Irritation coloured his voice and Dolly could understand why—he was an important man who’d taken time away from essential war work only to be left cooling his heels while his wife flitted about town.
‘Had you an arrangement to meet my wife?’ he asked suddenly, as if the thought had just occurred to him that Dolly, too, was being inconvenienced by Vivien’s tardiness.
‘Oh, no,’ she said quickly. He seemed affronted by the idea and she wanted to reassure him. ‘Vivien didn’t know that I was coming. I’ve brought her something, something she lost.’
‘Oh?’
Dolly took the necklace out of her handbag and draped it delicately over her fingers. She’d varnished her nails especially with the last of Kitty’s Coty Crimson.
‘Her photo locket,’ he said softly, reaching to take it. ‘She was wearing this when we first met.’
‘It’s a very nice necklace.’
‘She’s worn it since she was a girl. It doesn’t matter what I buy for her, how beautiful or grand it is, she won’t wear any necklace in place of this one. She even wears it with her strings of pearls. I don’t think I’ve ever known her to take it off, and yet—’ he was inspecting the chain—‘it’s intact, so she must have done so.’ He glanced sideways at Dolly and she shrank slightly beneath the intensity of his regard. Was that the way he looked at Vivien, she wondered, when he was lifting her dress, moving her locket aside to kiss her. ‘You said it was found?’ he continued. ‘I wonder where?’
‘I—’. Dolly’s thoughts made her blush. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know that—I wasn’t the one to find it, you see, it was just given to me to return to Vivien. On account of our closeness.’
He nodded slowly. ‘I wonder, Mrs Smitham—’
‘Miss Smitham.’
‘Miss Smitham—’ his lips twitched, the hint of a smile that only deepened her blush—‘at the risk of sounding impertinent, I wonder why it is you didn’t return this to my wife at the WVS canteen? Surely it would have been more convenient for a busy lady like yourself?’
A busy lady. Dolly liked the way she sounded when Henry said that. ‘Not impertinent at all, Mr Jenkins. Only, I knew how important it was to Vivien, and I wanted her to have it back as soon as possible. Our shifts don’t always align, you see.’
‘How strange.’ His fist closed thoughtfully around the locket. ‘My wife reports for duty every day.’
Before Dolly could tell him that no one went to the canteen every day, that there was a shift book and a Mrs Waddingham who ran a very tight ship, a key turned in the front lock.
Vivien was home.
Both Dolly and Henry glanced keenly at the closed door, listening to her footsteps on the entrance hall parquet. Dolly’s heart began to chirrup as she imagined how happy Vivien was going to be when Henry produced the necklace; when he explained that Dolly was responsible for bringing it back; the way Vivien would be overcome with gratitude and yes, love, and a radiant smile would spread across her face and she’d say, ‘Henry, darling. I’m so glad you’ve finally met Dorothy. I’ve been meaning to invite you over for tea for such a long time, dearest, but things have been impossibly busy, haven’t they?’ And then she’d make a joke about the hard taskmaster at the canteen, and the two of them would dissolve with laughter, and Henry would suggest they all have dinner together, perhaps at his club …
The sitting-room door opened and Dolly sat forward on the edge of her seat. Henry moved quickly to take his wife in his arms. The embrace was lingering, romantic, as if he were drawing in her scent, and Dolly realised, with a twinge of envy, how passionately Henry Jenkins loved his wife. She knew already, of course, having read The Reluctant Muse, but being in the room, observing them, drove it home. What was Vivien thinking, involving herself with that doctor when she was so well loved by a man like Henry?
The doctor. Dolly looked at Henry’s face, his eyes closed as he pressed Vivien’s head firmly to his chest; as he held her in the sort of clinch one might expect if months had passed and he’d feared the worst; and she realised, suddenly, that he knew. His agitation that Vivien was late, the pointed questions he’d asked Dolly, the frustrated way he’d spoken of his beloved wife … He knew. That was, he