The Secret Keeper

  With all the activity, he forgot about Myra’s comments, and it wasn’t until he’d said goodbye to the kids and was heading back downstairs that Jimmy started to muse on how best to reassure her she was imagining things, or whether it was even necessary. He fronted up to her desk when he reached the foyer, but before he could say a word, reassuring or otherwise, Myra said, ‘There you are, Jimmy. Dr Tomalin wants to say hello,’ with just the sort of reverence she might have used if the king himself had decided to drop by for the afternoon and expressed an interest in meeting him. She reached to brush a piece of lint from his collar.

  Jimmy waited, aware of a rising bitterness in his throat, an old familiar feeling he used to get as a boy when he imagined confronting the man who’d stolen his mum away from them. The minutes felt interminable until finally the door behind the desk opened and a dignified gentleman emerged. Jimmy’s antagonism dissolved, leaving him mightily confused. The other man had white hair, neatly cropped, and glasses so thick the lenses were bottle-ends; he was eighty years old if he was a day.

  ‘So. You’re Jimmy Metcalfe,’ the old doctor said, light blue eyes rheumy as he reached to shake Jimmy’s hand. ‘I trust you’re getting on all right?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, sir. Very well.’ Jimmy was fumbling, trying to grasp the meaning of everything. The man’s age didn’t preclude him from a love affair with Vivien Jenkins, not entirely, but still …

  ‘On something of a tight leash, I’d imagine,’ the doctor continued, ‘between Myra here and Mrs Jenkins. Granddaughter of an old friend of mine, you know, young Vivien.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘No? Well. Now you do.’

  Jimmy nodded and attempted a smile.

  ‘Anyway. Tremendous work you’re doing, helping out the children. Very kind. Much obliged.’ And with that he nodded stiffly and retreated to his office, a slight limp in his left leg.

  ‘He likes you,’ Myra said, eyes wide as the door closed.

  Jimmy’s thoughts were circling as he tried to sort his certain-ties from his suspicions. ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘How could you tell?’

  ‘He acknowledged your existence. He doesn’t have time for many adults. Prefers children, always has.’

  ‘You’ve known him a long time?’

  ‘I’ve worked for him these past thirty years.’ She puffed out proudly, straightening her cross so it sat flat in the V of her blouse. ‘I tell you,’ she said, eyeing Jimmy over the top of her half-spectacles, ‘he doesn’t tolerate many adults in his hospital. You’re the only one I’ve ever seen him make an effort with.’

  ‘Except Vivien, of course.’ Jimmy was digging. Myra, surely, would be able to set the record straight. ‘Mrs Jenkins, I should say.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Myra twirled her hand, ‘of course. But then he’s known her since she was a child herself—it’s hardly the same thing. He’s like a grandfather to her. In fact, I’d wager you’ve her to thank for him taking the time of day just now. Must’ve put in a good word for you.’ Myra caught herself then. ‘Anyway, he likes you. That’s lovely. Now—don’t you have photographs to take for my newspaper tomorrow morning?’ Jimmy signalled a mock salute that made her smile and then he started on his way.

  His head was spinning as he walked back home.

  Dolly had been wrong—no matter how certain she’d been, she’d got it wrong. There was no affair between Dr Tomalin and Vivien—the old man was ‘like a grandfather’ to her. And she—Jimmy shook his head, horrified at the things he’d thought, the way he’d judged her—she was no adulteress, she was just a woman, a good woman, at that, who’d given up her time to bring a bit of happiness to a group of orphans who’d lost everything.

  It was strange, perhaps, when everything he’d believed so strongly had been proved a lie, but Jimmy felt oddly light. He couldn’t wait to tell Doll; there was no need now to go through with the plan; Vivien was guilty of nothing.

  ‘Except being nasty to me,’ Dolly replied, when he said as much to her. ‘But I suppose that counts for nothing now you’re such good friends.’

  ‘Stop it, Doll,’ Jimmy said. ‘It’s not like that at all. Look—’. He reached to take her hands across the table, adopting the sort of light gentle voice that suggested the whole thing had been a bit of a lark but it was time now to call it quits. ‘I know she treated you unkindly, and I think the worse of her for that. But this plan—it’s not going to work. She’s not guilty—she’d read the letter and laugh if you sent it. She’d probably show it to her husband and he’d have a good laugh too.’

  ‘No she won’t.’ Dolly pulled her hands back and crossed her arms. She was stubborn, or perhaps she was merely desperate, it could be hard to spot the difference sometimes. ‘No woman wants her husband to think she’s having an affair with another man. She’ll still give us the money.’

  Jimmy took out a cigarette and lit it, eyeing Doll from behind the flame. Once upon a time he’d have moved to cajole her, his adoration would have blinded him to her faults. Now, though, things were different. There was a fracture that ran right the way across Jimmy’s heart, a fine line that had appeared the night Dolly told him she wouldn’t marry him and then left him on that restaurant floor. The break had been mended since then, and most of the time it couldn’t be seen; but just like the vase his mother had dashed to the ground the day they went to Liberty’s and which his dad had glued back together, the fault lines would always show up under certain lights. Jimmy loved Dolly, that would never change—for Jimmy loyalty was like breathing—but as he looked at her across the other side of the table, he thought that he didn’t really like her much right then.

  Vivien came back. She’d been gone just over a week and when Jimmy turned the attic corner, opened the door, and saw her in the centre of a hoard of fast-talking children, something rather unexpected happened. Jimmy was glad to see her. Not just glad, the world seemed a little brighter than it had only the moment before.

  He stopped where he was. ‘Vivien Jenkins,’ he said, causing her to look up and meet his eyes.

  She smiled at him and Jimmy smiled back, and he knew then that he was in a bit of trouble.

  Twenty-six

  New College Library, Oxford, 2011

  LAUREL SPENT the next fifty-seven minutes, each of them excruciating, pacing New College gardens. When the doors were finally unlocked, she all but set a library record, reminding herself of a shopper at the Boxing Day sales as she jostled past other people in her hurry to get back to her desk; certainly Ben seemed impressed when he arrived to find her already hard at work. ‘Cool,’ he said, eyes wide with wonder as he considered the possibility that she’d returned by the click of her fingers and the wiggle of her nose. Awed bafflement gave way to whispered concern, ‘I didn’t leave you in here by mistake, did I?’

  Laurel assured him he hadn’t, and got busy skimming through Katy’s first journal for 1941 in search of anything that might tell her how her mother’s plan had turned pear-shaped. There wasn’t much mention of Vivien in the first few months of the year, other than occasional notations advising that Katy had written or received a letter, and discreet statements along the lines of ‘all seems to go the same for Mrs Jenkins’, but then, on April 5th, 1941, things started to liven up:

  Today’s post brought word from my young friend, Vivien. It was a long letter by her standards, and I was alert immediately to the fact that something in her tone was changed. At first I was pleased, it seemed that a flush of her former spirit had returned, and I wondered that a new peace might have dawned on her concerns. But alas, no; for the letter did not describe a renewed commitment to home and hearth; rather, she wrote in lengthy and profuse details about the volunteer work she’s been doing at Dr Tomalin’s London hospital for orphaned children; entreating me, as always, to destroy her letter afterwards and refrain from making reference to her work in my response.

  I will of course comply, but I intend to implore her again, in the stron
gest possible terms, to cease all involvement with the place, at least until I can work out a lasting solution to her problems. Is it not enough she insists on making donations to the hospital’s running costs? Does she care nothing for her own health? She won’t stop, I know that; twenty years old now, but Vivien is still that stubborn child I first knew on our ship, refusing to heed my advice if it doesn’t suit her. I will write anyway. I could never forgive myself if the worst were to happen and I hadn’t done my best to steer her right.

  Laurel frowned. What worst? Clearly she was missing some-thing— why on earth would Katy Ellis, teacher and friend to small traumatised people everywhere, have felt so strongly that Vivien should cease volunteering at Dr Tomalin’s hospital for war orphans? Unless Dr Tomalin himself was a danger. Was that it? Or was the hospital perhaps located in an area that drew a lot of German bombers? Laurel pondered the question a minute before deciding it was impossible to know precisely what Katy feared without embarking on a tangential line of research that threatened to absorb what little time she had left. The question was intriguing, but irrelevant, she suspected, to the mission she was on to learn more about her mother’s plan. She continued reading:

  The cause of Vivien’s improved spirits was revealed to me on the second page of her letter. It appears she has met some-one, a young man, and although she is at pains to mention him in only the most casual terms—‘I am joined in my project with the children by another volunteer; a man who seems to know as little about boundaries as I know about turning lights into fairies’—I know my young friend well, and I suspect that her breezy veneer is a performance for my sake, designed to conceal something deeper. What precisely that something might be, I do not know, only that it is unlike her to devote so many lines to the discussion of an individual—friend or foe—whose acquaintance she has just made. I am wary. My instincts have never let me down before, and I plan to write at once to urge appropriate caution.

  Katy Ellis must have done just that, for her next journal entry contained a lengthy direct quote from a letter written by Vivien Jenkins, evidently in response to her concerns:

  How I miss you, Katy dear—it’s been over a year since last we met; it feels like ten. Your letter made me wish that we were sitting together beneath that tree at Nordstrom, the one by the lake where we used to picnic when you came to visit. Do you remember the night we crept from the great house and hung paper lanterns from the trees in the grove? We told my uncle that it must have been gypsies and he spent the whole of the next day stalking the grounds with that shotgun on his shoulder and his poor arthritic dog at his heels—darling old Dewey. Such a faithful hound.

  You lectured me later for causing mischief, but I seem to remember, Katy, that you were the one to describe in great detail at the breakfast table the ‘fearsome’ noises you’d heard in the night, when the ‘gypsies’ must’ve been ‘descending’ on the hallowed grounds of Nordstrom. Oh, but wasn’t it something, swimming by the light of the great silver moon? How I love to swim—it is to drop right over the edge of the world, isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve ever stopped believing I might just discover the hole on the stream floor that will lead me back.

  Ah, Katy—I wonder what age I will need to attain before you release me from your worries. What a burden I must be. Do you think you will still be minding me to keep my skirts clean and my nose dry when I am an old woman, clacking my knitting needles and rocking in my chair? How well you’ve looked out for me over the years, how difficult I’ve made that task for you at times, and how fortunate I am that it was you who met me that horrible day at the Southport railway station.

  You are wise as ever in your advice, and please, dearest, be reassured that I am equally wise in my actions. I am not a child any more, and know too well my responsibilities—you’re not reassured, are you? Even as you read this, you are shaking your head and thinking what a reckless person I am. To allay your fears, let me promise you that I have hardly spoken to the man in question (Jimmy is his name, by the way—let’s call him that, shall we—‘the man’ has rather a sinister feel to it); indeed, I have at all times done my best to discourage any contact, even veering, when necessary, into the realm of rudeness. Apologies for that, Katy dear, I know you would not like to see your young charge gaining a reputation for poor manners, and I for my part detest doing that which might bring your good name into disrepute!

  Laurel smiled. She liked Vivien; the response was tongue in cheek without straying into unkindness towards mother hen Katy and her wearying instinct towards worry. Even Katy had written beneath the extract: ‘It is nice to see my cheeky young friend returned. I’ve missed her these past years.’ Laurel liked less Vivien’s naming of the young man volunteering at the hospital with her. Was he the same Jimmy her mother had been in love with? Surely. Could it be a coincidence he was working with Vivien at Dr Tomalin’s hospital? Surely not. Laurel felt the rumblings of foreboding as the lovers’ plan began to take shape.

  Evidently Vivien had no idea of the connection between the nice young man at the hospital and her onetime friend, Doro-thy—which wasn’t surprising, Laurel supposed. Kitty Barker had mentioned how careful Ma was to keep her boyfriend away from Campden Grove. She’d also described the way emotions were intensified and moral certainties dissolved during the war, providing, it struck Laurel now, the perfect environment in which a pair of star-crossed lovers might become swept up in a folie a deux.

  The next week of journal entries contained no mention either of Vivien Jenkins or ‘the matter of the young man’; Katy Ellis devoted herself instead to the immediate concerns of divisional warden politics, and talk on the radio of invasion. On April 15th she recorded her concern that Vivien hadn’t written in a time, but then noted the next day a telephone call from Dr Tomalin, letting her know that Vivien was unwell. Now, that was interesting, it appeared the two were known to one another, after all, and it wasn’t an objection to the doctor’s character that had set Katy so firmly against his hospital. Four days later, the following:

  A letter today that vexes me greatly. I cannot possibly capture the tone in summary and I wouldn’t know where to begin or end in quoting that which troubles me. Thus, I am going against the wishes of my dear (infuriating!) young friend, just this once, and will not toss the letter on this evening’s fire.

  Laurel had never turned a page faster. There it was, on fine white paper and in rather messy handwriting—written in great haste it would seem—the letter from Vivien Jenkins to Katy Ellis dated April 23rd, 1941. A month before she died, Laurel noted grimly.

  I am writing to you from a railway restaurant, darling Katy, because I was gripped by a fear that if I didn’t record it all without delay, the whole thing would disappear and I would wake up tomorrow and discover it a figment of my imagination. None of what I write will please you, but you are the only person I can tell, and I must tell somebody. Forgive me, then, dear Katy, and accept my deepest apologies in advance for the nerves I know this confidence will cause you. Only if you must think badly of me, think it softly and remember that I am still your own Little Shipmate.

  Something happened today—I was leaving Dr Tomalin’s hospital and had paused on the step to straighten my scarf. I swear to you, Katy, and you know me not to be a liar, that I did not hesitate on purpose— still, when I heard the door open behind me I knew, without turning, that it was the young man—I believe I’ve mentioned him once or twice in my letters—Jimmy?—who was standing there.

  Katy Ellis had underlined this sentence and made an annotation in the margin, the note written in such tiny neat script, that Laurel could just picture the tight disapproving moue of its writer: Mentioned once or twice! The delusions of the love struck never cease to amaze one. Love struck. Laurel’s stomach balled with concern as she concentrated her attention back on Vivien’s letter. Had Vivien fallen in love with Jimmy? Is that what had turned the ‘harmless’ plan on its head?

  Sure enough, it was he; Jimmy had joined me on the front step and we
exchanged there a few words about a humorous incident that had occurred between the children. He made me laugh—he is funny, Katy—I do like funny people, don’t you?—my father was a very funny man, he always had us laughing—and then he asked, quite naturally, whether we might walk home together seeing as we were both headed in the same direction, to which, against every sensible dictate, I answered, ‘Yes.’

  Now, while you are shaking your head, Katy, (I can picture you at that little desk you told me about beneath the window—do you have fresh primroses in a vase on the corner? You do, I know it) let me tell you why I answered that way. For a month now, I have done as you advised and gone out of my way to ignore him, but the other day he gave me something—a gift of apology, the reason for which I won’t go into, after we had a small misunderstanding. The gift was a photograph. I will not describe it here other than to say that in its depiction it was as if he had somehow seen inside my soul to the world I’ve kept contained there since I was small.

  I took that photograph home with me, and I guarded it like a jealous child, taking it out at every opportunity, poring over each small detail, before locking it away in the concealed wall cabinet behind my grandmother’s portrait in the second bedroom—just as a child might hide a precious object, for no other reason than that by concealing it, by keeping it for my-self, the value was somehow magnified. He has heard me tell stories to the hospital children, of course, and I am not suggesting there was anything more ‘magical’ in his choosing such a gift, but still it moved me.

  The word ‘magical’ was underlined and subject to another annotation from Katy Ellis:

  It is precisely what she is suggesting: I know Vivien, and I know how deeply she believes. One of the things I have come to know most surely in my work is that the belief system acquired in childhood is never fully escaped; it may submerge itself for a while, but it always returns in times of need to lay claim to the soul it shaped.