The Secret Keeper

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘I pretended not to like it—I wanted to be independent—but it was lovely.’

  Laurel smiled as she collected the antique hairbrush from the shelf behind the bed; she passed it gently over her mother’s dandelion fluff and tried to picture what she must have been like as a little girl. Full of adventure, no doubt, naughty at times, but with the sort of spirit that made people fond rather than cross. Laurel supposed she’d never know, not unless her mother told her.

  Dorothy’s eyelids, paper-thin, had closed and the fine wiry nerves inside them twitched occasionally at whatever mysterious pictures were forming on the black beneath. Her breathing slowed as Laurel stroked her hair, and when it took on the rhythm of slumber, Laurel set down the brush as quietly as she could. She pulled the crocheted rug a little higher on her mother’s lap and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

  ‘Goodbye, Ma,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll come again tomorrow.’

  She was creeping from the room, careful not to jiggle her bag or make too much noise with her shoes, when a drowsy voice said, ‘That boy.’

  Laurel turned, surprised. Her mother’s eyes were still closed.

  ‘That boy, Laurel,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Which boy?’

  ‘The one you’ve been going around with—Billy.’ Her misty eyes opened and she turned her head towards Laurel. She lifted a feeble finger and her voice when she spoke was soft, sad. ‘You think I don’t notice? You think I wasn’t young once myself? That I don’t know how it feels to fancy a handsome boy?’

  Laurel realised then that her mother was no longer in the hospital room; that she was back at Greenacres, talking to her teenage daughter. The fact was unnerving.

  ‘Are you listening to me, Laurel?’

  She swallowed, found her voice. ‘I’m listening, Mummy.’ It had been a long time since she’d called her mother that.

  ‘If he asks you to marry him and you love him, then you must say yes … Do you understand me?’

  Laurel nodded. She felt strange, dizzy and rather hot. The nurses had said her mother’s mind was drifting these days, in and out of the present like a radio tuner slipping its station, but what had brought her here? Why would her focus settle on a boy she’d barely known, a fleeting crush of Laurel’s from so very long ago?

  Dorothy’s lips moved against one another softly, and then she said. ‘I made so many mistakes … so many mistakes.’ Her cheeks were moist with seeping tears. ‘Love, Laurel, that’s the only reason to get married. For love.’

  Laurel made it as far as the toilets in the hospital corridor. She turned on the tap, cupped her hands and collected some water to toss on her face; she leaned her palms on the basin. There were hairline fractures near the plughole and they merged together as her vision glazed. Laurel closed her eyes. Her pulse was beating like a jackhammer in her ears. God, she was shaken.

  It wasn’t merely the fact of being spoken to like a teenager, the instant erasure of fifty years, the conjuring of a long-ago boy, the faraway feeling of first love fluttering at her edges. It was the words themselves, the urgency in Ma’s voice as she spoke, the sincerity that suggested she was offering her teen-age daughter the wealth of her own experience. That she was pressing Laurel to make choices that she, Dorothy, had not—to avoid making the mistakes she had.

  But it didn’t make sense. Her mother had loved her father; Laurel knew it just as certainly as she knew her own name. They’d been married for five and a half decades before Daddy’s death without so much as a sniff of marital disharmony. If Dorothy had married for some other reason, if she’d regretted that decision all this time, she’d done a terrific job of pretending otherwise. No one could keep up a performance like that, surely? Of course they couldn’t. Besides, Laurel had heard the story of how her parents met and fell in love a hundred times before; she’d seen her mother gazing at her father’s face as he recounted the way he’d known at once that they were meant to be together.

  Laurel looked up. Grandma Nicolson had had her doubts though, hadn’t she? Laurel had always been aware of some-thing uncomfortable between her mother and grandmother—a formality in the way they spoke to one another, the stern set of the older woman’s mouth when she was looking at her daughter-in-law and thought no one else was watching. And then, when Laurel was fifteen or so and they were visiting Grandma Nicolson’s boarding house by the sea, she’d overheard some-thing she shouldn’t have. She’d spent too long in the sun one morning and come in early with a raging headache and a bad case of sunburned shoulders. She was lying in her darkened bedroom, nursing a wet flannel on her forehead and a feeling of great hardship in her breast, when Grandma Nicolson and her elderly boarder, Miss Perry, happened along the corridor.

  ‘He’s a real credit to you, Gertrude,’ Miss Perry was saying, ‘Of course, he always was a good lad.’

  ‘Yes, worth his weight in gold, my Stephen. More help around here than his father ever was.’ Grandma had paused, waiting for the knowing grunt of agreement that was forthcoming from her consort, and then continued, ‘Kind-hearted, too. Never could resist a stray.’

  That’s when Laurel had grown interested. The words were weighted with the echoes of previous conversations and certainly Miss Perry seemed to know precisely what it was of which they spoke. ‘No,’ she’d said. ‘The lad didn’t stand a chance, did he? Not with one as beautiful as her.’

  ‘Beautiful? Well, I suppose if you like that sort of thing. A bit, too—’ Grandma paused for thought and Laurel craned to hear which word she’d pluck—‘a bit too ripe, for my tastes.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Miss Perry backpedalled fast, ‘terribly ripe. Knew a good wicket when she saw it though, didn’t she?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘Knew a soft touch when she met it.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘And to think he might’ve married a nice local girl like that Pauline Simmonds down the street. I always thought she might have been sweet on him.’

  ‘Of course she was,’ Grandma snapped, ‘and who could blame her? Hadn’t counted on Dorothy, though, had we? Poor Pauline didn’t stand a chance, not against one like her, not against her when she had her mind set.’

  ‘Such a shame.’ Miss Perry knew her cue and her line. ‘Such a terrible shame.’

  ‘Bewitched him, she did. My dear boy didn’t know what had hit him. He thought she was an innocent, of course, and who could blame him—back from France just a few short months when they married. She had his head in a spin—she’s one of those people though, isn’t she, who gets whatever she sets her mind to.’

  ‘And she wanted him.’

  ‘She wanted an escape, and my son gave it to her. No sooner were they wed and she dragged him away from everything and everyone he knew to start again in that tumbledown farm-house. I blame myself, of course—’

  ‘But you mustn’t!’

  ‘I was the one who brought her into this house.’

  ‘There was a war on, it was near impossible to get good staff—you weren’t to know.’

  ‘But that’s just it. I should have known; I should have made it my business to know. I was far too trusting. At least I was at the start. I made enquiries about her but not until after, and by then it was too late.’ ‘What do you mean? Too late for what? What did you find out?’

  But whatever it was Grandma Nicolson had found remained a mystery to Laurel, for the two of them moved out of earshot before her grandmother could expand. To be honest it hadn’t concerned Laurel too much at the time. Grandma Nicolson was a prude and an atten- tion-seeker who liked to make her eldest granddaughter’s life a misery by reporting to her parents if she so much as looked at a boy on the beach. Whatever it was Grandma thought she’d discovered about their mother, Laurel had decided as she lay there cursing her throbbing head, it was bound to be an exaggeration, if not an all out fiction.

  Now though … Laurel dried her face and hands … now though, she wasn’t so sure. Grandma’s suspicions—that Dor
othy had been seeking an escape, that she wasn’t as innocent as she appeared, that her hasty marriage had been one of convenience—seemed to tally, in some ways, with the things her mother had said just now.

  Had Dorothy Smitham been running from a broken engagement when she turned up at Mrs Nicolson’s boarding house? Was that what Grandma had found out? It was possible, but there had to be more to it than that. A previous relationship might have been enough to sour her grandmother’s milk—Lord knows it hadn’t taken much—but surely it wasn’t the sort of thing her mother might still be crying over sixty years later (guiltily, it seemed to Laurel, all that talk of mistakes, of not thinking straight)—unless she’d run away from her fiance with-out telling him? But why, if she’d loved him so much, would Ma have done such a thing? Why hadn’t she just married him? And what did any of it have to do with Vivien and Henry Jenkins?

  There was something Laurel wasn’t seeing, lots of things, probably. She let out a hot sigh of exasperation that echoed around the small tiled bathroom. She felt thoroughly thwarted. So many disparate clues that meant nothing on their own. Laurel tore off a piece of toilet tissue and dabbed the mascara that had smeared beneath her eyes. The whole mystery was like the beginning of a child’s dot-to-dot, or a constellation in the night sky. Their father had once taken them sky-watching when Laurel was small. They’d set up camp on the rise above Blind- man’s Wood and, as they waited for the dusk to darken and the stars to appear, he’d told them about the time he’d been lost as a boy and followed the stars home. ‘You just have to look for the pictures,’ he’d said, lining up his telescope on its stand. ‘If you ever find yourself alone in the dark, they’ll show you the way back.’

  ‘But I can’t see any pictures,’ Laurel had protested, rubbing her mittens together and squinting at the twinkling stars above.

  Daddy had smiled at her then, fondly. ‘That’s because you’re looking at the stars themselves,’ he’d said, ‘instead of the spaces in between. You have to draw lines in your mind, that’s when you’ll begin to see the whole picture.’

  Laurel stared at herself in the hospital mirror. She blinked and the memory of her lovely father dissolved. A sudden pressing ache of mortal grief took its place—she missed him, she was getting older, her mother was fading.

  What a bloody mess she looked. Laurel took out her comb and did what she could with her hair. It was a start. She pushed air through her lips with a thoughtful steadiness. Finding pictures in the constellations had never been her strong suit. Gerry was the one who’d been able to wow them all by making sense of the night-time sky; even as a small boy, he’d pointed out patterns and pictures where Laurel saw only deep dark space.

  Thoughts of her brother tugged at Laurel. They ought to be together on this search, damn it. It belonged to both of them. She took out her mobile phone and checked for missed calls.

  Nothing. Still nothing.

  She scrolled through the address book until she found his number and pressed to make the call. She waited, biting her thumbnail as a distant telephone on a cluttered Cambridge office desk, rang and rang and rang. Finally, a click and then: ‘Hello, you’ve reached Gerry Nicolson. I’m shooting stars at the minute. You’re welcome to leave your details.’ No promise that he’d do anything with them though, Laurel noted wryly. She didn’t leave a message. She’d just have to go on alone for now.

  Fourteen

  London, January 1941

  DOLLY HANDED OVER her umpteenth cup of soup and smiled at whatever it was the young fireman had just said. The laughter, the chatter, the piano music were all too loud to know for sure, but judging by the look on his face it was something flirtatious. It never hurt to smile, so Dolly did, and when he took his soup and went in search of somewhere to sit, she was rewarded, finally, with a break in the flow of hungry mouths to feed and an opportunity to sit down and rest her weary feet.

  They were killing her. She’d been held up leaving Campden Grove when Lady Gwendolyn’s bag of sweets went ‘missing’ and the old woman had descended into a tremendous misery. The sweets turned up eventually, pressed into the mattress beneath the grande dame’s grande derriere; but by then Dolly was so strapped for time she’d had to run all the way to Church Street in a pair of satin shoes made for no greater duty than being admired. She’d arrived out of breath and sore of foot, only to have her hopes of sneaking in beneath the veil of carousing soldiers dashed. She was spied mid-flight by the team leader, Mrs Wad- dingham, a snout-faced woman with a terrible case of eczema that kept her in gloves and a filthy mood, no matter the weather.

  ‘Late again, Dorothy,’ she said, through lips as tight as a dachshund’s arse. ‘I need you in the kitchen serving soup, we’ve been run off our feet all evening.’

  Dolly knew the feeling. Worse luck, a quick glance confirmed her haste had been in vain—Vivien wasn’t even there. Which made no sense because Dolly had checked carefully that they’d be working the evening shift together; what was more, she’d waved at Vivien from Lady Gwendolyn’s window not one hour before, when she was leaving number 25 in her WVS uniform.

  ‘Get on then, girl,’ said Mrs Waddingham, making a scoot-scoot motion with her gloved hands. ‘Into the kitchen you go. The war’s not going to wait for a girl like you now, is it?’

  Dolly battled an urge to fell the other woman with a sharp jab to the shins, but decided it wouldn’t be proper. She bit back a smile—some- times imagining really was as good as doing—and gave Mrs Wadding- ham an obsequious nod instead.

  The canteen had been set up in the crypt of St Mary’s church and the ‘kitchen’ was a small draughty alcove across which a trestle table had been dressed with a skirt and a string of union jacks to form a counter. There was a small sink in the corner, a paraffin stove to keep the soup hot and, best of all as far as Dolly was concerned right now, a spare pew leaned against the wall.

  She took a last glance at the room to make sure her absence wouldn’t be noticed: the trestle tables were full of satisfied servicemen, a couple of ambulance drivers were playing table tennis, and the rest of the WVS ladies were busy clicking their knitting needles and tongues in the far corner. Mrs Waddingham was among them, her back turned on the kitchen, and Dolly decided to risk the dragon’s wrath. Two hours was an awfully long time to be on one’s feet. She sat down and slipped off her shoes; with a sigh of sweet relief, she arched her stocking-clad toes slowly back and forth.

  WVS members weren’t supposed to smoke in the canteen (fire regulations), but Dolly dug inside her bag and pulled out one of the crisp new packets she’d got from Mr Hopton the grocer. The soldiers always smoked—no one had the heart to stop them—and a permanent grey tobacco cloud hugged the ceiling; Dolly decided no one would notice if a little more drifted its way. She eased herself onto the tiled floor and struck the match, giving herself over finally to thoughts of the rather momentous thing that had happened that afternoon.

  It had all got off to rather an ordinary start: Dolly had been dispatched to the grocer’s after lunch and, embarrassing as it was to remember now, the task had put her in a foul mood. It wasn’t easy to find sweets these days, sugar being rationed and all, but Lady Gwendolyn was never one to take no for an answer and Dolly had been forced to trawl the back streets of Notting Hill in search of the friend of someone’s uncle’s landlord, who—it was whispered—still had such contraband to sell. She’d only just got inside number 7 two hours later and was still removing her scarf and gloves, when the doorbell rang.

  The type of day she’d been having, Dolly had fully expected to find a rabble of pesky kids collecting scrap metal for Spitfires; instead, she’d found a tidy little man with a thin moustache and a strawberry birthmark covering one cheek. He was carrying an enormous black alligator briefcase, bulging at the seams, the weight of which appeared to be causing him some discomfort. One glance at his neat comb-over was enough to recognise, however, that he wasn’t the sort to admit vexation.

  ‘Pemberly,’ he said briskly. ‘Reginald P
emberly, solicitor at law, here to see Lady Gwendolyn Caldicott.’ He bent forward leaning closer to add, with a secretive hushing of the voice, ‘It’s a matter of some urgency.’

  Dolly had heard mention of Mr Pemberly (‘A mouse of a man, not a patch on his father, knows how to keep a clean ledger, though, so I permit him to do my business …’), but she’d never come face to face with the man before. She let him in, out of the freezing cold, and ran upstairs to check that Lady Gwendolyn was happy to see him. She was never happy, not really, but where matters of money were concerned she was ever vigilant and so—despite sucking in her cheeks with sullen disdain—she waved a porcine hand to signal the fellow might be admitted to her bower.

  ‘Good morning, Lady Gwendolyn,’ he puffed (there were three flights of stairs, after all). ‘So sorry to call suddenly like this, but it’s the bombing, you see. I was hit rather hard back in December, and I’ve lost all my papers and files. Dreadful nuisance, as you can imagine, but I’m putting it all back together now—I’m going to carry the lot on my person henceforth.’ He tapped his bulging bag.

  Dolly was dismissed and spent the next half hour in her bedroom, glue and scissors in hand, updating her Book of Ideas, and glancing at her wristwatch with increasing anxiety as the minutes ticked ever closer to her WVS shift. Finally, the silver bell tinkled upstairs and she was summoned again to her lady’s chamber.

  ‘Show Mr Pemberly out,’ Lady Gwendolyn said, pausing to concede a bloated hiccup, ‘then come back and tuck me in for the night.’ Dolly had smiled and agreed, and been waiting for the solicitor to heave his bag, when the old girl added, with customary insouciance: ‘This is Dorothy, Mr Pemberly, Dorothy Smitham. The one I was telling you about.’

  There’d been an immediate shift in the solicitor’s bearing after that. ‘A pleasure to make your acquaintance,’ he’d said with great deference, and then he’d stood back for Dolly and held open the door. They’d exchanged polite conversation all the way down the stairs and when they reached the front and were conducting farewells, he’d turned to her and said, with a hint of awe, ‘You’ve done a remarkable thing, young lady. I can’t think that I’ve ever seen dear Lady Gwendolyn so cheerful, not since the terrible business with her sister. Why, she didn’t so much as raise a hand in anger, let alone her cane the whole time I was with her. Splendid stuff. Little wonder she’s so tremendously fond of you.’ And then he’d stunned Dolly by surrendering a little wink.