The Secret Keeper

  In the moonlight, he saw Dolly’s bottom lip trembling with emotion. ‘It was awful, Jimmy,’ she said in a whisper. ‘The things she said. The way they made me feel.’

  He threaded her hair behind her ear. ‘She wanted to apologise to you, she tried to, apparently, but when she went to Lady Gwendolyn’s house, no one was there.’

  ‘She came to see me?’

  Jimmy nodded, and he noticed her face soften. Just like that, all the bitterness was gone. The transition was breathtaking, and yet he shouldn’t have been surprised. Doll’s emotions were kites with long strings, no sooner did one dip than another brilliant colour caught the breeze.

  They’d gone dancing afterwards and for the first time in weeks, without that bloody plan hanging over their heads, Jim-my and Dolly had had a good time together, just like they used to. They’d laughed, and joked with one another, and by the time he kissed her goodnight and sneaked back out of Mrs White’s lower window, Jimmy had started to think it wasn’t such a bad idea after all, to bring Doll with him to the play.

  And he’d been right. After a shaky start the day had gone off better than he could have dreamed. Vivien had been fixing the sail to the ship when they first arrived. He’d seen the surprise on her face when she turned and saw him with Doll, the way her smile had started to slide before she caught it, and he’d felt an initial stab of misgiving. She’d climbed down carefully as Jimmy was hanging up Doll’s white coat, and when the two of them said ‘hello’ Jimmy had held his breath. But the greeting had gone smoothly. He’d been pleased and proud at the way Dolly handled herself. She’d gone out of her way to put the past behind her and be friendly towards Vivien; he could see that Vivien was relieved, too, though quieter than usual, and perhaps less warm. When he asked whether Henry was coming to watch the performance, she’d looked at him as if he’d just insulted her before reminding him that her husband had a very important job with the Ministry.

  Thank God for Dolly, who’d always had the gift of being able to lighten a mood. ‘Come on Jimmy,’ she’d said, linking her arm through Vivien’s as the children started to arrive. ‘Take a photo-graph, why don’t you? Your two favourite girls.’

  Vivien had started to demur, saying she didn’t enjoy having her picture taken, but Doll was trying so hard and Jimmy didn’t want to throw her efforts back in her face. ‘Promise it won’t hurt,’ he’d said with a smile, and eventually Vivien had nodded faint agreement …

  The applause finally died down, and Dr Tomalin told the children that Jimmy had something for all of them and the announcement was met with another round of cheering. Jimmy waved at them and started handing out copies of the photograph. He’d taken it a fortnight ago, when Vivien was still away sick, the whole cast in costume, standing together on the ship set.

  Jimmy had printed one for Vivien, too; he spied her over in the far corner of the attic, gathering discarded costumes into a woven basket. Dr Tomalin and Myra were talking to Dolly so he took it over to her.

  ‘So,’ he said, arriving at her side.

  ‘So.’

  ‘Rave reviews in tomorrow’s newspaper, I should think.’

  She laughed. ‘Without doubt.’

  He handed her a print. ‘This is for you.’

  She took it, smiling at the children’s faces. She leaned to put down the basket and when she did her blouse gaped slightly and Jimmy glimpsed a bruise stretching from her shoulder to her chest bone.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said, noticing the direction of his glance, fingers moving quickly to straighten the fabric. ‘I fell in the blackout, on my way to the shelter. A postbox—so much for paint that shows up in the dark.’

  ‘Are you sure? It looks bad.’

  ‘I bruise easily.’ Her eyes met his, and for a fraction of a second Jimmy thought he saw something there, but then she smiled. ‘Not to mention I go too fast. I’m always bumping into things—people too, sometimes.’

  Jimmy smiled back, remembering the day they’d met; but, as one of the children took Vivien’s hand and pulled her away, his thoughts shifted to her recurring illness and her inability to have children and what he knew of people who bruised easily, and Jimmy felt a knot of worry tighten in his stomach.

  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 learne
d 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.

&
nbsp; ‘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.’