The Secret Keeper (22 page)

He shook his head—what a conceited bugger he was, feeling sorry for himself when Doll was trying to deal with such enormous loss. It was just so unlike her, closing up like that; it scared Jimmy; it felt as if the sun had gone behind thick clouds and made him glimpse how cold it would be if he no longer had her in his life. That’s why tonight was so important. The letter she’d sent him, her insistence that he dress like a toff—it was the first time since the Coventry Blitz that he’d glimpsed the spirit of his Dolly and he wasn’t about to risk losing it again. Jimmy turned his attention back to the suit. He couldn’t quite believe it fitted so closely: his father in his suit had always seemed to Jimmy a giant. Now it seemed possible he had merely been a man.

Jimmy sat down on the worn patchwork quilt of his narrow bed and took up his socks. There was a hole in one that he’d been putting off darning for weeks, but he twisted the top to the side so he could trap it underneath and decided it would do. He wriggled his toes, eyed his shoes, polished on the floor beside him, and then glanced at his watch. Still an hour before they were due to meet. He’d gone and got himself ready far too early. No surprises there, Jimmy was as jumpy as a cat.

He lit a cigarette and lay back on his bed, one arm folded behind his head. There was something hard beneath him and he reached under his pillow, pulling out Of Mice and Men. It was a library copy, the very same he’d borrowed back in the summer of ’38, but Jimmy had paid the lost-book fee rather than return it. He’d enjoyed the novel well enough, but that wasn’t why he’d kept it. Jimmy was superstitious: he’d had it with him that day at the seaside and even to look at the book’s cover was to bring back the sweetest memories. It was also the perfect repository for his most prized possession. Tucked inside, where no one else would think to look, was the photograph he’d taken of Dolly in that field by the sea. Jimmy retrieved it and smoothed back a dog-eared corner. He drew on his cigarette and exhaled, running his thumb along the outline of her hair, over her shoulder, round the curve of her breast—

‘Jimmy?’ His father was rummaging in the cutlery drawer on the other side of the wall. Jimmy knew he ought to go and help him find whatever it was he thought he needed. He hesitated though. Searching gave the old man something to do, and in Jimmy’s experience a man was always better off when he was busy.

He turned his attention back to the photograph, as he had done a million times since it was taken. He knew every detail by heart, the way she was winding her hair around one finger, the set of her chin, the challenge in her eyes that was so Dolly, always acting bolder than she was (‘Something to remember me by?’ She’d certainly given him that); he could almost smell the salt and feel the sun on his skin, the press of her body arching beneath him when he’d laid her back and kissed her—

‘Jimmy? I can’t find the whatsit, Jim-boy.’

Jimmy sighed and counselled patience to himself. ‘All right, Dad,’ he called. ‘There in a minute.’ He gave the photograph a rueful smile— it wasn’t altogether comfortable staring at his girl’s naked breast while his father was having a spot of bother on the other side of the plaster. Jimmy slid the picture back inside the book’s pages and sat up.

He pulled on his shoes and tied the laces, took his cigarette from his lip and glanced around the walls of his small bedroom; since the war began he hadn’t stopped working and the faded green wallpaper had been covered with prints of his best photographs, his favourites at any rate. There were the ones he’d taken at Dunkirk, a group of men so tired they could barely stand, one with his arm slung over the other’s shoulders, another with a stained bandage tied across his eye, all of them trudging wordlessly as they watched the ground before them and thought only of the next step; a soldier asleep on the beach, missing both boots and hugging his filthy water canister for dear life; a horrifying helter-skelter of boats, and planes firing from above, and men who’d walked so far already only to be shot at in the water as they tried to escape from hell.

Then there were the photographs he’d taken in London since the Blitz started. Jimmy eyed a series of portraits on the far wall. He stood and went to have a closer look. The East End family pulling the remains of their possessions on the back of a handcart; the woman in her apron hanging laundry on a kitchen clothes line with the fourth wall of her kitchen missing, the private space suddenly made public; the mother reading bedtime stories to her six children in the Andersen shelter; the stuffed panda with half his leg blown off; the woman sitting on a chair with a blanket around her shoulders and a blaze behind her where her house used to stand; the old man searching for his dog in the rubble.

They haunted him. He sometimes felt he was stealing a piece of their souls, snatching a private moment for himself when he made his shot; but Jimmy didn’t take the transaction lightly, they were joined, he and his subjects. They watched him from his walls and he felt a debt to them, not only in having borne witness to a fixed instant in their human experience, but also to the ongoing responsibility of keeping their stories alive. Jimmy would often hear the grim announcements on the BBC: ‘Three firemen, five policemen, and one hundred and fifty- three civilians are known to have lost their lives’ (such clean, measured words to describe the horror he’d inhabited the night before), and he’d see the same few lines printed in the newspaper, but then that would be it. There was no time for any more these days, no point in leaving flowers or writing epitaphs, because it would all take place again the following night, and the one after that. The war left no space for individual grief and memorial, the sort he’d seen in his father’s funeral home as a boy, but Jimmy liked to think his photographs went some way to keeping a record. That one day, when it was all ended, the images might survive and people of the future would say, ‘That’s how it was.’

By the time Jimmy made it to the kitchen, his father had for-gotten his search for the mysterious whatsit and was sitting at the table, dressed in pyjama bottoms and a singlet. He was feeding his golden canary crumbs of broken biscuits Jimmy had got for him on the cheap. ‘Here, Finchie,’ he was saying, sticking his finger through the bars of the cage, ‘Here you are, Finchie love. There’s a good lad now.’ He turned his head when he heard Jimmy behind him.

‘Hello there! You’re dressed up, boy-o.’

‘Not really, Dad.’

His father was looking him up and down and Jimmy made a silent prayer he wouldn’t realise the provenance of the suit. Not that his father would’ve minded the loan, the old man was generous to a fault, rather the whole thing was likely to bring back confusing memories that would upset him.

In the end his father merely nodded approval. ‘You look very nice, Jimmy,’ he said, bottom lip trembling with paternal feeling. ‘Very nice indeed. You make a fellow proud, you do.’

‘All right, Dad, easy does it,’ said Jimmy gently, ‘I’ll get big-headed if you’re not careful. I’ll be a right horror to live with then.’

His father, still nodding, smiled faintly.

‘Where’s your shirt, Dad? In your bedroom? I’ll just go and fetch it—can’t have you catching cold now, can we?’

His father shuffled after him but stopped in the middle of the corridor. He was still there when Jimmy came back from the bedroom, a quizzical expression on his face as if he were trying to remember why he’d left his seat in the first place. Jimmy took him by the elbow and walked him carefully back to the kitchen. He helped him into his shirt and sat him in his usual seat; Dad got confused if he had to use any of the others.

The kettle was still half full and Jimmy put it back on the stove to boil. It was a relief to have the gas back on; the mains had been hit by an incendiary bomb a few nights back and Jimmy’s father had had an awful time trying to settle of a night without his milky cuppa. Jimmy spooned a careful portion of leaves into the pot but held off putting in more. Stocks were low at Hopwood’s and he couldn’t risk running short.

‘Will you be home for supper, Jimmy?’

‘No, Dad. I’m going to be out till late tonight, remember? I’ve left you some sausages on the stove.’

‘Right-o.’

‘Rabbit sausages, worse luck, but I’ve found you something special for after. You’ll never guess—an orange!’

‘An orange?’ The old man’s face flickered with the light of a passing memory. ‘I got an orange once for Christmas, Jimmy.’

‘Did you, Dad?’

‘Back when I was a nipper on the farm. Such a beautiful big orange. My brother Stevie ate it when I wasn’t looking.’

The kettle started to whistle and Jimmy topped up the pot. His father was crying softly as he always did when Stevie’s name came up, his older brother killed in the trenches twenty-five years or so before, but Jimmy ignored the fact. He’d learned over time that his father’s tears for past grief would dry as quickly as they’d come, that the best thing to do was to push on cheerfully. ‘Well, not this time, Dad,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s going to eat this one but you.’ He poured a good slug of milk into his father’s cup. His dad liked a milky tea and it was one of the few things they didn’t run short of thanks to Mr Evans and the pair of cows he kept in the barn at the side of his shop. Sugar was another story, and Jimmy scraped a small portion of condensed milk into the tea in lieu. He gave it a stir and carried the cup and saucer to the table. ‘Now listen, Dad, the sausages’ll stay warm in the saucepan till you’re ready, so there’s no need for you to turn on the burner, all right?’ His father was scratching his head and staring at the tablecloth. ‘Right, Dad?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Your sausages are cooked so don’t go turning on the stove.’ ‘Right-o.’ His father took a sip of tea.

‘No need to turn on the taps either, Dad.’

‘What’s that, Jim?’

‘I’ll help you get cleaned up when I get in.’

His father looked up at Jimmy, perplexed for a second, and then he said, ‘You look nice, boy-o. Off somewhere tonight, are you?’

Jimmy sighed. ‘Yes, Dad.’

‘Somewhere fancy, is it?’

‘I’m just catching up with someone.’

‘A lady friend?’

Jimmy couldn’t help smiling at his father’s coy term. ‘Yes, Dad. A lady friend.’

‘Someone special?’

‘Very.’

‘You’ll have to bring her home one of these days.’ His father’s eyes held a hint of their old cleverness and mischief and Jimmy ached suddenly for how things used to be, back when he was the child and his dad did the looking after. He was immediately ashamed, he was twenty-two now for Christ’s sake, and far too old to be longing for childish things. His shame was only increased when his father smiled, eager but uncertain, and said, ‘Bring your young lady home one evening, Jimmy? Let your mother and me see she’s good enough for our boy.’

Jimmy leaned to kiss his father on the head. He didn’t bother explaining about his mother any more, that she was gone, that she’d left the pair of them over a decade ago to be with a new fellow with a smart car and a big house. To what end? It made the old man happy to think she’d just popped out to stand in line for rationed groceries, and who was Jimmy to remind him how things really were? Life could be cruel enough these days without the truth making it worse. ‘You take care now, Dad,’ he said. ‘I’m going to lock the door after me but Mrs Hamblin next door has the key and she’ll help you down to the shelter when the raids start.’

‘Never know, Jimmy. Six o’clock already and still no sign of Jerry. He might’ve given himself a night off.’

‘I wouldn’t bet on it. There’s a moon out there like a robber’s lantern. Mrs Hamblin will come for you all right, soon as the alert sounds.’

His father was playing with the edge of Finchie’s cage.

‘All right, Dad?’

‘Yes, yes. All right, Jimmy. You have a good time now and stop worrying so much. Your old man’s not going anywhere. Didn’t get me in the last lot, ain’t going to get me in this.’

Jimmy smiled and swallowed the lump that was always in his throat these days, of love balled together with a sadness he couldn’t articulate, a sadness that was about so much more than just his ailing father. ‘That’s the way, Dad. Now you enjoy your tea and have a good listen to the wireless, I’ll be back be-fore you know it.’

Dolly was hurrying through a moonlit street in Bayswater. There’d been a bomb two nights ago, an art gallery with an attic full of paints and varnishes and an absentee landlord who’d made no provisions, and the place was still in disarray: bricks and charred pieces of wood, dislodged doors and windows, mountains of broken glass everywhere. Dolly had seen the fire burning from where she liked to sit sometimes on the roof of number 7, a great blaze in the distance, fierce and spectacular flames sending plumes of smoke into the lit-up sky.

She pointed her shaded torch at the ground, skirted around a sandbag, almost lost her heel in a blast hole, and had to hide from an over- zealous warden when he blew his whistle and told her she ought to be a sensible girl and get herself inside—couldn’t she see there was a bomber’s moon on the rise?