‘Let’s swap,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Every few weeks, or months, we’ll swap which side we sleep on.’
We did it, too. Every six months, we turned the mattress over, because it’s something my mother had always done, and Arthur would take my book and my night cream from the bedside table and swap them with his bits and pieces. I wonder whether I’ll always sleep on the same side, now that he died on the other one. I get into bed, and fall into a sleep so deep that coming up out of it a few hours later feels like a kind of rebirth. I didn’t dream of him. That sleep was a black hole, and that’s a comfort.
It’s when I go back downstairs that I spot it. A scrap of paper on the floor next to the dining table. I reach to pick it up, and seeing Arthur’s handwriting is a jolt. The paper is torn from the spiral notepad we kept on the go for his endless lists, and on the top line, in pencil, he’s written ‘Find D’。 Is it new, this note? Arthur’s final list. I almost laugh. Then I pull out a chair and sit down. Find D. What does it mean?
Find D. It could be a note for me, or something he was writing for himself. Is D a person, or a thing? And if it’s a thing, why the capital letter?
Olly’s getting under my feet, almost tripping me up, so I take hold of his face between my hands. He doesn’t like it, tries to shake me off.
‘It’s about Arthur,’ I say, and he tilts his head to one side. ‘He’s gone, for good. I’m sorry. I know how you loved him.’
There’s no knowing what he understands, but he slinks away from me and into the corner of the room. Curls up there, like he needs to be alone. Today might be the first day we’ve had him that he won’t get a walk. Arthur would go out in all weathers, even if he wasn’t feeling good.
‘He relies on us,’ he said once. ‘We’re all he’s got.’
And now, he only has me. The one he was never all that keen on.
I’m standing by the kettle, waiting for the low roar of its boil, when I think of Dot. Could he have meant Find Dot? And if he did, why did he leave me guessing by not writing her whole name? Or was he interrupted while writing? I run through the people we know for other names starting with D, but there are none. Find D. I repeat it in my head, over and over, as if with enough repetition the meaning will emerge like the sun from behind a cloud.
He mentioned Dot, at the market and then again last night, for the first time in years. Reminisced about the days we spent together, as a four. Could she have been on his mind? Could he have known he was dying, and wanted to suggest that I find my friend after he’d gone? Was he giving me permission? Although really, why did I need it?
In my mind, I sometimes get muddled about Dot leaving. I think it was just after Bill’s death, but the reality was that there was almost a year in between. I lost most of it to grief, but she was there, visiting the house, checking in on me and on Mother. Mother saw her as a daughter, so convinced was she that Dot and Bill would have married. Sometimes she brought flowers. Tulips, or carnations. Mother would stand at the kitchen counter, cutting off the ends and arranging them in a vase, saying how thoughtful Dot was, how much she appreciated her.
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.