drawn their own conclusions, made Dolly’s ears burn with indignation. It was as if something that belonged to her, something precious and private that she cared about deeply, was being riffled through like—well, like a hat box of salvaged clothes.
‘I heard she’s not entirely well,’ Louisa said, ‘that’s why he never takes his eyes off her.’
Kitty scoffed. ‘She doesn’t look one bit ill to me. Quite the contrary. I’ve seen her reporting to the WVS canteen round on Church Street when I’m coming home of an evening.’ She lowered her voice and the other girls leaned close to hear her. ‘I heard it was because she had a wandering eye.’
‘Ooh,’ Betty and Susan cooed together, ‘A lover!’
‘Haven’t you noticed how careful she is?’ Kitty continued, to the rapt attention of the others. ‘Always greeting him at the door when he gets home, dressed to the nines and placing a glass of whisky in his waiting hand. Please! That’s not love. It’s a guilty conscience. You mark my words—that woman’s hiding something, and I think we all know what that something is.’
Dolly had heard as much as she could stand; in fact, she found herself in rather violent agreement with Lady Gwendolyn that the sooner the girls left number 7 Campden Grove, the bet-ter. They really were an unsophisticated lot. ‘Is that the time?’ she said, clapping her book closed. ‘I’m going to go and have my bath.’
Dolly waited until the water had reached the five-inch line and turned the tap off with her foot. She poked her big toe inside the spout to stop it dripping. She knew she ought to call someone about fixing it, but who was there left nowadays? Plumbers were too busy putting out fires and turning off exploded water mains to care about a little drip and it always seemed to settle down eventually. She rested her bare neck on the tub’s cool rim and adjusted herself to keep her curlers and kirby grips from digging into her head. She’d tied the whole lot up with a scarf so the steam wouldn’t make her hair lank—wishful thinking, of course, Dolly couldn’t remember the last time her bath had been steaming.
She blinked at the ceiling as strains of dance music drifted up from the wireless downstairs. It really was a lovely room, black and white tiles and lots of silver rails and taps. Lady Gwendolyn’s ghastly nephew, Peregrine, would have a pink fit if he saw the lines strung across it with knickers and brassieres and stockings hung out to dry. The thought rather pleased Dolly.
She reached over the side of the tub and took up her cigarette in one hand, The Reluctant Muse in the other. Keeping both clear of the water (it wasn’t hard—five inches didn’t go far) she flicked through until she found the scene she was looking for. Humphrey, the clever but unhappy writer, has been invited by his old headmaster to return to his school and talk to the boys about literature, followed by dinner in his master’s private quarters. He’s just excused himself from the table and left the residence to stroll back through the darkling garden to the spot where he’s parked his car, and is thinking about the direction his life has taken, the regrets he’s acquired and the ‘cruel passing of time’, when he reaches the estate’s old lake and something catches his eye:
Humphrey dimmed his flashlight and stayed where he was, quiet and still in the shadows of the bathing house. In the nearby clearing on the bank of the lake, glass lanterns had been strung from the branches and candles flickered in the warm night air. A girl on the threshold of adulthood was standing amongst them, feet bare and only the simplest of summer dresses grazing her knees. Her dark hair fell loose in waves over her shoulders and moonlight dripped over the scene to cast silver along her profile. Humphrey could see that her lips were moving, as if she spoke the lines of a poem beneath her breath.
Her face was exquisite—cat-like eyes, arched brows, lips that were curled for singing—yet it was her hands that entranced him. While the rest of her body was perfectly still, her fingers were moving together in front of her body, the small but graceful motions of a person weaving together invisible threads. It wouldn’t have surprised Humphrey to learn that she was sending forth instructions to the sun and moon.