Unless she had something behind the counter she didn’t want him to see—Jimmy took out his cigarette packet and fed one out onto his lip—a surprise for him perhaps, something she was planning on showing him later at the restaurant. Or maybe he’d caught her remembering their night together, that might explain why she’d seemed so startled, almost embarrassed, when she looked up and saw him standing there. Jimmy struck a match and dragged hard, considering. After a moment he exhaled, letting the query go. It was impossible to guess, and as long as the odd behaviour wasn’t one of her games of pretend (not tonight, please God, he had to stay in control of tonight), he supposed it didn’t matter.
He slipped his hand inside his pocket and then shook his head, because of course the ring box was right where it had been two minutes ago. The compulsion was getting ridiculous; he needed to find a way to distract himself until he could slip the damn thing on Dolly’s finger. Jimmy hadn’t brought a book, so he took up the black folder in which he kept his printed photographs. He didn’t usually carry it with him when he was out on the job, but he’d come straight from a meeting with his editor and hadn’t had time to take it home.
He turned to his most recent photograph, one he’d taken in Cheap- side on Saturday night. It was of a little girl, four or five years old he guessed, standing in front of the kitchen of her local church hall. Her own clothes had been destroyed in the same raid that killed her family, and the Salvation Army hadn’t had any children’s clothes to give her. She was wearing an enormous pair of bloomers, an adult-size cardigan and a pair of tap shoes. They were red and she’d adored them. The St John’s ladies were fussing about in the background, finding biscuits for her, and she’d been tapping her feet like Shirley Temple when Jimmy saw her, as the woman minding her kept an eye on the door in hopes that one of her family would miraculously appear, whole and intact and ready to take her home.
Jimmy had taken so many war pictures, his walls and his memories were clogged with various strangers who stood defiant in the face of devastation and loss; just this week he’d been to Bristol and Portsmouth and Gosport; but there was something about that little girl— he didn’t even know her name—that Jimmy couldn’t forget. He didn’t want to forget. Her little face made happy by so little after suffering what was surely a child’s greatest loss; an absence that would ripple across the years to change her whole life. Jimmy ought to know—he still found himself scanning the faces of bomb-blast victims, searching for his mother.
Small individual tragedies like this little girl’s were nothing to the larger scale of the war; she and her tap shoes could be swept as easily as dust beneath history’s carpet. That photo-graph was real, though; it captured its moment and preserved it for the future like an insect in amber. It reminded Jimmy why what he did, recording the truth of the war, was important. He needed to be reminded sometimes, on nights like this one, when he looked around the room and felt his lack of uniform so keenly.
Jimmy killed his cigarette in the soup bowl that someone be-fore him had helpfully set out for the purpose. He glanced at his watch—fifteen minutes had passed since he’d sat down—and wondered what was keeping Dolly. Jimmy was debating whether to gather his things and go looking for her when he sensed a presence behind him. He turned, expecting to see Doll, but it wasn’t her. It was someone else, someone he’d never seen before.
At last Dolly had managed to extricate herself from Mrs Waddingham, and was coming back through the kitchen, wondering how shoes that looked such a dream could possibly hurt one’s feet so badly, when she glanced up and the world just about stopped turning. Vivien had arrived.
She was standing by one of the trestle tables.
Deep in conversation.
With Jimmy.
Dolly’s heart started to rabbit in her chest and she hid herself behind the pillar at the edge of the kitchen counter. She tried not to be seen while making perfectly sure to see everything. Eyes wide, she peered around the bricks and realised with horror that it was worse than she’d imagined. Not