of her nose. Money. It was one of the oldest motivators, wasn’t it? She sighed. It was so base, so predictable, but that had to be it. Her mother didn’t seem at all the type to desire more than she had, let alone to make plans to take it from someone else; but that was now. The Doro-thy Nicolson Laurel knew was removed by decades from the hungry young girl she’d used to be; an eighteen-year-old girl who’d lost her family in the Coventry Blitz and had to fend for herself in wartime London.
Certainly, the regrets her mother was expressing now, her talk of mistakes and second chances and forgiveness, fitted the theory. And what was it she’d used to say to Iris—no one likes a girl who wants more than the others every time? Might that have been a lesson she learned from her own experience? The more Laurel thought about it, the more right it seemed. It was money her mother had needed; money she’d tried to take from Vivien Jenkins; but it had all gone terribly wrong. She wondered again whether Jimmy had been involved; whether it was the plan’s failure that had seen their relationship flounder. And she wondered what part exactly the plan had played in Vivien’s death. Henry had held Dorothy responsible for his wife’s death: she might have fled to a life of atonement, but Vivien’s grieving husband had refused to give up his search, and he’d found her eventually. Laurel had seen what happened next with her own eyes.
Ben was behind her now, making small throat-clearing noises as the wall clock’s minute hand slipped past the hour. Laurel pretended not to hear him, wondering what had gone wrong with her mother’s plan. Had Vivien realised what was happening and put a stop to it, or was it something else, something worse that made it all blow up? She eyed the stack of journals, scanning the spines for that dated 1941.
‘I’d leave you here, really I would,’ Ben said, ‘only the head archivist is the sort to string me up by my toes.’ He gulped. ‘Or worse’.
Oh, bugger. Bloody hell. Laurel’s heart was heavy, there was a sick swirling in the pit of her stomach, and now she was going to have to cool her heels for fifty-seven minutes while the very book that might contain the answers she needed languished here in a shut-up room.
Twenty-five
London, April 1941
JIMMY STOOD with his foot pressed against the door of the hospital attic, staring through the crack after Vivien. He was puzzled. This was not the illicit scene of an extra-marital rendezvous he’d expected. There were children everywhere, playing with puzzles on the floor, jumping round in circles, one standing on her hands; he was in the attics, Jimmy realised, this room was the old nursery, these children, presumably, Dr Tomalin’s orphaned patients. Through some unspoken awareness their collective attention was caught and they looked up to see that Vivien was among them. As Jimmy watched, they all rushed towards her, arms out like airplanes. She was beaming, too, an enormous smile on her face as she dropped to her knees and held out her own arms to catch as many as she could when they leapt.
They all started talking then, rapidly and with some agitation, about flying and ships and ropes and fairies, and Jimmy knew that he was witnessing a conversation with its roots in an earlier time. Vivien seemed to know what they were on about though, she was nodding thoughtfully, and not in that pretend way adults have when they’re interacting with children—she was listening and considering and the slight frown she wore made it clear that she was trying to find solutions. She was different now from the way she’d been when she spoke to him in the street; more at ease, not so on guard. When they’d all said their piece and the noise fell away—as it sometimes seems to, all at once—she held up her hands and said, ‘Why don’t we just start and we’ll address each problem as we get to it?’
They agreed, at least Jimmy presumed that’s what had happened, for without a word of complaint they dispersed again, all industry as they dragged chairs and other inexplicable objects—blankets, broomsticks, teddy bears with eye patches—into the cleared section at the centre of the room and began assembling them into some sort of carefully worked-out structure. He realised then, and it made him laugh to himself with unexpected