Of course, he could be silly and affected, and maybe he did occasionally make things up, but what sixteen-year-old didn’t? She herself had spent most of her sixteenth year in Middle Wallop imagining that Nigel Thorn Davies, her father’s red-faced land agent, was secretly and painfully in love with her, and that he would seize her and declare his feelings for her at any moment—at dusk in the summerhouse, or on a country walk somewhere leafy and private. Sometimes it seemed to her that she’d spent her whole life imagining things would happen that hadn’t. And she still smiled to remember that moment on the ship when she’d played Guy the Jelly Roll Morton record. The satisfying way he’d yelped, how his skinny neck had jerked around like a ball on an elastic band. In that moment, he’d been what the Negro jazz musicians at the Taj called “a gone coon,” and wildness was something she wistfully appreciated. But even so, she was tremendously relieved when Viva phoned on Tuesday morning to apologize once more for her outburst.
