more justified about the plan when Vivien treated him like nothing; yet without gaining her trust, if not her affection, he wasn’t going to be able to make the plan work.
So Jimmy kept trying. He forced aside the resentment he felt at Vivien’s hostility, her disloyalty towards Doll, the way she’d cast off his glittering girl and brought her so low; and he focused instead on how she was with the hospital orphans. The way she created a world into which they could disappear when they came through the door; their real problems left behind in the downstairs dormitories and wards of the hospital. The way they all watched her, staring spellbound when rehearsal was over and she wove stories for them about tunnels through the centre of the earth, and dark magical creeks without bottoms, and tiny lights beneath the water that called to children to come just a little closer …
And eventually, as rehearsals continued, Jimmy began to suspect that Vivien Jenkins’s antipathy was fading; that she no longer hated him quite so much as she had at first. She continued not to make conversation or acknowledge him with more than the barest of nods, but sometimes Jimmy caught her looking at him when she thought he didn’t know, and it seemed to him that the expression on her face was not angry, so much as it was thoughtful, even curious. Perhaps that’s why he made his mistake. He’d started to perceive a growing—well, not a warmth, but at least an increasing thaw between them, and one day towards the end of April, when the children had run off to lunch and he and Vivien were left packing up the ship, he’d asked her whether she had any of her own.
It was supposed to be the start of a light conversation, but Vivien’s whole body had seemed to freeze, and Jimmy had known right away that he’d made an error—if not exactly how—and that it was too late to take it back.
‘No.’ The word when it came was as sharp as a stone in his heel. She cleared her throat. ‘I can’t have children.’
Jimmy had wished right about then for a deep tunnel through the centre of the earth into which he could fall and fall and fall. He muttered a ‘Sorry,’ which elicited a slight nod from Vivien, and then she finished wrapping up the sail and left the attic, letting the door shut reproachfully behind her.
He’d felt like an insensitive buffoon. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten why he was really there—what she was, what she was doing hadn’t changed—it was only that, well, Jimmy didn’t like being the one to cause a person hurt the way he had. Remembering how she’d stiffened when he said it made him wince, so he brought it to mind over and over, punishing himself for being such a louse. That night when he was out photographing the latest bomb damage, pointing his camera at the newest souls to join the ranks of the homeless and bereaved, half of his brain kept turning over ways he could possibly make it up to her.
He arrived at the hospital early the next day and waited for her across the street, smoking nervously. He’d have sat on the front steps only he had a feeling she’d turn and walk the other way if she saw him there.
When she came hurrying down the street, he got rid of his cigarette and went to meet her. He handed her a photograph.
‘What’s this?’ she said.
‘Nothing, really,’ he said, watching as she turned it over in her hands. ‘I took it for you—last night. It reminded me of your story, you know, the creek with the lights at the very bottom, and the people—the family on the other side of the veil.’
She looked at the picture.
He’d taken it as dawn was breaking; sunlight had made shards of glass in the ruins glitter and sparkle, and beyond the rising smoke you could make out the shadowy forms of the family who’d just emerged from the Andersen shelter that had saved their lives; Jimmy hadn’t slept after he took it, he’d headed straight over to the newspaper to develop the print for Vivien.
She didn’t say anything, and the look on her face made Jim-my think she might be going to cry.
‘I feel terrible,’ he said.
Vivien glanced at him.
‘What I said yesterday. I upset you. I’m sorry.’
‘You weren’t to know.’ She put the photograph carefully in her bag.
‘Still—’
‘You weren’t to know.’