The Secret Keeper (43 page)

How Vivien Jenkins felt about having the details of their courtship and early marriage written about in such a public way remains a mystery, as does the woman herself. The young Mrs Jenkins had barely begun to leave her mark on the world when her life was cut tragically short during the London Blitz. What is known, thanks to her husband’s clear adoration of his ‘reluctant muse’, is that she was a woman of remarkable loveliness and allure, about whom Jenkins’s feelings were clear from the first.

There came then a lengthy extract, taken from The Reluctant Muse, in which Henry Jenkins wrote rapturously about meeting and courting his young bride. Having recently suffered through the entire book, Laurel skipped over it, picking up the thread when the biographer returned his focus to the facts of Vivien’s life:

Vivien Longmeyer was the daughter of Jonathan Carlyon’s only sister, Isabel, who had eloped from England with an Australian soldier after the First World War. Neil and Isabel Longmeyer settled in the small cedar-getting community of Tamborine Mountain in south-east Queensland, and Vivien was the youngest of their four children. For the first eight years of her life Vivien Longmeyer lived a modest colonial existence, until she was sent back to England to be raised by her maternal uncle at the school he’d built on her family’s grand ancestral estate.

The earliest account of Vivien Longmeyer comes from Miss Katy Ellis, a renowned educator, who was charged with the duty of chaperoning the child on the long sea voyage from Australia to England in 1929. Katy Ellis mentioned the girl in her memoir, Born to Teach, suggesting it was this en-counter with the child that first sparked her lifelong interest in educating the young survivors of trauma.

The girl’s Australian aunt had issued a warning, when she asked me to act as chaperone, that the child was simple and I wasn’t to be surprised if she chose not to communicate with me on the voyage. I was young at the time, and therefore not yet equipped to castigate the woman for a lack of compassion that bordered on callous, but I was confident enough in my own impressions not to accept her assessment. Vivien Longmeyer was not simple, I could tell that much by looking at her; however, I could also see what it was that made her aunt describe her thus. Vivien had an ability, that bordered at times on unsettling, to sit still for very long periods of time, her face—not blank, certainly not that—rather alight with electric thought, but privately and in a manner that made anybody watching her feel excluded.

I was an imaginative child myself, often upbraided by my strict Protestant father for daydreaming and writing in my journals—a habit I continue to this day—and it seemed quite clear to me that Vivien had a vibrant inner life into which she disappeared. Further, it seemed natural and understandable that a child suffering the simultaneous loss of her family, her home, and the country of her birth, might necessarily seek to preserve what small certainties of identity she had left to her by internalising them.

Over the course of our long sea voyage, I was able to gain Vivien’s trust sufficiently to establish a relationship that continued over many years. We corresponded by letter with warm regularity until her tragic and untimely death during the Second World War, and although I never taught or counselled her in an official capacity I’m pleased to say that we became friends. She didn’t have many friends: she was the sort of person others longed to be loved by, yet she did not make connections easily or lightly. In retrospect, I consider it a highlight of my career that she opened up to me in detail about the private world she had constructed for herself. It was a ‘safe’ place into which she retreated if ever she was scared or alone, and I was honoured to be permitted a glimpse behind the veil.

Katy Ellis’s description of Vivien’s retreat into a ‘private world’ tallies with accounts of the adult Vivien: ‘She was attractive, the sort of person you wanted to look at, but whom afterwards you couldn’t really say you knew’; ‘She gave you the feeling there was more going on beneath the surface than there seemed’; ‘In some way, it was her very selfsufficiency that made her magnetic—she didn’t appear to need other people.’ Perhaps it was Vivien’s ‘strange, almost otherworldly air’ that caught the eye of Henry Jenkins that evening at the Nordstrom School. Or perhaps it was the fact that she, like he, had survived a childhood marked by tragic violence and been removed soon after to a world peopled by those with vastly different backgrounds from her own. ‘We were both outsiders in our way,’ Henry Jenkins told the BBC. ‘We belonged together, the two of us. I knew it the first time I laid eyes on her.

Watching her walk up the aisle towards me, perfect in her white lace, was the completion, in some ways, of a journey that started when I first arrived at Nordstrom School.’

There was a spottily reproduced photograph of the two of them then, taken on their wedding day as they emerged from the school chapel. Vivien was gazing up at Henry, her lace veil rippling in the breeze, as he held her arm and smiled directly at the camera. The people gathered around them tossing rice from the chapel steps were happy; yet the photograph made Laurel sad. Old photographs often did; she was her mother’s daughter; there was something terribly sobering about the smiling faces of people who didn’t yet know what fate awaited them. Even more so in a case like this one, where Laurel knew precisely the horrors that lurked around the corner. She had witnessed first-hand the violent death Henry Jenkins would suffer; and she knew, too, that young Vivien Jenkins, so perfect in her wedding photo, would be dead a mere three years after it was taken…

There is no doubt that Henry Jenkins adored his wife to the point of adulation. He made no secret of what she meant to him, calling her variously his ‘grace’, and his ‘salvation’, ex-pressing the sentiment, on more than one occasion, that without her his life would not be worth living. His claims would prove sadly prescient, for after Vivien’s death in an air raid on May 21st, 1941, Henry Jenkins’s world began to crumble. Despite being employed by the Ministry of Information and having first-hand knowledge of the Blitz’s heavy civilian toll, Jenkins found it impossible to accept that his wife’s death could have come by such a mundane cause. In retrospect, Jenkins’s rather wild claims—that there was foul play involved in Vivien’s death, that she’d been targeted by shady con-artists, that she would never have visited the site of the air raid otherwise—were the first indications of a madness that would ultimately claim him. He refused to accept his wife’s death as a simple wartime accident, vowing to ‘catch the people responsible and bring them to justice’. Jenkins was hospitalised after a breakdown in the mid 1940s, but sadly his mania was to last the rest of his life, leading him back to the fringes of polite society and eventually to his lonely death in 1961, a destitute and broken man.

Laurel slammed the book shut as if to trap its subject between the covers. She didn’t want to read any further about Henry Jenkins’s certainty that there’d been more to his wife’s death than met the eye, nor his vow to find the person responsible. She had a rather pressing and unwelcome feeling that he’d done just that, and that she, Laurel, had witnessed its result. Because Ma, with her ‘perfect plan’, was the person Henry Jenkins blamed for his wife’s death, wasn’t she? The ‘shady con-artist’ who’d sought to ‘take’ something from Vivien; who’d been responsible for drawing Vivien to the site of her death; a place she never would have visited otherwise.

With an involuntary shudder, Laurel glanced behind her. She felt conspicuous all of a sudden, as if unseen eyes were watching her. Her stomach, too, felt as though it had turned to liquid. It was guilt, she realised, guilt by association. She thought about her mother in the hospital, the regret she’d expressed, her talk of ‘taking’ something, of being grateful for a ‘second chance’—they were stars, all of them, appearing in the dark night sky; Laurel might not like the patterns she was beginning to see, but she couldn’t deny that they were there.

She looked down at the biography’s seemingly innocuous black cover. Her mother knew all the answers, but she hadn’t been the only one; Vivien had known them, too. up to this point, Vivien had seemed a whisper—a smiling face in a photograph, a name in the front of an old book, a figment who’d slipped through the cracks of history and been forgotten.

But she was important.

Laurel had a sudden burning conviction that whatever went wrong with Dorothy’s plan, had everything to do with Vivien. That something intrinsic to the other woman’s character made her the very worst person with whom to become entangled.

Katy Ellis’s account of the child, Vivien, was kindly enough; but Kitty Barker had described a ‘snooty’ woman, a ‘bad influence’, who was superior and cold. Had Vivien’s childhood suffering broken something inside her, hardened her and made her into the sort of woman—beautiful and wealthy—whose very power was in her coolness, her interior- ity, her unattainability? The information in Henry Jenkins’s biography, the way he’d been unable to live with her death and had searched over decades for those he held responsible, certainly suggested a woman whose nature exerted great influence over others.

With a slight dawning smile, Laurel opened the biography again and flicked quickly through the pages until she’d found the one she was after. There it was. Fumbling the pen a little with excitement, she scribbled down the name ‘Katy Ellis’ and the title of her memoir Born to Teach. Vivien might not have needed or, indeed, had many friends, but she’d written letters to Katy Ellis, letters in which (was it too much to hope?) she might’ve confessed her deepest darkest truths. There was every chance those letters still existed somewhere—many people might not keep their correspondence, but Laurel was willing to bet that Miss Katy Ellis, renowned educator and author of her own memoir, wasn’t one of them.

Because the more Laurel turned it over, the clearer it be-came. Vivien was the key; finding out about this elusive figure was the only way to unravel Dorothy’s plan; more importantly, where it all went wrong. And now—Laurel smiled—she’d caught her by the corner of her shadow.

Part Three

VIVIEN

Twenty-two

Tamborine Mountain, Australia, 1929

VIVIEN WAS PUNISHED in the first place because she had the great misfortune of being caught out front of Mr McVeigh’s Main Street shop. Her father hadn’t wanted to do it, anyone could’ve seen that. He was a soft-hearted man who’d had the last of his iron gutted out of him in the Great War, and truth be told he’d always admired the startling spirit of his youngest. But rules were rules, and Mr McVeigh kept crowing about the rod and the child, and spoiling and sparing, and a crowd was gathering, and hell but it was hot … Still, there was no way any child of his was getting hit, not by his hand, and certainly not for facing up to bullies like that Barker lad. And so he’d done the only thing he could: forbidden her publicly from going on the outing. The punishment had been rashly made and was later a source of deep regret and frequent late-night arguments with his wife, but there was no turning back. Too many people had heard him say it. The words left his mouth and as they arrived at Vivien’s ears she knew, even at the age of eight, that there was nothing left to do but set her chin and cross her arms and show them all that she didn’t give two hoots, she’d never wanted to go anyway.

Which is how she came to be at home, alone, on the hottest day of the summer in 1929, while her family set off for the annual Cedar Getters’ Picnic in Southport. There’d been strict instructions from Dad over breakfast, a list of things to do and a longer list of things not to, a fair bit of agonised handwringing from Mum when she thought she wasn’t being watched, a preventative dose of castor oil for all the kiddies, double for Vivien because she was bound to need it twice as much, and then with an excited flurry of last-minute preparations the rest of them had piled into the Lizzie Ford and headed off down the goat track.

The house was quiet for the lack of them. And darker some-how. And the dust motes hung motionless without the usual moving bodies to orbit around. The kitchen table, where they’d laughed and argued minutes before, was cleared now of plates, spread instead with a motley assortment of jars filled with Mum’s cooling jam, and the notepa- per Dad had laid out so that Vivien could write apology notes to Mr McVeigh and Paulie Barker. So far she’d written ‘Dear Mr McVeigh,’ scratched out the ‘Dear’ and put ‘To’ above it, and then she’d sat staring at the blank page beneath, wondering how many words it would take to fill it. Willing them to appear before Dad got home.

When it became apparent the notes weren’t going to write themselves, Vivien put down the fountain pen, stretched her arms above her head, dangled her bare feet back and forth a bit, and surveyed the rest of the room: the heavily framed pictures on the wall, the dark mahogany furniture, the cane daybed with its crocheted rug. This was Indoors, she thought with distaste; the place of grown-ups and homework, the cleaning of teeth and bodies, of ‘Quiet,’ and ‘Don’t run,’ of combs and lace and Mum having tea with Aunt Ada, and visits from the reverend and the doctor. It was deathly and dull and a place she did her best to avoid, and yet—Vivien chewed the inside of her cheek, struck by a thought—today Indoors was hers and hers alone, most likely for the only time ever.

Vivien read her sister Ivy’s diary first; combed through Robert’s hobby periodicals next; examined Pippin’s marble collection; and then she turned her attention to her mother’s ward-robe. She slipped her feet into the cool inside of shoes that be-longed to the long-ago time of before she was born, rubbed the slippery fabric of Mum’s best blouse against her cheek, layered strings of shiny beads from the walnut box on top of the duchesse around her neck. In the drawer she turned over the Egyptian coins Dad had brought back from the war, the carefully folded copy of his discharge papers, a package of letters tied together with ribbon, and a piece of paper entitled, Certificate of Marriage, with Mum and Dad’s real names printed on it, Mum when she was Isabel Carlyon of Oxford, England, and not one of them at all.