he saw in the corners of her mouth and the minute shift of her brows that finally she understood.
As Jimmy waited, Dolly sighed, long and slowly. She reached for her hat, frowning a little as she turned it round and round by the brim. She’d always favoured the dramatic pause, so he wasn’t really worried as he followed the perfect line of her profile, just as he had on that hill by the sea; as she said, ‘Oh, Jimmy,’ in a voice not quite her own; as she turned to him and he saw a fresh tear sliding down her cheek: ‘what a thing to ask; what a damnable thing to ask me right now.’
Before Jimmy could ask her what she meant, she hurried past him, bumping her hip against another table in her hurry to get away, disappearing into the cold and the dark of wartime London without so much as hinting at a backwards glance. It was only after minutes had passed and she still hadn’t returned that Jimmy finally understood what had happened. And he saw himself suddenly, as if from above, as if the subject of his very own photograph, a man who’d somehow lost everything, kneeling alone on the dirty floor of a dingy restaurant that had become very cold.
Fifteen
Suffolk, 2011
LAUREL DID WONDER afterwards how it was possible she’d come this far without thinking to Google her mother’s name. Then again, nothing she knew about Dorothy Nicolson led her to suspect for a second that she might have an online presence.
She didn’t wait to get home to Greenacres. She sat in the parked car outside the hospital, took out her phone and typed ‘Dorothy Smitham’ into the search window. She went too quickly, of course, spelled it incorrectly and had to do it all over again. She steeled herself against whatever the results might show, and then pressed the search button. There were 127 hits. Laurel exhaled. A genealogy site in America, a Thelma Dorothy Smitham looking for friends on Facebook, a white pages listing in Australia, and then, halfway down the page, an entry on the BBC People’s War archive, subtitled ‘A London telephonist remembers World War Two’. Laurel’s finger was shaking as she selected that option.
The page contained the wartime remembrances of a woman called Katherine Frances Barker who’d worked as a telephonist for the War Office in Westminster during the Blitz. It had been submitted, said the note at the top, by Susanna Barker on be-half of her mother. There was a photograph at the top of a spritely old woman, posing somewhat coquettishly against a raspberry velour sofa with crocheted headrests. The annotation read:
Katherine ‘Kitty’ Barker relaxing at home. When WW2 broke out, Kitty moved to London, where she worked as a telephonist for the duration. Kitty would have liked to join the WRNS but communications was considered an essential service and she wasn’t able to leave.
The article itself was rather long and Laurel skimmed it, waiting for her mother’s name to jump out from the text. A few paragraphs down she found it:
I had grown up in the Midlands and had no family in London, but during the war there were services set up to find accommodation for war workers. I was fortunate compared to some, being sent to board in the home of a rather grand woman. The house was at number 7 Campden Grove, Kensington, and although you might not think so, my time spent there during the war was very happy. There were three other office girls staying, too, and a couple of Lady Gwendolyn Cal- dicott’s staff members who had remained when war broke out, a cook and a girl called Dorothy Smitham who was a companion of sorts to the mistress of the house. We became friendly, Dorothy and I, but lost touch when I married my husband, Tom, in 1941. Friendships were forged very quickly during the war—I suppose that should come as no surprise—and I have often wondered what became of my friends from that time. I hope they survived.
Laurel was buzzing. It was incredible, the effect of seeing her mother’s name, her name from before, in print. Especially in a document like this one, recounting the very time and place that Laurel was curious about.
She read the paragraph again and her excitement didn’t wane. Dorothy Smitham had been real. She’d worked for a woman named Lady Gwendolyn Caldicott and lived at number 7 Campden Grove (the same street as Vivien and Henry