of the day had been like any other; Dolly had worked a double shift at the factory and then stopped to buy dinner at the nearby British Restaurant because she simply couldn’t stomach another night of Mrs White’s foul cooking.
She sat there at her seat in the corner until the place closed, watching all the other diners from behind her cigarette, especially the couples as they stole kisses across the tabletops and laughed together as if the world were a good place; Dolly could vaguely remember feeling that way herself, being full of laughter and happiness and hope.
On the way home, taking a short cut down a narrow lane as bombers sounded in the distance, Dolly tripped in the black-out—she’d left her torch at Campden Grove when she’d had to leave (Vivien’s fault)— and she fell down deep inside a bomb crater. Dolly’s ankle was twisted and her knee bled through the new ladder in her best stockings, but it was her pride that took the greatest battering. She had to limp the whole way back to Mrs White’s boarding house (Dolly refused to call it ‘home’—it wasn’t her home, that had been stolen from her—Vivi- en’s fault) in the cold and the dark, and by the time she arrived the door had already been locked and bolted. Curfew was something Mrs White took very seriously: not to keep Hitler out (though she held grave fears that 24 Rillington Place was top of his invasion force’s list), rather to make an example of the dirty stop-outs among her tenants. Dolly clenched her fists and limped down the side alley. Her knee was stinging by now, and she winced as she scaled the wall, using the old iron bolt as a foothold. The blackout made it darker than normal and there was no moon to speak of, but somehow she managed to clamber through the mess of the back garden to reach the storeroom window with the weak latch. As carefully as she could, Dolly jimmied it with her shoulder until the lock budged and she could tap it upwards and clamber through.
The hallway smelled of stale grease and old cheap meats and Dolly held her breath as she climbed the grubby stairs. When she reached the first floor, she noticed a thin strip of light beneath the door to Mrs White’s rooms. No one was quite sure what went on behind that door, only that it was a rare night Mrs White’s light was out before the last of the girls turned in. She could be communing with the dead or sending covert radio messages to the Germans for all Dolly knew, and frankly she didn’t care. So long as it kept the landlady occupied while her truant tenants sneaked home to roost, everyone got along fine. Dolly continued along the corridor, taking extra care to avoid the squeaky floorboards, opened her bedroom door and sealed herself safely inside.
Only then, with her back pressed hard against the door, did Dolly finally surrender herself to the throbbing pain that had built inside her chest all night. Without even dropping her handbag to the floor, she began to cry as freely as a child; hot spurting tears of shame and pain and anger. She looked down at her filthy clothing, her messed-up knee, the blood that had mixed with dirt and spread across everything; she blinked through her scalding tears to take in the ghastly, bare little room, the bedspread with holes in it, the sink stained brown around the plughole; and she realised with crashing certainty the absence of anything in her life that was good or precious or true. She knew, too, that it was all Vivien Jenkins’s fault—all of it: the loss of Jimmy, Dolly’s destitution, her tedious job in the factory. Even the mishap to- night—her torn-up knee and damaged stockings, being locked out of the boarding house, having to suffer the insult of breaking in to a place where she paid good money to stay—would never have happened if Dolly hadn’t laid eyes on Vivien, if she hadn’t volunteered to take that necklace back, if she hadn’t tried to be such a good friend to so unworthy a woman.
Dolly’s tearful gaze alit then on the shelf containing her Book of Ideas. She saw the book’s spine and grief swelled inside her to the point of exploding. Dolly pounced on the book. She sat cross-legged on the floor with it, fingers stumbling through the pages to arrive at