Jenkins, Laurel noted with a thrill) and she’d had a friend called Kitty. Laurel searched the date of the entry’s submission, 25 October 2008—a friend, who was quite possibly still alive and willing to talk to Laurel. Each discovery was another shining star in the great black sky, forming the picture that would lead Laurel home.
Susanna Barker invited Laurel to call for tea that afternoon. Finding her had proved so simple that Laurel, who’d never believed in an easy ride, had felt a surge of constitutional suspicion. She’d done no more than punch the names Katherine Barker and Susanna Barker into the Numberway online directory page, and then set about dialling each of the resulting numbers. She struck pay dirt on the third. ‘Mother plays golf on Thursdays and talks to students at the local grammar on Fridays,’ Susanna said. ‘There’s a space in her diary today at four, though?’ Laurel had taken the slot gladly, and was now following Susanna’s careful directions along a meandering lane through drenched green fields on the outskirts of Cam-bridge.
A plump jolly sort of woman with a fuzz of coppery rain-frizzed hair was waiting for her by the front gate. She was wearing a cheery sun-yellow cardigan over a brown dress, and clutching an umbrella with both hands in an attitude of polite anxiety. Sometimes, thought the actress inside Laurel (‘ears, eyes and heart, all at once’), you could tell everything there was to know about a person by a single gesture. The woman with the umbrella was nervous, dependable and grateful.
‘Why, hello there,’ she trilled as Laurel crossed the street to-wards her. Her smile exposed a magnificent amount of glossy gum. ‘I’m Susanna Barker and it’s just such an enormous pleasure to meet you.’
‘Laurel. Laurel Nicolson.’
‘But of course I know who you are! Come in, come in, please. Terrible weather, isn’t it? Mother says it’s because I killed a spider inside. Silly me, I ought to know better by now. It always brings the rain, though, doesn’t it?’
Kitty Barker was bright as a button and sharp as a pirate’s sword. ‘Dolly Smitham’s daughter,’ she said, bringing her tiny fist down on the table with a thump. ‘What a bloody marvellous surprise.’ When Laurel attempted to introduce herself and ex-plain how she’d found Kitty’s name on the Internet, the frail hand waved impatiently and its mistress barked; ‘Yes, yes, my daughter told me already—you said so on the phone.’
Laurel, who’d been accused of brusqueness more than once herself, decided to find the woman’s efficiency refreshing—for now. Presumably at the age of ninety-two, one neither minced a word nor wasted a moment. She smiled and said, ‘Mrs Barker, my mother never spoke much about the war when I was growing up—I gather she wanted to put it all behind her—but she’s unwell now and it’s become important to me to know everything I can about her past. I thought perhaps you might tell me a bit about wartime London, in particular about my mother’s life back then.’
Kitty Barker was only too happy to comply. That is, she leapt with alacrity to fulfill the first part of Laurel’s request, launching a lecture on Blitz-time London while her daughter brought the tea and scones.
Laurel paid full attention for a time, but her concentration began to waver when it became clear that Dorothy Smitham was only going to be a bit player in this story. She studied the war-time memorabilia on the sitting-room wall, posters entreating people not to take the squander bug with them when they went shopping, rather to remember their vegetables.
Kitty was still describing the ways in which a person might come to accidental harm in the blackout, and as Laurel watched the clock tick past the half hour her focus drifted to Susanna Barker, gazing at her mother with rapt attention and mouthing along to each and every line. Kitty’s daughter had heard these anecdotes many times before, Laurel realised, and suddenly she understood the dynamic per- fectly—Susanna’s nerviness, her willingness to please, the reverence with which she spoke of her mother—Kitty was Ma’s opposite; she’d created of her war years a mythology from which her own daughter could never escape.
Perhaps all children were held captive, in some part, by their parents’ pasts. What, after all, could poor Susanna ever hope to achieve compared to her mother’s tales of heroism and sacrifice? For the first time, Laurel felt some small gratitude to her parents for having spared their children such a heavy burden. (On