The Secret Keeper

  Poor old Cuthbert. He’d been a glorious little baby, full of giggles and gummy smiles and a rather fetching habit of crying whenever Dolly left the room. The older he became, though, the more he grew, the clearer it became to all that he was on a collision course with his fate: to become a doppelganger of Mr Arthur Smitham. Which meant, sadly, that despite the affection between them, Dolly and Cuthbert couldn’t possibly be flesh and blood, and begged the question: who were her real parents and how did she come to be mixed up with this sorry little group anyway?

  Circus performers? A spectacular couple of high-wire walkers? It was possible—she glanced at her legs, relatively long and slender, both of them. She’d always been good at sports: Mr Anthony, the school sports master, made a point of selecting her for the first hockey team each year; and when she and Caitlin rolled back Caitlin’s mother’s parlour carpet and put Louis Armstrong on the gramophone, Dolly was quite sure she didn’t just imagine herself to be the finer dancer. There—Dolly crossed her legs and smoothed her skirt—natural grace; that all but proved it.

  ‘Can I have a sweet at the station, Father?’

  ‘A sweet?’

  ‘At the station? From the little shop.’

  ‘I don’t know about that, Cuthbert.’

  ‘But Father—’

  ‘There’s the budget to think of.’

  ‘But Mother, you said—’

  ‘Now, now, Cuthbert. Father knows best.’

  Dolly turned her attention to the fleeting fields outside. Circus per- formers—it felt about right. Spangles and sequins and late nights beneath the big top, empty but bathed still in the collective awe and adoration of the night’s rapturous crowd. Glamour, excitement, romance—yes, that was far more like it.

  Such entrancing origins would also explain the fierce admonishments meted out by her parents whenever Dolly’s behaviour threatened to ‘draw attention’. ‘People will look, Dorothy,’ her mother would remind her if her hem was too high, her laugh was too loud, her lipstick too red. ‘You’re going to make them look. You know how your father feels about that.’ Dolly did indeed. As Father was fond of reminding them, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, and thus he must’ve lived in fear that Bohemia would seep one day like spoiled fruit through the skin of propriety he and Mother had taken care to construct around their little stolen daughter.

  Dolly sneaked a peppermint from the bag in her pocket; tongued it into her cheek and leaned the side of her face against the window. How, precisely, the stealing might have been achieved was a rather more perplexing prospect. It didn’t matter how she turned it, Arthur and Janice Smitham just weren’t the thieving types. To imagine them creeping towards an unattended pram and snatching a sleeping babe was decidedly problematic. People who stole did so because, whether down to need or greed, they desired the item passionately. Arthur Smitham by contrast believed ‘passion’ should be removed from the English dictionary, if not the English soul, and that one might as well scratch ‘desire’ while one was at it. A trip to the circus? Well now, that just smacked of unnecessary fun.

  Far more likely—the mint broke in two—Dolly had been discovered on the doorstep, and it was duty rather than desire that had brought her into the Smitham fold.

  She leaned back further on the carriage seat and closed her eyes; she could see it clearly. The secret pregnancy, the ring-master’s threat, the circus train arriving in Coventry … For a time the young pair struggle bravely on their own, raising the babe on a diet of love and hope; but alas, with no work (there being, after all, only so much call for high- wire skills) and no money for food, desperation sets in. One night as they pass through the centre of town, their baby too weak now to cry, a house catches their eye. A front step, cleaner and shinier than all the others, a light on inside, and the meaty aroma of Janice Smitham’s (admittedly fine) pot roast brisket seeping out beneath the door. They know what they have to do—

  ‘But I can’t hold on. I can’t!’

  Dolly cracked an eye open sufficiently to observe her brother hopping from one leg to the other in the middle of the carriage.

  ‘Come along, Cuthbert, we’re almost—’

  ‘But I need the lav now!’

  Dolly closed her eyes again, tighter than before. It was true—not the bit about the tragic young couple, she didn’t really believe that— but the part about being special. Dolly had always felt different, as if she were somehow more alive than other people, and the world, fate or destiny, whatever, had big plans for her. She had proof, now, too—scientific proof. Caitlin’s father, who was a doctor and ought to know about such things, had said as much when they played Blotto in Caitlin’s parlour; he’d held up one ink-splotched card after another and Dolly had taken her turn, calling out the first thing that came to mind. ‘Tremendous,’ he’d mumbled around his pipe when they were midway through; and ‘fascinating,’ with a small shake of the head; before, ‘Well, I never …’ and a light laugh that revealed him as rather too handsome for a friend’s father. Only Caitlin’s sour glare had kept Dolly from following him to his study when Dr Rufus declared her answers ‘exceptional’ and suggested—no, urged—further testing.

  Exceptional. Dolly ran the word through her mind. Exceptional. She wasn’t one of them, the ordinary Smithams, and she certainly wasn’t going to become one. Her life was going to be bright and wonderful. She was going to dance outside the square of ‘proper’ behaviour within which Mother and Father were so anxious to trap her. Perhaps she’d even run off to the circus herself and try her luck beneath the big top.

  The train was slowing now as it drew nearer to Euston station. The houses of London appeared thickly through the window and Dolly felt a tremor of excitement. London! A great whirlpool of a city (or so it said in the introduction to the Ward Lock & Co’s Guide to London she kept hidden in the drawer with her knickers), brimming with theatre and nightlife and truly grand people leading tremendous lives.

  When Dolly was younger, her father used to go to London sometimes for work. She’d waited up those nights, watching through the banisters when her mother thought she was asleep, anxious just to get a glimpse of him. His key would sound in the lock, and she’d hold her breath, and then in he’d come. Mother would take his coat, and there’d be an air about him of having Been Somewhere, of being More Important than he had been before. Dolly never would have dreamed of asking him about his trip; even then she’d guessed that the truth would be a poor imitation of her imaginings. Still, she glanced at her father now, hoping he might meet her eyes, that she’d see in them evidence that he, too, felt the pull of the great city they were passing through.

  He did not. Arthur Smitham had eyes only for his notebook, the front page now, on which he’d made his careful notation of train times and platform numbers. The corners of his mouth twitched and Dolly’s heart sank. She braced for the panic she knew was coming: that always came no matter how large a buffer they built into their travel time, no matter that they made the same trip every year, no matter that people everywhere caught trains from A to B and B to C and managed not to fuss. Sure enough—she flinched pre-emptively—here it came, the rousing call to battle.

  ‘Everybody stay together while we find a taxi.’ A gallant at-tempt by their leader to radiate calm in the face of oncoming trial. He felt about on the baggage rack for his hat.

  ‘Cuthbert,’ Mother worried, ‘take my hand.’

  ‘I don’t want to—’

  ‘Everybody responsible for your own piece of luggage,’ Father continued, his voice rising in a rare swell of feeling. ‘Hold tight to your sticks and rackets. And avoid getting caught behind passengers with limps or canes. We mustn’t allow ourselves to be slowed.’

  A well-dressed man who’d been sharing their carriage glanced askance at her father and Dolly wondered—not for the first time—if it was possible to disappear simply by wishing it badly enough.

  The Smitham family had a habit, refined and cemented over years of identical seaside holiday
s, of heading down to the Front straight after breakfast. Father had long ago ruled out hiring a bathing hut, declaring them unnecessary luxuries that encouraged show-offs, and early arrival was thus essential if they expected to secure a decent space before the crowds arrived. On this particular morning, Mrs Jennings had kept them in the Bellevue dining room a little later than usual, over-brewing the tea and then fussing dreadfully with the replacement pot. Father became increasingly twitchy—his white canvas shoes were calling to him, despite the sticking plasters he’d been forced to adhere to his heels after the previous day’s exertions—but interrupting their host was unthinkable, and Arthur Smitham did not do unthinkable things. In the end it was Cuthbert who saved them all. He glanced at the ship’s clock above the framed picture of the pier, swallowed a whole poached egg, and exclaimed, ‘Golly! It’s already gone half nine!’

  Not even Mrs Jennings could argue with that, backing to-wards the kitchen doors, and wishing them all a lovely morning. ‘And what a day you’ve got for it, what a perfect day!’

  The day was rather perfect. It was one of those heavenly summer days when the sky is clear and the breeze is light and warm, and you just know there’s something exciting waiting round the corner. A charabanc was arriving as they reached the promenade and Mr Smitham hurried his family along, anxious to beat the hordes. With the proprietorial air of those who’d booked their fortnight in February and paid in full by March, Mr and Mrs Smitham took a dim view of day-trippers. They were impostors and imposers, decamping on their beach, crowding their pier, and making them queue for their ice-creams.

  Dorothy lingered a few steps behind as the rest of her family, marshalled by their fearless leader, sallied round the bandstand to cut off the invaders at the pass. They took the stairs with the majesty of victors and staked a spot right by the stone wall. Father set down the picnic basket and tucked his thumbs into the waistband of his trousers, gazing left and right before declaring the position, ‘Just right.’ He added, with a smile of self-satisfaction, ‘And not one hundred steps from our front door. Not even a hundred steps.’

  ‘We could wave hello to Mrs Jennings from here,’ said Mother, always glad of the chance to please her husband.

  Dorothy managed a faint, wincing smile of encouragement, and then turned her attention to straightening the edges of her towel. Of course, they couldn’t actually see Bellevue from where they were sitting. Contrary to the boarding house’s name (imparted with uncharacteristic hope by the dour Mr Jennings who’d once spent a ‘fair’ month in Paris), the building itself stood in the middle of Little Collins Street, which ran dog-legged off the promenade. The ‘vue’, therefore, wasn’t particularly ‘belle’—drab slices of the town centre from rooms at the front, the drainpipes of a twin house from those at the rear—but neither was the building French, so to quibble, it seemed to Dorothy, was rather pointless. Instead she rubbed Pond’s cold cream into her sunburned shoulders and hid behind her magazine, sneaking glances over its pages at the richer, prettier better people, lounging and laughing on the balconies of the bathing huts.

  There was one girl in particular. She had blonde hair, sun-kissed skin and cutie-pie dimples when she laughed, which was often. Dolly couldn’t stop watching her. The way she moved like a cat on that balcony, warm and assured, reaching to stroke the arm of first this friend, and then that one; the tilt of her chin, the bitten-lip smile reserved for the best-looking fellow; the light drift of her silver satin dress when the breeze brushed by. The breeze. Even nature knew the rules. While Dolly baked in the Smitham family camp, sweat beads colonising her hairline and making her bathing suit stick, that silver dress fluttered tantalisingly from up on high.

  ‘Who’s for cricket?’

  Dolly ducked lower behind her magazine.

  ‘Me, me!’ said Cuthbert, dancing from one foot (sunburned already) to the other. ‘I’ll bowl, Dad, I’ll bowl. Can’t I? Can’t I? Please, please, PLEASE?’

  Father’s shadow cast a brief respite from the heat. ‘Dorothy? You always like to take first turn.’

  Her gaze traversed the proffered bat, the rotundity of her father’s middle, the morsel of scrambled egg clinging to his moustache. And an image flashed across her mind of the beautiful laughing girl in the silver dress, joking and flirting with her friends—not a parent in sight.

  ‘Might give it a miss, thanks Dad,’ she said weakly. ‘Head-ache coming on.’

  Headaches carried the whiff of ‘women’s business’ and Mr Smitham’s lips tightened with awe and distaste. He nodded, backing away slowly, ‘Rest up then, eh, don’t exert yourself—’

  ‘C’mon, Dad!’ called Cuthbert. ‘Bob Wyatt’s stepping up to the fold. Show him how it’s done, why don’t you?’

  In the face of such rallying cry, Father was powerless but to act. He turned on his heel, strutting down the beach, bat slung over his shoulder, in the chipper manner of a much younger, far fitter man. The game began and Dolly shrank back even closer to the wall. Arthur Smitham’s one-time cricketing prowess was part of the Great Family Story and the holiday game was thus a hallowed institution.

  There was a part of Dolly that hated herself for the way she was acting—after all, it was probably the last time she’d come on the annual family holiday—but she couldn’t seem to shake herself free of this ghastly mood. With every day that passed she felt the gulf between herself and the rest of her family widen. It wasn’t that she didn’t love them; it was just that they had a knack lately, even Cuthbert, for driving her stir crazy. She’d always felt herself to be different, there was nothing new in that, but recently things had taken a definite turn for the worse. Her father had started talking at the dinner table about what was going to happen when Dolly finished school in September. There was a junior position opening up on the secretarial staff at the bicycle factory—after thirty years of service he might just be able to pull a few strings with the head secretary to make sure Dolly got it. Father always smiled and winked when he said that, about the strings, as if he were doing Dolly a tremendous favour and she ought to be grateful. In reality the thought made her want to scream like the heroine in a horror film. She couldn’t think of anything worse. More than that, she couldn’t believe that after seventeen years, Arthur Smitham—her very own father—could so misunderstand her.

  From the sand, there came a cry of ‘Six!’ and Dolly glanced over the top of her Woman’s Weekly to see her father swing his bat over his shoulder like a musket and begin the jog between makeshift wickets. Beside her, Janice Smitham was emanating nervous encouragement, offering tentative calls of ‘Good show!’ and ‘Jolly well done!’, countered quickly with desperate cries of ‘Careful now,’ or ‘Not so fast,’ or, ‘Breathe Cuthbert, remember your asthma,’ as the boy chased his ball towards the water. Dolly took in her mother’s neat permanent wave, the sensible cut of her bathing suit, the care she’d taken to present herself to the world in a way that ensured she made the least possible impact; and Dolly sighed with hot perplexity. It was her mother’s lack of understanding on the matter of Dolly’s future that vexed her most of all.

  When she first realised that Father was serious about the bi-cycle factory, she’d hoped Mother would smile fondly at the suggestion, before pointing out that naturally there were far more exciting things in store for their daughter. Because, although Dolly had fun sometimes imagining she’d been swapped at birth, she didn’t really believe it. Nobody who saw her standing next to her mother could have thought such a thing for long. Janice and Dorothy Smitham had the same chocolate brown hair, the same high cheekbones, and the same generous bust. As Dolly had recently learned, they had something more important in common, too.

  She’d been searching the garage shelves for her hockey stick when she made the discovery: a powder-blue shoebox at the very back of the top shelf. The box was immediately familiar, but it took Dolly a few seconds to remember why. The memory came to her of her mother sitting on the edge of her twin bed in the room she shared with Father, the blue b
ox on her lap and an unreadable expression on her face as she went through its contents. It was a private moment and Dolly had known instinctively to make herself scarce; but she’d wondered about that box, trying to imagine what it could possibly have held that made her mother look dreamy, and lost, and somehow both young and old at once.

  Alone in the garage, Dolly had lifted the box’s lid and all had been revealed. The box was filled with bits and pieces of another life: programmes for singing performances, blue first-place ribbons from eisteddfods, certificates of merit proclaiming Janice Williams the singer with the Most Beautiful Voice. There was even a newspaper article with a picture: a bright young woman with starry eyes and a lovely figure and the look of someone who was going places; who wasn’t going to follow the other girls in her school class into the dull ordinary lives expected of them.

  Except that she had. Dolly stared at that picture for a long time. Her mother had once possessed a talent—a real one, that set her apart and made her special—yet, in seventeen years of living in the same house, Dolly had never heard Janice Smitham sing anything. What could possibly have happened to silence the young woman who’d once told a newspaper: ‘Singing is my favourite thing in the whole world; it makes me feel that I could fly. One day I’d like to sing onstage before the king’?

  Dolly had a feeling she knew the answer.

  ‘Keep it up, boy,’ Father called across the beach at Cuthbert: ‘Look smart, eh. Don’t slouch.’

  Arthur Smitham: accountant extraordinaire, bicycle-factory stalwart, guardsman of all that was good and proper. Enemy to all that was exceptional.