now to face him; Vivien was glowering, her copy of Peter Pan closed on her lap. Jimmy ignored her. ‘I guess you’d have to shine it from somewhere high. Yes, that would work, and if you made sure it was always angling down towards the stage, it would focus a smaller light, rather than a wide, general brightness, and maybe if you fashioned a sort of funnel …’
‘But none of us is tall enough to operate it.’ The kid in the glasses again. ‘Not from up there.’ Orphan or not, Jimmy was starting to dislike him.
Vivien had been watching the exchange with a firm expression on her face, willing Jimmy, he knew, to remember what she’d said—to let the suggestion go and just disappear—but he couldn’t do it. He could picture how tremendous it was going to look, and he could think of a hundred ways to make it work. If they put a ladder in the corner, or else attached it to a broom—reinforced somehow—and wielded it like a fishing rod, or else—‘I’ll do it,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’ll operate the light.’
‘No!’ Vivien said, standing.
‘Yes!’ cried the children.
‘You couldn’t.’ She gave him a flinty look—‘You won’t.’
‘He could!’ ‘He will!’ ‘He must!’ shouted the mass of children.
Jimmy spotted Nella then, sitting on the floor; she waved at him and then glanced around at the others, a glimmer of unmistakable pride and ownership in her eyes. How could he say no? Jimmy raised his palms at Vivien in a gesture of not entirely genuine apology, and then he grinned at the kids. ‘That does it,’ he said. ‘I’m in. You’ve found yourselves a new Tinkerbell.’
Hard to believe later, but when Jimmy offered to play Tinkerbell in the hospital play, he hadn’t been thinking—even remotely—of the meeting he was supposed to be setting up with Vivien Jenkins. He’d merely become swept up in his grand vision for the way they’d be able to represent the fairy with his photography light. Dolly didn’t mind either way: ‘Oh, Jimmy, you clever thing,’ she said, drawing excitedly on her cigarette. ‘I knew you’d think of something.’
Jimmy took the praise and let her believe it was all part of his plan. She was so happy lately, and it was such a relief to have his old Doll back. ‘I’ve been thinking about the seaside,’ she’d say some evenings when she smuggled him through Mrs White’s larder window and they lay together in that narrow sink-in-the-middle bed of hers. ‘Can’t you just picture us, Jimmy? Growing old together, our children around us, grandchildren one day, visiting in their flying cars—we could get one of those swing seats for two—what do you say to that, lovely boy?’ Jimmy said, yes please. And then he kissed her again on her bare neck and made her laugh and thanked God for this new intimacy and warmth they were sharing. Yes, he wanted what she described; he wanted it so badly it hurt. If it pleased her to think Jimmy and Vivien were working together and growing closer, then it was a fiction he was glad enough to go along with.
The reality, as he knew only too well, was rather different. Over the next couple of weeks, as Jimmy fronted up to every scheduled rehearsal he could manage, Vivien’s hostility astonished him. He couldn’t believe she was the same person he’d met in the canteen that night, who’d seen his photograph of Nella and told him about her work at the hospital; now, it was as if it were beneath her to exchange more than a few words with him. Jimmy was pretty sure she’d have ignored him entirely if she could have. He’d expected coldness to a degree—Doll had prepared him for how cruel Vivien Jenkins could be when she took against a person—what caught him by surprise was how personal her hatred was. They hardly knew each other, and furthermore she had no way of suspecting his connection to Dolly.
One day they were both laughing at something funny one of the children had done, and Jimmy glanced over, as one adult might to another, wanting nothing more than to share the moment. She sensed his gaze and met it, but the minute she saw him smiling, she let her own happy expression drop away. Vivien’s animus put Jimmy between a rock and a hard place. In some respects it suited him to be so loathed— the idea of blackmail didn’t sit well with Jimmy, but he felt easier and