by Kate Morton
‘Ms Nicolson,’ he began, ‘we’ve spoken a lot about the highs and lows of your theatrical career, but what our viewers want to know is how their heroes were made. Can you tell me about your childhood?’ The script was straightforward enough; Laurel had written it herself. Once upon a time, in a farmhouse in the country, there lived a girl with a perfect family, lots of sisters, a baby brother, and a mother and father who loved each other almost as much as they loved their children. The girl’s childhood was smooth and even, filled with long sunlit spaces, and makeshift play, and when the nineteen-fifties yawned to an end and the sixties began to swing, she took herself towards the bright lights of London and arrived on the wave of a cultural revolution. She’d been smiled upon by luck (gratitude played well in interviews), she’d refused to give up (only the glib ascribe all good fortune to chance), she hadn’t been out of work since finishing drama school.
‘Your childhood sounds idyllic.’
‘I suppose it was.’
‘Perfect even.’
‘No one’s family is perfect.’ Laurel’s mouth felt dry.
‘Do you think your childhood formed you as an actress?’
‘I expect so. We are all shaped by that which came before. Isn’t that what they say? They, who seem to know everything.’
Mitch smiled and scribbled something in the notebook on his knee. His pen scratched across the surface of the paper and as it did, Laurel experienced a jolt of memory. She was sixteen, and sitting in the Greenacres sitting room while a policeman wrote down every word she said—
‘You were one of five siblings; was there a battle for attention? Did it force you to develop ways of being noticed?’
Laurel needed some water. She looked about for Claire, who seemed to have disappeared. ‘Not at all. Having so many sisters and a baby brother taught me how to disappear into the background.’ So adeptly, she could slip away from a family picnic in the middle of a game of hide and seek.
‘As an actor you could hardly be accused of disappearing into the background.’
‘But acting isn’t about being noticed or showing off, it’s about observation.’ A man had said that to her once at the stage door. She’d been leaving after a theatre session, buzzing still with the high of performance, and he’d stopped her to say how much he’d enjoyed it. ‘You’ve a great talent for observation,’ he’d said, ‘Ears, eyes and heart, all at once.’ The words had been familiar, a quote from some play or other, but Laurel couldn’t remember which one.
Mitch cocked his head. ‘Are you a good observer?’
Such a strange thing to remember now, that man at the stage door. The quote she couldn’t place, so familiar, so elusive. It had driven her mad for a time. It was doing a good job now. Her thoughts were jumbled. She was thirsty. There was Claire, watching from the shadows by the door.
‘Ms Nicolson?’
‘Yes?’
‘Are you a good observer?’
‘Oh yes. Yes, indeed.’ Hidden in a tree house, quiet as can be. Laurel’s heart was racing. The warmth of the room all those people staring at her, the lights—
‘You’ve said before, Ms Nicolson, that your mother was a strong woman. She lived through the war, she lost her family in the Blitz, she started again. Did you inherit her strength, do you think? Is that what’s enabled you to survive, indeed to thrive, in a notoriously tough business?’
The next line was easy to deliver, Laurel had done so many times before. Now, though, the words wouldn’t come. She sat like a stunned mullet as they dried to sawdust in her mouth. Her thoughts were swim- ming—the house on Campden Grove, the smiling photograph of Dorothy and Vivien, her tired old mother in a hospital bed—time thickened so that seconds passed like years. The cameraman straightened, the assistants began to whisper to one another, but Laurel sat trapped beneath the furious bright lights, unable to see past the glare, seeing instead her mother, the young woman in the photo who’d left London in 1941, running from something, looking for a second chance.
A touch on her knee. The young man, Mitch, with a concerned expression: did she need a break, would she like a drink, fresh air, was there anything at all he could do?
Laurel managed to nod. ‘Water,’ she said. ‘A glass of water please.’ And then Claire was by her side. ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing, just a little warm in here.’
‘Laurel Nicolson, I’m your agent and, more to the point, one of your oldest friends. Let’s try that again, shall we?’
‘My mother,’ said Laurel, tightening her lip as it threatened to quiver, ‘she isn’t well.’
‘Oh, darling.’ The other woman took up Laurel’s hand.
‘She’s dying, Claire.’
‘Tell me what you need.’
Laurel let her eyes close. She needed answers, the truth, to know for certain that her happy family, her entire childhood wasn’t a lie. ‘Time,’ she said eventually. ‘I need time. There isn’t much left.’
Claire squeezed her hand. ‘Then you shall have some.’
‘But the film—’
‘Don’t give it another thought, I’ll take care of that.’
Mitch arrived with a fresh glass of water. He hovered nervously while Laurel drank it.
Claire said, ‘All right?’ to Laurel and, when she nodded, turned to Mitch. ‘Just one more question and then, regrettably, we’ll have to call it a day. Ms Nicolson has another engagement to get to.’
‘Of course.’ Mitch swallowed. ‘I hope I didn’t … I certainly didn’t mean any offence—’
‘Don’t be silly, none taken.’ Claire smiled with all the warmth of an Arctic winter. ‘Let’s get on, shall we?’
Laurel set down the glass and readied herself. A great weight had lifted from her shoulders, replaced by the clarity of firm resolve: during the Second World War, as bombs rained down on London, and plucky residents mended and made do and spent their nights huddled together in leaky shelters; as they craved oranges and cursed Hitler and longed for an end to the devastation; as some found courage they’d never used and others experienced fear they hadn’t imagined, Laurel’s mother had been one of them. She’d had neighbours, and probably friends, she’d traded coupons for eggs and been thrilled when she came by an occasional pair of stockings, and in the midst of it all her path had crossed those of Vivien and Henry Jenkins. A friend she would lose and a man she would one day kill.
Something terrible had happened between the three of them. It was the only explanation for the seemingly inexplicable, something horrific enough to justify what Ma had done. In what little time remained, Laurel intended to find out what that something was. It was possible she wouldn’t like what she found, but that was a chance she was willing to take. It was one she had to take.
‘Last question, Ms Nicolson,’ said Mitch. ‘We were speaking last week about your mother, Dorothy. You’ve said that she was a strong woman. She lived through the war, she lost her family in the Coventry Blitz, she married your father and started again. Did you inherit her strength, do you think? Is that what’s enabled you to survive, indeed to thrive, in a notoriously tough business?’
This time Laurel was ready. She delivered the line perfectly, no need at all for the prompt. ‘My mother was a survivor; she’s a survivor still. If I’ve inherited half her courage, I can count myself a very lucky woman.’
Part Two
DOLLY
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 seem
ed 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.’