I opened my eyes. “Is he here?”
The nurse smiled and pushed the hair from my forehead. Such a tender touch. It reminded me of Mam and made me want to cry. “Welcome back, Dorothy.”
“Where is he? Where am I?”
“You’re in the hospital. Remember?”
I did. And all I wanted to do was fall into Teddy’s arms and forget.
“A cup of tea. That’s what you need. Tea will set you right.”
But it didn’t. The milk had turned. Everything was soured.
I placed the cup and saucer on the small table beside my bed, slid under the covers, and wept until the morning. I tried to recall the sound of my baby’s cry, but all I heard was my own breath and the distant voice of a man I had loved. I had abandoned him too. I had abandoned them both when they needed me the most.
The truck driver pulls up outside the laundry entrance and I make my way inside. It is a hot, noisy place. The flat-iron machines hiss and whir as great armies of laundry maids pull bedsheets through huge rollers to stiffen and smooth them. Clouds of steam fog the washroom, so that I can just make out a blur of white and hear the rattle and thrum of the electric machines. One of the maids points me in the direction of the laundry manageress. I explain that the dress is needed for tonight and that I’m to take it back with me when it is ready.
“There’s a tearoom on the high street,” she says. “You can wait there.” But I am not interested in tearooms. I already know where I’m going. Teddy always said that when you lose something you should go back to the start, back to the place you saw it last.
Leaving the laundry, I make my way slowly toward the Mothers’ Hospital. I walked these streets once before, as hesitant then as I am now. I walk up the stone steps at the front of the building and push open the door. The smell immediately takes me back: bleach and sterilizing fluid. The smell of babies. The smell of him.
My heart pounding, I approach the reception desk. A girl behind the counter passes me a piece of paper without even looking up. “Fill in the form and hand it back when you’re done.”
“I’m not registering,” I say. She looks at me over the top of her spectacles. I show her the photograph. “I want to find my son.”
She sighs with a sense of having heard this a hundred times a day. “There’s paperwork.”
“Then I’ll fill it in.”
Leaving her chair, she rummages around in drawers and filing cabinets. Someone behind me coughs. Someone is sobbing into a handkerchief.
The girl returns and pushes several official-looking forms across the counter. I take a pencil from a pot and sit on a chair, carefully filling in as many details as I can remember. His date of birth. The date he left. My date of birth. My name. It takes a while but I complete everything as accurately as I can and take the forms back to the desk.
“When will I hear?” I ask as the girl clips the pages together and writes something in a ledger.
“We’ll be in touch if there’s any news.”
It is a cold emotionless process. Forms are stamped. Papers are filed. The next young woman is called forward to take my place at the window.
As I step outside I turn to look up at the front of the building. A young girl stands at a window on the top floor. Pale-faced, blank expression. She is like an echo of myself not so many years ago.
The earlier fog has lifted by the time the laundry truck collects me, and as we drive back across the river I can clearly see the dome of St. Paul’s on the skyline. It is a reminder. A reminder that I must be patient; that the fog will lift. Until then, I must keep hoping. Keep searching. Keep breathing.
33
DOLLY
I closed my eyes and wished that whoever took my child would be like her. Like spring.
In our cozy little bedroom at the hotel, we ring in the New Year with hot port, the chimes of Big Ben, and a rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.” I can’t imagine a time when I didn’t know this hotel or this room or these girls: Sissy, Gladys, even Mildred. They have become my family along with the other staff. O’Hara and Cutler are like the strict parents, the maids my sisters, the hotel the grand home we all share with strange aunts and cousins from all over the world. Sissy still makes me laugh, Gladys is still all talk of Hollywood, and Mildred and I still move awkwardly around each other like strangers at a ball.
We haven’t spoken of the Mothers’ Hospital again. She avoids being alone with me and I am hesitant around her. If she’s in our room and I walk in, she leaves. If it’s just the two of us in the Maids’ Hall after tea break or supper, she gathers her things and rushes away. On her afternoons and Sundays off, she disappears. Nobody knows where to. Nobody asks. She writes her letters and remains sullen and withdrawn. It is only through a chance encounter in the linen stores that I finally get the chance to talk to her.
I’m counting chamber towels when I hear a strange wailing that at first I think must be a cat, but as I look behind a stack of wicker baskets I find Mildred, curled up on the floor, a towel folded in her arms like a mother holding an infant.
“Mildred?” Her face is blotched with tears. I step over a basket and bend down to her. “What’s the matter? Has something happened?” I think immediately of Snyder. I’d hoped I wouldn’t see him again after Mademoiselle Delysia was forced to return to France to recover from a nasty dose of laryngitis, but he returned last week. I know my indiscretion with the silver dance shoes won’t have been forgiven; nor his threats forgotten. Maybe he has other maids in his sights. “Has someone been bothering you?”
She shakes her head and sits up as I shuffle into the narrow space behind the baskets and sit down beside her, pressing my back into the wickerwork. I pass her a handkerchief and we sit in silence until her tears subside and her breathing steadies.
“I try to forget,” she says, “but I can’t.” She folds the handkerchief into a neat square and places it in her pocket. “Dorothy Lane. Edie Bishop. Betty Evans. All those names, all those memories, flooding back as you stood there in the Maids’ Hall dripping rainwater all over the floor. I’d wondered what happened to you all, and there you were, standing in front of me like a ghost.”
“And what about Vera Green?” I ask. “What happened to her?”
“I gave my name as Vera Green so nobody would know it was me. I cut my hair the day I left the hospital. That’s why you didn’t recognize me. I thought I’d be able to leave Vera Green behind, but it’s not that simple, is it?”
I shake my head. “No, it isn’t.”
“I remember them taking you from the ward,” she continues. “You were hysterical with a fever. I never knew if you’d walked out of that place alive or if they carried you out in a box.”
I think about those days and nights, drifting in and out of consciousness. “The nurses told me I’d been very ill, but the fever broke suddenly one night. I didn’t know where I was when I woke up. At first I wished I’d never woken up at all.”
Leaving day was the worst—the days the babies left. I’d watched the other girls on these days; heard their choking sobs. Too soon, it was my turn.
I washed him and dressed him and held him tight—so tight—his tiny heart a butterfly’s wings fluttering against my chest.
I was cleaning the windows when I first saw her: red hair beneath a brown velvet hat, a ribbon of cream tied in a bow to the side, a coat the color of daffodils. She looked like spring; like she could love every single baby in the hospital and still have love to spare. I closed my eyes and wished that whoever took my child would be someone like her. Like spring.
I watched her again as she walked back down the steps a while later, a tiny bundle in her arms, and as she turned to step into the car I saw it: the matinée jacket, powder blue with a white ribbon trim stitched so carefully into the collar. The matinée jacket I’d made myself, sobbing with every click and clack of the needles.
I’d wished for her and I watched him go, knowing that I would never see him again; never feel his butterfly-wing h
eartbeat. All the loveliness of that spring day belonged to the woman in the daffodil coat, while I was left with an ache in my heart so dark and so deep I didn’t know how I would ever recover.
I wept until I thought my bones would break.
The camera was all I had to remember him by, his beautiful little face captured by the shutter somewhere inside that little machine of Teddy’s. When I developed the film I would be able to see him every day, and as I sobbed into my pillow that night, I vowed that every day without him would be a reminder to me to want more, to make a better life, to find the adventures and dreams I’d captured in my scrapbooks. I would do it for him. For little Edward.
Mildred sits silently beside me. We both stare at a cobweb being blown about by a draft.
“I went back last week,” I say. “It was the first time I’d stepped foot in the place since I left. It smelled exactly the same. It smelled of him.”
She turns her face to me. She’s pretty, close up. There’s a softness about her I hadn’t noticed before. “What would you have called him?”
I can barely say his name. “Edward. He would have been known as Teddy, after the man who should have been his father.”
“Why did you go back?”
“I hadn’t planned to. I was running an errand at the laundry and there it was. It was as if I had to go back. Had to try to find out what happened to him.” I pull at a loose thread on my apron. “They said it’s very unlikely I’ll hear anything.”
“What if you do?” she asks. “What if they do find him?”
It is the question I have asked myself over and over. The question I have searched and searched for an answer to. “I don’t know, Mildred. He came from such a dark place. I’m afraid all those memories will come back if I find him. Until then, I don’t know.” I close my eyes and see it all so clearly. “She had red hair, Mildred. Red hair and a yellow coat, the color of daffodils. I wished for someone like her to take him. There isn’t a day has passed without me thinking about him; wondering what he looks like, where he is, whether he is loved.”
Mildred takes the rolled-up towel from her arms and stands up, shaking it out and folding it. “We have to believe they are loved, Dolly. What else can we do but imagine the happiness our babies brought to someone else’s life; happiness where there was only sadness before. Think of that when you don’t hear anything. Think of that when you look at his photograph.”
She is right. “Did you ever think of taking your baby home with you?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “What life could I give her? The father was a soldier I met in a dance hall. He was on leave. Said he loved me and that we’d be married when the war was over. He’d gone back to Gallipoli when I wrote to tell him I was in the family way and that he was the father.”
“What happened?”
“Told me to sort it out. You know, get rid of it. Turns out he was already married with a wife and kids. I never heard from him again.”
“I’m so sorry, Mildred. Did anyone know?”
She shakes her head. “Didn’t tell a soul. I booked myself into a place in Hackney where they sorted out girls like me, but I couldn’t go through with it.”
“Is that when you went to the Mothers’ Hospital?”
“When I couldn’t hide it any longer I told my mother. She arranged for me to go to the Mothers’ Hospital.” She lets out a long sigh. “She’d been there too. She used to be a dancer, a chorus girl, but she gave it up when she married my father. When she told him she was expecting his child, he left her for someone else. Another dancer, as it turns out. She gave birth to me in the same hospital I gave birth to my daughter. History repeating itself. Except she was brave and selfless. She took me home. She said she couldn’t bear to let me go.”
My guilt surges within me. Why didn’t I show such courage? “Your mother must be a brave woman.”
“She is.” Mildred hesitates for a moment. “In fact, you know her.”
“Do I?”
“Her name is Kathleen O’Hara. Head of housekeeping.”
I look at Mildred, wide-eyed. “O’Hara’s your mother?” I can’t believe it. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Why would I? It only complicates things for everyone.” She stands up and brushes dust from her skirt. “After I was born she moved back to her parents’ house and got a position here as a potato peeler in the kitchens. Over the years she worked her way up. When I was old enough, I started in the kitchens, and we’ve lived in ever since. The governor was very kind to us. I’m the daughter she refused to give away, despite all the nasty comments and people looking down their noses at her. I’ll always admire her for that.”
I think of the stiff starchy woman who inspects us so thoroughly every morning. I think of the odd flash of something else I have sometimes seen in her eyes. “I can’t believe O’Hara’s your mother. All this time and I never knew.”
“We all have a past, Dolly. There’s always more to a person than the part they choose to show to the world.”
I stand up and wrap my arms around her. She stiffens at first, but gradually I feel her give in to the gesture. “Thank you, Mildred. Thank you for talking to me. And I’m sorry for judging you.”
“We all judge, Dolly. We’d be made of stone if we didn’t.” She wipes the last of her tears from her eyes and straightens her apron. “We’d better get on.”
We leave the linen closet and I close the door behind us, turning the lock on our past and our secrets. If only they would stay there, locked away, hidden in the dark.
If only.
34
TEDDY
Mawdesley, Lancashire
September 1919
“We are not just Teddy and Dolly.
We are a damaged soldier and a broken heart.”
They told me I could go home, that there was nothing more they could do for me. No miracle cure. No medical intervention. They’d tried everything: shock treatment, cold water, isolation.
“Time and patience, Mr. Cooper. That’s the only medicine for you now.”
Time and patience.
I am much improved from the broken man who had lumbered into the hospital so many months ago. I’ve watched the bare winter branches produce their first fragile buds. I’ve watched the blossoms blown on the wind, the birds build their nests, and the foliage burst into life beneath the warmth of the sun. Now it is my turn to grow new buds, green shoots, and strong branches.
The nurses helped me with my speech, and while I still sound like I’ve drunk ten pints of ale, people can at least understand me, and my words become clearer every day. They also helped me to control the tremble in my hands, mostly by drawing. Turns out I have a talent for art. They said I should keep it up when I got home.
Home.
Such a different place from the one I left and yet so familiar: the smell of hops from the brewery, the sweep of the sails on the flour mill. They tell me many were lost, ripped from our community by war and the influenza epidemic. Those who remain are forever changed by what they have seen.
But the biggest difference is that Dolly is not here.
Her mam tells me she went to London; that she found better employment than anything Mawdesley could ever offer her. I smile as she tells me. Dolly Lane was always going to leave. I only wish I could have said a proper good-bye.
At least I have her letters to remember her by. From the very first—now faded and stained, read so many times—to the very last, still crisp and white and read only once.
A good-bye is a good-bye after all.
July 1919
My darling Teddy,
This is the last time I will write to you and the hardest letter I will ever send.
I have to leave, Teddy. For reasons I can’t explain, I have to go away. I will never stop loving you, and if only things were different there is nowhere I would rather be than by your side.
War changed us all, Teddy. I am not the girl who wept for you on the station platform all those years ago
and you are not the carefree boy who wiped the tears so gently from my cheeks. Those two people were lost, somewhere between the battlefields of France and the barley fields of home. We are not just Teddy and Dolly. We are a damaged soldier and a broken heart.
You are a good, good man, Teddy Cooper, and I wish you nothing but happiness. My only hope is that one day these words will mean something to you, and that you will remember me and all that we once had. And when you remember, I hope that you will find it in your heart to forgive me. More than anything, I can’t bear the thought of bringing you any more pain.
You always told me to look and listen, to take notice of what was around me. I promise I will. I promise that I will always be looking for you; listening for you. I will see you in the stars and hear you in those silent moments.
Live your life, Teddy. Live your life with hope and love and adventure.
Your Little Thing, always.
Dolly
X
After reading the letter, I fold it neatly in half and place it in a special box I keep beneath my bed. And there it will stay. Her good-bye. Her final act of love.
35
DOLLY
“And after all, every leading lady
needs a great understudy.”
London shakes off winter like an unwanted coat and spring arrives with a week of sunshine and curtains dancing at the open windows of the river suites. Daffodils and crocuses decorate the parks and gardens in yellow and purple, while cherry blossoms sway on the trees in shades of pink and white. On my Sundays off, I go to look at the displays of Easter hats and gloves, handkerchiefs and ribbons in the windows on Regent Street and Oxford Street. Without the din of weekday traffic and market traders, it is perfectly peaceful, the sounds of distant church bells and the clap of pigeons’ wings my only companions. I pass the theaters on Shaftesbury Avenue, admiring the posters promoting new shows and the new stars for us to idolize. I close my eyes and imagine.