them lurid details about her latest con-quest. ‘It’s personal,’ she said finally, adding a secretive smile for good measure.
‘Spoilsport.’ Kitty pouted. ‘Keeping a handsome RAF pilot all to yourself! When are we going to meet him anyway?’
‘Yes,’ Louisa chimed in, hands on her hips as she bent for-ward from the waist. ‘Bring him round one evening so we can see for ourselves that he’s the right sort of fellow for our Doll.’
Dolly eyed Louisa’s heaving bust as she bounced her hips from side to side. She couldn’t exactly remember how they’d got the impression Jimmy was with the RAF; a mix up many months ago and, at the time, Dolly had been struck by the idea. She hadn’t set them straight and now it seemed rather too late. ‘Sorry, girls,’ she said, folding the letter in half. ‘He’s far too busy at the moment—flying secret missions, war business, I’m really not at liberty to speak about the details—and even if he weren’t, you know the rules.’
‘Oh, come on,’ Kitty said, ‘the old battle axe’ll never know. She hasn’t been downstairs since horse-drawn carriages went out of fashion, and it’s not like any of us is going to tell.’
‘She knows more than you think,’ Dolly said. ‘Besides, she relies on me I’m the closest thing she has to family. She’d let me go if she even suspected I was seeing a fellow.’
‘Would that be so bad?’ Kitty said. ‘You could come and work with us. One smile and my supervisor would take you in a jiffy. Bit of a lech, but jolly good fun once you know how to handle him.’
‘Oh yes!’ said Betty and Susan, who had a curious knack for unison. They looked up from their magazine. ‘Come and work with us.’
‘And give up my daily flaying? I hardly think so.’
Kitty laughed. ‘You’re mad, Doll. Mad or brave, I’m not sure which.’ Dolly shrugged; she certainly wasn’t going to discuss her reasons for staying with a gossip like Kitty.
She took up her book instead. It was lying on the side table where she’d left it the night before. The book was new, the first she’d ever owned (except for the unread copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management her mother had thrust so hopefully into her hands). She’d gone to Charing Cross Road especially on one of her Sundays off and bought it from a bookseller there.
‘The Reluctant Muse.’ Kitty leaned forward to read the cover. ‘Haven’t you already read that one?’
‘Twice, actually.’
‘That good?’
‘’Tis, rather.’
Kitty wrinkled her pretty little nose. ‘Not much of a reader myself.’ ‘No?’ Dolly wasn’t either, not usually, but Kitty didn’t need to know that.
‘Henry Jenkins? That name’s familiar … oh now, isn’t he the fellow across the street?’
Dolly gave a vague wave of her cigarette. ‘I believe he lives around here somewhere.’ Of course, it was the very reason she’d chosen the book. Once Lady Gwendolyn had let slip that Henry Jenkins was well known in literary circles for including rather too much fact in his fiction (‘a fellow I could mention was furious to find his dirty laundry aired. Threatened to bring a lawsuit but died before he had the chance—accident prone, just like his father. Lucky for Jenkins …’), Dolly’s curiosity had worked at her like a file. After careful discussion with the bookseller, she’d divined that The Reluctant Muse was about the love affair between a handsome author and his much younger wife, and had eagerly handed over her precious savings. Dolly had spent a delicious week thereafter, eye pressed up close to the window of the Jenkins’s marriage, learning all sorts of details she’d never have dared to ask Vivien outright.
‘Terrifically handsome chap,’ Louisa said, lying prone now on the rug, arching her spine cobra-style to blink at Dolly. ‘Married to that woman with the dark hair, the one who walks around like she’s got a broomstick up her—’
‘Oh!’ Betty and Susan, wide-eyed. ‘Her.’
‘Lucky girl,’ Kitty said. ‘I’d kill for a husband like him. Have you seen the way he looks at her? Like she’s a piece of perfection and he can’t quite believe his luck.’
‘I wouldn’t mind if he glanced my way,’ said Louisa. ‘How do you think a girl meets a man like him?’
Dolly knew the answer to that—how Vivien met Henry—it was right there in the book, but she didn’t volunteer it. Vivien was her friend. To discuss her like this, to know that the others had noticed her too, that they’d speculated and wondered and