicolson at Greenacres Farm. The stamp was olive green and featured a young Queen Elizabeth in her coronation robes; Laurel felt a sudden quiver of memory when she saw that image of the queen, as if it were important, though how she couldn’t guess. There was no sender address, and she bit down on her lip as she opened the envelope and slipped a cream rectangular card from inside. There were two words written across its middle in black ink: ‘Thank you’. Laurel turned it over and found nothing more. She agitated the card back and forth, wondering.
There were lots of people who might’ve had reason to thank her mother over the years, but to do so in such an anonymous way—no return address, no name at the bottom of the card—was decidedly odd; the fact that Dorothy had kept it under lock and key, odder still. Evidence, Laurel realised, that her mother must have known precisely from whom it had come; further, that whatever the person was thanking Ma for was something secret.
All of which was exceedingly mysterious—sufficiently so to quicken Laurel’s heart—but not necessarily relevant to her search. (Conversely, there was every chance it was the vital clue, but Laurel couldn’t think there was any way of knowing that for sure, not at this point; not unless she asked her mother outright, and she didn’t intend to do that. Yet.) She returned the card to its envelope and slipped it down the inside edge of the trunk, where it lodged beside a little figurine made of wood; Mr Punch, Laurel realised with a half-smile, thinking of the holidays they used to have at Grandma Nicolson’s.
There was another item in the trunk, an object so large it al-most filled the whole space. It looked like a blanket, but when Laurel reached in, drew it out and shook it to full length, she saw it was a coat, a rather tatty fur that must once have been white. Laurel held it by the shoulders at arm’s length, letting it hang, sizing it up the way one might when deciding whether to purchase a jacket in a shop.
The wardrobe at the far end of the attic had a mirrored door. They used to play inside that wardrobe when they were children, at least Laurel had; the others had been too frightened, which had made it the perfect place for her to hide from them when she needed the freedom to disappear inside her made-up stories.
Laurel took the coat to the wardrobe and slipped her arms inside its sleeves. She regarded herself, turning slowly from one side to the other. The coat fell just past her knees, with buttons down the front and a belt around the middle. It was a lovely cut, no matter what you thought of fur, the attention to detail, the line. Laurel was willing to bet someone had paid a lot of money for this coat, back when it was new. She wondered if that person had been her mother, and if so, how a young girl working as a maid had afforded such a fine thing.
As she watched her reflection, a distant memory came. It wasn’t the first time Laurel had worn the coat. It had been a rainy day, back when she was just a girl. They’d been driving their mother crazy all morning running up and down the stairs and Dorothy had banished them to the attic for a game of dressing up. The Nicolson children had an enormous dressing-up box that their mother kept stocked with old hats and shirts and scarves, funny things she found along the way that might be turned by childish magic into something fine.
While her sisters draped themselves in the old favourites, Laurel had spied a bag in the corner of the attic, something white and furry poking from its top. She’d taken out the coat and put it on at once. Then she’d stood before this very mirror, admiring herself, thinking how grand it made her look: like a wicked but wonderful Snow Queen.
Laurel was a child and therefore she didn’t see the thinning patches of fur, nor the curious dark stains around the hem; but she did recognise the sumptuous authority inherent in such a coat. She spent a marvellous few hours ordering her sisters into cages, threatening to set her wolves upon them if they didn’t follow her orders, cackling with evil laughter. By the time their mother called them down for lunch, Laurel had become so attached to the coat and its curious power that she didn’t consider taking it off.
Dorothy’s expression when she saw her eldest daughter arrive in the kitchen had been hard to read. She hadn’t been pleased, but she hadn’t shouted either. It had been worse than that. Her face had drained of all colour and her voice when she spoke was trembling. ‘Take it off,’ she’d said, ‘take it off now.’ When Laurel didn’t leap directly to action, her mother had come quickly to where she was standing and started pulling the coat from her shoulders, muttering about the day being too hot, the coat too long, the attic ladder too steep for wearing such a thing. Why, she was lucky not to have tripped and fallen and killed herself. She had glanced at Laur
el then, the fur coat bundled in her arms, and the look on her face had been almost accusative, a mixture of distress and betrayal, almost fear. For a single awful moment, Laurel had thought her mother might be going to cry. She didn’t though; she ordered Laurel to sit down at the table, and then she disappeared, taking the coat with her.
Laurel didn’t see the fur again. She’d asked about it once, some months later when she needed a costume for a play at school, but Dorothy had only said, without meeting Laurel’s eyes, ‘That old thing? I threw it out. It was nothing more than food for the rats up there in the attic.’
But here it was now, tucked away in her mother’s trunk, kept for decades under lock and key. Laurel exhaled thoughtfully, tucking her hands inside the pockets of the coat. There was a hole in the satin lining of one, and her fingers slipped right through. She touched something; it felt like the corner of a piece of cardboard. The hem lining perhaps, pulled apart from the rest? Laurel caught hold of whatever it was and drew it out through the hole.
It was a piece of white card, neat, rectangular, with some-thing printed on it. The type had faded and Laurel had to take it to the remaining patch of sunlight to make out the words. It was a train ticket, she realised, stamped with a single fare from Lon-don to the station nearest Grandma Nicolson’s town. The date on the ticket was the May 23 rd, 1941.
Twenty
London, February 1941
JIMMY HURRIED across London, an unfamiliar spring in his step. It had been weeks since he’d had any contact with Dolly—she’d refused to see him when he tried to visit her at Campden Grove, and she hadn’t answered any of his letters—but now, finally, this. He could feel her letter in his pocket, the same spot he’d carried the ring that awful night—God, he hoped it wasn’t an ill omen. The letter had arrived at the newspaper office earlier in the week, a simple note imploring him to meet her at the park bench in Kensington Gardens, the one nearest the Peter Pan sculpture. There was something she needed to talk to him about, something she hoped might please him.
She’d changed her mind and wanted to marry him. That had to be it. Jimmy was trying to be wary, he hated to jump to conclusions, not when he’d suffered so hard after she turned him down, but he couldn’t stop his thoughts—admit it, his hopes—from going there. What else could it be? Something that would please him—there was only one thing he could think of that would do that. God knew, Jimmy could do with some good news.
They’d been bombed out ten days before. The whole thing had come out of nowhere. There’d been a lull lately, more eerie in its way than the worst of the Blitz—all that quietude and peace had a way of getting people on edge—but on January 18th a stray bomb had fallen right on top of Jimmy’s flat. He’d come home from a night out working and seen the telltale may-hem as he turned the corner. God, but he’d held his breath as he ran towards the fire and ruins. He’d stopped hearing any-thing but his own voice and his own body working, breathing and pumping blood, as he combed through the wreckage, shouting his father’s name, cursing himself for not having found a safer place, for not having been there when the old man needed him most. When Jimmy turned up Finchie’s crushed cage, he’d let out a startling animal noise of pain and grief, the sort he hadn’t known himself capable of making. And he’d had the God-awful experience of suddenly inhabiting a scene from one of his photographs, except the ruined house was his house, the discarded possessions his possessions, the lost loved one his dad, and he’d known then that no matter how much praise his editors heaped upon him he’d failed gravely in his attempts to capture the truth inherent in that moment; the fear and panic and startling realness of having suddenly lost everything.
He’d turned away and dropped, bone-heavy, to his knees and that’s when he’d seen Mrs Hamblin from the flat next door, waving dazedly at him from across the street. He’d gone to her, taken her in his arms and let her sob against his shoulder, and he’d wept too, hot tears of helplessness and anger and sorrow. And then she’d lifted her head and said, ‘Have you seen your dad, yet?’ and Jimmy had answered, ‘I couldn’t find him,’ and she’d pointed down the street. ‘He went with the Red Cross, I think. A lovely young medic offered him a cup of tea, and you know what he’s like for tea, he’d—’
Jimmy hadn’t stuck around to hear more. He’d started running towards the church hall where he knew the Red Cross would be. He’d burst through the front doors and seen his father almost right away, the old boy sitting at a table with a cup of tea in front of him and Finchie on his forearm. Mrs Hamblin had got him to the shelter in time, and Jimmy didn’t think he’d ever been so grateful to a person in his life. He’d have given her the world if he could, so it was a great pity he owned nothing fit for giving. He’d lost all his savings in the blast, along with everything else. He’d been left with the clothes on his back, and the camera he’d been carrying. And thank God for that—what would he have done otherwise?
Jimmy flicked his hair out of his eyes as he walked. He had to put his father out of his mind, their cramped temporary digs. The old man made him vulnerable and he didn’t want to be weak today. He couldn’t afford to be. Today was about being in control, dignified, maybe even a little standoffish. It was hatefully proud of him perhaps, but he wanted Dolly to see him and know she’d made a mistake. He hadn’t dressed up like a monkey in his father’s suit this time—he couldn’t—but he’d made an effort.
He turned off the street and into the park, making his way past the lawn that had been turned over to Victory vegetable gardens, along the paths that seemed naked without their iron railings, and he prepared himself to see her again. She’d al-ways had a power over him, a way, just by looking, of bending him to her will. Those eyes, bright with laughter, that had watched him over the top of her cup of tea in a Coventry cafe; the curl of her lips when she smiled, a little bit teasing at times, but, God, so exciting, so full of life. He was warming now just at the thought of her, and he took himself in hand, concentrated on remembering exactly how much she’d hurt him, embarrassed him, too—the look on the waiters’ faces when they saw Jimmy alone in the restaurant, still holding the ring—he’d never forget they way they’d looked at him, the way they must have laughed when he left. Jimmy stumbled on the edge of the path. Christ. He had to take control, quell his optimism and longing, safeguard himself against the possibility of further disappointment.
He did his best, he really did, but he’d loved her too long he supposed (later when he was back at home, when he thought back over the day’s events); and love made fools of men, everyone knew that. Case in point: entirely without meaning to and against his better judgement, when Jimmy Metcalfe got near the meeting place he began to jog.
Dolly was sitting on the bench, exactly where she’d said she’d be. Jimmy saw her first and stopped where he was, catching his breath and straightening his hair, his cuffs, his posture, while he watched her. His initial excitement turned quickly, though, to wonder. It had only been three weeks (though the circumstances of their separation made it feel more like three years) but she’d changed. She was Dolly, she was beautiful, but there was something wrong with her, he knew it even from a distance. Jimmy felt suddenly dislocated; he’d been ready to be tough, petulant if pushed, but to see her sitting there, arms wrapped around her body, eyes downcast, smaller somehow than he remembered—it was the last thing he’d expected and it caught him off guard.
She saw him then and a hand leapt to wave but she captured it in time and smiled instead, a tentative brightening of her face. Jimmy returned it and started towards her, wondering what on earth could possibly have happened; whether someone had hurt her, done something to knock the spirit clean out of her, knowing at once that he’d kill them if they had.
She stood as he drew near and they embraced, her bones fi-ne and birdlike beneath his hands. She wasn’t wearing enough clothing; it had been snowing on and off, and her tatty old coat wasn’t warm enough. She held on to him for a long time and Jimmy—who’d been so hurt by her, so furious at th
e way she’d treated him, her refusal to explain herself; he, who’d promised himself to keep the bitterness uppermost in his mind when he saw her today—found that he was stroking her hair the way he would a lost and vulnerable child.
‘Jimmy,’ she said finally, her face still pressed against his shirt, ‘Oh, Jimmy—
‘Shh,’ he said, ‘There now, don’t cry.’
She did though, light soft tears that didn’t seem to end, and she gripped the sides of his chest with her hands, making him feel concerned and oddly excited too. God, what the hell was the matter with him?
‘Oh Jimmy,’ she said again. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so ashamed.’
‘What are you talking about, Doll?’ He took her shoulders and reluctantly she met his eyes.
‘I made a mistake, Jimmy,’ she said, ‘I’ve made so many. I should never have treated you that way. That night in the restaurant, what I did—leaving like that, walking away I’m so, so sorry.’
He didn’t have a handkerchief but he had a lens cloth and he used it to wipe her cheeks gently dry.
‘I don’t expect you to forgive me,’ she said. ‘And I know we can’t go back in time, I do know that, but I had to tell you. I’ve felt so guilty and I needed to apologise in person so you could see that I meant it.’ She blinked through her tears and said, ‘I do mean it, Jimmy. I’m so very sorry.’
He nodded then. He ought to have said something, but he was too surprised and touched to find the right words. It seemed to be enough because she smiled, more broadly now, in reply Jimmy saw a flash of her old vibrancy in the smile and it made him want to freeze her in that moment so it couldn’t dis-appear again. She was the sort of person who needed to be kept happy, he realised. Not as a matter of selfish expectation, but as a simple fact of design, like a piano, or a harp, she’d been made to function best at a certain tuning.