of their stay at Bournemouth, and on the family’s return to Coventry a gleeful evening would be spent, to which they would all be reluctant invitees, analysing its contents. Tables would be drawn, comparisons made with last year’s results (and those stretching back a decade if they were lucky), commitments undertaken to do better next time; before, refreshed from the annual break, he would return to his accountant’s chair at H. G. Walker Ltd., Bicycle Manufacturers, and knuckle down to another year’s work.
Dolly’s mother sat in the corner of the carriage, fussing at her nostrils with a cotton handkerchief. It was a surreptitious dab, the hanky concealed for the most part within her hand, followed occasionally by a skittish glance at her husband to ensure he hadn’t been disturbed and was still frowning with grim pleasure at his notebook. Really, only Janice Smitham could manage to catch a cold on the eve of the annual summer holiday with such astonishing regularity. The consistency was almost admirable and Dolly might’ve been able to salute her mother’s commitment to habit if it weren’t for the accompanying sniffle—so meek and apologetic—that made her want to jam Father’s sharpened pencil through her own eardrums. Mother’s fortnight by the sea would be spent as it was each year: making Father feel like King of the Sand- castle, fussing over Dolly’s swimsuit cut, and worrying whether Cuth- bert was making friends with ‘the right kind of boys’.
Poor old Cuthbert. He’d been a glorious little baby, full of giggles and gummy smiles and a rather fetching habit of crying whenever Dolly left the room. The older he became, though, the more he grew, the clearer it became to all that he was on a collision course with his fate: to become a doppelganger of Mr Arthur Smitham. Which meant, sadly, that despite the affection between them, Dolly and Cuthbert couldn’t possibly be flesh and blood, and begged the question: who were her real parents and how did she come to be mixed up with this sorry little group anyway?
Circus performers? A spectacular couple of high-wire walkers? It was possible—she glanced at her legs, relatively long and slender, both of them. She’d always been good at sports: Mr Anthony, the school sports master, made a point of selecting her for the first hockey team each year; and when she and Caitlin rolled back Caitlin’s mother’s parlour carpet and put Louis Armstrong on the gramophone, Dolly was quite sure she didn’t just imagine herself to be the finer dancer. There—Dolly crossed her legs and smoothed her skirt—natural grace; that all but proved it.
‘Can I have a sweet at the station, Father?’
‘A sweet?’
‘At the station? From the little shop.’
‘I don’t know about that, Cuthbert.’
‘But Father—’
‘There’s the budget to think of.’
‘But Mother, you said—’
‘Now, now, Cuthbert. Father knows best.’
Dolly turned her attention to the fleeting fields outside. Circus per- formers—it felt about right. Spangles and sequins and late nights beneath the big top, empty but bathed still in the collective awe and adoration of the night’s rapturous crowd. Glamour, excitement, romance—yes, that was far more like it.
Such entrancing origins would also explain the fierce admonishments meted out by her parents whenever Dolly’s behaviour threatened to ‘draw attention’. ‘People will look, Dorothy,’ her mother would remind her if her hem was too high, her laugh was too loud, her lipstick too red. ‘You’re going to make them look. You know how your father feels about that.’ Dolly did indeed. As Father was fond of reminding them, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, and thus he must’ve lived in fear that Bohemia would seep one day like spoiled fruit through the skin of propriety he and Mother had taken care to construct around their little stolen daughter.
Dolly sneaked a peppermint from the bag in her pocket; tongued it into her cheek and leaned the side of her face against the window. How, precisely, the stealing might have been achieved was a rather more perplexing prospect. It didn’t matter how she turned it, Arthur and Janice Smitham just weren’t the thieving types. To imagine them creeping towards an unattended pram and snatching a sleeping babe was decidedly problematic. People who stole did so because, whether down to need or greed, they desired the item passionately. Arthur Smitham by contrast believed ‘passion’ should be removed from the English dictionary, if not the English soul, and that one might as well scratch ‘desire’ while one was at it. A trip to the circus? Well