The Secret Keeper (12 page)

She’d been searching the garage shelves for her hockey stick when she made the discovery: a powder-blue shoebox at the very back of the top shelf. The box was immediately familiar, but it took Dolly a few seconds to remember why. The memory came to her of her mother sitting on the edge of her twin bed in the room she shared with Father, the blue box on her lap and an unreadable expression on her face as she went through its contents. It was a private moment and Dolly had known instinctively to make herself scarce; but she’d wondered about that box, trying to imagine what it could possibly have held that made her mother look dreamy, and lost, and somehow both young and old at once.

Alone in the garage, Dolly had lifted the box’s lid and all had been revealed. The box was filled with bits and pieces of another life: programmes for singing performances, blue first-place ribbons from eisteddfods, certificates of merit proclaiming Janice Williams the singer with the Most Beautiful Voice. There was even a newspaper article with a picture: a bright young woman with starry eyes and a lovely figure and the look of someone who was going places; who wasn’t going to follow the other girls in her school class into the dull ordinary lives expected of them.

Except that she had. Dolly stared at that picture for a long time. Her mother had once possessed a talent—a real one, that set her apart and made her special—yet, in seventeen years of living in the same house, Dolly had never heard Janice Smitham sing anything. What could possibly have happened to silence the young woman who’d once told a newspaper: ‘Singing is my favourite thing in the whole world; it makes me feel that I could fly. One day I’d like to sing onstage before the king’?

Dolly had a feeling she knew the answer.

‘Keep it up, boy,’ Father called across the beach at Cuthbert: ‘Look smart, eh. Don’t slouch.’

Arthur Smitham: accountant extraordinaire, bicycle-factory stalwart, guardsman of all that was good and proper. Enemy to all that was exceptional.

Dolly sighed as she watched him jouncing backwards from the wicket, winding himself up to bowl the ball at Cuthbert. He might have won against her mother, convincing her to suppress everything that made her special, but he wasn’t going to do the same to Dolly. She refused to let him. ‘Mother,’ she said suddenly, letting her magazine drop to her lap.

‘Yes, dear? Would you like a sandwich? I’ve some shrimp paste here with me.’

Dolly drew breath: she couldn’t quite believe she was going to say it, now, here, just like that, but the wind was with her and away she went, ‘Mother, I don’t want to go to work with Father at the bicycle factory.’

‘Oh?’

‘No.’

‘Oh.’

‘I don’t think I could stand to do the same thing every day, typing up letters full of bicycles and order references and dreary yours sincerelys.’

Her mother blinked at her with a bland, unreadable expression on her face. ‘I see.’

‘Yes.’

‘And what is it you propose to do instead?’

Dolly wasn’t sure how to answer that. She hadn’t thought about the specifics, she just knew there was something out there waiting for her. ‘I don’t know. I just … Well, the bi-cycle factory’s hardly the right sort of place for someone like me, don’t you think?’

‘Why ever not?’

She didn’t want to have to say it. She wanted her mother to know, to agree, to think it herself without being told. Dolly struggled to find the words, while the undertow of disappointment pulled hard against her hope.

‘It’s time to settle down now, Dorothy,’ her mother said gently. ‘You’re almost a woman.’

‘Yes, but that’s exactly—’

‘Put away childish notions. The time for all that has passed. He wanted to tell you himself, to surprise you, but your father’s already spoken with Mrs Levene at the factory and organised an interview for you.’

‘What?’

‘I wasn’t supposed to say anything, but they’ll see you in the first week in September. You’re a very lucky girl to have a father with such influence.’

‘But I—’

‘Father knows best.’ Janice Smitham reached to tap Dolly’s leg but didn’t quite make contact. ‘You’ll see.’ There was a hint of fear behind her painted-on smile, as if she knew she was betraying her daughter in some way, but didn’t care to think about how.

Dolly burned inside; she wanted to shake her mother and remind her that she’d once been exceptional herself. She wanted to demand to know why she’d changed; tell her (though Dolly knew this bit was cruel) that she, Dolly, was frightened; that she couldn’t bear to think the same thing might happen one day to her. But then—

‘Watch out!’

A shriek came from the Bournemouth shoreline, drawing Dolly’s attention to the water’s edge and saving Janice Smitham from a conversation she didn’t want to have.

There, in a bathing costume straight from Vogue, stood The Girl, previously of The Silver Dress. Her mouth was tightened to a pretty moue and she was rubbing at her arm. The other beautiful people had clustered in a tableau of tut-tutting and sympathetic posturing, and Dolly strained to understand what had happened. She watched as a boy, around her age, stooped to scoop at the sand, as he righted himself and held aloft—Dolly’s hand went gravely to her mouth—a cricket ball.

‘So sorry, chaps,’ Father said.

Dolly’s eyes widened—what on earth was he doing now? Dear God, not making an approach, surely. But yes, she drew breath, that’s exactly what he was doing. Dolly wanted to disappear, to hide, but she couldn’t look away. Father stopped when he reached the group and made a rudimentary mime of swinging the bat. The others nodded and listened, the boy with the ball said something and the girl touched her arm, and then shrugged lightly and smiled those dimples at Father. Dolly exhaled, it seemed disaster had been averted.

But then, dazzled perhaps by the aura of glamour into which he’d stumbled, Father forgot to leave, turning instead and pointing up the beach, directing the collective attention of the others to the patch where Dolly and her mother sat. Janice Smitham, with a deficit of grace that made her daughter cringe, started to stand before thinking better of it, failing to sit, and choosing instead to hover at a crouch. From such position she lifted a hand to wave.

Something inside Dolly curled up and died. Things could not have been worse.

Except that suddenly they were.

‘Look here! Look at me!’

They looked. Cuthbert, with all the patience of a gnat, had grown tired of waiting. Cricket game forgotten, he’d wandered up the beach and made contact with one of the seaside don-keys. One foot already in the stirrup, he was struggling to hoist himself atop. It was awful to watch, but watch Dolly did; watch—a sneaking glance confirmed—did everybody.

The spectacle of Cuthbert weighing that poor donkey down was the last straw. She knew she probably should have helped him, but Dolly couldn’t, not this time. She muttered something about her headache and too much sun, swept up her magazine, and hurried back towards the grim solace of her tiny room with its stingy view of drainpipes.

Back behind the bandstand, a young man with longish hair and a shabby suit had seen it all. He’d been dozing beneath his hat when the cry of ‘Watch out!’ cut through his dream and woke him. He’d rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and glanced about to pinpoint the source of the cry and that’s when he’d seen them by the foreshore, the father and son who’d been playing cricket all morning.

There’d been some sort of a kerfuffle, the father was waving at a group in the shallows—the rich young people, he realised, who’d been making so much of themselves at the nearby bathing hut. The hut was empty now, but for a swathe of silver fabric fluttering from the balcony rail. The dress. He’d noticed it earlier—it had been hard not to, which was no doubt the point. It wasn’t a beach dress, that one; it belonged on a dance floor.

‘Look here!’ someone called, ‘Look at me!’ And the young man duly looked. The lad who’d been playing cricket was busy now making a donkey of himself, with, it would appear, a don-key. The rest of the crowd was watching the entertainment un-fold.

Not him, though. He had other things to do. The pretty girl with heart-shaped lips and the sort of curves that made him ache with longing, was by herself now, leaving her family and heading away from the beach. He stood up, swinging his haversack over his shoulder and pulling his hat down low. He’d been waiting for an opportunity like this one and he didn’t intend to waste it.

Eight

Bournemouth, 1938

DOLLY DIDN’T SEE HIM at first. She didn’t see much of anything. She was far too busy blinking back tears of frustration as she trudged along the beach towards the promenade. Everything was a hot angry blur of sand and seagulls and lousy smiling faces. She knew they weren’t laughing at her, not really, but it didn’t matter one bit. Their jolliness was a personal blow; it made everything a hundred times worse. Dolly couldn’t go to work at that bicycle factory, she just couldn’t. Marry a younger version of her father and, bit by tiny bit, turn into her mother? It was inconceivable—oh, fine for the two of them, they were happy with their lot, but Dolly wanted more than that … she just didn’t know yet what it was or where to find it.

She stopped short. A gust of wind, stronger than those that had come before it, chose the very moment of her arrival near the bathing huts to lift the silk dress, sweep it from the railing and send it scuttling across the sand. It came to rest right in front of her, a luxurious spill of silver. Why—she drew an in-credulous breath—the blonde girl with the dimples mustn’t have bothered to pin it down safely. But how could anybody care so little for such a beautiful piece of clothing? What was the point of renting a hut if not to procure the perfect place in which to stow such precious items while one was swimming? Dolly shook her head; a girl with such scant regard for her own possessions hardly deserved to have them. It was the sort of thing a princess might have worn—an American film star, a glamour model in a magazine, an heiress on holidays in the French Riviera—and if Dolly hadn’t come along right then it might’ve continued its flight across the dunes and been lost forever.

The wind returned and the dress rolled further up the beach, disappearing behind the bathing huts. Without another moment’s hesitation, Dolly started after it: the girl had been foolish, it was true, but Dolly wasn’t about to let that divine piece of silver come to harm.

She could just imagine how grateful the girl would be when the dress was returned. Dolly would explain what had happened—taking care not to make the girl feel worse than she already did—and the pair of them would start to laugh and say what a close call it was, and the girl would offer Doll a glass of cold lemonade, real lemonade, not the watery substitute Mrs Jennings served at Bellevue. They’d get to talking and discover they had an awful lot in common, and then finally the sun would slip in the sky and Dolly would say she really ought to be going and the girl would smile disappointedly, before brightening and reaching to stroke Dolly’s arm—‘What if you join us here tomorrow morning?’ she’d ask. ‘Some of us are going to get together and play a bit of tennis on the sand. It’ll be such a lark—do say you’ll come.’

Hurrying now, Dolly rounded the corner of the bathing hut after the silver dress, only to find as she did so that it had already stopped its tumble, having run straight into the ankles of somebody else. It was a man in a hat, bending down now to pick up the dress, and as his fingers grasped the fabric, as grains of sand slid from the dress, with them went all Dolly’s hopes.

For a split second Dolly honestly felt she could’ve murdered the man in the hat, happily torn him limb from limb. Her pulse beat furiously, her skin tingled and her vision glazed. She glanced back towards the sea: at her father, marching stonily towards poor flummoxed Cuth- bert; at her mother, frozen still in that attitude of pained supplication; at the others, those with the blonde girl, laughing now, slapping their knees as they pointed out the ridiculous scene.

The donkey let loose a pained and pitiful braying, echoing Dolly’s feelings so entirely that before she knew what she was doing she’d spluttered at the man, ‘Hey there—’ he was about to steal the blonde girl’s dress and it was up to Dolly to stop him—‘you. What do you think you’re doing?’

The man looked up, surprised, and when Dolly saw the handsome face beneath the hat she was briefly knocked off course. She stood, drawing quick breaths, wondering what to do next, but as the man’s mouth started to pull up at the sides in a suggestive way, she suddenly knew.

‘I said—’ Dolly was lightheaded, strangely excited—‘what do you think you’re doing? That dress isn’t yours.’

The young man opened his mouth to speak, and as he did so a policeman by the unfortunate name of Constable Suckling—who’d been making his portly progress down the beach—arrived beside them.