their arms linked. They were laughing at her from within its white border, standing together in a room with bunting hanging above them and sunlight streaming in from an unseen window. She turned it over, looking for an annotation, but there was nothing written there except the date: May 1941. How peculiar. Laurel knew the family album inside out and this photograph, these people, did not belong. The door opened and Rose appeared, two mismatched teacups jiggling on their saucers.
Laurel held up the photo. ‘Have you seen this, Rosie?’
Rose set a cup down on the bedside table, squinted briefly at the picture, and then she smiled. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘It turned up a few months ago at Greenacres—I thought you’d be able to make a place for it in the album. Lovely, isn’t she? So special to discover something new of her, especially now.’
Laurel looked again at the photo. The young women with their hair in side-parted Victory rolls; skirts grazing their knees; one with a cigarette dangling from her hand. Of course it was their mother. Her makeup was different. She was different.
‘Funny,’ Rose said, ‘I never thought of her like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘Young, I suppose. Having a laugh with a girlfriend.’
‘Didn’t you? I wonder why?’ Though of course the same was true of Laurel. In her mind—in all of their minds, apparently—their mother had come into being when she’d answered Grandma’s newspaper advertisement for a maid-of-all-work and started at the boarding house. They knew the basics of before: that she’d been born and raised in Coventry, that she’d gone to London just before the war began, that her family had been killed in the bombings. Laurel knew, too, that the death of her mother’s family had struck her deeply. Dorothy Nicolson had taken every opportunity to remind her own children that family was everything; it had been the mantra of their childhood. When Laurel was going through a particularly painful teenage phase, her mother had taken her by the hands and said, with unusual sternness, ‘Don’t be like I was, Laurel. Don’t wait too long to realise what’s important. Your family might drive you mad sometimes, but they’re worth more to you than you could ever imagine.’
As to the details of Dorothy’s life before she met Stephen Nicol- son, though, she’d never forced them on her children and they hadn’t thought to ask. Nothing odd in that, Laurel supposed with mild discomfort. Children are inherently self-centred; they don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, about parental claims to a prior existence. Now though, looking at this wartime stranger, Laurel felt the lack of knowledge keenly.
When she was starting out as an actress, a well-known director had leaned over his script, straightened his coke-bottle glasses and told Laurel she hadn’t the looks to play leading roles. The advice had stung and she’d wailed and railed, and then spent hours catching herself ac- cidentally-on-purpose in the mirror before hacking her long hair short in the grip of drunken bravura. But it had proved a ‘moment’ in her career. She was a character actress. The director cast her as the leading lady’s sister and she garnered her first rave reviews. People marvelled at her ability to build characters from the inside out, to submerge herself and disappear beneath the skin of another person, but there was no trick to it; she merely bothered to learn the character’s secrets. Laurel knew quite a bit about keeping secrets. She also knew that’s where the real people were found, hiding behind their black spots.
‘Do you realise it’s the youngest we’ve ever seen her?’ Rose perched on Laurel’s armrest, her lavender smell stronger than before, as she took the photograph.
‘Is it?’ Laurel reached for her cigarettes, remembered she was in a hospital and took up her tea instead. ‘I suppose it is.’ So much of her mother’s past was made up of black spots. Why had it never bothered her before? She glanced again at the picture, the two young women who seemed now to be laughing at her ignorance. She tried to sound casual. ‘Where did you say you found it, Rosie?’
‘Inside a book.’
‘A book?’
‘A play, actually—Peter Pan.’
‘Ma was in a play?’ Their mother had been a great one for games of ‘dressing up’ and ‘let’s pretend’, but Laurel couldn’t remember her ever performing in a real play.
‘I’m not sure about that. The book was a gift. There was an inscription in the front—you know, the