The Secret Keeper

  Vivien cursed that part of her. She crossed the street and walked faster along the paving stones, her shoes clipping coldly. Foolish woman. He’d visited her mind that night for no reason other than that her brain had somehow thrown his image into the unconscious jumble that gave rise to dreams.

  ‘Wait,’ he said, close behind now. ‘God, you weren’t joking about your speed. You ought to think about the Olympics. A champion like you—it’d be good for the country’s morale don’t you think?’

  She felt herself slow marginally as he reached her side, but she didn’t look at him, only listened when he said. ‘I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot. I didn’t mean to tease back there, I was just so pleased to have run into you like this.’

  She glanced at him, ‘Oh? Why is that?’

  He stopped walking, and there was something in the seriousness of his expression that made her stop too. She looked up and down the street, checking she hadn’t been followed by anybody else as he said, ‘No need to be worried, it’s just—I’ve been thinking a lot since we met about the hospital, about Nella—the little girl in the photo.’

  ‘I know who Nella is,’ Vivien snapped. ‘I saw her just this week.’ ‘She’s still in the hospital then?’

  ‘She is.’

  Her brevity, she saw, made him wince—good—but then he smiled, presumably trying to thaw her. ‘Look, I’d like to visit her, that’s all. I didn’t mean to bother you, and I promise not to get in your way. If you’d take me there some time, I’d be very grateful.’

  Vivien knew she should say no. The last thing she needed—or want- ed—was a man like him tagging along when she went to Dr Tomalin’s place. The whole affair was dangerous enough as it was; Henry was already growing suspicious. But he was looking at her so keenly, and damn it, his face was full of light and goodness somehow—hope—and that feeling was back, the shimmering craving of the dream.

  ‘Please?’ He lifted his hand towards her; in the dream she’d held it. ‘You’ll need to keep up,’ she said sharply. ‘And it’s only this once.’ ‘What? You mean now? That’s where you’re headed?’

  ‘Yes. And I’m running very late.’ She didn’t say ‘thanks to you’, but she hoped it was implied. ‘I have … an appointment to keep.’

  ‘I won’t get in your way. Promise.’

  She hadn’t meant to encourage him, but she could tell by his grin that she had. ‘I’ll take you there today,’ she said, ‘but then you’re to disappear.’

  ‘You know I’m not really invisible, right?’

  She didn’t smile. ‘You’re to go back to wherever it was you came from and forget all about what I told you that night in the canteen.’ ‘You have my word.’ He held out his hand for her to shake, ‘My name’s—’

  ‘No.’ She said it quickly and saw by his face that she’d taken him by surprise. ‘No names. Friends exchange names, and we’re not that.’ He blinked and then nodded.

  She sounded cold; she was glad; she’d been foolish enough already. ‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘After I’ve taken you to visit Nella, I trust that you and I will never meet again.’

  Jimmy hadn’t been joking, not entirely—Vivien Jenkins walked like someone with a target painted on her back. More aptly, like someone trying to stay two paces ahead of the fellow she’d reluctantly agreed to escort to a rendezvous with her lover. He had to jog a little to keep up as she hurried through the rabbit warren of riverside streets, and there was no way he’d have been able to make conversation at the same time. Just as well, too: the less said between them the better. Like she’d said, they weren’t friends, nor were they going to be. He was glad she’d spelled it out—it was a timely reminder for Jimmy, who had a habit of getting on with most people, that he didn’t want to know Vivien Jenkins any more than she wanted to know him.

  He’d agreed to Doll’s plan in the end partly because she’d promised him no one would get hurt. ‘Can’t you see how simple it is?’ she’d said, squeezing his hand tightly in the Lyons Corner House by Marble Arch. ‘You bump into her accidentally—or so it seems—and while you’re to- ing and froing about what a coincidence it is, you tell her you’d like to visit the little girl, the one from the bomb blast, the orphan.’

  ‘Nella,’ he’d said, watching the way the sunlight failed to bring a shine to the metal table rim.

  ‘She’ll agree—who wouldn’t? Especially when you tell her how moved you were by the child’s plight—which is true, Jim-my, isn’t it? You told me yourself you wanted to go and check how she was getting on.’

  He nodded, still not meeting her eyes.

  ‘So you go with her, find a way to arrange one more meeting, and then I turn up and take a photograph of the two of you looking, you know, close. We’ll send her a letter—anonymously, of course—letting her know what I have, and then she’ll be only too happy to do what’s necessary to keep it secret.’ Dolly had killed her cigarette by stabbing it violently into the ashtray. ‘See? It’s so simple it’s foolproof.’

  Simple, perhaps, foolproof even, but still not right. ‘It’s extortion, Doll,’ he’d said softly, and then, turning his head to look at her, ‘It’s stealing.’

  ‘No—’ Dolly was adamant—‘it’s justice; it’s what she de-serves after what she did to me, to us, Jimmy—not to mention what she’s doing to her husband. Besides, she’s got loads of money—she won’t even miss the small amount we ask for.’

  ‘But her husband, he’ll—’

  ‘Never know—that’s the beauty of it, Jimmy, it’s all hers. The house they live in on Campden Grove, the private income … Vivien’s grandmother left it to her with a stipulation she was to retain control even after marriage. You should have heard Lady Gwendolyn on the mat- ter—she thought it was the most tremendous lark.’

  He hadn’t answered and Dolly must have sensed his reluctance, because she started to panic. Her already large eyes widened imploringly and she knotted her fingers together, prayer-like. ‘Don’t you see?’ she said. ‘She’ll hardly feel it, but we’ll be able to live together, man and wife. Happily ever after, Jim-my.’

  He still hadn’t known what to say so he said nothing, toying with a match as the tension between them continued to swell, and his thoughts had drifted, as they always did when Jimmy was upset, like a curlicue of smoke, away from the issue at hand. He found himself thinking of his father. The room they were sharing until they found something better, and the way the old man sat at the window watching the street, wondering aloud whether Jimmy’s mother would know where to find them now, wondering whether perhaps that’s why she didn’t come, and asking Jimmy every night if they mightn’t please go back to the other flat now. He cried sometimes, and it damn near broke Jimmy’s heart to hear the old man sobbing into his pillow and saying over and over to no one in particular that he just wished things could go back to how they’d been. When he had children, Jimmy hoped he’d know just the right words to say to make everything better when they cried as if the world was coming apart, but it was harder somehow when the crying person was your dad. There were so many people weeping into their pillows these days—Jimmy thought of all the lost souls he’d photographed since the war began, the dispossessed and grieving, the hopeless and the brave, and he looked at Doll, lighting another cigarette now and smoking it anxiously, so changed from that girl by the seaside with laughter in her eyes, and he thought there were probably a lot of people who’d join his father in wishing to go back.

  Or forward. The match snapped between his fingers. You couldn’t go backwards, could you, that was just wishful thinking, but there was another way out of now and it was forwards. He remembered how he’d felt in the weeks after Dolly said she couldn’t marry him, the vast emptiness that had stretched blackly ahead, the loneliness that had kept him awake at night, listening to the wretched, endless beating of his own heart; his father’s sobbing; and he wondered finally whether there was really anything so terrible in what Doll suggested.

  Ordinarily Jimmy might’ve
answered that yes there was, he’d once had very clear ideas about right and wrong; but now, with the war, with everything being blown to pieces around them, well—Jimmy shook his head uncertainly—things were just different somehow. There were times, he realised, when a person stuck to their rigid ideas at their own risk.

  He brought the pieces of matchstick into perfect alignment and, as he did so, Jimmy heard Doll sigh next to him. He glanced at her as she collapsed back against the leather seat and buried her face in her small hands. He noticed again the scratches on her arms, how thin she’d become. ‘I’m sorry, Jim-my,’ she said through her fingers, ‘I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. It was just an idea. I just—I just wanted—’. Her voice was a whisper now, as if she couldn’t bear to hear herself speak the awful simple truth. ‘She made me feel like I was nothing, Jimmy.’

  Dolly liked to play make-believe, and there was no one like her for disappearing beneath the skin of an imagined character, but Jimmy knew her well and in that moment her naked honesty cut him to the core. Vivien Jenkins had made his beautiful Doll—she, who was so clever and sparkly, whose laugh made him feel more alive, who had so damn much to offer the world—feel like she was nothing. Jimmy didn’t need to hear anything more.

  ‘Hurry up.’ Vivien Jenkins had stopped walking and was waiting for him on the doorstep of a brick building, indistinguishable from those either side except for a brass plate on the door: ‘Dr M. Tomalin, MD’. She was checking the fine rose-gold wristwatch she wore like a bracelet and her dark hair caught the sunlight as she tilted her head to glance down the street beyond him. ‘I have to move quickly, Mr—’ she drew a sharp breath, remembering their arrangement—‘well, you anyway. I’m late enough as it is.’

  Jimmy followed her inside, arriving in what once must have been the entrance hall of a grand home but was now being used as a reception area. A woman whose silver hair was styled patriotically in a determined-looking Victory roll glanced up from where she sat behind a turned-leg desk.

  ‘This gentleman is here to see Nella Brown,’ Vivien said.

  The other woman’s attention shifted to Jimmy and she regarded him for an unblinking instant over the top of her half-spectacles. He smiled; she didn’t; he realised that further explanation was necessary, furthermore it was expected. Jimmy took a step closer to the desk. He felt like a character from Dickens all of a sudden, the boy from the forge tugging his forelock in the face of greatness. ‘I know Nella,’ he said, ‘sort of. That is, we met the night her family was killed. I’m a photographer. For the newspapers. I’ve come to say hello—to see how she’s doing.’ He made himself stop talking then. He looked at Vivien, hopeful she might step in and vouch for him, but she didn’t.

  A clock ticked somewhere, a plane flew overhead, and at length, the nurse released a slow considering sigh. ‘I see,’ she said, as if it were against her better judgement to admit him. ‘A photographer. For the newspapers. And what did you say your name was?’

  ‘Jimmy,’ he said, glancing again at Vivien. She looked away ‘Jimmy Metcalfe.’ He could have lied—he probably should have—but he didn’t think of it in time. He hadn’t had much practice with duplicity. ‘I just wanted to see how Nella’s getting on.’

  The woman regarded him, lips fixed neatly together, and then she nodded briefly. ‘All right then, Mr Metcalfe, follow me. But I warn you, I won’t have my hospital or my charges upset. Any sign of trouble and you’re out.’

  Jimmy smiled gratefully. A little fearfully, too.

  She tucked her chair in neatly beneath the desk, straightened the gold cross that hung on a fine chain round her neck, and then, without a backward glance, started up the sweeping stairs with a clarity of purpose that demanded he follow. Jimmy did. He was halfway up when he realised Vivien hadn’t come with them. He turned back and saw her standing by a doorway on the far wall, straightening her appearance in an oval mirror.

  ‘You’re not coming?’ he said. It was meant to be a whisper, but the shape of the room, the dome in the ceiling, made it echo terribly.

  She shook her head. I have something else to do—somebody to see—’. She flushed. ‘Go—go! I can’t keep talking, I’m already late.’

  Jimmy stayed for about an hour, watching the little girl tap-dance, and then a bell sounded and Nella said, ‘That’s lunch,’ and he figured it was time to say goodbye. She held his hand as they walked together down the corridor, and when they reached the stairs she looked up at him: ‘When are you coming to visit me again?’ she said. Jimmy hesitated— he hadn’t thought that far ahead—but when he looked at her open earnest face, he had a sudden pressing memory of his mother leaving, followed by a lightning-bright flash of awareness that came too fast to pin down but which had something to do with the innocence of children, the willingness with which they trusted, and how little it took for them to put their small soft hand in yours and presume you wouldn’t disappoint them. He said, ‘How about in a couple of days’ time?’ and then she smiled and waved and tapped her way along the corridor to the dining room.

  ‘That was the very perfect thing to do,’ said Doll later that evening, when he was telling her all about it. She’d listened avidly to his entire account, eyes widening when he mentioned the mirror outside the doctor’s rooms, the way Vivien had blushed—guiltily, they agreed— when she realised Jimmy had seen her fixing herself up (‘I told you, Jimmy, didn’t I? She’s seeing that doctor behind her husband’s back’). Now Doll smiled. ‘Oh, Jimmy, we’re getting so close!’

  Jimmy didn’t feel so certain. He lit a cigarette. ‘I don’t know, Doll. It’s complicated—I promised Vivien I wouldn’t go back to the hospital—’ ‘Yes, and you promised Nella that you would.’

  ‘Then you see my problem.’

  ‘What problem? You’re hardly going to break your promise to a child, are you? An orphan at that.’

  He wasn’t, of course he wasn’t, but he obviously hadn’t made Doll understand just how caustic Vivien had been. Before he went upstairs with the silver-haired woman, he’d started to suggest that the two of them might meet up afterwards for the walk back to Kensington, and Vivien had looked at him as if the idea repulsed her.

  ‘Jimmy?’ Dolly said again. ‘You’re not going to disappoint Nella, are you?’

  ‘No, no,’ he waved the hand that was holding his cigarette, ‘I’ll go back. Vivien won’t be happy though. She was quite clear about it.’ ‘You’ll bring her round.’ Dolly took his face gently between his hands. ‘I don’t think you realise, Jimmy, how people warm to you.’ She brought her face close to his so that her lips were touching his ear. She whispered playfully, ‘Just look how I’m warming to you.’

  Jimmy smiled, but distractedly, as she kissed him lightly. He was busy envisaging Vivien Jenkins’s disapproving face when she saw him again at the hospital, defying her direct orders. He was still trying to work out how he would explain his reappearance—was it enough just to say that Nella had asked him to come?—when Dolly sat back and said,

  ‘It really is the simplest way.’

  Jimmy nodded. She was right; he knew she was.

  ‘Visit Nella, bump into Vivien, set a time and a place and leave the rest to me.’ She tilted her head and smiled at him; she looked younger when she did. ‘Simple?’

  Jimmy managed a faint smile in return. ‘Simple.’

  And so it had seemed, except that Jimmy didn’t bump into Vivien. He went to the hospital every chance he had over the next fortnight, squeezing in visits to Nella between his responsibilities at work, and to his dad, and to Doll. But although he saw Vivien twice from a distance, neither occasion gave him the opportunity to reverse her ill opinion of him and somehow convince her to meet him again. The first time, she’d been leaving the hospital at the same time Jimmy turned the corner into Highbury Street. She had stopped on the doorstep, glancing in either direction as she lifted a scarf up to hide her face from anyone who might recognise her. He’d picked up pace, but by the time he got near the hospital i
t was too late and she’d stalked off in the opposite direction, head down against prying eyes.

  The second time she hadn’t been so careful. Jimmy had just arrived in the hospital reception and was waiting to let Myra (the silver-haired receptionist—they’d become quite friendly over the weeks) know that he was heading up to see Nella, when he’d noticed that the door behind the desk stood ajar. He’d been able to see into Dr Tomalin’s office, and there he’d glimpsed Vivien, laughing softly at someone hidden behind the door. As he watched, a man’s hand came to rest on her bare arm and Jimmy felt his stomach start to churn.

  He wished he’d brought his camera; he couldn’t make out much of the doctor, but he could see Vivien clearly enough: the man’s hand on her arm, the happy expression on her face …

  Of all the days not to have his equipment with him—it would’ve been all they needed. Jimmy was still fuming at him-self when Myra appeared from nowhere, closed the door, and asked him how his day was treating him.

  Then, finally, on Jimmy’s third Monday, as he rounded the top of the stairs and started down the corridor towards Nella’s dormitory, he saw a familiar figure walking ahead of him. It was Vivien. Jimmy lingered where he was, paying fierce and undue attention to the Dig for Victory poster on the wall, taking in the pigeon-toed child with his hoe and spade, while keeping both ears trained on her retreating footsteps. When she’d turned the corner he scurried after her, heart beginning to thump as he watched her progress from a distance. She reached a door in the wall, a small door Jimmy had never noticed before, and pulled it open. He followed, surprised when he found a flight of narrow stairs behind, leading upwards. He climbed, quickly but quietly, until a sliver of light ahead revealed the doorway she’d left by. He did the same, finding himself on a level of the old house with lower ceilings than those below, and less of a hospital feel. He could hear her distant footsteps but wasn’t sure which way she’d gone, until he glanced left and saw her shadow slide across the faded blue and gold wallpaper. He smiled to himself—the boy in him was rather enjoying the chase—and went after her.