stick when she made the discovery: a powder-blue shoebox at the very back of the top shelf. The box was immediately familiar, but it took Dolly a few seconds to remember why. The memory came to her of her mother sitting on the edge of her twin bed in the room she shared with Father, the blue box on her lap and an unreadable expression on her face as she went through its contents. It was a private moment and Dolly had known instinctively to make herself scarce; but she’d wondered about that box, trying to imagine what it could possibly have held that made her mother look dreamy, and lost, and somehow both young and old at once.
Alone in the garage, Dolly had lifted the box’s lid and all had been revealed. The box was filled with bits and pieces of another life: programmes for singing performances, blue first-place ribbons from eisteddfods, certificates of merit proclaiming Janice Williams the singer with the Most Beautiful Voice. There was even a newspaper article with a picture: a bright young woman with starry eyes and a lovely figure and the look of someone who was going places; who wasn’t going to follow the other girls in her school class into the dull ordinary lives expected of them.
Except that she had. Dolly stared at that picture for a long time. Her mother had once possessed a talent—a real one, that set her apart and made her special—yet, in seventeen years of living in the same house, Dolly had never heard Janice Smitham sing anything. What could possibly have happened to silence the young woman who’d once told a newspaper: ‘Singing is my favourite thing in the whole world; it makes me feel that I could fly. One day I’d like to sing onstage before the king’?
Dolly had a feeling she knew the answer.
‘Keep it up, boy,’ Father called across the beach at Cuthbert: ‘Look smart, eh. Don’t slouch.’
Arthur Smitham: accountant extraordinaire, bicycle-factory stalwart, guardsman of all that was good and proper. Enemy to all that was exceptional.
Dolly sighed as she watched him jouncing backwards from the wicket, winding himself up to bowl the ball at Cuthbert. He might have won against her mother, convincing her to suppress everything that made her special, but he wasn’t going to do the same to Dolly. She refused to let him. ‘Mother,’ she said suddenly, letting her magazine drop to her lap.
‘Yes, dear? Would you like a sandwich? I’ve some shrimp paste here with me.’
Dolly drew breath: she couldn’t quite believe she was going to say it, now, here, just like that, but the wind was with her and away she went, ‘Mother, I don’t want to go to work with Father at the bicycle factory.’
‘Oh?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
‘I don’t think I could stand to do the same thing every day, typing up letters full of bicycles and order references and dreary yours sincerelys.’
Her mother blinked at her with a bland, unreadable expression on her face. ‘I see.’
‘Yes.’
‘And what is it you propose to do instead?’
Dolly wasn’t sure how to answer that. She hadn’t thought about the specifics, she just knew there was something out there waiting for her. ‘I don’t know. I just … Well, the bi-cycle factory’s hardly the right sort of place for someone like me, don’t you think?’
‘Why ever not?’
She didn’t want to have to say it. She wanted her mother to know, to agree, to think it herself without being told. Dolly struggled to find the words, while the undertow of disappointment pulled hard against her hope.
‘It’s time to settle down now, Dorothy,’ her mother said gently. ‘You’re almost a woman.’
‘Yes, but that’s exactly—’
‘Put away childish notions. The time for all that has passed. He wanted to tell you himself, to surprise you, but your father’s already spoken with Mrs Levene at the factory and organised an interview for you.’
‘What?’
‘I wasn’t supposed to say anything, but they’ll see you in the first week in September. You’re a very lucky girl to have a father with such influence.’
‘But I—’
‘Father knows best.’ Janice Smitham reached to tap Dolly’s leg but didn’t quite make contact. ‘You’ll see.’ There was a hint of fear behind her painted-on smile, as if she knew she was betraying her daughter in some way, but didn’t care to think about how.
Dolly burned inside; she wanted to shake her mother and remind her that she’d once been exceptional herself. She wanted to demand to know why she’d changed; tell her (though Dolly knew this