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 unkind. She wanted to convince Katy that her feelings for Jimmy were simply those of one friend for another.

Even if it wasn’t exactly true.

Vivien knew the moment that she’d fallen in love with Jimmy Metcalfe. It was when she was sitting at the breakfast table downstairs and Henry was telling her of some work he was doing at the Ministry and she was nodding along but thinking about an incident at the hospi- tal—something funny Jimmy had done when he was trying to cheer up their newest patient—and then she’d laughed, despite herself, and thank God it must’ve been at a point in Henry’s story that he found amusing, because he smiled at her, and came to kiss her, and said, ‘I knew you’d think so, too, darling.’

Vivien also knew that the affair was one-sided and that her feelings were not something she would ever share with him. Even if by some chance he felt the same way, there was no future for Jimmy with Vivien. She couldn’t offer him that. Vivien’s fate was sealed. Her condition didn’t cause her angst or upset, not any more; she’d accepted for some time the life she had remaining; she certainly didn’t need illicit whispered confessions or physical expressions of love to make her whole.

Quite the contrary. Vivien had learned early, as a child on a lonely railway station, on her way to board a ship to a faraway country, that she could only ever control the life she led inside her mind. When she was in the house on Campden Grove, when she could hear Henry whistling in his bathroom, trimming his moustache and admiring his profile, it was enough to know that what she had inside was hers alone.

Even so, seeing Jimmy together with Dolly Smitham at the play had been a shock. They’d spoken once or twice about his fiancee, but Jimmy had always closed up when the topic surfaced and so Vivien had stopped asking. She’d become used to thinking of him as someone who hadn’t a life outside the hospital, or family aside from his father. Watching him with Dolly, though—the tenderness with which he held her hand, the way he kept his eyes trained on her—Vivien had been forced to confront the truth. Vivien might have loved Jimmy, but Jimmy loved Dolly. Moreover, Vivien could see why. She’d found Dolly pretty and funny, and filled with a sort of zest and adventure that drew people to her. Jimmy had described her once as sparkling, and Vivien knew just what he meant. Of course he loved her; no wonder he was so intent on providing the mast for her glorious, billowing sail—she was exactly the sort of person to inspire that sort of devotion from a man like Jimmy.

And that’s exactly what Vivien planned to tell Katy—that Jimmy was engaged to be married, his fiancee was a charming woman, and there was no reason he and Vivien shouldn’t still—

The telephone rang on the table beside her and Vivien glanced at it, surprised. People didn’t call 25 Campden Grove during the day; Henry’s colleagues telephoned him at work, and Vivien didn’t have many friends, not the sort who made phone calls. She picked it up uncertainly.

The voice on the other end was male and unfamiliar. She didn’t catch the gentleman’s name, he said it too quickly. ‘Hel-lo?’ she said again. ‘Who did you say is calling?’

‘Dr Lionel Rufus.’

Vivien couldn’t think that she knew anyone by that name and wondered whether perhaps he was an associate of Dr Tomalin’s. ‘How may I help you, Dr Rufus?’ It struck Vivien sometimes that her voice was like her mother’s now, here in this other life; her mother’s voice when she’d used to read stories to them and it had become clipped and perfect and faraway, not her real voice at all.

‘Is this Vivien Jenkins?’

‘Yes?’

‘Mrs Jenkins, I wonder if I might speak to you on a delicate matter. It concerns a young woman I believe you’ve met once or twice. She lived across the road from you for a time, working as a companion to Lady Gwendolyn.’

‘Do you mean Dolly Smitham?’

‘Yes. Now, what I have to tell you is not something I would usually discuss—there are issues of confidentiality to consider—however in this case I feel it’s in your best interest. You might want to sit down, Mrs Jenkins.’

Vivien was already sitting down, so she made a small noise of assent, and then she listened closely as a doctor she’d never met before told her a story she could hardly believe.

She listened, and she said very little, and when Dr Rufus finally rang off Vivien sat with the telephone receiver in her hand for a very long time. She played his words over in her mind, trying to plait each strand together in a way that made sense—he’d spoken of Dolly (‘A good girl, at the whim sometimes of a grand imagination’) and her young man (‘Jimmy, I think—never met the fellow myself’); and he’d told her of their desire to be together, their perceived need for money so they could start again. And then he’d outlined the plan they’d come up with; the part they’d cast her in; and when Vivien wondered aloud why they’d chosen her, he’d explained Dolly’s despair at finding herself ‘disowned’ by someone she so admired.

The conversation left Vivien numb at first—and thank good-ness, for the hurt at what she’d learned, the lie it made of things she’d believed fine and true, might otherwise have been crushing. She told herself the man was wrong, that it was a cruel practical joke, or else a mistake—but then she remembered the bitterness she’d seen in Jimmy’s face when she’d asked why he and Dolly didn’t marry and move away at once; the way he’d upbraided her, reminding her that romantic ideals were the luxury of those who could afford them; and she’d known.

She sat very still, listening to the silence of their great big house as all her hopes dissolved around her. Vivien was very good at disappearing behind the storm of her emotions; she’d had an awful lot of practice; but this was different; it made her ache in a part of herself she’d long ago put away for safekeeping. Vivien saw clearly then, as she hadn’t before, that it wasn’t Jimmy alone she’d craved; it was what he’d represented. A different life; freedom and the future she’d stopped herself from imagining; a future that rolled on ahead without a brick barrier built right the way across it. Also, in some strange way, the past— but not the past of her nightmares, the opportunity to build a bridge between now and then, to come to peace with the events of before …

It wasn’t until she heard the hall clock chiming downstairs that Vivien seemed to remember where she was. And that’s when she realised there was more at stake than her own grievous disappointment. Much more. Her mind flared with molten fear. She hooked the telephone receiver back in place and looked at her wristwatch. Two o’clock. Which meant she had three hours before she needed to be home to get ready for Henry’s dinner engagement.

There was no time now to lament; Vivien went to the writing desk and did what she had to do. She faltered on her way to-wards the door, the only outward sign of her inner torment, and then hurried back to retrieve the book. She scribbled her message across its page, recapped her pen in the great yawning house, and then, without another minute’s hesitation, she hurried downstairs and set off on her way.

 

Mrs Hamblin, the woman who came in to sit with Mr Metcalfe when Jimmy was working, answered the door. She smiled when she saw Vivien and said, ‘Oh good, it’s you dear. I’ll just pop down to the grocer, if you don’t mind, seeing as you’re here to watch him.’ She fed a string bag over her arm and tapped the side of her nose as she hurried out the door. ‘I’ve heard tell there’s bananas under the counter for those that know how to ask nice for them.’

Vivien had grown enormously fond of Jimmy’s dad. She thought sometimes that her own father might have been just like him, had he been given the chance to make such an age. Mr Metcalfe had grown up on a farm, one of a great gaggle of children, and many of the stories he told were of the sort Vivien could relate to—certainly they’d influenced Jimmy’s ideas about the life he wanted to lead. Today, though, was not one of his father’s good days. ‘The wedding,’ he said, clutching her hand in alarm. ‘We haven’t missed the wedding, have we?’

‘You most certainly have not,’ she said gently. ‘A wedding without you? What are you thinking—there’s no chance of such a thing happening.’

Vivien’s heart ached for him. To be old and confused and frightened; she just wished there were more she could do to ease his way. ‘How about a cup of tea?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘oh yes, please.’ As grateful as if she’d offered him his life’s desire. ‘That sounds lovely.’

There was the sound of a key in the lock when Vivien was stirring in the drop of condensed milk, just as he liked it.

Jimmy came through the door and if he were surprised to see her there, he didn’t show it. He smiled warmly, and Vivien smiled back, aware of the elastic tightening in her chest.

She stayed for a time, talking with the two of them, drawing out the visit as long as she dared. Finally, though, she had to go; Henry would be expecting her.

Jimmy walked her to the station as he always did, but when they reached the underground she didn’t go straight through the entrance as was usual.

‘I have something for you,’ she said, reaching into her purse. She took out her copy of Peter Pan and gave it to him.

‘You want me to have this?’

She nodded.

He was touched, but also, she saw, confused.

‘I wrote in the front,’ she added.

He opened it and read aloud what she’d written. ‘A true friend is a light in the dark.’ He smiled at the book, and then, from beneath his hair, at her. ‘Vivien Jenkins, this is the nicest gift I’ve ever received.’ ‘Good.’ Her chest ached. ‘Now we’re even.’ She hesitated, knowing that what she was about to do would change every-thing. Then she reminded herself that it had already changed; the telephone call from Dr Rufus had done that; his dispassionate voice was still in her head, the things he’d told her so plainly. ‘I have something else for you, too.’ ‘It’s not my birthday. You know that, right?’

She handed him the slip of paper.

Jimmy turned it over, reading what was written, and then he looked at her. ‘What’s this?’

‘I should think that’s self-explanatory.’

Jimmy glanced over his shoulder; he lowered his voice. ‘I mean, what’s it for?’

‘Payment. For all your tremendous work at the hospital.’

He handed the cheque back as if it were poison. ‘I didn’t ask to be paid; I wanted to help. I don’t want your money.’

For a split second, doubt flared like hope in her chest; but she’d come to know him well and she saw the way his eyes darted from hers. Vivien didn’t feel vindicated by his shame, she only felt sadder. ‘I know you did, Jimmy, and I know you’ve never asked for payment. But I want you to have it. I’m sure you’ll find something to do with it. Use it to help your father,’ she said. ‘Or your lovely Dolly—if it makes you feel any easier, think of it as my way of repaying her for the great kindness she did me in returning my locket. use it to get married, to make things perfect, just the way you both want—to move away and start again—the seaside, the children, the whole pretty future.’

His voice was expressionless. ‘I thought you said you didn’t think about the future.’

‘I meant my own.’

‘Why are you doing this?’

‘Because I like you.’ She took his hands, holding them firmly. They were warm, clever kind hands. ‘I think you’re a fine man, Jimmy, one of the best, and I want you to have a happy life.’

‘That sounds a lot like goodbye.’

‘Does it?’

He nodded.

‘I suppose that’s because it is.’ She came closer then and, after the merest hesitation, she kissed him, right there in the middle of the street; she kissed him softly, barely, finally, and then she held onto his shirt, committing the splendid moment to her memory. ‘Goodbye, Jimmy Metcalfe,’ she said. ‘And this time … this time we really won’t meet again.’

 

Jimmy sat for a long time afterwards staring at the cheque. He felt betrayed, angry with her, even as he knew he was being utterly unfair. Only—why would she have given him such a thing? And why now, when Doll’s plan was forgotten and they were becoming real friends? Was it to do with her mysterious illness? There’d been something final in the way she was speaking; it had worried him.

All through the following week, as he fielded his dad’s questions as to when his lovely girl was coming back, Jimmy looked at the cheque and wondered what he was going to do. There was a part of him that wanted to rip the hateful thing into a hundred tiny pieces; but he didn’t. He wasn’t stupid; he knew it was the answer to all his prayers, even if it did make him burn with shame and frustration and a strange unnameable grief.

The day he was due to meet Dolly again for tea at Lyons, he debated whether or not to take the cheque with him. He went back and forth on the subject: taking it from inside the copy of Peter Pan, putting it in his pocket, and then replacing it in the book and hiding the damn thing out of sight. He looked at his watch. And then he did the same thing over again. He was running late. He knew Dolly would be waiting for him. She’d said she had something important to show him. She’d be staring at the door, eyes wide and bright, and he’d never be able to explain to her that he’d lost something rare and precious.

Feeling as if all the world’s shadows were closing in around him, Jimmy pocketed Peter Pan and went to meet his fiancee.

 

Dolly was waiting in the same seat she’d sat in when she pro-posed the plan. He noticed her at once because she was wearing that horrible white coat of hers; it wasn’t cold enough any more to wear fur, but Dolly refused to take it off. The coat had become so entangled in Jimmy’s mind with the whole awful scheme, that even a glimpse of it was enough to send a sick feeling surging through his body.

‘Sorry I’m late, Doll, I—’

‘Jimmy.’ Her eyes were shining. ‘I’ve done it.’

‘Done what?’

‘Here—’. She was holding an envelope between the fingers of both hands and now she pulled a square piece of photo-graphic paper from inside. ‘I even had it developed myself.’ She slid the picture across the table.

Jimmy picked it up and briefly, before he could stop himself, he felt a surge of tenderness. It had been taken at the hospital, the day of the play. Vivien could be made out clearly, and Jim-my, too, standing close, his hand reaching to touch her arm. They were looking at one another; he remembered the moment, it was when he’d noticed that bruise … And then he realised what he was looking at. ‘Doll—’

‘It’s perfect, isn’t it?’ She was smiling at him broadly, proudly, as if she’d done him a huge favour—almost as if she expected him to thank her.

Louder than he’d intended, Jimmy said, ‘But we decided not to do it—you said it was a mistake, that you never should have asked.’

‘You, Jimmy. I never should have asked you.’

Jimmy glanced again at the photograph and then back to Doll; his gaze was an unforgiving light that showed up all the cracks in his beautiful vase. She hadn’t lied; he’d simply misunderstood. She’d never been interested in the children or the play or making amends with Vivien. She’d just seen an opportunity.

‘Jimmy—’. Her face fell. ‘But why do you look that way? I thought you’d be happy. You haven’t changed your mind, have you? I wrote the letter so nicely, Jimmy, not at all unkindly, and she’s the only one who’ll ever see the pho—’

‘No.’ Jimmy found his voice then. ‘No, she won’t.’

‘Jimmy?’

‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’ He forced the photograph back inside the envelope and slid the whole thing towards her. ‘Get rid of it, Doll. There’s no need for any of that, not any more.’ ‘What do you mean?’ Her eyes narrowed suspiciously.

Jimmy took Peter Pan from his pocket, retrieved the cheque and handed it across the table. Dolly turned it over cautiously and read the contents.

Her cheeks flushed. ‘What’s this for?’

‘She gave it to me—to us. For help with the hospital play, and to thank you for returning her locket.’

‘She did?’ Tears came into Dolly’s eyes, not of sadness but relief. ‘But Jimmy—it’s for ten thousand pounds.’

‘Yes.’ He lit a cigarette while she stared dazedly at the cheque.

‘More than I ever would have thought to ask for.’

‘Yes.’

Dolly leapt up to kiss him then, and Jimmy felt nothing.

 

He walked around London for a long time that afternoon. Doll had his copy of Peter Pan—he’d been loathe to part with it, but she’d snatched it up and pleaded with him to let her take it home and what reason could he have given to explain his reticence to let it go? The cheque he had retained and it sat like a weight in his pocket as he roamed down street after battered street. Without his camera he didn’t see the small poetic vignettes of war, he saw the whole God-awful mess. One thing he knew for certain: he could never use a penny of that money, and he didn’t think he’d be able to look at Doll ever again if she did.

He was crying when he got back to his room, hot angry tears that he swiped away with the heel of his hand, because every-thing was wrong and he didn’t know how to begin setting it right. His father noticed he was upset, and asked whether one of the other neighbourhood children had been giving him a hard time at school—did he need his dad to go and sort them out? Jimmy’s heart lurched then for the impossible yearning he felt at the idea of going back, of being a child again. He gave his father a kiss on the top of his head and told him he’d be all right, and when he did, he noticed the letter on the table, addressed in small precise handwriting to Mr J. Metcalfe.

The sender was a woman called Miss Katy Ellis and she was writing to Jimmy, she said, about Mrs Vivien Jenkins. Jimmy read it, and as he did his heart began to pound with anger, love and finally determination. Katy Ellis had some rather compelling reasons for wanting Jimmy to stay away from Vivien, but all Jimmy saw was how desperately he needed to go to her. Finally, he understood everything that had previously confused him.

 

As to the letter Dolly Smitham wrote to Vivien Jenkins, and the photograph tucked inside its envelope: they were forgotten. Dolly had no need now for either so she didn’t go looking for the envelope and therefore didn’t notice it was missing. But it was. Swept aside by the sleeve of her thick white coat when she clutched the cheque and leaned ecstatically to kiss Jimmy, it had skidded to a halt on the edge of the table, teetered a few seconds, before tipping, finally, and falling deep into the narrow crevice where the bench seat met the wall.

The envelope was completely hidden from sight, and per-haps it might have stayed that way, gathering dust, being nib-bled at by cockroaches, disintegrating over the continuous ebb and flow of seasons until long after the names inside it were nothing more than the echoes of lives once lived. But fate has a funny way about it, and that’s not what happened.

Late that night, while Dolly slept, curled up in her narrow bed at Rillington Place, dreaming of Mrs White’s face when Dolly announced that she was leaving the boarding house; a Luftwaffe Heinkel on its way back to Berlin, dropped a time-bomb that fell quietly through the warm night sky. The pilot would’ve preferred to hit Marble Arch, but he was tired and his aim was off, and so the bomb landed where the iron railing used to stand, right out the front of the nearby Lyons Corner House. It went off at four o’clock the next morning, just as Dolly, who’d woken early, far too excited to keep sleeping, was sitting up in bed, looking over the copy of Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Never Grew Up she’d brought home from the restaurant, and copying her name— Dorothy—very carefully at the top of the annotation; so sweet of Vivien to give it to her—it made Dolly sad to think how she’d misjudged her. She was glad they were friends now. The bomb took the restaurant and half the house next door with it. There were casualties, but not as many as there might have been, and the ambulance team from Station 39 responded promptly, combing the ruins for survivors. A kindly officer named Sue, whose husband Don had come home shell-shocked from Dunkirk, and whose only boy had been evacuated to a place in Wales with a name she couldn’t pronounce, was nearing the end of her shift when she spied something in the debris.

She rubbed her eyes and yawned, thought about leaving it, but then reached down to pick it up. It was a letter, she saw, addressed and stamped, but not yet sent. The envelope wasn’t sealed and a photograph slipped out into the palm of her hand. She could see quite clearly now, as dawn broke brilliantly over proud smouldering London: the photograph was of a man and a woman, lovers—she could tell that just by looking at them. The way the fellow had his eyes trained on the pretty young woman; he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He wasn’t smiling as she was, but everything in his face told Sue that the man in the picture loved that woman with all his heart.

She smiled to herself, a little sadly, remembering the way she and Don had used to stare at one another, and then she sealed up the letter and tucked it in her pocket. She jumped into the trusty brown Daimler beside her shift partner, Vera, and they drove back to the station. Sue believed in staying positive, and in helping others—sending the lovers’ note on its way was to be her first good deed of the breaking day. She popped the envelope in the postbox as she walked home, and for the rest of her long, largely happy life, she thought about those lovers sometimes and hoped things had turned out well for them.

Отправить