The Secret Keeper (58 page)

She’d brought the photograph of Dorothy and Vivien into the tree house with her, the one Rose had found inside Peter Pan, and now Laurel took it out of her pocket. Along with the play script itself, she’d been carrying it around with her ever since she’d got back from Oxford; they’d become a talisman of sorts, the starting point to this mystery she was trying to unravel, and—God, she hoped—with any luck, the key to its solution. The two women hadn’t been friends, Gerry said, and yet they must have been, for what else explained this picture?

Laurel stared hard at them, their arms linked as they smiled at the photographer, determined to find a clue. Where had it been taken? she wondered. In a room somewhere, that much was clear; a room with a slanting roof—an attic perhaps? There was no one else in the photo, but a small dark smudge behind the women might have been another person moving very quickly—Laurel looked closer—a small person, unless there was something tricky going on with the perspective. A child? Perhaps. Though that didn’t help especially, there were children everywhere. (Or were there, in London during the war? A lot were evacuated, particularly during the first years when London was being blitzed.)

Laurel sighed frustratedly. It was no use; no matter how she tried, it was still a guessing game—one option was as plausible as the next and nothing she’d discovered so far gave any real hint as to the circumstances that had led to this picture being taken. Except perhaps the book it had been nestled inside all these decades. Did that mean something—had the two objects always been a pair—had her mother and Vivien been in a play together? Or was it just another infuriating coincidence?

She focused her attention on Dorothy, slipping on her glasses and angling the photograph towards the light of the open window, better to see each grain of detail. It struck Laurel that there was something not quite right about her mother’s face; it was strained, as if the extreme good humour she’d found for the photographer wasn’t entirely genuine. It wasn’t antipathy; certainly not; there was no sense that she didn’t like the person behind the camera—rather that the happiness was an exaggeration. That it was driven by some emotion other than pure simple joy—

‘Hey!’

Laurel jumped and made an owl-like whoop. She glanced at the tree-house entrance. Gerry was standing at the top of the ladder, laughing. ‘Oh, Lol,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You should have seen your face.’

‘Yes. Very funny, I’m sure.’

‘It really was.’

Laurel’s heart was still pounding. ‘To a child perhaps.’ She looked out onto the empty driveway. ‘How did you get here? I didn’t hear a car?’

‘We’ve been working on teleporting—you know, dissolving matter into nothing and then transmitting it. Going pretty well so far, though I think I might’ve left half my brain in Cambridge.’

Laurel smiled with exaggerated patience. Delighted though she was to see her brother, she was in no mood for humour.

‘No? Oh, all right. I caught the bus and walked up from the village.’ He climbed in and sat down next to her. He looked like a lanky shaggy giant, craning his long neck to take in every angle of the tree house. ‘God, it’s been a while since I’ve been up here. I really like what you’ve done with the place.’

‘Gerry.’

‘I mean I like your flat in London, but this is less pretentious, isn’t it? More natural.’

‘Are you finished?’ Laurel blinked sternly at him.

He pretended to consider, tapping his chin, and then pushed his unruly hair back from his forehead. ‘You know, I think I am.’

‘Good, then would you kindly tell me what you found in Lon-don? Don’t mean to be rude, but I’m trying to solve a rather significant family mystery here.’

‘Right, well. When you put it like that …’ He was wearing a green canvas satchel across his body and he lifted the strap over his head, long fingers feeling about inside to draw out a small notebook. Laurel felt a surge of dismay when she saw it, but she bit her tongue and didn’t remark on how tatty the book was—bits of paper coming out at all angles, some curling Post-it notes at top and bottom, a coffee ring on the front. The man had a doctorate and more besides, presumably he knew how to take good notes, hopefully he’d be a dab hand at finding them again.

‘While you’re riffling,’ she said with determined cheerfulness. ‘I’ve been wondering about what you said the other day, on the phone.’ ‘Mm?’ He continued searching through a clutch of papers.

‘You said Dorothy and Vivien weren’t friends, that they hardly knew each other.’

‘That’s right.’

‘I just—I’m sorry, but I just don’t understand how that can be. Do you think you might’ve got it wrong somehow? I mean—’ she held up the photograph, the two young women, arms linked, smiling at the camera—‘what do you say to that?’

He took it from her. ‘I say they’re both very pretty young la-dies. Film quality’s come a long way since then. Black and white’s a far more moody finish than col—’

‘Gerry,’ Laurel warned.

‘And—’ he handed it back—‘I say all this photo tells me is that for a split second, sixty years ago, our mother linked arms with another woman and smiled at a camera.’

Damned, dry science logic. Laurel grimaced. ‘What about this then?’ She took up the old copy of Peter Pan and opened it to the frontispiece. ‘It’s inscribed,’ she said, pointing her finger at the handwritten lines, ‘Look.’

Gerry set his papers in his lap and took the book from her. He read the message. ‘For Dorothy, A true friend is a light in the dark, Vivien.’ It was small of her, she knew, but Laurel felt just a wee bit triumphant then. ‘That’s a bit harder to dispute, isn’t it?’

He stuck the pad of his thumb in his chin dimple and frowned, still staring at the page. ‘That, I grant you, is a little trickier.’ He brought the book closer, lifted his brows as if he were trying to focus, and then he leaned it more towards the light. As Laurel watched, a smile brightened her brother’s face.

‘What?’ she demanded. ‘What is it?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t expect you to notice, of course—you humanities types are never big on detail.’

‘The point, Gerry?’

He handed the book back to her. ‘Have a closer look. It strikes me that the body of the message is written in a different pen from the name above it.’

Laurel moved to beneath the tree-house window and let sunlight stream directly onto the page. She adjusted her reading glasses and stared hard at the inscription.

Well—some detective she turned out to be—Laurel couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed before. The message about friend-ship was written in one pen, and the words ‘For Dorothy,’ at the top, though also in black ink, had been written with another, slightly finer. It was possible Vivien had started writing with one and then switched to a second— the ink of the first might have been running low—but it was unlikely, wasn’t it?

Laurel had the dispiriting sense she was clutching at straws, particularly when, as she continued to look, she started to perceive slight variations in the two handwriting styles. Her voice was low and clipped: ‘You’re suggesting Ma might have written her own name in the book, aren’t you? Made it look as if it were a gift from Vivien?’

‘I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just saying two different pens have been used. But yeah—that’s a distinct possibility, particularly in light of what Dr. Rufus observed.’

‘Yes,’ said Laurel, closing the book. ‘Dr Rufus—tell me everything you found, Gerry. Everything he wrote about this—’ she waved her fingers—‘obsessive condition of Ma’s.’

‘First up, it wasn’t an obsessive condition, it was just your garden- variety obsession.’

‘There’s a difference?’

‘Well, yes. One is a clinical definition, the other is a single trait. Dr Rufus certainly thought she had some issues—I’ll get to those—but she was never actually his patient. Dr Rufus had known her as a child—his daughter had been friends with Ma when they were growing up in Coventry. He liked her, I gather, and he took an interest in her life.’ Laurel glanced at the photograph in her hand, her beautiful young mother. ‘I’ll bet he did.’

‘They met regularly for lunch and—’

‘—and he just happened to write down most of what she told him? Some friend he turned out to be.’

‘Just as well for our purposes.’

Laurel had to concede the point, but only grudgingly.

Gerry had closed his notebook and he glanced at the Post-it note stuck to its cover. ‘So, according to Lionel Rufus, she’d always been an outgoing sort of girl, playful, fun and very imaginative—all the things we know Ma to be; her origins were ordinary enough, but she was desperate to lead a fabulous life. He first became interested in her because he was researching narcissism—’

‘Narcissism?’

‘—in particular the role of fantasy as a defence mechanism. He noticed that some of the things Ma said and did as a teen-ager tallied with the list of traits he was working on. Nothing over the top, just a certain level of self-absorption, a need to be admired, a tendency to see herself as exceptional, dreams of being successful and popular—’

‘Sounds like every teenager I’ve met.’

‘Exactly, and it’s all a sliding scale. Some narcissistic traits are common and normal, other people parlay the same traits into forms for which society generously rewards them—’

‘Like who?’

‘Oh, I don’t know—actors …’ He gave her a crinkly smile. ‘Seriously though, despite what Caravaggio would have us believe, it’s not all about staring into mirrors all day—’

‘I should think not. Daphne would be in trouble if it were.’

‘But people with a bent towards narcissistic personality types are susceptible to obsessive ideas and fantasies.’

‘Like imagined friendships with people they admire?’

‘Yes, precisely. Many times it’s a harmless delusion that fades eventually leaving the recipient of the ardour none the wiser; other times, though, if the person is forced to confront the fact that their fantasy isn’t real—if something happens to crack the mirror, so to speak—well, let’s just say they’re the type to feel rejection rather deeply.’

‘And to seek revenge?’

‘I should say so. Though they’d more likely see it as justice than revenge.’

Laurel lit a cigarette.

‘Rufus’s notes don’t go into enormous detail, but it seems that in the early 1940s, when Ma was around nineteen years old, she developed two major fantasies: the first with regards to her employer—she was convinced the old aristocrat looked up-on her as a daughter and was going to leave her the bulk of the ancestral estate—’

‘Which she didn’t?’

Gerry inclined his head and waited patiently for Laurel to say, ‘No, of course she didn’t. Go on …’

‘The second was her imagined friendship with Vivien. They knew each other, they just weren’t as close as Ma imagined them to be.’

‘And then something happened to spoil the fantasy?’

Gerry nodded. ‘I couldn’t find a lot of details, but Rufus wrote that Ma was “slighted” by Vivien Jenkins; the circumstances weren’t clear, but I gather Vivien openly denied knowing her. Ma was hurt and embarrassed, angry too, but—he thought—all right, until a month or so later he was advised she’d come up with some sort of plan to “put things right”.’

‘Ma told him that?’

‘No, I don’t think so …’ Gerry scanned the Post-it note. ‘He didn’t specify how he knew, but I got the impression—something in the way it was worded—that the information didn’t come directly from Ma.’ Laurel drew in the corner of her mouth, considering. The words ‘put things right’ made her mind cast back to her visit with Kitty Barker, in particular the old woman’s account of the night she and Ma went out dancing. Dolly’s wild over-the-top behaviour, the ‘plan’ she kept on about, the friend she’d brought with her—a girl she’d grown up with in Coventry. Laurel smoked thoughtfully. Dr Rufus’s daughter, it had to be, who’d gone home afterwards and told her father what she’d heard.

Laurel felt sorry for her mother then—to be denied by one friend, reported on by another; she could well remember the hot intensity of her own teenage daydreams and imaginings: it had been a relief when she became an actress and was able to funnel them into artistic creations. Dorothy, though, hadn’t had that opportunity …

‘So what happened, Gerry?’ she said. ‘Ma just let her fantasies go, snapped out of it?’ The word “snapped”, and Laurel remembered her mother’s crocodile story. That sort of change was exactly what she’d been suggesting in the tale, wasn’t it? A transition from the young Dolly of Kitty Barker’s London memories, to Dorothy Nicolson of Greenacres.