the banana she’d been hoarding since Mr Hoskins the greengrocer ‘found’ it for her under the counter on Tuesday. Humming a little melody to herself, she crept back out of the door and along the corridor. Strictly, there was no reason to be creeping at all: Kitty and the others were busy stabbing at their typewriters in the War Office, Cook was standing in line at the butcher’s armed with a handful of ration cards and a foul tem-per, and Lady Gwendolyn was snoring peacefully in her bed—but it was so much more fun to creep than to walk. Especially when one had a whole glorious hour of freedom ahead.
She ran up the stairs, pulled out the little key she’d had cut, and let herself into Lady Gwendolyn’s dressing room. Not the poky little closet from which Dolly selected a flowing coverall each morning to clad the great lady’s bod; no, no, not this. The dressing room was a grand arrangement in which were housed countless gowns and shoes and coats and hats, the likes of which Dolly had rarely glimpsed outside the Society pages. Silks and furs hung side by side in huge open wardrobes, and bespoke pairs of little satin shoes sat prettily upon the mighty shelves. The circular hat boxes, stamped proudly with the names of their Mayfair milliners—Schiaparelli, Coco Chanel, Rose Valois—towered towards the ceiling in columns so high a dainty white stepladder had been furnished to enable their retrieval.
In the bow of the window, with its rich velvet curtains that brushed the carpet (drawn always now against the German planes), a turned- leg table held an oval mirror, a set of sterling silver brushes, and a host of photographs in fancy frames. Each depicted a pair of young women, Penelope and Gwendolyn Caldicott, most of them official portraits with the studio’s name in cursive at the bottom corner, but a few taken candidly while they were attending this or that Society party. There was one photograph in particular that drew Dolly’s eye every time. The two Caldicott sisters were older here—thirty-five at least—and had been photographed by Cecil Beaton on a grand spiral staircase. Lady Gwendolyn was standing with one hand low on her hip, eyeballing the camera, while her sister was glancing at something (or someone) out of shot. The photograph had been taken at the party where Penelope fell in love, the night her sister’s world came tumbling down.
Poor Lady Gwendolyn, she wasn’t to know her life was set to change that night. She looked so pretty, too: it was impossible to believe that the old woman upstairs had ever been that young or striking. (Dolly, like all the young perhaps, didn’t for a second imagine the same fate lay in store for her.) It showed, she thought sadly, how heavily loss and betrayal could weigh on a person, poisoning them within, but also without. The satin evening dress Lady Gwendolyn was wearing in the photograph was dark in colour and luminous, bias-cut so that it clung lightly to her curves. Dolly had searched high and low in the wardrobes until she finally found it, draped over a hanger amongst a host of others—imagine her pleasure to discover it was deepest red, surely the most magnificent of all colours.
It was the first of Lady Gwendolyn’s dresses she ever tried on, but certainly not the last. No, before Kitty and the others had come, when nights at Campden Grove had been her own to do with as she wished, Dolly had spent a lot of time up here, a chair jammed beneath the doorknob as she stripped down to her underwear and played at dressing up. She’d sat at the turned-leg table sometimes, too, dusting clouds of powder across her bare decolletage, sorting through the drawers of diamond clasps, and tending her hair with the boar-bristle brush—what she’d have given to own a brush like that, with her own name, Dorothy, curled along its spine …
There wasn’t time for all that today, though. Dolly sat cross-legged on the velvet settee below the chandelier and set about peeling her banana. She closed her eyes as she took a first bite, letting out a sigh of supreme satisfaction—it was true, for-bidden (or at least severely rationed) fruits really were the sweetest. She ate her way right down to the bottom, relishing every mouthful, and then draped the skin delicately along the seat beside her. Pleasantly sated, Dolly dusted off her hands and got to work. She’d