long. He was brave and protective, he was funny; he was patient with his mother, even though she was the sort of woman whose most amiable chatter contained acid enough to strip paint from the walls. He had strong hands and he did clever things with them; he could fix just about anything, and he could draw (though not as well as he’d have liked). He was handsome, and had a way of looking at her that made Dorothy’s skin heat with desire; he was a dreamer, but not so that he lost himself inside his fancies. He loved music and played the clarinet, jazz songs that Dorothy adored, but which drove his mother wild. Sometimes, while Dorothy sat cross-legged in the window seat in his room watching him play, Mrs Nicolson would take up her broom downstairs and hammer the end of it against the floor, which made Stephen play louder and jazzier, and made Dorothy laugh so hard she had to clap both hands across her mouth. He made her feel safe.
At the top of her list though, the thing she valued high above the rest, was his strength of character. Stephen Nicolson had the courage of his convictions; he would never let his lover bend his will and Dorothy liked that; there was a danger, she thought, in the sort of loving that made people act against type.
He also had a great respect for secrets. ‘You don’t talk much about your past,’ he’d said to her one night as they sat together on the sand.
‘No.’
A silence stretched between them in the shape of a question mark, but she didn’t say more.
‘Why not?’
She sighed but it caught the night sea breeze and drifted away silently. She knew his mother had been whispering in his ear; terrible lies about her past, aimed to convince him that he ought to wait a while, see other women, think about settling down with a nice local girl instead, who didn’t have ‘London ways’ about her. She knew, too, that Stephen had told his mother that he liked mysteries; that life was rather dull if you knew all there was to know about a person before you’d crossed the street to say hello. Dorothy said, ‘For the same reason, I suspect, that you don’t talk much about the war.’
He took her hand and kissed it. ‘Makes sense to me.’
She knew she’d tell him all about it one day, but she had to be careful. Stephen was the sort of man who’d want to march right up to London and take care of Henry himself. And Dorothy wasn’t about to lose anyone else she loved to Henry Jenkins. ‘You’re a good man, Stephen Nicolson.’
He was shaking his head; she could feel his forehead shifting against hers. ‘No,’ he insisted. ‘Just a man.’
Dorothy didn’t argue, but she took his hand in hers and she leaned her cheek gently on his shoulder in the dark. She’d known men before, good men and bad, and Stephen Nicolson was a good man. The best of men. He reminded her of some-one else she used to know.
Dorothy thought about Jimmy, of course, in the same way she continued to think of her brothers and sister, her mother and father. He’d taken up residence with them in that weatherboard house in the subtropics, welcomed by the Longmeyers of her mind. It wasn’t difficult to imagine him there, beyond the veil, he’d always reminded her of the men in her family; his friend-ship had been a light in the dark, it had given her hope, and maybe if they’d had the chance to know one another longer and better, it would have deepened into the sort of love that was written about in books, the sort of love she’d found with Stephen. But Jimmy belonged to Vivien and Vivien was dead.
Just once she thought she saw him. It was a few days after her wedding and she and Stephen were walking hand in hand along the water’s edge when he leaned to kiss her neck. She laughed and wriggled free, skipping ahead before glancing over her shoulder to call something teasing back to him. And that’s when she noticed a figure on the strand, way in the distance, watching them. Her breath caught in recognition as Stephen reached her and swept her off her feet. But it was just her mind playing tricks on her, for when she turned around to look again he was gone.