The Secret Keeper (46 page)

‘My fault,’ he said with a wave of his hand. ‘I can be hard to see— practically invisible sometimes. I can’t tell you how much of a nuisance it is.’

His comment caught her off guard and Vivien felt the beginnings of a surprised smile. It was a mistake, for he canted his head and regarded her closely, narrowing his dark eyes slightly. ‘We’ve met before.’

‘No.’ She let her smile drop sharply. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Yes, I’m sure of it.’

‘You’re mistaken.’ She nodded, signalling, she hoped, an end to the matter, and then said, ‘Good day now,’ before continuing on her way Moments passed. She was almost at Cale Street when: ‘The WVS canteen in Kensington,’ he called after her. ‘You saw my photograph and told me about your friend’s hospital.’

She stopped.

‘The hospital for orphaned children, right?’

Vivien’s cheeks flushed red hot and she turned and hurried back to where he stood. ‘Stop it,’ she hissed, lifting a finger to her lips as she reached him. ‘Stop talking now.’

He frowned, evidently confused, and she looked beyond his shoulders, back over her own, before pulling him with her be-hind a bomb- damaged shop front, away from the street’s prying eyes. ‘I’m sure I made it very clear to you that you weren’t to re-peat what I said—’

‘So you do remember.’

‘Of course I remember. Do I look like a fool?’ She glanced towards the street and waited as a woman with a shopping basket idled past. When the woman was gone she whispered, ‘I told you not to mention the hospital to anyone.’

He matched her whisper: ‘I didn’t think that included you.’

Vivien’s next sentence caught before she could say it. He was straight-faced, but something in his tone made her think that he was joking. She didn’t let herself acknowledge it though, it would only encourage him and that was the last thing she wanted to do. ‘Well, it did,’ she said. ‘It did include me.’

‘I see. Well. Now I know. Thank you for explaining it to me.’ A small smile played about his lips as he said: ‘I certainly hope I haven’t ruined everything by telling you your secret.’

Vivien realised she’d been holding his wrist and she let it go as if it burned, taking a step backwards through the rubble, re-positioning the neat roll of hair that had slipped forwards on her forehead. The ruby pin Henry had given her on their anniversary was beautiful but it didn’t grip like a kirby. ‘I need to be getting on now,’ she said curtly, and then without another word she walked as quickly as she could back to the street.

She’d remembered him at once, of course. The moment they’d collided and she’d stepped back and seen his face, she’d known him, and she’d felt recognition fire like electricity right through her. She still couldn’t explain it, even to herself; the dream she’d had after they met that night in the canteen. Lord, but it had been the sort to make her draw breath when its echoes came to mind next day. It hadn’t been sexual; it had been more intoxicating than that, and far more dangerous. The dream had filled her with a deep and inexplicable yearning for a faraway place and time; a desire that Vivien had thought she’d long outgrown, the absence of which she’d felt like a loved one’s passing when she woke up next morning and realised she’d have to go on without it. She’d tried everything to get it out of her head, that dream, the hungry shadows of it that refused to dissipate; she hadn’t been able to meet Henry’s eyes across the breakfast table without feeling certain he would see what was hidden there—she who had become so good at hiding things from him.

‘Wait a minute.’

Oh God, it was him again; he was following her. Vivien kept walking, faster now, her chin a little higher. She didn’t want him to reach her; it was best for all concerned that he didn’t. And yet. There was a part of her—the same incautious curious part that had ruled her as a child and got her into so much trouble; the part Aunt Ada had despaired of and her father had nurtured; the small concealed part that didn’t seem to die no matter what was thrown at it—that wanted to know what the man from the dream would say next.

Vivien cursed that part of her. She crossed the street and walked faster along the paving stones, her shoes clipping coldly. Foolish woman. He’d visited her mind that night for no reason other than that her brain had somehow thrown his image into the unconscious jumble that gave rise to dreams.

‘Wait,’ he said, close behind now. ‘God, you weren’t joking about your speed. You ought to think about the Olympics. A champion like you—it’d be good for the country’s morale don’t you think?’

She felt herself slow marginally as he reached her side, but she didn’t look at him, only listened when he said. ‘I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot. I didn’t mean to tease back there, I was just so pleased to have run into you like this.’

She glanced at him, ‘Oh? Why is that?’

He stopped walking, and there was something in the seriousness of his expression that made her stop too. She looked up and down the street, checking she hadn’t been followed by anybody else as he said, ‘No need to be worried, it’s just—I’ve been thinking a lot since we met about the hospital, about Nella—the little girl in the photo.’

‘I know who Nella is,’ Vivien snapped. ‘I saw her just this week.’ ‘She’s still in the hospital then?’

‘She is.’

Her brevity, she saw, made him wince—good—but then he smiled, presumably trying to thaw her. ‘Look, I’d like to visit her, that’s all. I didn’t mean to bother you, and I promise not to get in your way. If you’d take me there some time, I’d be very grateful.’

Vivien knew she should say no. The last thing she needed—or want- ed—was a man like him tagging along when she went to Dr Tomalin’s place. The whole affair was dangerous enough as it was; Henry was already growing suspicious. But he was looking at her so keenly, and damn it, his face was full of light and goodness somehow—hope—and that feeling was back, the shimmering craving of the dream.

‘Please?’ He lifted his hand towards her; in the dream she’d held it. ‘You’ll need to keep up,’ she said sharply. ‘And it’s only this once.’ ‘What? You mean now? That’s where you’re headed?’

‘Yes. And I’m running very late.’ She didn’t say ‘thanks to you’, but she hoped it was implied. ‘I have … an appointment to keep.’

‘I won’t get in your way. Promise.’

She hadn’t meant to encourage him, but she could tell by his grin that she had. ‘I’ll take you there today,’ she said, ‘but then you’re to disappear.’

‘You know I’m not really invisible, right?’

She didn’t smile. ‘You’re to go back to wherever it was you came from and forget all about what I told you that night in the canteen.’ ‘You have my word.’ He held out his hand for her to shake, ‘My name’s—’

‘No.’ She said it quickly and saw by his face that she’d taken him by surprise. ‘No names. Friends exchange names, and we’re not that.’ He blinked and then nodded.

She sounded cold; she was glad; she’d been foolish enough already. ‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘After I’ve taken you to visit Nella, I trust that you and I will never meet again.’

Jimmy hadn’t been joking, not entirely—Vivien Jenkins walked like someone with a target painted on her back. More aptly, like someone trying to stay two paces ahead of the fellow she’d reluctantly agreed to escort to a rendezvous with her lover. He had to jog a little to keep up as she hurried through the rabbit warren of riverside streets, and there was no way he’d have been able to make conversation at the same time. Just as well, too: the less said between them the better. Like she’d said, they weren’t friends, nor were they going to be. He was glad she’d spelled it out—it was a timely reminder for Jimmy, who had a habit of getting on with most people, that he didn’t want to know Vivien Jenkins any more than she wanted to know him.

He’d agreed to Doll’s plan in the end partly because she’d promised him no one would get hurt. ‘Can’t you see how simple it is?’ she’d said, squeezing his hand tightly in the Lyons Corner House by Marble Arch. ‘You bump into her accidentally—or so it seems—and while you’re to- ing and froing about what a coincidence it is, you tell her you’d like to visit the little girl, the one from the bomb blast, the orphan.’

‘Nella,’ he’d said, watching the way the sunlight failed to bring a shine to the metal table rim.

‘She’ll agree—who wouldn’t? Especially when you tell her how moved you were by the child’s plight—which is true, Jim-my, isn’t it? You told me yourself you wanted to go and check how she was getting on.’

He nodded, still not meeting her eyes.

‘So you go with her, find a way to arrange one more meeting, and then I turn up and take a photograph of the two of you looking, you know, close. We’ll send her a letter—anonymously, of course—letting her know what I have, and then she’ll be only too happy to do what’s necessary to keep it secret.’ Dolly had killed her cigarette by stabbing it violently into the ashtray. ‘See? It’s so simple it’s foolproof.’

Simple, perhaps, foolproof even, but still not right. ‘It’s extortion, Doll,’ he’d said softly, and then, turning his head to look at her, ‘It’s stealing.’

‘No—’ Dolly was adamant—‘it’s justice; it’s what she de-serves after what she did to me, to us, Jimmy—not to mention what she’s doing to her husband. Besides, she’s got loads of money—she won’t even miss the small amount we ask for.’

‘But her husband, he’ll—’

‘Never know—that’s the beauty of it, Jimmy, it’s all hers. The house they live in on Campden Grove, the private income … Vivien’s grandmother left it to her with a stipulation she was to retain control even after marriage. You should have heard Lady Gwendolyn on the mat- ter—she thought it was the most tremendous lark.’

He hadn’t answered and Dolly must have sensed his reluctance, because she started to panic. Her already large eyes widened imploringly and she knotted her fingers together, prayer-like. ‘Don’t you see?’ she said. ‘She’ll hardly feel it, but we’ll be able to live together, man and wife. Happily ever after, Jim-my.’

He still hadn’t known what to say so he said nothing, toying with a match as the tension between them continued to swell, and his thoughts had drifted, as they always did when Jimmy was upset, like a curlicue of smoke, away from the issue at hand. He found himself thinking of his father. The room they were sharing until they found something better, and the way the old man sat at the window watching the street, wondering aloud whether Jimmy’s mother would know where to find them now, wondering whether perhaps that’s why she didn’t come, and asking Jimmy every night if they mightn’t please go back to the other flat now. He cried sometimes, and it damn near broke Jimmy’s heart to hear the old man sobbing into his pillow and saying over and over to no one in particular that he just wished things could go back to how they’d been. When he had children, Jimmy hoped he’d know just the right words to say to make everything better when they cried as if the world was coming apart, but it was harder somehow when the crying person was your dad. There were so many people weeping into their pillows these days—Jimmy thought of all the lost souls he’d photographed since the war began, the dispossessed and grieving, the hopeless and the brave, and he looked at Doll, lighting another cigarette now and smoking it anxiously, so changed from that girl by the seaside with laughter in her eyes, and he thought there were probably a lot of people who’d join his father in wishing to go back.

Or forward. The match snapped between his fingers. You couldn’t go backwards, could you, that was just wishful thinking, but there was another way out of now and it was forwards. He remembered how he’d felt in the weeks after Dolly said she couldn’t marry him, the vast emptiness that had stretched blackly ahead, the loneliness that had kept him awake at night, listening to the wretched, endless beating of his own heart; his father’s sobbing; and he wondered finally whether there was really anything so terrible in what Doll suggested.

Ordinarily Jimmy might’ve answered that yes there was, he’d once had very clear ideas about right and wrong; but now, with the war, with everything being blown to pieces around them, well—Jimmy shook his head uncertainly—things were just different somehow. There were times, he realised, when a person stuck to their rigid ideas at their own risk.

He brought the pieces of matchstick into perfect alignment and, as he did so, Jimmy heard Doll sigh next to him. He glanced at her as she collapsed back against the leather seat and buried her face in her small hands. He noticed again the scratches on her arms, how thin she’d become. ‘I’m sorry, Jim-my,’ she said through her fingers, ‘I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. It was just an idea. I just—I just wanted—’. Her voice was a whisper now, as if she couldn’t bear to hear herself speak the awful simple truth. ‘She made me feel like I was nothing, Jimmy.’

Dolly liked to play make-believe, and there was no one like her for disappearing beneath the skin of an imagined character, but Jimmy knew her well and in that moment her naked honesty cut him to the core. Vivien Jenkins had made his beautiful Doll—she, who was so clever and sparkly, whose laugh made him feel more alive, who had so damn much to offer the world—feel like she was nothing. Jimmy didn’t need to hear anything more.