animal hospital and rescue centre. The decree didn’t worry Kitty and Louisa, both of whom were married to respective RAF pilots within days of one another in early February; the other two girls remained as indistinguishable in death as they had been in life, hit by a bomb as they skipped together arm in arm on their way to a dance in Lambeth on January 30th.
Which just left Dolly. It wasn’t easy to find a room in London, not for someone who’d become accustomed to the finer things in life, and Dolly looked at three squalid arrangements before returning to the Notting Hill boarding house she’d lived in years before, back in her shop-girl days when Campden Grove was just a name on a map, and not the repository for her life’s great dreams and disappointments. Mrs White, the widowed owner of 24 Rillington Place, was delighted to see Dolly again (though ‘see’ was rather too optimistic a description, the old biddy was blind as a bat without her glasses), and further delighted to report that Dolly’s old room was still available—just as soon as she handed over her bond and ration book, of course.
Little wonder the room was still free. There were few people, Dolly was sure, even in wartime London, who were desperate enough for somewhere to live that they’d hand over good money to sleep within its walls. It was more an afterthought, really, rather than a room: what was left when a bedroom in the original house had been subdivided into two unequal halves. The window had gone with the other portion, leaving a very small, very dark, closet-like area on Dolly’s side of the plaster wall. There was space for a narrow bed, a side table, a tiny sink, and not much besides. Still, lack of light and ventilation kept the price low and Dolly didn’t have a lot to accommodate—everything she owned was in the suitcase she’d carried with her when she danced out of her parents’ house, three years before.
One of the first things she’d done upon arriving was to arrange her two books, The Reluctant Muse and Dorothy Smitham’s Book of Ideas, on the single shelf above the sink. There was part of her that never wanted to see the Jenkins book again, but she’d so few possessions left, and Dolly so loved special things, that she couldn’t bear to be rid of it. Not yet. She turned the book around instead so the spine was against the wall. The display was still rather sad, so Dolly added the Leica camera Jimmy had given her one birthday. Photography hadn’t been her caper—it required too much stillness and waiting for Dolly—but the room was so stark and empty she’d have proudly flaunted the commode if she’d owned one. At last, she took the fur coat she’d inherited, put it on a hanger and slipped it over the hook on the back of the door: all the better to see it no matter where she happened to be standing in the tiny room. That old white coat had become an emblem, of sorts, for every one of Dolly’s dreams that had been reduced to tatters. She stared at it, and she seethed, and she directed all the fury she felt for Vivien Jenkins deep into the coat’s matted fur.
Dolly took a job in a nearby munitions factory because Mrs White wouldn’t have hesitated to throw her out if she didn’t make her weekly payments, and because it was the sort of work that could be done without devoting more than a single per cent of one’s attention. Which left the rest of Dolly’s mind free to dwell on the ills done to her. She would come home at night, force down some of Mrs White’s corned- beef hash, and then leave the other girls to laugh together about their boyfriends and shout at Lord Haw-Haw on the wireless, while she took to her narrow bed, smoking her way through her last packets of cigarettes and thinking about everything she’d lost: her family and Lady Gwendolyn and Jimmy … She thought, too, about the way Vivien had said, ‘I don’t know this woman’—her mind kept coming back to that; and she saw Henry Jenkins pointing her to the door; and she felt again the hot and cold waves of shame and anger coursing through her body.
So it went, day after day the same, until one night in the middle of February, things happened differently. Most