We talk for a while as she makes a few small adjustments to the dress, pinning it here and there. “I’ll have it ready for you tomorrow. I can drop it to the theater if you like.”
“Don’t trouble yourself. I’ll call by. You’ve enough on your plate with little Thomas to mind. How is your sister?”
“She’s doing much better. She’s up and about again. She’ll be here to collect him soon. I still take him the odd morning until she gets back to full health. To be honest, I love having him around. Gives me a bit of company.”
As she sees me back through into the hallway Thomas bounds down the stairs. He stands and looks at me, his fingers stuck into his mouth.
“Well, hello there, Thomas,” I say.
He looks at his feet as Hettie ruffles his hair. “I thought I told you to wait upstairs while the lady was with me,” she whispers. He looks up at her with big brown eyes. She can’t be cross with him and scoops him up into her arms.
“It’s all right,” I say. “I don’t mind a bit. It’s always lovely to see you, Thomas.” I hold out my hand to shake his but he hides in Hettie’s hair.
“If only he was this quiet all the time,” she laughs, rubbing his back.
“He’s adorable. Such gorgeous brown eyes. Does he get them from your sister?”
She hesitates. Lowers her voice. “We’re not sure who he gets them from. Thomas was adopted.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I just assumed . . .”
“No need to apologize. Most people assume.” She lets him down from her arms and he runs through to the scullery. “My brother-in-law was left badly injured after the war and unable to father a child. Thomas was abandoned at a Mothers’ Hospital. He was only a few weeks old when Helen took him. He’s never known anyone but her as his mother. She loves him with all her heart.”
I feel dizzy as she speaks. Thomas was abandoned . . . It sounds so harsh. So thoughtless and cruel.
“I’d better get going. Thank you again, Hettie. The dress is perfect.”
She smiles and takes my coat from the stand as there’s a knock at the door. “That’ll be your mother, Thomas! Come along now.”
She opens the door and I watch as little Thomas squeals with excitement and runs into his mother’s arms.
Like a pause between breathing in and breathing out, everything is suspended.
She is standing in front of me, like spring in a daffodil-yellow coat.
Thomas buries his face in her red hair as he perches so naturally on her hip. I almost fall sideways with the need to feel him on mine. I look at him and I look at her. “Thomas was adopted.” His eyes so brown, like mine, when hers are so blue. “Thomas was abandoned at a Mothers’ Hospital.” I stall on the doorstep and I stare at them both. “He was only a few weeks old when Helen took him. He’s never known anyone but her as his mother. She loves him with all her heart.”
Her name is Helen. And I wished for her.
My heart folds in on itself as all my life comes rushing toward me in this single moment. I stare at this doting mother and her happy child, his fat little legs wrapped around her daffodil-yellow coat, and my arms feel crushed by the absence of him.
And then he jumps down and stands on the path and I am saying good-bye and he turns to me and waves. “Bye bye, pretty lady.” He is dressed in powder blue and he is waving good-bye.
I sink to my knees and throw my arms around him, holding him there for a perfect wonderful moment. I feel the warmth of him, breathe in the smell of him. I feel the rapid beat of his butterfly heart and I know him. I know him. Little Edward, my child.
Too quickly, he wriggles free and rushes back to his mother, back to the arms he feels secure in, loved in, burying himself in her skirts.
Somehow I walk away from him, down the narrow path. Somehow I open the latch on the gate and let it click shut behind me. Somehow I put one foot in front of the other. Somehow I breathe. Somehow, I find the strength to accept that in the very moment I find my little boy, I must lose him all over again.
Like the girls in the gallery, I must watch from a distance and cheer and applaud and stamp my feet in admiration. I must be content to know that he is loved and happy. I must put down my net and set him free. I must let him spread his wings and fly.
46
DOLLY
. . . he has always been a part of me,
something I do to keep myself afloat.
What a send-off London gives us! Our final performance is blessed with a perfect summer’s evening. London glows beneath the generous sun as I make my way to the theater. The Thames glistens. The Houses of Parliament dazzle, bathed in rose gold. It is truly beautiful. I will miss this skyline; these familiar buildings and landmarks.
Fans flock to the theater in their hundreds. Police constables are brought in to control the crush; the gallery girls causing a stampede when the doors are opened. The lobby is filled with autograph hunters and reporters, society ladies and gentlemen. I try to take it all in; try to understand how it is possible that I am now part of this, that I am the one signing the autographs, not the one pleading for them.
In the dressing room, I go through the usual routine: warm-up, makeup, costume, and a silent prayer for a good performance. Charlot pokes his head around the door just before the five-minute curtain call, making us all scream as we throw coats and wrappers over our exposed limbs.
“Let’s make it a good one, girls,” he says. “Let’s leave London begging for us to return and America salivating at the prospect of our arrival!”
The fizz of excitement passes among us like electricity. I take Loretta’s picture from my coat pocket. “I am ready, Miss May,” I whisper. “I am ready to shine.”
The show is our best yet. The audience’s enthusiasm is infectious and everyone lifts their performance in response. The principal actors and actresses ad-lib and improvise brilliantly, sending the audience into raptures.
As we reach the grand finale, my eyes are drawn to a man in the second row of the stalls, his head held high, his eyes fixed only on me. A familiar broad chin. A dimple in the cheek. It can’t be. My heart races faster and faster as I move in and out of the spotlight, trying to find him again, but the glare of the footlights blinds me so that I can’t be sure, and then the curtain falls and the place erupts to thunderous applause and incessant cries for more.
I run to the wings waiting for my curtain call, and as I step out onto the stage, again I search for him, able to see a little more clearly now that more of the houselights are up. I take my bow and throw grateful smiles at our adoring audience and I search for him in the twilight as the curtain rises and falls, rises and falls. I scour the rows and rows of faces, but all I find is an empty seat. He isn’t there. It wasn’t him.
As I rush to the dressing room, one of the stagehands gives me a package.
“This was delivered for you, Miss Lane. The gentleman said it was urgent.”
I’ve become so used to gifts from admirers that I hardly give the package a moment’s notice. I take it from him and carry on along the corridor, eager to be in the privacy of the dressing room. I close the door behind me and lean my back against it, taking a long deep breath.
I have done it. I have danced and performed in the most talked-about show of the season. I have risen from the gray obscurity of a chambermaid at The Savoy to the dazzling spotlight of an actress on the West End stage, my name in large print on the program. I have walked into my very own dream and I am wonderfully awake.
Perspiration peppers my skin. The dresser wraps a robe around me to prevent a chill as my skin cools. I place the package among all the other gifts from fans and would-be lovers and settle at the dressing table, peering at myself in the mirror. I sip a glass of water and wish it were something stronger. Miss May was right. Gin is an acquired taste, and once acquired, it is rarely lost. I smile to myself, remembering her wonderful turn of phrase as I rub cold cream into my face, carefully removing the heavy stage makeup. I follow my usual routine: cold cr
eam and Vaseline followed by pancake and rouge. A sweep of mascara, kohl, and lipstick and I am ready to face the world again.
As I leave the dressing room, my eye is drawn to the package. I pick it up and look at it properly as I close the door behind me and stand in the corridor.
To Little Thing.
My heart tilts at the sight of the words, written so carefully onto the brown paper in neat looping script. I pull roughly at the string and tear open the careful wrappings. Every nerve, every part of me jolts at the sight. A chalk drawing. A young woman with butterfly wings, surrounded by the words Love, Hope, and Adventure. A shiver runs across my skin as I brush my fingers lightly across the page. I have admired the same image so often among the work of the Embankment screevers.
“I remembered you, Dolly.”
His voice, a million fragments of ice slipping down my back. The drawing tumbles from my hands and falls at my feet as I turn around.
He is here.
He is here.
He is here.
“Teddy?”
He smiles and I cannot speak, cannot breathe. I grasp the edge of the doorframe, my knees trembling like leaves shaken by a tempest.
“Teddy?” His name the faintest whisper on my lips, a distant echo of the thousands of times I have said it, longing for him to hear me, to reply, to remember.
He walks slowly toward me and takes my hands in his. “Dear Little Thing. Dear Dolly. Look at you. Even more beautiful beneath the spotlights. Who would have thought it possible?”
His voice, his words, tumble and swirl in my mind, and I cannot grasp them. I stand perfectly still while all my life rushes forward to this moment, to this man—my hopes, my life, my past, my onetime future.
“But . . . how? Why? I don’t understand.” My tears fall in quiet, confused ribbons.
“I saw your name in the newspaper. MISS DOLLY LANE. Right there, in black and white. Right here in London. I always knew you were destined for a bigger stage than Mawdesley village hall. I always said I would come and watch you perform and clap and cheer . . .”
“. . . and blow me kisses and throw roses at my feet.” I finish the sentence for him. I remember the words so clearly.
“I forgot the roses.”
We both smile; shy and hesitant, and yet so comfortable and familiar. It is like finding the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. We fit. It feels right.
His eyes search deep into my soul, looking for the part of me he remembers. Lost words and years stretch between us, while all around us doors slam, scenery clunks and thuds, stagehands curse and shout to one another. All is chaos here. All is chaos in my mind; my heart.
“Is there somewhere quieter we can go?” he asks. “To talk?
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“Miss Lane, I wondered if . . .” Perry rushes along the corridor, stalling when he sees us. He looks at me and I look from him to Teddy and I am drowning and I don’t know what to cling to.
“This is Teddy. He came to see the show.” My words are clipped, suffocated by my confusion. Perry doesn’t move. His eyes searching; understanding. “I can’t come to the after party. I’m sorry, Perry. Will you explain? I have to go.”
I take Teddy’s arm and we walk together, through the stage door and out to the waiting car.
Everything around me is a blur—the reporters, the gallery girls—they all shout my name and the magnesium bulbs pop and fizz, but I am underwater and I cannot hear clearly. As we step into the car and drive away, I cannot speak; cannot catch my breath. The man I have loved since I was a little girl is sitting beside me, and I am terrified and exhilarated because I do not know him, and yet I know him better than I have ever known anyone. All my life has been about Teddy Cooper. Thinking about him, writing to him, loving him, waiting for him, praying for him to remember. Like breathing and blinking, sleeping and walking, he has always been a part of me, something I do to keep myself afloat.
We travel in silence as a thousand questions and unspoken words fill the air between us. It isn’t a hesitant or an awkward silence. It is patient and understanding. Necessary.
I take him to Miss May’s home in Belgravia. She’d left instructions that I was to think of it as my own home; that I was to use it whenever I needed to, whenever I needed to escape from things. I need it now more than ever.
Elsie answers the door and doesn’t say a word as I explain that I need a little time alone with Mr. Cooper. I show Teddy into the drawing room. I pour myself a martini and him a Scotch. We sit at opposite ends of the sofa and try to make sense of the lost years and all those that came before.
“I want you to know that I forgive you,” he says, as he passes me a sheet of paper. I recognize my writing, my words. It is my final letter to him.
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.
“I remembered you at the hospital,” he says. “You sat beside me and read your letters to me. For months, I thought you were a nurse; a dream. And then there you were, sitting beside me. My Dolly. My Little Thing. It was like a fog had lifted, and I knew you.”
“You remembered?”
He nods. Smiles. “And then I watched you leave. I watched you walk away.”
“Oh, Teddy. I’m so sorry.” I throw my arms around him and I am ten years old, and we are dangling our legs over the stone bridge and all is warmth and peace in the world. “I couldn’t bear to leave you, but I had to. I had to go.”
I remember the conversation I’d had with his mother and mine, fabricating a story about how it was breaking my heart to see Teddy suffer in the hospital and that it was kinder for us both if I left.
“I don’t blame you for leaving, Dolly. I never did and I never will.” He takes my hands in his and I can’t believe he is sitting here, in front of me. That he is talking to me, looking at me, touching me, forgiving me. “Do you remember in my hospital room there was a butterfly always at the window?”
I smile through my tears. “Yes! It would never fly away, and whenever it did it always came back. I often wondered if it ever left.”
“It did. It flew on the same day that you did, Dolly. You both needed to stretch your wings.”
“I wanted to stay, Teddy. I wanted to help you get better, but things . . . things had happened while you were away. Terrible things.”
And I tell him. I somehow find the courage to revisit those dark moments and tell him everything, and as I do, I feel the cracks in my heart coming back together. I feel myself heal.
He listens and wipes the tears from my cheeks. He never questions or judges. “I wish you had told me,” he whispers. “I wish I could have helped you.”
He tells me that when he left the hospital he tried to settle back into life in Mawdesley, but everything had changed. “I hadn’t appreciated how far the war had reached. Not one person was unaffected. Not one person hadn’t lost someone they loved. Mam got me back. I lost you. That’s what war does. It breaks things apart. Tears things up.”
“I should have stayed. I was a coward to run away.”
“You were right to leave, Dolly. I watched so many couples struggle on after the war, trying to find the passion they’d once felt for each other. The men couldn’t explain how they felt. The women could never understand. We all changed, Dolly. You loved the man who went to war. It wasn’t fair to expect you to love the stranger who came back.”
“But I did love you. I did.”
I did.
The words hang in the air between us. What about now? What do I feel when I look at him now? Love? Pity? Hope? What?
He stands up and walks to the window. “I’m so sorry for the reason that took you away, Dolly. I wish things could have been different for us, I really do, but you he
lped me more by leaving than you could ever have done by staying. What use would I have been to you and your child? I could barely look after myself. Your absence gave me a purpose, Dolly; a reason to keep living, to keep searching. And I had your letters. You gave me words when I had none. You showed me who I had been—a person who had loved and laughed and hoped. Because of your words, I wasn’t just a recovering soldier, I was Teddy Cooper, and I had loved a girl called Dorothy Lane. To know that I had been someone so full of life meant everything to me. It made me want to be that person again.”
We talk for a long time, finding our way slowly back to each other across all the years we have been apart.
“Why did you come looking for me, Teddy? Why now?”
“Because I wanted you to know that I remembered. I wanted you to know that I didn’t blame you for leaving. And I wanted to know that you were happy.” He looks around the room. “And look what I found! If you hadn’t left Mawdesley you wouldn’t be sitting here in this house wearing that beautiful dress. You wouldn’t have your name on a poster outside one of London’s finest theaters. You would have sat beside me, miserable and incomplete and unfulfilled, working at Mawdesley Hall for the rest of your days, and that would have damaged me more than any heavy artillery ever could.”
We talk until the gray light of dawn creeps through the windows. He tells me about the work he has been doing in the factories and the drawings he does on the streets, and as he talks the eager young girl who loved the very bones of him throws her arms around his neck and reaches up onto her tiptoes to plant kisses all over his weather-reddened cheeks. But I am not that eager young girl. I am a young woman, and I am leaving for America. I can hardly bear to tell him, but I must.
I walk to the window and watch London wake up. “I’m leaving, Teddy. We are taking the revue to America.”
“When do you leave?”
“Tomorrow.” I watch the lamplighter extinguish the lights on the street below and correct myself. “Today.”
He smiles as he walks over to me. “So I must lose you twice in one lifetime.” He takes my hands and holds them in his. “When I left Mawdesley, I made myself a promise that to find you would be enough. I didn’t allow myself to imagine anything more. I would find you, and with or without you I would go back to Lancashire.” He squeezes my hands so tight. “What if I asked you to stay, Dolly. What if I asked you to give up your dream, and come home with me? What would you say?”