that Vivien kept up his acquaintance. It seemed as likely an explanation as any. What other reason could there be for her to change her tune so remarkably?
He still reflected on it sometimes, wondering why she’d said yes that day at the hospital when he’d asked her to walk with him. He didn’t need to wonder why he’d asked her: it was having her back after she was ill, the brightening of everything when he’d opened the attic door and seen her there unexpectedly. He’d hurried to catch up with her when she left, opening the front door so quickly she’d still been standing on the step, straightening her scarf. He hadn’t expected her to say yes, he knew only that he’d been thinking about it all through the rehearsal; he wanted to spend time with her, not because Dolly had told him to, but because he liked her; he liked being with her.
‘Do you have children, Jimmy?’ she’d asked him as they walked together. She was moving more slowly than usual, still delicate after the illness that had kept her at home. He’d noticed a certain reticence all day—she’d laughed with the kids as usual, but there’d been a look in her eyes, a caution or reservation that he wasn’t used to. Jimmy had felt sad for her, though he didn’t know why exactly.
He’d shaken his head, ‘No.’ And he’d felt his face colour, remembering how he’d upset her when he’d asked the same question. This time, though, she was steering the conversation and she pressed on.
‘But you want them one day.’
‘Yes.’
‘Just one or two?’
‘For starters. Then the other six.’
She’d smiled at that.
‘I was an only child,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘It was lonely.’
‘I was one of four. It was noisy.’
Jimmy had laughed then, and he was still smiling when he realised what he hadn’t before. ‘The stories you tell at the hospital,’ he said, as they turned the corner, thinking of the photograph he’d taken for her, ‘the ones about the wooden house on stilts, the enchanted forest, the family through the veil—that’s your family, isn’t it?’
Vivien nodded.
Jimmy wasn’t sure what had made him tell her about his dad that day—something in the way she’d looked when she spoke about her own family, the stories he’d heard her tell that crack-led with magic and longing and made time disappear, the need he suddenly felt to let somebody in. Whatever the case, he had told her, and Vivien had asked questions and Jimmy was re-minded of the day he’d first seen her with the children, that quality he’d noticed in the way she listened to them. When she said she’d like to meet the old man, Jimmy thought it was just one of those things that people say when they’re thinking about the train they’ve got to catch and wondering if they’ll get to the station in time. But at the next rehearsal she said it again. ‘I’ve brought something for him,’ she added, ‘something I think he might like.’
She had too. And the following week, when Jimmy finally agreed to take her to meet his dad, she’d presented the old man with a fine piece of cuttlefish, ‘For Finchie’. She’d found it on the beach, she said, when she and Henry were visiting his publisher’s family.
‘She’s a lovely one, Jim-boy,’ Jimmy’s dad had said loudly. ‘Very pretty—like something out of a painting. Kind, too. Will you wait and have your wedding when we get to the seaside, do you think?’
‘I don’t know, Dad,’ Jimmy said, glancing at Vivien who was pretending great interest in some of his photographs pinned to the wall. ‘Let’s just wait and see, eh?’
‘Don’t wait too long, Jimmy. Your mum and me, we’re not getting any younger.’
‘Right-o, Dad. You’ll be first to know—promise.’
Later, when he was walking Vivien back to the underground station, he explained about his dad’s confusion, hoping she hadn’t been too embarrassed.
She seemed surprised. ‘You mustn’t apologise for your father, Jimmy.’
‘No, I know. I just—I didn’t want you to feel uncomfortable.’
‘On the contrary. I haven’t felt so comfortable in a long time.’
They walked a bit further without conversation, and then Vivien said, ‘Are you really going to live at the seaside?’
‘That’s the plan.’ Jimmy flinched. Plan. He’d said the word without thinking and he cursed himself. There was something enormously uncomfortable in outlining for Vivien the selfsame future scenario that had become bound up in his mind with Dolly’s scheme.