By day, she kept her own eyes peeled. At first she saw him everywhere: the familiar strutting walk of a man coming down the jetty, a set of ripe, brutish features on a passing stranger, a raised voice in the crowd that made her skin creep. Over time she saw him less, and she was glad, but she never stopped watching, because Dorothy knew that some day he would find her—it was only a matter of when and where—and she intended to be ready for him.
She sent only one postcard. When she’d been at Sea Blue boarding house six months or so, she picked the prettiest picture she could find—a great big passenger ship, the sort people boarded to travel from one side of the world to the other—and she wrote on the back: The weather’s glorious here. Everybody well. Please destroy upon receipt, and addressed it to her dear friend—her only friend—Miss Katy Ellis of Yorkshire.
Life gained a rhythm. Mrs Nicolson ran a tight ship, which suited Dorothy fine—there was something deeply therapeutic in being held to military standards of housekeeping excellence and she was freed from her dark memories by the pressing need to buff as much oil as possible (‘without wasting it, Dorothy—there’s a war on, didn’t you know?’) into the stair rails. And then one July day in 1944, a month or so after the D-Day landings, she came home from the grocery store to find a man in uniform sitting at the kitchen table. He was older, of course, and a little the worse for wear, but she recognised him instantly from the eager boyish photograph his mother kept enshrined on her mantelpiece in the dining room. Dorothy had polished the glass many times before, and knew his earnest eyes, the angles of his cheekbones, the dimple in his chin, so well, she blushed when she saw him sitting there, just as surely as if she’d been peeking through his keyhole all these years.
‘You’re Stephen,’ she said.
‘I am.’ He leapt up to help her with the paper bag of groceries.
‘I’m Dorothy Smitham. I work for your mother. Does she know you’re here?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘The side door was open so I let myself in.’
‘She’s upstairs; I’ll just go—’
‘No—’. He’d spoken quickly, and his face crinkled into an embarrassed smile. ‘That is, it’s kind of you, Miss Smitham, and I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. I love my mother—she gave me life—but if it’s all right by you I’m just going to sit a few moments and enjoy the peace and quiet, before my real military service begins.’
Dorothy laughed then and the sensation took her by surprise. She realised it was the first time she’d laughed since she arrived from London. Many years later, when their children asked for the story (again!) of how they fell in love, Stephen and Dorothy Nicolson would tell them about the night they stole along the broken pier to dance at its very end—Stephen had brought his old gramophone and they’d put it on, dodging holes in the boards to the strains of ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’. Later, Dorothy had slipped and fallen when she was trying to balance her way along the railing (pause for parental instruction: ‘You must never try to balance on high railings, darlings’), and Stephen hadn’t even taken off his shoes, he’d dived straight over the edge and fished her right back out—‘And that’s how I caught your mother,’ Stephen would say, which always made the children laugh with the image it conjured of Mummy at the end of a fishing line—and the pair had sat on the sand afterwards, because it was summer and the night was warm, and they’d eaten cockles out of a paper cup and talked for hours until the sun broke pink across the horizon and they strolled back to Sea Blue and knew, without either saying another word, they were in love. It was one of the children’s favourite stories, the picture it painted of their parents walking along the pier in saturated clothing, their mother as a free spirit, their father as a hero—but in her own heart, Dorothy knew it was, in part, a fiction. She’d loved her husband long before that. She fell for him that first day in the kitchen when he made her laugh.
The list of Stephen’s attributes, had she ever been called upon to write it, would have been