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 innuendos 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 sightlessly watched the water.
This wasn’t her only mood; it was just one of them, though it was the most vicious and unhappy. I had learned to navigate the maze of Dottie’s ups and downs over the last three months, not finding the task unduly hard as I was well versed in unhappiness myself. She was fiftyish, her frame 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 shoes practical. All the better for chasing and devouring her prey.
I glanced back at her and found that she was now showing the photographs to Mrs. Carter-Hayes. She kept six or seven of them in her pocketbook, 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 showing 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.
I turned back to the water. I should quit. I should have done it long ago. The position was unpleasant and demeaning. I had been a typist before I married Alex, before my life had fallen apart. My skills were now rusty, but it was 1921, and girls found jobs all the time. I could try Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds. They must need typists there. It wouldn’t be much of a life, but I would be fed and clothed, with Mother’s fees paid for, and I could stay pleasantly numb.
But I would not quit. I knew it, and, I believed, so did Dottie. It wasn’t the pay she gave me, which was small and sporadic. It wasn’t the travel, which had simply seemed like a nightmare to me, as if I were taking the train across a vast wartime graveyard, the bombed buildings just losing their char, the bodies buried just beneath the surface of the still-shattered fields. I would not quit because Dottie, viperish as she was, was my last link to Alex. And though it hurt me even to think of him, I could not let him go.
I had last seen him in early 1918, home on leave before he went back to France and flew three more RAF missions, the final from which he did not return. His plane was found four days later, crashed behind enemy lines. There was no body. The pack containing his parachute was missing. He had not appeared on any German prisoner-of-war rosters, any burial details, any death lists. He had not been a patient in any known hospital. In three years there had been no telegram, no cry for help, no sighting of him. He had vanished. My life had vanished with him.
He died in the war, Dottie had said, but it was just another sting of hers. According to the official record, my husband had not died in the war. When there is a body, a grave, then a person has died. But no one ever tells you: When you have nothing but thin air, what happens then? Are you a widow when there is nothing but a gaping hole in what used to be your life? Who are you, exactly? For three years I had been trapped in amber—first in my fear and uncertainty, and then in a slow, chilling exhale of eventual, inexorable grief.
As long as I was with Dottie, part of me was Alex’s wife. He still existed, even if only in the form of Dottie’s innuendos and recriminations. Just hearing someone—anyone—say his name aloud was a balm I could not let go of. I had followed her across Europe for it, and now I would follow her to Wych Elm House, her family home. Where Alex had lived part of his childhood, something he had never thought to tell me.
I stared out to sea, uneasy, as England loomed on the horizon.