The Secret Keeper (10 page)

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 brought 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’.

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.