grown interested. The words were weighted with the echoes of previous conversations and certainly Miss Perry seemed to know precisely what it was of which they spoke. ‘No,’ she’d said. ‘The lad didn’t stand a chance, did he? Not with one as beautiful as her.’
‘Beautiful? Well, I suppose if you like that sort of thing. A bit, too—’ Grandma paused for thought and Laurel craned to hear which word she’d pluck—‘a bit too ripe, for my tastes.’
‘Oh yes,’ Miss Perry backpedalled fast, ‘terribly ripe. Knew a good wicket when she saw it though, didn’t she?’
‘She did.’
‘Knew a soft touch when she met it.’
‘Indeed.’
‘And to think he might’ve married a nice local girl like that Pauline Simmonds down the street. I always thought she might have been sweet on him.’
‘Of course she was,’ Grandma snapped, ‘and who could blame her? Hadn’t counted on Dorothy, though, had we? Poor Pauline didn’t stand a chance, not against one like her, not against her when she had her mind set.’
‘Such a shame.’ Miss Perry knew her cue and her line. ‘Such a terrible shame.’
‘Bewitched him, she did. My dear boy didn’t know what had hit him. He thought she was an innocent, of course, and who could blame him—back from France just a few short months when they married. She had his head in a spin—she’s one of those people though, isn’t she, who gets whatever she sets her mind to.’
‘And she wanted him.’
‘She wanted an escape, and my son gave it to her. No sooner were they wed and she dragged him away from everything and everyone he knew to start again in that tumbledown farm-house. I blame myself, of course—’
‘But you mustn’t!’
‘I was the one who brought her into this house.’
‘There was a war on, it was near impossible to get good staff—you weren’t to know.’
‘But that’s just it. I should have known; I should have made it my business to know. I was far too trusting. At least I was at the start. I made enquiries about her but not until after, and by then it was too late.’ ‘What do you mean? Too late for what? What did you find out?’
But whatever it was Grandma Nicolson had found remained a mystery to Laurel, for the two of them moved out of earshot before her grandmother could expand. To be honest it hadn’t concerned Laurel too much at the time. Grandma Nicolson was a prude and an atten- tion-seeker who liked to make her eldest granddaughter’s life a misery by reporting to her parents if she so much as looked at a boy on the beach. Whatever it was Grandma thought she’d discovered about their mother, Laurel had decided as she lay there cursing her throbbing head, it was bound to be an exaggeration, if not an all out fiction.
Now though … Laurel dried her face and hands … now though, she wasn’t so sure. Grandma’s suspicions—that Dorothy had been seeking an escape, that she wasn’t as innocent as she appeared, that her hasty marriage had been one of convenience—seemed to tally, in some ways, with the things her mother had said just now.
Had Dorothy Smitham been running from a broken engagement when she turned up at Mrs Nicolson’s boarding house? Was that what Grandma had found out? It was possible, but there had to be more to it than that. A previous relationship might have been enough to sour her grandmother’s milk—Lord knows it hadn’t taken much—but surely it wasn’t the sort of thing her mother might still be crying over sixty years later (guiltily, it seemed to Laurel, all that talk of mistakes, of not thinking straight)—unless she’d run away from her fiance with-out telling him? But why, if she’d loved him so much, would Ma have done such a thing? Why hadn’t she just married him? And what did any of it have to do with Vivien and Henry Jenkins?
There was something Laurel wasn’t seeing, lots of things, probably. She let out a hot sigh of exasperation that echoed around the small tiled bathroom. She felt thoroughly thwarted. So many disparate clues that meant nothing on their own. Laurel tore off a piece of toilet tissue and dabbed the mascara that had smeared beneath her eyes. The whole mystery was like the beginning of a child’s dot-to-dot, or a constellation in the night sky. Their father had once taken them sky-watching when Laurel was small. They’d set up camp on the rise above Blind- man’s Wood and, as