It was actually in the run up to my wedding that she disappeared. I hadn’t asked her to be my bridesmaid yet, but it probably went unsaid. Was it hard for her to see me getting ready to be married when we’d all thought she would be first? Or was it more than that? Did she have a reason for not wanting the wedding to go ahead?
I used to meet her on the corner of Halfpenny Street and we’d walk to work at the typing pool together, and then one Wednesday, she wasn’t there. It happened sometimes, if one of us caught a cold or came down with a tummy bug, so I went on ahead, thought nothing of it. But when I got to work, there was a new girl in Dot’s place, and there were whispers that she wasn’t coming back. I thought it was ridiculous, just a rumour. Dot would be tucked up in bed with a bowl of warming chicken soup on a tray, her nose red and her throat sore.
By the end of my shift, I was tired and hungry. But I called in on the way home to put my mind at rest. To find out whether she’d be up to coming in tomorrow, whether I should wait on the corner like always. But her mother answered the door, and said she was gone.
‘Gone?’ I asked. ‘Gone where?’
‘London.’
Dot’s mother, Irene, was a small, wiry woman but you didn’t cross her. She’d been known to go into the Carpenters and drag her husband out by his hair. She stood in the doorway with a firm look on her face, and she didn’t ask me in.
‘But she would have told me,’ I said.
Irene shrugged, and it felt unkind.
‘It was last minute,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a sister there, and she asked if Dot wanted to go and stay.’
‘So it’s a holiday?’
‘No, it’s not a holiday. She’s going to make a life there. Find a job. She’s always liked the city.’
Dot and I had walked across fields together, picked flowers for our hair. Was she a city girl? There had been something, I had to admit, some sort of yearning I caught sometimes in her eyes when she thought I wasn’t looking, but I’d always thought that was about love. About Bill. Was it about being in the wrong place, in a life that felt too small, that didn’t fit her properly?
A week or so later, I called again, asked for an address so I could write. Irene huffed and puffed but she gave me the address, and that night I wrote a long letter, telling Dot everything she’d missed. How Elsie Jacks at work had been sacked for sneaking off to smoke in the toilets, how my cousin Margaret was having a baby and I was hoping to have a week off work to help her out in the early days, how Mother was starting to do a little better, was starting to hum and whistle as she moved about the house again for the first time since Bill. I didn’t say I missed her, but that message surely hummed beneath the words, between the lines. I put a stamp on it and posted it off the following morning, and I never heard back.
I didn’t give up, though. I wrote another three or four. And it was weeks before I stopped checking the post in the mornings, sure there would be something for me. Should I have been clearer, about the gaping hole she left in my life? Would it have made a difference? I talked to Arthur about looking for her, back then when it seemed possible to think of getting on a train and seeking her out, but he was always dead against it. Said it was her decision to go and to not reply to my letters, and we should leave her be. It always made me wonder whether he had something to hide, something Dot had taken away with her that he didn’t want bringing back. And now, when it’s too late, is he really encouraging me to do it? Is he admitting he was wrong?
I move about the house, unable to settle. Olly seems equally discombobulated, but we don’t comfort each other, because we never have. We give one another space, instead. My head is full of Arthur and Dot and Bill, and being young, and a time that felt like it was golden. No, that’s not right. It didn’t feel like it was golden when we were in it, did it? That’s a tint I’ve cast on it since, now I know so much more about life and pain and drudgery. I’ve added the gold shimmer, but how much of it is about youth and freedom, and how much about having those people close to me? It’s impossible to know.
It’s like my brain has got caught and is stuttering, so I go to the back room and sit at the table and look again at the note. Find D.
‘Tell me what you mean, Arthur,’ I say. ‘This isn’t enough.’
In the back room, I open the bottom drawer in the sideboard, the one only he used. Inside, there’s a mess of boxes and papers. A watch his dad gave him. Cufflinks. A box of handkerchiefs he must have got for Christmas one year. What am I looking for? Anything. A clue. It seems unlikely I’ll find it here. I fold the piece of paper and slip it into the pocket of my dressing gown so I can sneak a look at it whenever I want to. Try to forget about it. Know I won’t. Find D. It repeats in my brain like a mantra.
5
For a week, or thereabouts, I don’t get dressed. It’s a rebellion of sorts. Arthur had to be feeling like he was at death’s door to spend a day in bed. When we retired, I remember him saying that it would be easy to slip into bad habits. He meant me; there was no slipping for him.
So I stay in bed. Sometimes I cry, both for the loss of him and for the loss of all those years. For the life I didn’t live. All the lives I didn’t live. We only get to choose one, after all. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I just stare at the wall, or at the empty space in the bed beside me. And all the time, in the back of my mind, on repeat: Find D. If it was some kind of last request, I want to honour it.
Several hours after they took him away, I stripped the bed. And it was only when it was all in the machine, spinning, that I wished I had left it for a while, his particular scent trapped in those sheets. I have to make do with the wardrobe, those carefully hung shirts and jackets. When I get cold in my nightdress, I pull one of his woolly jumpers on, and my slippers. I must look a sight. But there’s no one to see me. I hear post dropping through the door at about eleven every morning, but otherwise it’s quiet.
There’s Olly, of course. I let him out in the garden to do his business and have a run around. For the first couple of days, he sits by the door and whines, but then it seems like he accepts that I’m not going to take him out, and he gives up. He’s grieving too, of course. He keeps going to the end of the sofa where Arthur used to sit. Does he understand? I talk to him, tell him over and over that Arthur’s gone, and he looks at me with those mournful eyes. When I try to pet him, he pulls away.