By the time we left Calais, I thought perhaps I hated Dottie Forsyth. To the observer, I had no reason for it, since by employing me as her companion Dottie had saved me from both poverty and a life robbed of color in my rented flat, the life I was failing to live without Alex. However, the observer would not have had to spend the past three months crisscrossing Europe in her company, watching her scavenge for art as cheaply as possible while smoking her cigarettes in their long black holder.
“Manders,” she said to me—though my name was Jo, one of her charms was the habit of calling me by my last name, as if I were the upstairs maid—“Mrs. Carter-Hayes wishes to see my photographs. Fetch my pocketbook from my luggage, won’t you? And do ask the porter if they serve sherry.”
This as if we were on a luxurious transatlantic ocean liner, and not on a simple steamer over the Channel for the next three hours. Still, I rose to find the luggage, and the pocketbook, and the porter, my stomach turning in uneasy loops as I traveled the deck. The Channel wasn’t entirely calm today, and the misty gray in the distance gave a hint of oncoming rain. The other passengers on the deck cast me brief glances as I passed them. A girl in a wool skirt and a knitted cardigan is an unremarkable English sight, even if she’s passably pretty.
I found the luggage compartment with the help of the porter, whose look of surprise turned to one of pity when I asked about the sherry, and from there I rummaged through Dottie’s many bags and boxes, looking for the pocketbook. I didn’t think Mrs. Carter-Hayes, who had been acquainted with Dottie for all of twenty minutes, had any real desire to see the photographs, but despite the pointlessness of the mission, I found myself lingering over it, taking longer than I needed to in the quiet and privacy of the luggage department. I tucked a lock of hair behind my ear and took a breath, sitting on the floor with my back to one of Dottie’s trunks. We were going back to England.
Without Alex, I had nothing there. I had nothing anywhere. I had given up my flat when I left with Dottie, taken the last of my belongings with me. There wasn’t much. A few clothes, a few packets of beloved books I couldn’t live without. I’d sold off all our furniture by then, and I’d even sold most of Alex’s clothes, a wrench that still made me sick to my stomach. The only fanciful thing I’d kept was the case with his camera in it, which I could have gotten a few pounds for but simply hadn’t been able to part with. The camera had come with me on all of my travels, on every boat and train, though I hadn’t even opened the case. If Dottie had noticed, she had made no comment.
And so my life in England now sat before me as a perfect blank. We were to go to Dottie’s home in Sussex, a place I had never seen. I was to stay on in Dottie’s pay, even though she was no longer traveling and my duties had not been explained. When she had first written me, declaring starkly that she was Alex’s aunt, that she’d heard I was in London, and that she was in need of a female companion for her travels to the Continent, I’d imagined playing kindly nursemaid to an undemanding old lady, serving her tea and reading Dickens and Collins aloud as she nodded off. Dottie, with her scraped-back hair, harsh judgments, and grasping pursuit of money, had been something of a shock.
I tried to picture primroses, hedgerows, soft, chilled rain. No more hotels, smoke-filled dining cars, resentful waiters, or searches through unfamiliar cities for just the right tonic water or stomach remedy. No more sweltering days at the Colosseum or the Eiffel Tower, watching tourists blithely lead their children and snap photographs as if we’d never had a war. No more seeing the names of battlefields on train departure boards and wondering if that one—or that one, or that one—held Alex’s body forgotten somewhere beneath its newly grown grass.
I would have to visit Mother once I was back; there was no escaping it. And I did not relish living on another woman’s charity, something I had never done. But at least at Dottie’s home I would be able to avoid London, and all of the places Alex and I had been. Everything about London since he’d gone to war the last time had stabbed me. I wished never to see it again.
Eventually I gave up the musty silence of the luggage department and returned to the deck, pocketbook in hand. “What took so long?” Dottie demanded as I approached. She was sitting in a wooden folding chair, her cloche hat pulled down against the wind and her feet in their practical oxfords crossed at the ankles. She looked up at me, frowning, and though the cloudy light softened the edges of her features, I was not fooled.
“They don’t serve sherry here,” I said in reply, handing her the pocketbook.
Dottie’s eyes narrowed perceptibly. I thought she often convinced herself that I was lying to her, though she could not quite figure out exactly when or why. “Sherry would have been most convenient,” she said.
“Yes,” I agreed. “I know.”
She turned to her companion, a fortyish woman with a wide-brimmed hat sitting on the folding chair next to hers and already looking as if she wished to escape. “This is my companion,” she said, and I knew from her tone that she intended to direct some derision at me. “She’s the widow of my dear nephew Alex, poor thing. He died in the war and left her without children.”
Mrs. Carter-Hayes swallowed. “Oh, dear.” She looked at me and flashed a sympathetic smile, an expression that was so genuine and kind that I almost pitied her for the next three hours she’d have to suffer in Dottie’s company. When Dottie was in a mood like this, she took no prisoners—and she’d been in this mood more and more often the closer we came to England.
“Can you imagine?” Dottie exclaimed. “It was a terrible loss to our family. He was a wonderful young man, our Alex, and I should know since I helped raise him. He spent several years of his childhood living with me at Wych Elm House.”