The girls turned to her expectantly. FANYs most probably. Dori had lots of friends in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Whatever their duties might have been, they did not appear to have included catering.
Edith went to the Aga and lifted a lid. ‘Good God! What is this?’
‘The goulash?’ The taller girl volunteered.
Edith inspected the thin stew, feebly bubbling on the Aga. Dori was proud of her national dish, but she was no cook.
‘What do you want us to do?’ The other girl asked plaintively. Edith directed them to the larder to fetch corned beef and spam. She’d prepared something similar that first night to pay back the generosity of her hostess. She’d been surprised and delighted by Dori’s genuine pleasure in her skill at making something from nothing – canapés, a flattering term for titbits on toast.
‘Ooh, Stella Snelling’s canapés.’ The girl smiled. ‘My mum did those at Christmas. She collects all her recipes.’
‘You’ll know what to do, then.’ Edith smiled back.
Edith went to her own shelves in the pantry for OXO cubes, Bovril and her precious bottle of Worcestershire sauce. She raided Dori’s cupboard for the fiercely guarded tin of paprika pepper. A couple of teaspoons more wouldn’t hurt.
‘Go upstairs, would you?’ she asked the tall one. Frankie, was it? ‘See if you can find me Angostura bitters.’ Just a drop works wonders! (Stella Snelling: Tips to Cheer Up Tired Dishes.) Pam was ready with the titbits. ‘Under the grill. Not the Aga. The gas cooker.’
A recent addition to Dori’s kitchen. The Aga had become increasingly temperamental and there was the shortage of fuel.
Pam opened the oven door. ‘There’s a book in here!’
‘Well, take it out! When you’ve done that put some potatoes in to bake.’
Hanging above the Aga were herbs Edith had scavenged from a bombed-out garden. She broke off thyme, sage, rosemary, bay. The scent reminded her of home. She put that out of her mind. Mother would be round at Edith’s sister Louisa’s by now sipping a festive sherry, already getting on her younger daughter’s nerves, complaining about Edith’s imminent departure for Germany. She would not feel guilty. Their problem now.
Edith took the narrow stairs up to the Bolt Hole, the tiny attic room she rented at the top of Dori’s house. It was her refuge. It offered a place to stay on her trips to see Leo or when she needed to escape the suffocation of home. It was paid for by the money she made from her recipes: she’d said nothing to the girl in the kitchen, but she’d been writing cookery tips as Stella Snelling for years now.
The great thing about Stella was that she had been a real person in Edith’s life – a friend from college who then became a fictitious, handy pal in London and holiday companion. The family had met Stella, so they never questioned Edith going to see her in London or their holidays abroad: cover for her trips with Leo. Even though he was family and they’d been in prams together, jaunting off with him would have caused more than a few frowns. Edith discovered that having a phantom female companion freed her, for a while anyway, from the dull routine of work and the constraints of the family.
The real Stella had married and emigrated to New Zealand but Edith conjured her again when she began to submit wartime recipes, in answer to an invitation in Woman’s Journal. Edith enjoyed cooking and liked to think of ways to make the ration go further. There was no dearth of tips. Every woman she knew had their hints and tricks: her mother, sister Louisa, Mother’s friends in the W.I. and the Townswomen’s Guild. The magazine accepted her writing and wanted more. She sent her recipes as Stella Snelling, hiding behind the pseudonym’s anonymity. She didn’t want anyone at home to know and she liked the idea of Stella as much as she disliked the way people made judgements about her based on her job and her unmarried status.
She stripped off Edith’s tweed costume and sensible blouse, balled her lisle stockings and wrapped herself in the burnt-orange shantung robe she’d come to think of as Stella’s. The tips and recipes didn’t interest Dori but she’d immediately loved the idea of Stella, intrigued by this hidden aspect of Edith and happy to help find what Edith increasingly identified as her ‘Stella side’. They had gone shopping for ‘Stella’. Dori knew all sorts of unfortunates ready to sell the most wonderful clothes for next to nothing. Any qualms were firmly squashed with a ‘Nonsense, darling, you’ll be doing them a favour’. Dori had taught her about labels and fashion houses, shown her how to wear her new wardrobe, put on makeup, do her hair. Become a very different version of herself.
Dori seemed to have a talent for this chameleon-like change from one personality to another. Nothing was certain about her: who she was, where she came from, how she had tipped up in London, what she did exactly, even her age was a matter for conjecture. The stories changed depending on who was doing the telling. She was a Hungarian countess who had been married to a Polish cavalry officer who had fallen in the last charge. She had fled the Nazis, pursued on skis across the mountains. No, she was Hungarian all right, but Jewish, and had escaped through the Balkans. No, that was wrong. She was Polish, not Hungarian. She’d married a White Russian and had lived in Paris, got out just before the fall of France. The stories fed on themselves, each one more exotic. The only common thread? Dori was a spy.
This was true, Edith knew. Dori had spent time in France during the war. It accounted for her mysterious disappearances and Edith had seen the scars on her body and the ones inside that she strove to hide. Once, she’d come back from one of these absences ill and weak, unable to sleep, dark eyes deep and wide with the horrors she had seen. Edith, down in London for the weekend, had come in to find her gaunt and wasted, hunched and shivering with a rattling cough. Edith had not asked where she’d been, what might have happened to account for the state she was in and Dori hadn’t offered to tell her: Careless talk costs lives. She’d just reached out a thin hand and Edith had answered her unspoken need for a friend. She’d stayed to nurse her, cabling Mother that she was caring for a sick friend. She’d sent Anton out to beg bones from the butcher for broth. When Dori was on the mend, the household had pooled their meat coupons and Edith had found paprika to make the goulash that she craved.
It was the Easter holidays. Edith stayed one week, then another. During this time of illness and convalescence, Dori had begun to reveal more about herself. She was from Hungary but had moved to Poland. She’d fallen in love with a British Flying Officer, Robert Stansfield, who was training Polish pilots. They’d left together when war broke out, made their way through the Balkans to Greece, then Alexandria where they were married before coming back to England.
Bobby had been killed in the Battle of Britain. He’d left her this house in Cromwell Square. That’s where the story, as told by Dori, stopped. A few weeks later, Adeline supplied the rest. With Dori, it was personal. The Germans had robbed her of her adopted homeland and the man she loved. She regarded them with a visceral, implacable hatred. She wanted revenge.
‘She wanted to be able to kill ’em,’ Adeline had told her. ‘So she volunteered for a secret outfit who’d let her do just that.’
Now it was all over, but ever since VE Day, Edith had sensed a restive dissatisfaction, almost despair about Dori, as if life was finished and everything to come would be merely a diminishing echo. Edith knew that others felt this too, but no one exhibited this restless ennui as strongly as Dori.