The Secret Keeper

  It had made perfect sense.

  That is, Laurel had wanted it to make sense and therefore it had. The man had read the newspaper, seen her mother’s picture and then set out to find her. And if a small voice in the back of Laurel’s mind whispered, why?, she waved that nagging drone aside. He was a madman, who could say why for certain? And what did it matter anyway? It was over. So long as Laurel didn’t pick too closely at its delicate threads, the tapestry hung together. The picture remained intact.

  At least it had done until now. Incredible, really, that after fifty years all it took was the return of an old photograph and the utterance of a woman’s name for the fabric of Laurel’s fiction to begin unravelling.

  The oven rack slid back with a clang and, ‘Five more minutes,’ said Rose.

  Laurel glugged wine into her glass and strove for nonchalance: ‘Rosie?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘That photograph today, the one at the hospital. The woman who gave the book to Ma—’

  ‘Vivien.’

  ‘Yes.’ Laurel shuddered lightly as she set down the bottle. The name did something strange to her. ‘Did Ma ever mention her to you?’

  ‘A little,’ said Rose, ‘After I found the photo. They were friends.’ Laurel remembered the date on the photograph, 1941. ‘During the war.’

  Rose nodded, folding the tea towel into a neat rectangle. ‘She didn’t say much, though she did say Vivien was Australian.’

  ‘Australian?’

  ‘She came here as a child, I’m not sure why exactly.’

  ‘How did they meet?’

  ‘She didn’t say.’

  ‘Why haven’t we met her?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Funny, isn’t it, that she was never mentioned?’ Laurel took a sip of wine. ‘I wonder why not.’

  The oven timer rang. ‘Perhaps they had a bust up. Drifted apart. I don’t know.’ Rose drew on the mitts. ‘Why are you so interested anyway?’

  ‘I’m not. Not really.’

  ‘Let’s eat then,’ said Rose, cupping the cobbler dish. ‘This looks quite perf—’

  ‘She died,’ said Laurel with sudden conviction. ‘Vivien died.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I mean—’ Laurel swallowed and backtracked swiftly—‘perhaps she died. There was a war on. It’s possible, don’t you think?’

  ‘Anything’s possible.’ Rose probed the crust with a fork. ‘Take, for example, this really rather respectable glaze. Ready to brave the others?’ ‘Actually—’ the need to get upstairs, to check her flash of memory, was immediate and searing—‘you were right before. I am feeling poorly.’

  ‘You don’t want pudding?’

  Laurel shook her head, halfway to the door. ‘Early night for me, I’m afraid. Terrible to be ill tomorrow.’

  ‘Can I get you something else—paracetamol, a cup of tea?’

  ‘No,’ said Laurel, ‘no thanks. Except, Rose—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The play.’

  ‘Which play?’

  ‘Peter Pan—the book the photo came from. Is it handy?’

  ‘You are a funny thing,’ said Rose with a lopsided smile. ‘I’ll have to dig it out for you.’ She bobbed her head at the cobbler. ‘Later all right?’ ‘Of course, no hurry, I’ll just be resting. Enjoy your pudding. And Rosie?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sorry to send you back into the fray alone.’

  It was the mention of Australia that had done it. As Rose re-counted what she’d learned from their mother, a light bulb had fired in Laurel’s mind and she’d known why Vivien was important. She remembered, too, where she’d first come across the name, all those years before.

  While her sisters ate dessert and hunted for a knife they’d never find, Laurel braved the attic in search of her trunk. There was one for each of them; Dorothy had been strict in that regard. It was because of the war, Daddy had once confided in them—everything she loved had been lost when that bomb fell on her family home in Coventry and turned her past to rubble. She’d been determined her children would never suffer the same fate. She might not be able to spare them every heart-ache, but she could damn well make sure they knew where to find their class photo when they wanted it. Their mother’s passion for things, for possessions—objects that could be held in one’s hands and invested with deeper meaning—had verged on obsessive, her enthusiasm for collecting so great that it was hard not to fall into line. Everything was kept; nothing thrown away; traditions adhered to religiously. Case in point, the knife.

  Laurel’s trunk was tucked beside the broken radiator Daddy had never got around to fixing. She knew it was hers before she read her name stencilled on the top. The tan leather straps and broken buckle were a dead giveaway. Her heart fluttered when she saw it, anticipating the thing she knew she’d find inside. Funny the way an object she hadn’t thought of in decades could arrive so precisely in her mind. She knew exactly what she was looking for, what it would feel like in her hand, the emotions its uncovering would cause to surface. A faint imprint of herself the last time she’d done so knelt beside her as she undid the straps.

  The trunk smelled like dust and damp and an old cologne with a name she’d forgotten but a fragrance that turned her six-teen inside. It was full of paper: diaries, photographs, letters, school reports, a couple of sewing patterns for capri pants, but Laurel didn’t pause to look them over. She pulled out one pile after another, scanning quickly.

  Midway down on the far left-hand side, she found what she’d come for. A thin book, totally unprepossessing, and yet, for Laurel, reverberating with memories.

  She’d been offered the role of Meg in The Birthday Party some years back; it had been a chance to perform at the Lyttelton Theatre, but Laurel had said no. It was the only time she could think of that she’d put her personal life ahead of her career. She’d blamed it on her film schedule, which wasn’t entirely improbable but wasn’t the truth either. Obfuscation had been necessary. She couldn’t have done it. The play was inextricably linked with the summer of 1961; she’d read it over and over that year, ever since the boy—she couldn’t remember his name; how ridiculous, she’d been mad about him—had given it to her. She’d memorised its lines, imbuing the scenes with all her pent-up anger and frustration. And then the man had walked up their driveway and the whole thing had become so muddled in her mind and heart that to contemplate the play in any detail made her physically ill.

  Her skin was clammy even now, her pulse quickening. She was glad it wasn’t the play she needed, but what she’d tucked inside. They were still there, she could tell by the rough edges of paper jutting from between the pages. Two newspaper articles: the first a rather vague report from the local rag about a man’s death during a Suffolk summer; the second an obituary from The Times, torn surreptitiously from the paper her friend’s father brought home with him from London each day. ‘Look at this,’ he’d said one evening when Laurel was visiting Shirley ‘A piece about that fellow, the one who died out near your place, Laurel.’ It was a lengthy article, for it turned out the man wasn’t quite the usual suspect; there’d been moments, long before he’d turned up on the Greenacres doorstep, in which he’d distinguished himself and even been lauded. There were no surviving children, but there’d once been a wife.

  The single light bulb swaying gently overhead wasn’t bright enough to read by, so Laurel closed the trunk and took the book downstairs.

  She’d been assigned their girlhood room to sleep in—another given in the complex scale of sibling seniority—and the bed was made up with fresh sheets. Someone, Rose, she guessed, had brought her suitcase up already, but Laurel didn’t unpack. She opened the windows wide and sat on the ledge.

  A cigarette held between two fingers, Laurel slipped the articles from inside the book. She passed over the report from the local paper, picking up the obituary instead. She scanned the early years of Henry Ronald Jenkins’s life waiting for her eye to alight on what she knew was
there.

  A third of the way down, the name jumped out at her.

  Vivien.

  Laurel backtracked to read the whole sentence: ‘Jenkins was married in 1938 to Miss Vivien Longmeyer, born in Queensland, Australia, but raised by an uncle in Oxfordshire.’ She scrolled down further to find: ‘Vivien Jenkins was killed in 1941 during a heavy air raid in Not- ting Hill.’

  She drew heavily on her cigarette and noticed that her fingers were trembling.

  It was possible, of course, that there were two Viviens, both Australian.

  It was possible that her mother’s wartime friend was unrelated to the Australian Vivien whose husband had died on their doorstep.

  But it wasn’t likely, was it?

  And if her mother knew Vivien Jenkins, then surely she knew Henry Jenkins, too. ‘It’s been a long time, Dorothy,’ he’d said, and then Laurel had seen fear on her mother’s face.

  The door opened and Rose was there. ‘Feeling all right?’ she said, wrinkling her nose at the tobacco smoke.

  ‘Medicinal,’ said Laurel, gesturing shakily with the cigarette before holding it outside the window. ‘Don’t tell the parents; I’d hate to be grounded.’

  ‘Secret’s safe with me.’ Rose came closer and held out a small book. ‘It’s rather tattered, I’m afraid.’

  Tattered was an understatement. The book’s front cover was hanging, literally, by threads, and the green cloth board beneath had been discoloured by dirt; perhaps, judging by the vaguely smoky smell, even soot. Laurel turned carefully through the first pages until she reached the title page. On the frontispiece, handwritten in black ink, was the following: For Dorothy, A true friend is a light in the dark, Vivien.

  ‘It must’ve been important to her,’ said Rose. ‘It wasn’t on the bookshelf with the others; it was inside her trunk. She’d kept it up there all these years.’

  ‘You saw inside her trunk?’ Their mother had rather fixed ideas about privacy and its observation.

  Rose blushed. ‘No need to look at me like that, Lol, it’s not as though I broke the padlock open with a nail file. She asked me to fetch the book for her a couple of months ago, just before she went into hospital.’

  ‘She gave you the key?’

  ‘Reluctantly, and only after I caught her trying to get up the ladder herself.’

  ‘She wasn’t.’

  ‘She was.’

  ‘She’s incorrigible.’

  ‘She’s like you, Lol.’

  Rose was being kind, but her words made Laurel flinch. A flash of memory came: the evening she’d told her parents she was going up to London to attend Central School. They’d been shocked and unhappy: hurt she’d gone behind their backs to audition, adamant she was too young to leave home, worried she wasn’t going to finish school and get her A levels. They’d sat with her around the kitchen table, taking it in turns to make reasonable arguments in exaggeratedly calm voices. Laurel tried to look bored, and when they’d finally finished she said, ‘I’m still going,’ with all the sulky vehemence one might expect from a confused and resentful teenager. ‘Nothing you say will change my mind. It’s what I want.’

  ‘You’re too young to know what you really want,’ her mother had said. ‘People change, they grow up, they make better decisions. I know you, Laurel—’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘I know you’re headstrong. I know you’re stubborn and determined to be different, that you’re full of dreams, just like I was—’

  ‘I’m not a bit like you,’ Laurel had said then, her pointed words cutting like a blade through her mother’s already shaky composure. ‘I’d never do the things you do.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Stephen Nicolson put his arms around his wife. He signalled to Laurel that she should go upstairs to bed, but warned her that the conversation was far from over.

  Laurel lay in bed fuming as the hours passed; she wasn’t sure where her sisters were, only that they’d been put some-where else so as not to break her quarantine. It was the first time she could remember fighting with her parents and she was in equal parts exhilarated and crushed. It didn’t feel as if life could ever go back to how it had been before.

  She was still there, lying in the dark, when the door opened and someone walked carefully towards her. Laurel felt the edge of the bed depress when the person sat and then she heard Ma’s voice. She’d been crying, Laurel could tell, and the realisation, the knowledge that she was the cause, made her want to wrap her arms around her mother’s neck and never let go.

  ‘I’m sorry we fought,’ said Dorothy, a wash of moonlight falling through the window to illuminate her face; ‘It’s funny how things turn out. I never thought I’d argue with my daughter. I used to get in trouble when I was young—I always felt different from my parents. I loved them, of course, but I’m not sure they knew quite what to make of me. I thought I knew best and didn’t listen to a word they said.’

  Laurel smiled faintly, unsure where the conversation was headed, but glad her insides were no longer roiling like hot lava.

  ‘We’re similar, you and I,’ her mother continued. ‘I expect that’s why I’m so anxious you shouldn’t make the same mistakes I did.’

  ‘I’m not making a mistake, though.’ Laurel had sat up tall against her pillows. ‘Can’t you see that? I want to be an actress—drama school is the perfect place for someone like me.’

  ‘Laurel—’

  ‘Imagine you were seventeen, Ma, and your whole life was ahead of you. Can you think of anywhere else you’d rather go than London?’ It was the wrong thing to say—Ma had never shown the least interest in going up to London.

  There was a pause and a blackbird called to his friends out-side. ‘No,’ Dorothy had said eventually, softly and a little sadly as she reached to stroke the ends of Laurel’s hair. ‘No, I don’t suppose I can.’

  It struck Laurel now, that even then she’d been too self-absorbed to wonder or ask what her mother was actually like at seventeen, what it was she’d longed for, and what mistakes she’d made that she was so anxious her daughter should not repeat.

  Laurel held up the book Rose had given her and said, more shakily than she’d have liked, ‘It’s strange to see something of hers from before, isn’t it?’

  ‘Before what?’

  ‘Before us. Before this place. Before she was our mother. Just imag- ine—when she was given this book, when that photograph with Vivien was taken, she had no idea that we were out there somewhere waiting to exist.’

  ‘No wonder she’s beaming in the photo.’

  Laurel didn’t laugh. ‘Do you ever think about her, Rose?’

  ‘About Mummy? Of course—’

  ‘Not about Ma, I mean that young woman. She was a different person back then, with a whole other life we know nothing about. Do you ever wonder about her, about what she wanted, how she felt about things—’ Laurel sneaked a glance at her sister—‘the sorts of secrets she kept?’

  Rose smiled uncertainly and Laurel shook her head. ‘Don’t mind me. I’m a bit maudlin tonight. It’s being back here, I guess. The old room.’ She forced a cheeriness she didn’t feel. ‘Remember the way Iris used to snore?’

  Rose laughed. ‘Worse than Daddy, wasn’t she? I wonder if she’s improved.’

  ‘I expect we’re about to find out. You heading to bed now?’

  ‘I thought I’d take a bath before the others finish up and I lose the mirror to Daphne.’ She lowered her voice and lifted the skin above one eye. ‘Has she … ?’

  ‘It would appear so.’

  Rose pulled a face that said, ‘Aren’t people strange?’ and closed the door behind her.

  Laurel’s smile fell as her sister’s footsteps retreated down the corridor. She turned to watch the night sky. The bathroom door clicked shut and the water pipes began to whistle in the wall behind her.

  Fifty years ago, Laurel told a distant patch of stars, my mother killed a man. She called it self-defence, but I saw it. She raised the knife and brough
t it down and the man fell backwards onto the ground where the grass was worn and the violets were flowering. She knew him, she was frightened, and I’ve no idea why.

  It suddenly seemed to Laurel that all the absence in her own life, every loss and sadness, every nightmare in the dark, every unexplained melancholy, took the shadowy form of the same unanswered question; something that had been there since she was sixteen years old—her mother’s unspoken secret.

  ‘Who are you, Dorothy?’ she said beneath her breath, ‘Who were you, before you became Ma?’

  Seven

  The Coventry—London train, 1938

  DOROTHY SMITHAM was seventeen years old when she knew for certain she’d been stolen as a baby. It was the only explanation. The truth came to her, clear as day, on a Saturday morning around eleven as she watched her father roll his pencil between his fingers, run his tongue slowly over his bottom lip, and then mark down in his small black notebook the precise amount (4s) he’d paid the taxi driver to deliver the family and their trunk to the station. The list and its creation would occupy him for the better part of their stay at Bournemouth, and on the family’s return to Coventry a gleeful evening would be spent, to which they would all be reluctant invitees, analysing its contents. Tables would be drawn, comparisons made with last year’s results (and those stretching back a decade if they were lucky), commitments undertaken to do better next time; before, refreshed from the annual break, he would return to his accountant’s chair at H. G. Walker Ltd., Bicycle Manufacturers, and knuckle down to another year’s work.

  Dolly’s mother sat in the corner of the carriage, fussing at her nostrils with a cotton handkerchief. It was a surreptitious dab, the hanky concealed for the most part within her hand, followed occasionally by a skittish glance at her husband to ensure he hadn’t been disturbed and was still frowning with grim pleasure at his notebook. Really, only Janice Smitham could manage to catch a cold on the eve of the annual summer holiday with such astonishing regularity. The consistency was almost admirable and Dolly might’ve been able to salute her mother’s commitment to habit if it weren’t for the accompanying sniffle—so meek and apologetic—that made her want to jam Father’s sharpened pencil through her own eardrums. Mother’s fortnight by the sea would be spent as it was each year: making Father feel like King of the Sand- castle, fussing over Dolly’s swimsuit cut, and worrying whether Cuth- bert was making friends with ‘the right kind of boys’.