song and she wanted to listen to it in the sitting room. Laurel offered to bring a CD player into the bedroom so she didn’t have to move, but the suggestion was quickly dismissed and Laurel knew better than to argue. Not with Ma, not this morning when she had that otherworldly look in her eyes. She’d been like it for two days now, ever since Laurel got back from Campden Grove and told her mother what she’d found.
The long slow drive from London, even with Daphne talking about Daphne the whole way, had done nothing to diminish Laurel’s exhilaration, and she’d gone in to sit with her mother as soon as they could be alone. They’d spoken, finally, of everything that had happened, of Jimmy, and Dolly, and Vivien, and the Longmeyer family in Australia too; her mother told Laurel of the guilt she’d always harboured about having gone to see Dolly on the night of the bombing and urged her back inside the house. ‘She wouldn’t have died there if not for me. She was on her way out when I arrived.’ Laurel reminded her mother that she’d been trying to save Dolly’s life, that she’d been delivering a warning and she couldn’t possibly blame herself for the random landing places of German bombs.
Ma had asked Laurel to bring in Jimmy’s photograph—not a print at all, but an original—one of the few vestiges of the past she hadn’t locked away. Sitting there beside her mother, Laurel had looked at it afresh: the dawn light after a raid, the broken glass in the foreground shining like little lights, the group of people emerging from their shelter in the background, through the smoke. ‘It was a gift,’ Ma said softly, ‘it meant such a lot when he gave it to me. I couldn’t have borne to part with it.’
They’d both wept as they talked, and Laurel had wondered at times, as her mother found a reserve of energy and managed to speak—halt- ingly but with urgency—about the things she’d seen and felt, if the strain of old memories, some of them desperately painful, would prove too much; but, whether it was gladness at hearing Laurel’s news of Jimmy and his family, or relief at finally having let go of her secrets, she seemed to have rallied. The nurse warned them that it wouldn’t last, that they weren’t to be misled, and that the dip when it came would be swift; but she smiled, too, and told them to enjoy their mother while they could. And they did; they surrounded her with love and noise and all the happy, fractious crush of family life that Dorothy Nicolson had always loved best.
Now, while Gerry carried Ma to the sofa, Laurel thumbed through the vinyls in the rack, looking for the right album. She went quickly, but paused a moment when she reached the Chris Barber Jazz Band, a smile settling on her face. The record had belonged to her father; Laurel could still remember the day he’d brought it home. He’d got out his own clarinet and played along with Monty Sunshine’s solo for hours, standing right there in the middle of the rug, pausing every so often to shake his head in wonder at the sheer virtuosity of Monty’s skill. All through dinner that night he’d kept to himself, the noise of his daughters washing over him as he sat at the head of the table with a glaze of perfect satisfaction lighting his face.
Infused by the memory’s lovely emotion, Laurel pushed Monty Sunshine aside and continued turning through the records until she found what she was after, Ray Noble and Snooky Lanson’s ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’. She looked back to where Gerry was settling their mother, pulling the light rug so gently to cover her frail body, and she waited, thinking as she did what a boon it was to have had him back at Greenacres these past days. He was the only one in whom she’d confided the truth of the past. They’d sat up together the night before, drinking red wine in the tree house and listening to a London rockabilly station Gerry found on the Internet and talking nonsense about first love and old age and everything in between.
When they spoke of their mother’s secret, Gerry said he didn’t see there was any reason to tell the others. ‘We were there that day, Lol; it’s a part of our history. Rose, Daphne and Iris—’