I tried to picture primroses, hedgerows, and 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 never wished to see it again.
Eventually I gave up the musty silence of the luggage compartment and returned to the deck, photograph book 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 book.
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, as I know well, since I helped raise him. He spent several years of his childhood living with me at Wych Elm House.”
Her glance cut to me, and in its gleam of triumph I knew that my shock showed on my face. Dottie smiled sweetly. “Didn’t he tell you, Manders? Goodness, men are so forgetful. But then, you weren’t together all that long.” She turned back to the bewildered Mrs. Carter-Hayes. “Children are life’s greatest joy, don’t you agree?”
It would go on like this, I knew, until we docked: Dottie speaking in innuendoes and double meanings, cloaked in polite small talk. I moved away and stood by the rail—there was no folding chair for me—and let the noise of the wind blow the words away. I hadn’t bothered with a hat, and I felt my curls come loose from their knot and touch my face, my hair tangling and my cheeks chapping as I watched the water sightlessly.
This wasn’t her only mood; it was just one of them, though it was the most vicious and unhappy. Over the last three months I had learned to navigate the maze of Dottie’s ups and downs, a task I’d learned naturally, as I was well versed in unhappiness myself. She was fiftyish, her body narrow and strangely muscular, her face with its gray-brown frame of meticulously pinned-back hair naturally sleek, with a pointed chin. She looked nothing like Alex, though she was his mother’s sister. She was not vain and never resorted to powders or lipsticks, which would have looked absurd on her tanned skin and narrow line of a mouth. She ate little, walked often, and kept her hair tidy and her clothes mysteriously immaculate, even when traveling. All the better for chasing and devouring her prey.
I glanced back at her and found that she was now displaying the photographs to Mrs. Carter-Hayes. She kept six or seven of them in the slender photograph book, on hand for occasions in which she had cornered a stranger and wished to show off. From the softening of Dottie’s features I could tell that she was looking at the picture of her son, Martin, in his officer’s uniform. I had seen the photograph many times, and I had heard the accompanying narrative just as often. He is coming home to be married. He is such a dear boy, my son. The listeners were always too polite, or too bored, to question the fact that the war had ended three years ago, yet Dottie Forsyth’s son was only now coming home. That she still showed the photograph of Martin in uniform, as if she hadn’t seen him since it was taken.