Dot
The remarkable new novel from the bestselling author of Everything and Nothing is a warm and heartbreaking tale of three generations of women.In a higgledy-piggledy house with turrets and tunnels towering over the sleepy Welsh village of Druith, two girls play hide and seek. They don’t see its grandeur or the secrets locked behind doors they cannot open. They see lots of brilliant places to hide.Squeezed under her mother’s bed, pulse racing with the thrill of a new hiding place Dot sees something else: a long-forgotten photograph of a man, his hair blowing in the breeze. Dot stares so long at the photograph the image begins to disintegrate before her eyes, and as the image fades it is replaced with one thought: ‘I think it’s definitely him.’DOT is the story of one little girl and how her one small action changes the lives of those around her for ever.
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DOT
Araminta Hall
To Lindy & David, my Mum and Dad
‘Wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zig-zags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.’
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Join-the-dots puzzle
noun (British): a puzzle requiring you to connect a series of dots by drawing lines between them. If the dots are correctly connected, the result is a picture.
Collins English Dictionary
Table of Contents
1 … Discovery
They were playing a game of hide and seek, as they so often did. Some people might have seen it as a lack of imagination, but as both Dot and Mavis displayed so much imagination in later life, it seems more likely a fact of circumstance. Druith is after all miles from anywhere, sunk in a low, damp Welsh valley, and Dot’s house suggested itself to hide and seek in a multitude of ways. Not that two ten-year-old girls were aware of any of this. They didn’t even find Dot’s house strange: it was still nothing more than a marker in their childhood landscape, and the fact that the floors tipped, cupboard doors opened into secret passages and a concealed turret sprouted out of the side of the house washed over them. The only thing they were beginning to find amusing were the plates which Dot’s grandmother inexplicably chose to hang on the walls. ‘What next?’ they’d whisper to each other. ‘Will we be eating off paintings?’ Although one glance at the heavy oils of permanently displeased relatives and windswept landscapes made this seem very unlikely.
They never played hide and seek when they were at Mavis’s house, not just because she lived in a perfectly proportioned box with no nooks and crannies, but also because her mother looked as if she might cry if you so much as walked on her permanently hoovered floors or breathed on her dustless possessions. Which was in direct contrast to Dot’s mother, who seemed to float through life without noticing anything, and her grandmother, who unfathomably didn’t care about dirt but about most other things. Out of two peculiar options, however, Dot’s house always seemed the most appealing.
Mavis had annoyed Dot that day. She was a fastidious girl, given to huffing and puffing and slapping logic all over Dot’s daydreams. Games of beautiful princesses or magic carpets were never allowed and sometimes Dot was bored by the shops where prices had to be accurate and bills added up precisely. That was usually when she suggested a game of hide and seek.
She left Mavis counting in her attic bedroom, nasally intoning the numbers up to one hundred, and raced down the stairs to the second-floor landing. Once there she weighed up her options and realised she’d used all her best places a dozen times already. Mavis would go straight to the bottom of the laundry basket, the jutting shelves in the larder, even behind the basement door which they both found so scary. The door to her mother’s bedroom was open and the space below her mother’s bed beckoned as invitingly as a pair of outstretched arms. Dot hesitated on the threshold, knowing that Mavis would never enter this room without permission and wondering if this meant she would be cheating. Mavis had already reached sixty-five; she didn’t have much time. Dot glanced behind her but her grandmother’s door was firmly closed, as it always was. Besides, her mother wouldn’t care. It was only her grandma who was mortally offended if anyone entered her room without permission; a peculiar rule which had somehow permeated the consciousness of the house. Even Dot’s mother knocked on her own ten-year-old daughter’s door before coming in to kiss her goodnight. Dot decided that if she left the door open it wouldn’t technically count as cheating.
Dot always felt depressed by her mother’s room, although at that time she would never have used this word to describe what she felt whenever she went in there. She would have said that it made her feel empty, or sad, which is of course a childish way of saying the same thing. Nor would she have vocalised those emotions anyway as, even at the age of ten, she already understood enough about the human heart to know never to articulate feelings like those to her mother, who was so delicate even the slightest thing could disturb her for hours. Besides all of which, Dot couldn’t have told you why it made her feel sad and empty. If pushed she might have said that it was because it lacked so much, which was true. No photos or pictures, no books, no ornaments, no mess; it looked like the spare rooms at the other end of the house and it made Dot worry that really her mother lived elsewhere.
