He’d taken it a fortnight ago, when Vivien was still away sick, the whole cast in costume, standing together on the ship set.
Jimmy had printed one for Vivien, too; he spied her over in the far corner of the attic, gathering discarded costumes into a woven basket. Dr Tomalin and Myra were talking to Dolly so he took it over to her.
‘So,’ he said, arriving at her side.
‘So.’
‘Rave reviews in tomorrow’s newspaper, I should think.’
She laughed. ‘Without doubt.’
He handed her a print. ‘This is for you.’
She took it, smiling at the children’s faces. She leaned to put down the basket and when she did her blouse gaped slightly and Jimmy glimpsed a bruise stretching from her shoulder to her chest bone.
‘It’s nothing,’ she said, noticing the direction of his glance, fingers moving quickly to straighten the fabric. ‘I fell in the blackout, on my way to the shelter. A postbox—so much for paint that shows up in the dark.’
‘Are you sure? It looks bad.’
‘I bruise easily.’ Her eyes met his, and for a fraction of a second Jimmy thought he saw something there, but then she smiled. ‘Not to mention I go too fast. I’m always bumping into things—people too, sometimes.’
Jimmy smiled back, remembering the day they’d met; but, as one of the children took Vivien’s hand and pulled her away, his thoughts shifted to her recurring illness and her inability to have children and what he knew of people who bruised easily, and Jimmy felt a knot of worry tighten in his stomach.
Twenty-eight
VIVIEN SAT DOWN on the edge of the bed and picked up the photograph Jimmy had given her, the one taken in the Blitz, with the smoke and the glittering glass and the family behind. She smiled as she looked at it, and then lay back, closing her eyes and willing her mind to slip over the edge, into her shadow land. The veil, the sparkling lights in the deep of the watery tunnel, her family beyond, waiting for her in the house.
She lay there, and she tried to see them, and then she tried harder still.
It was no use. She opened her eyes. Lately all Vivien saw when she closed them was Jimmy Metcalfe. The spill of dark hair across his forehead; the twitch of his lips when he was about to say something funny; the way his brows knotted together when he spoke about his father …
She stood up briskly and went to the window, leaving the photograph behind her on the bedspread. It had been a week since the play and Vivien was restless. She missed working with the children, and Jimmy, and she couldn’t stand the endless days split between the canteen and this big quiet house. It was quiet, too: awfully quiet. It ought to have children running up the stairs, sliding down the banisters, stomping in the attics. Even Sarah, the maid, was gone now—Hen- ry had insisted they let her go after what had happened, but Vivien wouldn’t have minded had Sarah stayed. She hadn’t realised how much she’d grown used to the thumping of the vacuum machine against the skirting boards, the creaking of the old floors, the intangible knowledge that there was somebody else breathing, moving, watching, in the same space as she was …
A man riding an old bicycle wobbled by on the street below, his handlebar basket filled with dirty gardening tools, and Vivien let the sheer day-curtain fall against the criss-crossed glass. She sat on the edge of the nearby armchair and tried again to order her thoughts. She’d been writing to Katy on and off in her mind for days; it would be the first letter since her friend’s recent visit to London and Vivien was keen to put things right between them. Not to concede—Vivien had never been one to apologise where she knew herself to be right—but rather to explain.
She wanted to make Katy understand, as she hadn’t when they’d met, that her friendship with Jimmy was good and true; most of all, that it was innocent. That she had no intention of leaving her marriage or jeopardising her health or any of the other dire scenarios Katy warned against. She wanted to ex-plain about Mr Metcalfe and the way she was able to make him laugh, about the easiness she felt with Jimmy when they talked or looked over his photographs, about the way he believed the best of people and the sense he gave her that he would never be