Dolly Read Online Free PDF Page A

seasoned traveller. Dolly’s curious career, the details of which I learned only later, had left her unmarked, as if all her experiences were instantly absorbed,leaving no shadow or taint in her mind. She lived in the present, which is actually quite a difficult thing to do. Even now her face brightened as Miss Lawlor brought in tea. It was only years later that I could appreciate Dolly’s courage. Yet she herself did not register her peculiar quality as courage. To her it was merely common sense, allied with a certain basic shrewdness. Singing and dancing, as she said.
    ‘We are here if you need us,’ said my father, taking both her hands in his.
    ‘If you could just get me a taxi, Paul,’ she said. It was clear that she found my father attractive. My mother had settled back on the sofa, her face drawn with grief and illness. She was silent and thoughtful for the rest of the evening. My father, who was by now largely recovered, decreed an early night for them both. By half-past nine the flat was silent.
    Dolly turned up again the following week. I was out with Miss Lawlor; when I got back Dolly was having tea with my mother. Neither appeared to want to talk to me, for which I was grateful. Dolly seemed to me as she had always seemed: fierce. When she left our house reverted to its normal calm.
    That evening my mother recounted the day’s events to my father.
    ‘Dolly was here,’ she said.
    ‘How was she?’
    ‘Not too happy. It seems she has fallen out with Mother.’
    ‘Entirely foreseeable. Any particular reason?’
    ‘It seems that Mother was furious about the Catholic funeral.’
    ‘Your mother has never seemed to me a woman of profound religious conviction.’
    ‘Yes, darling, but she is Jewish. One tends to forget it: she is so untypical.’
    ‘I doubt if I should want to go that far.’
    ‘Well, anyway, she and Dolly had a falling out. Dolly told her that Adèle Rougier had taken charge, and that annoyed her even more. She said she thought it better if Dolly had a place of her own: she would help towards it, and give her a small allowance, but not to rely on her. She said she could see they were both too independent-minded to get along.’
    He smiled. He seemed tremendously interested in what had taken place.
    ‘And how did Dolly take all this?’
    ‘She is quite remarkable. She said it was up to her to make a new life for herself. She was almost cheerful.’
    ‘Shall we have a cup of tea?’ he asked. ‘Now that we are back on an even keel I don’t think it will keep us awake.’
    They drank in companionable silence. Finally my father laid aside his cup and turned to face my mother.
    ‘How much?’ he enquired.
    My mother hesitated. ‘Five,’ she said. There was a pause. ‘He was my brother, after all.’
    ‘You have a child, remember.’
    That was his only reproach, and yet it was not so much a reproach as a statement of the facts in the case. These facts were not revealed to me until much later. Many of them I had to supply myself. It seemed to me important to reconstruct the story, even to the point of doing a certain amountof research. I did this for my own satisfaction, to re-establish those elusive facts. In this I revealed myself to be my father’s daughter, the daughter of both my parents, those innocents abroad in a world which they persisted in believing to be both orderly and benign.

2

    M y mother’s name was Henrietta. My father called her Henry, which I thought was rude of him, until I was old enough to recognise it for what it was: a term of endearment. He would look up from his book with a gleam of pleasure and raise himself fractionally from his chair when she came into the room. They were a placid reticent couple, and as time went by they spoke less and less, conferring with each other almost by osmosis, a process which was successful, since they rarely disagreed.
    They met at a recital of French songs at the Wigmore Hall. They sat in adjoining seats, and when my mother