Dolly sighed as she watched him jouncing backwards from the wicket, winding himself up to bowl the ball at Cuthbert. He might have won against her mother, convincing her to suppress everything that made her special, but he wasn’t going to do the same to Dolly. She refused to let him. ‘Mother,’ she said suddenly, letting her magazine drop to her lap.
‘Yes, dear? Would you like a sandwich? I’ve some shrimp paste here with me.’
Dolly drew breath: she couldn’t quite believe she was going to say it, now, here, just like that, but the wind was with her and away she went, ‘Mother, I don’t want to go to work with Father at the bicycle factory.’
‘Oh?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
‘I don’t think I could stand to do the same thing every day, typing up letters full of bicycles and order references and dreary yours sincerelys.’
Her mother blinked at her with a bland, unreadable expression on her face. ‘I see.’
‘Yes.’
‘And what is it you propose to do instead?’
Dolly wasn’t sure how to answer that. She hadn’t thought about the specifics, she just knew there was something out there waiting for her. ‘I don’t know. I just … Well, the bi-cycle factory’s hardly the right sort of place for someone like me, don’t you think?’
‘Why ever not?’
She didn’t want to have to say it. She wanted her mother to know, to agree, to think it herself without being told. Dolly struggled to find the words, while the undertow of disappointment pulled hard against her hope.
‘It’s time to settle down now, Dorothy,’ her mother said gently. ‘You’re almost a woman.’
‘Yes, but that’s exactly—’
‘Put away childish notions. The time for all that has passed. He wanted to tell you himself, to surprise you, but your father’s already spoken with Mrs Levene at the factory and organised an interview for you.’
‘What?’
‘I wasn’t supposed to say anything, but they’ll see you in the first week in September. You’re a very lucky girl to have a father with such influence.’
‘But I—’
‘Father knows best.’ Janice Smitham reached to tap Dolly’s leg but didn’t quite make contact. ‘You’ll see.’ There was a hint of fear behind her painted-on smile, as if she knew she was betraying her daughter in some way, but didn’t care to think about how.
Dolly burned inside; she wanted to shake her mother and remind her that she’d once been exceptional herself. She wanted to demand to know why she’d changed; tell her (though Dolly knew this bit was cruel) that she, Dolly, was frightened; that she couldn’t bear to think the same thing might happen one day to her. But then—
‘Watch out!’
A shriek came from the Bournemouth shoreline, drawing Dolly’s attention to the water’s edge and saving Janice Smitham from a conversation she didn’t want to have.
There, in a bathing costume straight from Vogue, stood The Girl, previously of The Silver Dress. Her mouth was tightened to a pretty moue and she was rubbing at her arm. The other beautiful people had clustered in a tableau of tut-tutting and sympathetic posturing, and Dolly strained to understand what had happened. She watched as a boy, around her age, stooped to scoop at the sand, as he righted himself and held aloft—Dolly’s hand went gravely to her mouth—a cricket ball.
‘So sorry, chaps,’ Father said.
Dolly’s eyes widened—what on earth was he doing now? Dear God, not making an approach, surely. But yes, she drew breath, that’s exactly what he was doing. Dolly wanted to disappear, to hide, but she couldn’t look away. Father stopped when he reached the group and made a rudimentary mime of swinging the bat. The others nodded and listened, the boy with the ball said something and the girl touched her arm, and then shrugged lightly and smiled those dimples at Father. Dolly exhaled, it seemed disaster had been averted.
But then, dazzled perhaps by the aura of glamour into which he’d stumbled, Father forgot to leave, turning instead and pointing up the beach, directing the collective attention of the others to the patch where Dolly and her mother sat. Janice Smitham, with a deficit of grace that made her daughter cringe, started to stand before thinking better of it, failing to sit, and choosing instead to hover at a crouch. From such position she lifted a hand to wave.
Something inside Dolly curled up and died. Things could not have been worse.
Except that suddenly they were.
‘Look here! Look at me!’
They looked. Cuthbert, with all the patience of a gnat, had grown tired of waiting. Cricket game forgotten, he’d wandered up the beach and made contact with one of the seaside don-keys. One foot already in the stirrup, he was struggling to hoist himself atop. It was awful to watch, but watch Dolly did; watch—a sneaking glance confirmed—did everybody.
The spectacle of Cuthbert weighing that poor donkey down was the last straw. She knew she probably should have helped him, but Dolly couldn’t, not this time. She muttered something about her headache and too much sun, swept up her magazine, and hurried back towards the grim solace of her tiny room with its stingy view of drainpipes.
Back behind the bandstand, a young man with longish hair and a shabby suit had seen it all. He’d been dozing beneath his hat when the cry of ‘Watch out!’ cut through his dream and woke him. He’d rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and glanced about to pinpoint the source of the cry and that’s when he’d seen them by the foreshore, the father and son who’d been playing cricket all morning.
There’d been some sort of a kerfuffle, the father was waving at a group in the shallows—the rich young people, he realised, who’d been making so much of themselves at the nearby bathing hut. The hut was empty now, but for a swathe of silver fabric fluttering from the balcony rail. The dress. He’d noticed it earlier—it had been hard not to, which was no doubt the point. It wasn’t a beach dress, that one; it belonged on a dance floor.
‘Look here!’ someone called, ‘Look at me!’ And the young man duly looked. The lad who’d been playing cricket was busy now making a donkey of himself, with, it would appear, a don-key. The rest of the crowd was watching the entertainment un-fold.
Not him, though. He had other things to do. The pretty girl with heart-shaped lips and the sort of curves that made him ache with longing, was by herself now, leaving her family and heading away from the beach. He stood up, swinging his haversack over his shoulder and pulling his hat down low. He’d been waiting for an opportunity like this one and he didn’t intend to waste it.
Eight
Bournemouth, 1938
DOLLY DIDN’T SEE HIM at first. She didn’t see much of anything. She was far too busy blinking back tears of frustration as she trudged along the beach towards the promenade. Everything was a hot angry blur of sand and seagulls and lousy smiling faces. She knew they weren’t laughing at her, not really, but it didn’t matter one bit. Their jolliness was a personal blow; it made everything a hundred times worse. Dolly couldn’t go to work at that bicycle factory, she just couldn’t. Marry a younger version of her father and, bit by tiny bit, turn into her mother? It was inconceivable—oh, fine for the two of them, they were happy with their lot, but Dolly wanted more than that … she just didn’t know yet what it was or where to find it.
She stopped short. A gust of wind, stronger than those that had come before it, chose the very moment of her arrival near the bathing huts to lift the silk dress, sweep it from the railing and send it scuttling across the sand. It came to rest right in front of her, a luxurious spill of silver. Why—she drew an in-credulous breath—the blonde girl with the dimples mustn’t have bothered to pin it down safely. But how could anybody care so little for such a beautiful piece of clothing? What was the point of renting a hut if not to procure the perfect place in which to stow such precious items while one was swimming? Dolly shook her head; a girl with such scant regard for her own possessions hardly deserved to have them. It was the sort of thing a princ
ess might have worn—an American film star, a glamour model in a magazine, an heiress on holidays in the French Riviera—and if Dolly hadn’t come along right then it might’ve continued its flight across the dunes and been lost forever.
The wind returned and the dress rolled further up the beach, disappearing behind the bathing huts. Without another moment’s hesitation, Dolly started after it: the girl had been foolish, it was true, but Dolly wasn’t about to let that divine piece of silver come to harm.
She could just imagine how grateful the girl would be when the dress was returned. Dolly would explain what had happened—taking care not to make the girl feel worse than she already did—and the pair of them would start to laugh and say what a close call it was, and the girl would offer Doll a glass of cold lemonade, real lemonade, not the watery substitute Mrs Jennings served at Bellevue. They’d get to talking and discover they had an awful lot in common, and then finally the sun would slip in the sky and Dolly would say she really ought to be going and the girl would smile disappointedly, before brightening and reaching to stroke Dolly’s arm—‘What if you join us here tomorrow morning?’ she’d ask. ‘Some of us are going to get together and play a bit of tennis on the sand. It’ll be such a lark—do say you’ll come.’
Hurrying now, Dolly rounded the corner of the bathing hut after the silver dress, only to find as she did so that it had already stopped its tumble, having run straight into the ankles of somebody else. It was a man in a hat, bending down now to pick up the dress, and as his fingers grasped the fabric, as grains of sand slid from the dress, with them went all Dolly’s hopes.
For a split second Dolly honestly felt she could’ve murdered the man in the hat, happily torn him limb from limb. Her pulse beat furiously, her skin tingled and her vision glazed. She glanced back towards the sea: at her father, marching stonily towards poor flummoxed Cuth- bert; at her mother, frozen still in that attitude of pained supplication; at the others, those with the blonde girl, laughing now, slapping their knees as they pointed out the ridiculous scene.
The donkey let loose a pained and pitiful braying, echoing Dolly’s feelings so entirely that before she knew what she was doing she’d spluttered at the man, ‘Hey there—’ he was about to steal the blonde girl’s dress and it was up to Dolly to stop him—‘you. What do you think you’re doing?’
The man looked up, surprised, and when Dolly saw the handsome face beneath the hat she was briefly knocked off course. She stood, drawing quick breaths, wondering what to do next, but as the man’s mouth started to pull up at the sides in a suggestive way, she suddenly knew.
‘I said—’ Dolly was lightheaded, strangely excited—‘what do you think you’re doing? That dress isn’t yours.’
The young man opened his mouth to speak, and as he did so a policeman by the unfortunate name of Constable Suckling—who’d been making his portly progress down the beach—arrived beside them.
Constable Basil Suckling had been perambulating the promenade all morning, keeping an eye fixed firmly on his beach. He’d noticed the dark-haired girl as soon as she arrived, and had been watching her closely ever since. He’d turned away only briefly over that blasted business with the donkey, but when he looked back the girl was gone. It had taken Constable Suckling a tense few minutes to find her again, behind the bathing huts, engaged in what looked to him suspiciously like heated discussion. Her companion, none other than the rough young man who’d been lurking beneath his hat at the back of the bandstand all morning.
Hand on his truncheon, Constable Suckling jostled across the beach. The sand made progress more ungainly than he’d have liked, but he did his best. As he drew near he heard her say, ‘That dress isn’t yours.’ ‘Everything all right then?’ said the constable now, holding his stomach in a little tighter as he came to a stop. She was even prettier up close than he’d imagined. Bowtie lips with up-turned outer corners. Peachy skin—smooth, he could tell just by looking, yielding. Glossy curls around a love-heart face. He added, ‘This fellow’s not bothering you is he, Miss?’
‘Oh. Oh, no, sir. Not at all.’ Her face was flushed and Constable Suckling realised she was blushing. Not every day she met a man in uniform, he supposed. She really was quite charming. ‘This gentleman was just about to return something to me.’
‘Is that right?’ He frowned at the young man, taking in the insolent expression, the jaunty way he carried himself, the high cheekbones and arrogant black eyes. They gave the lad a distinctly foreign look, an Irish look, those eyes, and Inspector Suckling narrowed his own. The young man shifted his weight and made a small sighing noise, the plaintive nature of which made the constable improbably cross. Louder this time, he said again, ‘Is that right?’
Still there came no answer, and Constable Suckling’s grip settled on his truncheon. He tightened his fingers around its familiar shaft. It was, he sometimes thought, the best partner he’d ever had, certainly the most abiding. His fingertips itched with pleasant memories and it was almost a disappointment when the young man, cowed, gave a nod.
‘Well then,’ the constable said; ‘Hurry it up. Return the young lady’s item to her. ’
‘Thank you, Constable,’ she said, ‘it’s so kind of you.’ And then she smiled again, setting off a not unpleasant shifting sensation in the constable’s trousers. ‘It blew away, you see.’
Constable Suckling cleared his throat and adopted his most policeman-like expression. ‘Right then, Miss,’ he said, ‘Let’s get you home, shall we? Out of the wind and out of danger’s way.’
Dolly managed to extricate herself from Inspector Suckling’s dutiful care when they reached the front door of Bellevue. It had looked a little hairy for a while—there’d been talk of walking her inside and fetching her a nice cup of tea to ‘settle her nerves’—but Dolly, after no small effort, convinced him that his talents were wasted on such menial tasks and he really should be getting back to his beat. ‘After all, Constable, you must have so many people needing you to rescue them.’
She thanked him profusely—he held her hand a little longer than was strictly necessary in parting which was uncomfortable, for his skin was sticky—and then Dolly made a great show of opening the door and heading inside. She closed it almost but not quite completely and watched through the gap as he strutted back to the promenade. Only when he’d become a pinprick in the distance did she tuck the silver dress beneath a cushion for safekeeping and sneak back out, doubling back the way they’d come along the prom.
The young man was loitering, waiting for her, leaning against the pillar outside one of the smartest guesthouses. Dolly didn’t so much as glance sideways at him as she passed, only kept walking, shoulders back, head held high. He followed her down the road, she could tell he was there, and into a small laneway that zigzagged away from the beach. Dolly could feel her heartbeat speeding up and, as the sounds of the seaside deadened against the cold stone walls of the buildings, she could hear it too. She kept walking, faster than before. Her plimsolls were scuffing on the tarmac, her breaths were growing short, but she didn’t stop and she didn’t look behind her. There was a spot she knew, a dark juncture where she’d become lost once as a little girl, hidden from the world as her mother and father called her name and feared the worst.
Dolly stopped when she reached it, but she didn’t turn around. She stood there, very still, listening, waiting until he was right behind her, until she could feel his breath on the back of her neck, his very closeness heating her skin.
He took her hand and she gasped. She let him turn her slowly to face him, and she waited, wordless, as he lifted the inside of her wrist to his mouth and brushed across it the sort of kiss that made her shiver from way down deep inside.
‘What are you doing here?’ she whispered.
His lips were still touching her skin. ‘I missed you.’
‘It’s only been three days.’
He shrugged, and that lock of dark hair that refused to stay put fell forward across his forehead.
> ‘You came by train?’
He gave a slow single nod.
‘Just for the day?’
Another nod, half a smile.
‘Jimmy! But it’s such a long way.’
‘I had to see you.’
‘What if I’d stayed with my family on the beach? What if I hadn’t headed back alone, what then?’
‘I still would’ve seen you, wouldn’t I?’
Dolly shook her head, pleased but pretending not to be. ‘My father will kill you if he finds out.’
‘I reckon I can take him.’
Dolly laughed, he always made her laugh. It was one of the things she liked best about him. ‘You’re mad.’
‘About you.’
And then there was that. He was mad about her. Dolly’s stomach turned a somersault. ‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘There’s a path through here that leads out into fields. No one will see us there.’
‘You realise, of course, that you could’ve got me arrested.’
‘Oh, Jimmy! You’re being too serious.’
‘You didn’t see the look on that policeman’s face—he was ready to lock me up and throw away the key. Don’t get me started on the way he was looking at you.’ Jimmy turned his head to face her, but she didn’t meet his eyes. The grass was long and soft where they were lying and she was staring up at the sky, humming some dance tune beneath her breath and making diamond shapes with her fingers. Jimmy traced her profile with his gaze—the smooth arc of her forehead, the dip between her brow that rose again to form that determined nose, the sudden drop and then the full scoop of her top lip. God she was beautiful. She made his whole body yearn and ache, and it took every bit of restraint he had not to jump on top of her, pin her arms behind her head and kiss her like a madman.
But he didn’t, he never did, not like that. Jimmy kept it chaste even though it damn near killed him. She was still a schoolgirl, and he a grown man, nineteen years to her seventeen. Two years might not seem a lot, but they came from different worlds, the two of them. She lived in a nice clean house with her nice clean family; he’d been out of school since he was thirteen, taking care of his dad and working at whatever lousy job he could get to make ends meet. He’d been a lather boy at the barber’s for five shillings a week, the baker’s lad for seven and sixpence, a heavy lifter on the construction site out of town for whatever they would give him; then home each night to put the butcher’s gristly odds and ends together for his dad’s tea. It was a life, they did fine. He’d always had his photographs for pleasure; but now, somehow, for reasons Jimmy didn’t understand and didn’t want to unravel for fear of wrecking everything, he had Dolly too, and the world was a brighter place; he sure as hell wasn’t going to move too fast and spoil things.