Dot

Dot
Araminta Hall

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.

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

Title Page (#u03282984-d297-5943-840a-48f84207b981)

Dedication (#ua6f0dab6-571d-538f-bf85-47ed805d9c46)

Epigraph (#u20503406-f004-5cf8-a124-5aca8851907e)

1 … Discovery (#ucdb90d5e-4860-56eb-b8ca-87b25ac44cc3)

2 … Concealment (#uf00075bf-66aa-56c2-bc9a-cda198335fc5)

3 … Redemption (#uc63f4eb5-b1ac-56a8-8f2b-7f2e780f9a78)

4 … Trying (#u6c7d328a-63c8-5f1c-8747-11541e0cbc59)

5 … Fear (#ua0d1586b-9200-5b6c-9748-cbe37a5a8d4a)

6 … Consumption (#u4cc47245-8ee0-5867-9ba4-8de2bddf467d)

7 … Friendship (#litres_trial_promo)

8 … Confession (#litres_trial_promo)

9 … Nothing (#litres_trial_promo)

10 … Bewilderment (#litres_trial_promo)

11 … Acting (#litres_trial_promo)

12 … Speech (#litres_trial_promo)

13 … Revelation (#litres_trial_promo)

14 … Arrival (#litres_trial_promo)

15 … Recklessness (#litres_trial_promo)

16 … Waiting (#litres_trial_promo)

17 … Leaving (#litres_trial_promo)

18 … Tragedy (#litres_trial_promo)

19 … Despair (#litres_trial_promo)

20 … Writing (#litres_trial_promo)

21 … Kindness (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

A Q&A with Araminta Hall (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

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.

Dot slid her body under her mother’s bed, shimmying as far back as she could against the rear wall, where she was sure no one could casually glimpse her from the door. It was dusty under there, but it still smelt of her mother’s favourite perfume, Rive Gauche, which sat next to her bed in a magical blue and silver bottle and was her only concession to luxury, or maybe even life. The springs which held her mother each night almost touched Dot’s nose and she worried that her mother might come in for a rest and push the springs into her face. Dot would shout, of course, but she knew it would take her mother ages to figure out what was going on, by which time the springs could have dug into her skin.

Mavis was searching now. Dot could hear her in the bathroom next door looking in the laundry basket. She could probably roll out from under the bed before her mother lay down; in fact if she heard her coming upstairs she’d roll out just in case. This made Dot worry that she would scare her mother or not be able to make her understand what she was doing. Only the night before she’d been going up to her room and seen her mother sitting at her dressing table, staring so intently at her reflection that the woman in the mirror seemed more real than the one doing the looking. Dot wished that she hadn’t hidden under her mother’s bed; it had been a stupid idea and was bound to make Mavis cross. Nothing was ever simple. Why couldn’t her mother be more like a proper mother? This mythical woman lived solely as an image in Dot’s mind along with the ponies and princesses: proper mothers did things like bake and pick flowers and ask what had happened at school. A proper mother didn’t drift off in the middle of sentences or rub her temples as if she would push her fingers into her brain if she could. She didn’t cook the most indigestible and weird foods she could think of, she didn’t still live with her own mother. Most of all, she didn’t forget to mention who her child’s father was.

The fact that Dot had never met a perfect mother was not the point. The only other mother she knew well enough to compare was Mavis’s, who was as strange as her own, cleaning a pristine house every day, watching the world through smear-free windows and avoiding speaking to Mavis’s father as if her life depended on it. There was her grandmother as well, who was of course her mother’s mother, but it was almost impossible for her young mind to comprehend her as a mother and she was hardly what you might call normal anyway. Dot listed some of her grandmother’s beliefs as the dust itched her eyes and prickled her skin: do not sit on at least five of the chairs round the dining room table and three in the sitting room as they are too precious, never pick daffodils as they look common anywhere but in the ground, under no circumstances say the words ‘toilet’ or ‘pardon’, stand up when anyone older comes into the room, never sit on the blue velvet chair by the fire or go into her bedroom or touch any of her china. Dot was still too young to decide what she thought about her grandma’s rules, for all she knew they could have been right. And besides, they were related to Jesus, as proved by a family tree which some great-uncle had drawn and which now hung on her grandmother’s bathroom wall. And that surely must give her grandmother some sort of right to preach.