The Secret Keeper (37 page)

She couldn’t reach.

Dolly panicked. Perhaps if she pounded the old lady’s back, or squeezed her round the middle?

She attempted both, her heart racing, her pulse hammering in her ears. She tried to lift Lady Gwendolyn, but she was so heavy, her silk coverall so slippery—‘It’s all right,’ Dolly heard herself saying as she fought to keep her grip. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

Over and over she said it, heaving with all her might as Lady Gwendolyn struggled and flailed in her arms: ‘It’s all right, it’s going to be all right, everything’s all right.’

Until finally Dolly ran out of breath and stopped speaking and when she did, realised that her companion had grown heavier, that she was no longer writhing or gasping for air, that everything was unnaturally still.

Then all was quiet in the stately bedroom but for Dolly’s breaths, and the eerie creaking of the bed as she eased herself from beneath her dead mistress and let the still-warm body sink back into its familiar position.

The doctor, when he arrived, stood at the end of the bed and decreed it ‘a clear case of natural extinguishment’. He looked to Dolly, who was holding Lady Gwendolyn’s cold hand, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief, and added, ‘She’d always had a weakness of the heart. Scarlet fever as a girl.’

Dolly contemplated Lady Gwendolyn’s face, especially stern in death, and nodded. She hadn’t mentioned either the bull’s eye or the sneeze; there hadn’t seemed any point. It didn’t change things, not now, and she would’ve sounded a fool jabbering on about sweets and dust. The bull’s eye had dissolved, anyway, in the time it took the doctor to make his way through streets ripped up by last night’s raids.

‘There, there, dear girl,’ the doctor said, patting Dolly’s hand. ‘I know you were fond of her. And she of you, too, might I add.’ And then he returned his hat to his head, collected his bag, and said he’d leave the name of the Caldicott family’s preferred funeral people on the table downstairs.

Lady Gwendolyn’s last will and testament was read in the library at number 7 Campden Grove on the twenty-ninth day of January 1941. Strictly speaking, it needn’t have been read at all, not publicly; a discreet letter to each person named therein was the solicitor Mr Pember- ly’s preference (he suffered terribly with stage fright) but Lady Gwendolyn, with an instinct for drama, had insisted. It didn’t surprise Dolly, who, as one of the beneficiaries, was invited to attend the reading. The old woman’s hatred for her only nephew was no secret, and what better way to punish him from beyond the grave than to withhold his expected inheritance and have him sit through the public shame of seeing the whole lot pass to someone else.

Dolly dressed carefully, just as Lady Gwendolyn would have wanted her to, eager to look the part of the worthy heiress, without seeming to be trying too hard.

She was nervous as she waited for Mr Pemberly to get on with it. The poor man was stuttering and stammering his way through the preliminary articles, his birthmark reddening as he reminded those assembled (Dolly and Lord Wolsey) that his client’s wishes, having been ratified by himself, an impartial and qualified solicitor at law, were final and binding. Lady Gwendolyn’s nephew was a great bulldog of a man, and Dolly hoped he was listening carefully to the stilted disclaimers. She couldn’t imagine he was going to be too happy when he realised what his aunt had done.

Dolly was right. Lord Peregrine Wolsey was incensed to the point of apoplexy when the will was finally read. He was an impatient gentleman at the best of times and had started steaming from the ears long before Mr Pemberly even finished his pre-amble. Dolly could hear him huffing and puffing at each new sentence that didn’t begin, ‘I give and bequeath to my nephew, Peregrine Wolsey …’ At length though, the solicitor drew breath, took out a handkerchief to mop his damp brow, and moved on to the business of dispensing his client’s largesse. ‘I, Gwendolyn Caldicott, revoking all other wills and testaments by me heretofore made, give and bequeath to the wife of my nephew, Peregrine Wolsey, the bulk of my wardrobe, and to my nephew himself, the contents of my late father’s dressing room.’

‘What?’ the fellow roared so suddenly he spat out his cigar stub, ‘What the bloody hell is the meaning of this?’

‘Please, Lord Wolsey,’ Mr Pemberly jabbered, his birthmark darkening further to an angry shade of purple, ‘I’d ask you to p-p-please sit quietly a m-m-moment longer while I f-f-f-finish.’

‘Why, I’ll sue you, you grubby worm. I know it was you, get-ting in my aunt’s ear—’

‘Lord Wolsey, p-p-please, I beg you.’

Mr Pemberly continued his reading, encouraged by a kindly head bob from Dolly. ‘I give and bequeath the residue and remainder of my property and estate, real, personal and mixed, including my dwelling at number 7 Campden Grove, London, with the exception of the few items named hereafter, to the Kensington Animal Shelter, a representative of which was unable to attend today …’ Which is about the point that Dolly stopped hearing anything but the deafening ring of betrayal’s bells in her ears.

Lady Gwendolyn had, of course, left a provision for ‘my young companion, Dorothy Smitham’, but Dolly was in too much shocked distress to listen when it was read. Only later that night in the privacy of her own bedroom, as she pored over the letter Mr Pemberly had put into her shaking hands while he dodged threats from Lord Wolsey, did she realise her inheritance comprised a small selection of coats from the dressing room upstairs. Dolly recognised the listed items at once. With the exception of a rather tatty white fur, she’d given all of them away already, in the hat-box loads she’d donated so joyously to the WVS clothes drive organised by Vivien Jenkins.

Dolly was livid. She seethed and burned and spat. After all she’d done for the old woman, the numerous indignities she’d had to bear— those toenails and the ear-cleaning sessions, the regular sprays of venom she’d endured. She hadn’t suffered them gladly, Dolly never would have tried to argue that, but she’d suffered them nonetheless, and not for nothing. She’d given up everything for Lady Gwendolyn; she’d thought they were like family; she’d been led to believe a great inheritance awaited her, by Mr Pemberly most recently, but also by Lady Gwendolyn herself. Dolly couldn’t understand what could possibly have happened to make her change her mind.

Unless—. The answer came like the fall of an axe, swift and absolute. Dolly drew breath. Her hands began to tremble and the solicitor’s letter dropped to the floor. But of course, it all made perfect sense. Vivien Jenkins, that spiteful woman, had come to visit Lady Gwendolyn after all; it was the only explanation. She must have sat by her window, biding her time and watching for an opportunity, one of the rare instances over the past fortnight when Dolly had been left no choice but to leave the house on an errand. Vivien had waited, and then she’d pounced; sat with Lady Gwendolyn, filling the old woman’s head with wicked lies about Dolly, she who’d never had anything but the grande dame’s best interests at heart.

The Kensington Animal Shelter’s first act as owner of 7 Camp-den Grove was to contact the War Office and insist that alternative arrangements be made for the office girls who were currently being lodged in the house. The dwelling was to be converted immediately for use as an animal hospital and rescue centre. The decree didn’t worry Kitty and Louisa, both of whom were married to respective RAF pilots within days of one another in early February; the other two girls remained as indistinguishable in death as they had been in life, hit by a bomb as they skipped together arm in arm on their way to a dance in Lambeth on January 30th.

Which just left Dolly. It wasn’t easy to find a room in London, not for someone who’d become accustomed to the finer things in life, and Dolly looked at three squalid arrangements before returning to the Notting Hill boarding house she’d lived in years before, back in her shop-girl days when Campden Grove was just a name on a map, and not the repository for her life’s great dreams and disappointments. Mrs White, the widowed owner of 24 Rillington Place, was delighted to see Dolly again (though ‘see’ was rather too optimistic a description, the old biddy was blind as a bat without her glasses), and further delighted to report that Dolly’s old room was still available—just as soon as she handed over her bond and ration book, of course.

Little wonder the room was still free. There were few people, Dolly was sure, even in wartime London, who were desperate enough for somewhere to live that they’d hand over good money to sleep within its walls. It was more an afterthought, really, rather than a room: what was left when a bedroom in the original house had been subdivided into two unequal halves. The window had gone with the other portion, leaving a very small, very dark, closet-like area on Dolly’s side of the plaster wall. There was space for a narrow bed, a side table, a tiny sink, and not much besides. Still, lack of light and ventilation kept the price low and Dolly didn’t have a lot to accommodate—everything she owned was in the suitcase she’d carried with her when she danced out of her parents’ house, three years before.

One of the first things she’d done upon arriving was to arrange her two books, The Reluctant Muse and Dorothy Smitham’s Book of Ideas, on the single shelf above the sink. There was part of her that never wanted to see the Jenkins book again, but she’d so few possessions left, and Dolly so loved special things, that she couldn’t bear to be rid of it. Not yet. She turned the book around instead so the spine was against the wall. The display was still rather sad, so Dolly added the Leica camera Jimmy had given her one birthday. Photography hadn’t been her caper—it required too much stillness and waiting for Dolly—but the room was so stark and empty she’d have proudly flaunted the commode if she’d owned one. At last, she took the fur coat she’d inherited, put it on a hanger and slipped it over the hook on the back of the door: all the better to see it no matter where she happened to be standing in the tiny room. That old white coat had become an emblem, of sorts, for every one of Dolly’s dreams that had been reduced to tatters. She stared at it, and she seethed, and she directed all the fury she felt for Vivien Jenkins deep into the coat’s matted fur.

Dolly took a job in a nearby munitions factory because Mrs White wouldn’t have hesitated to throw her out if she didn’t make her weekly payments, and because it was the sort of work that could be done without devoting more than a single per cent of one’s attention. Which left the rest of Dolly’s mind free to dwell on the ills done to her. She would come home at night, force down some of Mrs White’s corned- beef hash, and then leave the other girls to laugh together about their boyfriends and shout at Lord Haw-Haw on the wireless, while she took to her narrow bed, smoking her way through her last packets of cigarettes and thinking about everything she’d lost: her family and Lady Gwendolyn and Jimmy … She thought, too, about the way Vivien had said, ‘I don’t know this woman’—her mind kept coming back to that; and she saw Henry Jenkins pointing her to the door; and she felt again the hot and cold waves of shame and anger coursing through her body.

So it went, day after day the same, until one night in the middle of February, things happened differently. Most of the day had been like any other; Dolly had worked a double shift at the factory and then stopped to buy dinner at the nearby British Restaurant because she simply couldn’t stomach another night of Mrs White’s foul cooking.

She sat there at her seat in the corner until the place closed, watching all the other diners from behind her cigarette, especially the couples as they stole kisses across the tabletops and laughed together as if the world were a good place; Dolly could vaguely remember feeling that way herself, being full of laughter and happiness and hope.

On the way home, taking a short cut down a narrow lane as bombers sounded in the distance, Dolly tripped in the black-out—she’d left her torch at Campden Grove when she’d had to leave (Vivien’s fault)— and she fell down deep inside a bomb crater. Dolly’s ankle was twisted and her knee bled through the new ladder in her best stockings, but it was her pride that took the greatest battering. She had to limp the whole way back to Mrs White’s boarding house (Dolly refused to call it ‘home’—it wasn’t her home, that had been stolen from her—Vivi- en’s fault) in the cold and the dark, and by the time she arrived the door had already been locked and bolted. Curfew was something Mrs White took very seriously: not to keep Hitler out (though she held grave fears that 24 Rillington Place was top of his invasion force’s list), rather to make an example of the dirty stop-outs among her tenants. Dolly clenched her fists and limped down the side alley. Her knee was stinging by now, and she winced as she scaled the wall, using the old iron bolt as a foothold. The blackout made it darker than normal and there was no moon to speak of, but somehow she managed to clamber through the mess of the back garden to reach the storeroom window with the weak latch. As carefully as she could, Dolly jimmied it with her shoulder until the lock budged and she could tap it upwards and clamber through.

The hallway smelled of stale grease and old cheap meats and Dolly held her breath as she climbed the grubby stairs. When she reached the first floor, she noticed a thin strip of light beneath the door to Mrs White’s rooms. No one was quite sure what went on behind that door, only that it was a rare night Mrs White’s light was out before the last of the girls turned in. She could be communing with the dead or sending covert radio messages to the Germans for all Dolly knew, and frankly she didn’t care. So long as it kept the landlady occupied while her truant tenants sneaked home to roost, everyone got along fine. Dolly continued along the corridor, taking extra care to avoid the squeaky floorboards, opened her bedroom door and sealed herself safely inside.