she was, but everything in his face told Sue that the man in the picture loved that woman with all his heart.
She smiled to herself, a little sadly, remembering the way she and Don had used to stare at one another, and then she sealed up the letter and tucked it in her pocket. She jumped into the trusty brown Daimler beside her shift partner, Vera, and they drove back to the station. Sue believed in staying positive, and in helping others—sending the lovers’ note on its way was to be her first good deed of the breaking day. She popped the envelope in the postbox as she walked home, and for the rest of her long, largely happy life, she thought about those lovers sometimes and hoped things had turned out well for them.
Twenty-nine
Greenacres, 2011
ANOTHER DAY of Indian summer, and a golden heat haze hovered above the fields. After sitting all morning with her mother, Laurel had handed over to Rose and left the pair of them with the pedestal fan turning slowly on the dressing table while she ventured outside. She’d intended to take a walk down to the stream to stretch her legs, but the tree house had struck her eye, and she decided to climb up the ladder instead. It would be the first time she’d done so in fifty years.
Lord, but the doorway was much lower than she remembered. Laurel clambered through, bottom cocked at an unfortunate angle, and then sat with her legs crossed, surveying the room itself. She smiled when she saw Daphne’s mirror still set on its side along the crossbeam. Sixty years had caused the mercury backing to rupture and flake so that when Laurel looked at her reflection, the image was mottled as if through water. It was strange indeed, to find herself within this place of childhood memories and see her grown-up wrinkled face staring back at her. Like Alice falling through the rabbit hole; or else falling through it again, fifty years on, only to find herself the only thing changed.
Laurel put the mirror back and allowed herself to glance out of the window, just as she had that day; she could almost hear Barnaby barking, see the one-winged hen turning circles in the dust; feel the stretched summer glare sheering off the driveway stones. She was just about convinced that if she peeked back at the house she might see Iris’s hula hoop rocking against its leaning post when the hot breeze grazed it. And so she didn’t look. Sometimes the distance of years—all that was contained within its concertina folds—was a physical ache. Laurel turned away from the window instead.
She’d brought the photograph of Dorothy and Vivien into the tree house with her, the one Rose had found inside Peter Pan, and now Laurel took it out of her pocket. Along with the play script itself, she’d been carrying it around with her ever since she’d got back from Oxford; they’d become a talisman of sorts, the starting point to this mystery she was trying to unravel, and—God, she hoped—with any luck, the key to its solution. The two women hadn’t been friends, Gerry said, and yet they must have been, for what else explained this picture?
Laurel stared hard at them, their arms linked as they smiled at the photographer, determined to find a clue. Where had it been taken? she wondered. In a room somewhere, that much was clear; a room with a slanting roof—an attic perhaps? There was no one else in the photo, but a small dark smudge behind the women might have been another person moving very quickly—Laurel looked closer—a small person, unless there was something tricky going on with the perspective. A child? Perhaps. Though that didn’t help especially, there were children everywhere. (Or were there, in London during the war? A lot were evacuated, particularly during the first years when London was being blitzed.)
Laurel sighed frustratedly. It was no use; no matter how she tried, it was still a guessing game—one option was as plausible as the next and nothing she’d discovered so far gave any real hint as to the circumstances that had led to this picture being taken. Except perhaps the book it had been nestled inside all these decades. Did that mean something—had the two objects always been a pair—had her mother and Vivien been in a play together? Or was it just another infuriating coincidence?
She focused her attention on Dorothy, slipping on her glasses and angling