a good word for you.’ Myra caught herself then. ‘Anyway, he likes you. That’s lovely. Now—don’t you have photographs to take for my newspaper tomorrow morning?’ Jimmy signalled a mock salute that made her smile and then he started on his way.
His head was spinning as he walked back home.
Dolly had been wrong—no matter how certain she’d been, she’d got it wrong. There was no affair between Dr Tomalin and Vivien—the old man was ‘like a grandfather’ to her. And she—Jimmy shook his head, horrified at the things he’d thought, the way he’d judged her—she was no adulteress, she was just a woman, a good woman, at that, who’d given up her time to bring a bit of happiness to a group of orphans who’d lost everything.
It was strange, perhaps, when everything he’d believed so strongly had been proved a lie, but Jimmy felt oddly light. He couldn’t wait to tell Doll; there was no need now to go through with the plan; Vivien was guilty of nothing.
‘Except being nasty to me,’ Dolly replied, when he said as much to her. ‘But I suppose that counts for nothing now you’re such good friends.’
‘Stop it, Doll,’ Jimmy said. ‘It’s not like that at all. Look—’. He reached to take her hands across the table, adopting the sort of light gentle voice that suggested the whole thing had been a bit of a lark but it was time now to call it quits. ‘I know she treated you unkindly, and I think the worse of her for that. But this plan—it’s not going to work. She’s not guilty—she’d read the letter and laugh if you sent it. She’d probably show it to her husband and he’d have a good laugh too.’
‘No she won’t.’ Dolly pulled her hands back and crossed her arms. She was stubborn, or perhaps she was merely desperate, it could be hard to spot the difference sometimes. ‘No woman wants her husband to think she’s having an affair with another man. She’ll still give us the money.’
Jimmy took out a cigarette and lit it, eyeing Doll from behind the flame. Once upon a time he’d have moved to cajole her, his adoration would have blinded him to her faults. Now, though, things were different. There was a fracture that ran right the way across Jimmy’s heart, a fine line that had appeared the night Dolly told him she wouldn’t marry him and then left him on that restaurant floor. The break had been mended since then, and most of the time it couldn’t be seen; but just like the vase his mother had dashed to the ground the day they went to Liberty’s and which his dad had glued back together, the fault lines would always show up under certain lights. Jimmy loved Dolly, that would never change—for Jimmy loyalty was like breathing—but as he looked at her across the other side of the table, he thought that he didn’t really like her much right then.
Vivien came back. She’d been gone just over a week and when Jimmy turned the attic corner, opened the door, and saw her in the centre of a hoard of fast-talking children, something rather unexpected happened. Jimmy was glad to see her. Not just glad, the world seemed a little brighter than it had only the moment before.
He stopped where he was. ‘Vivien Jenkins,’ he said, causing her to look up and meet his eyes.
She smiled at him and Jimmy smiled back, and he knew then that he was in a bit of trouble.
Twenty-six
New College Library, Oxford, 2011
LAUREL SPENT the next fifty-seven minutes, each of them excruciating, pacing New College gardens. When the doors were finally unlocked, she all but set a library record, reminding herself of a shopper at the Boxing Day sales as she jostled past other people in her hurry to get back to her desk; certainly Ben seemed impressed when he arrived to find her already hard at work. ‘Cool,’ he said, eyes wide with wonder as he considered the possibility that she’d returned by the click of her fingers and the wiggle of her nose. Awed bafflement gave way to whispered concern, ‘I didn’t leave you in here by mistake, did I?’
Laurel assured him he hadn’t, and got busy skimming through Katy’s first journal for 1941 in search of anything that might tell her how her mother’s plan had turned pear-shaped. There wasn’t much mention of Vivien in the first few months of the year, other than occasional notations