The Secret Keeper (16 page)

Laurel turned into Campden Grove and met a large drift of leaves. The street-sweeper hadn’t been around yet and she was glad. She crunched through the thickest clump and time looped back upon itself so she was both here and now, and eight years old again playing in the woods behind Greenacres. ‘Fill the bag right to the top, girls. We want our flames to reach the moon.’ That was Ma and it was Bonfire Night. Laurel and Rose in Wellington boots and scarves, Iris a bundled baby blinking from the pushchair. Gerry, who would come to love the woods best of all was but a whisper, a distant firefly in the rosy sky. Daphne, also unborn, was making her presence felt, swimming and swirling and leaping in their mother’s belly: I’m here! I’m here! I’m here! (‘That happened when you were dead,’ they used to tell her when conversation turned to something from before she was born. The suggestion of death hadn’t bothered her, but the idea that the whole noisy show had been rolling along without her scorched.)

Halfway along the street, just past Gordon Place, Laurel stopped. There it was, number 25. Wedged between 24 and 26, just as it should be. The house itself was much like the others, white Victorian with black iron railings on the first-floor balcony and a dormer window in the shallow slate roof. A baby’s pram, the sort that looked as if it might well double as a lunar module, was sitting on the tessellated-tile front path, and a garland of Halloween pumpkin heads, drawn by a child, had been strung across the ground-floor window. There was no blue plaque on the front, only the street number. Evidently no one had seen fit to suggest to English Heritage that Henry Ronald Jenkins’s tenure at 25 Campden Grove should be marked for posterity. Laurel wondered if the current residents knew that their house had once belonged to a famous writer. Probably not, and why should they? Lots of people in London lived in a house that could lay claim to having once been lived in by a Somebody, and Henry Jenkins’s fame had been fleeting.

Laurel had found him on the Internet, though. Opposite problem there—one couldn’t disentangle oneself from that net for all the love and money in England. Henry Jenkins was one of millions of ghosts who lived inside it, milling wraithlike until the right combination of letters was entered and they were briefly resurrected. At Greenacres, Laurel had made a tentative attempt to surf the Web on her new phone, but just as she’d worked out where she was supposed to enter the search terms, the battery had died. Borrowing Iris’s laptop for such clandestine purpose was out of the question, so she’d spent her final hours in Suffolk in silent excruciation, helping Rose scrub mould from the bathroom grout.

When Neil came as arranged on Friday, they’d made pleas-ant small talk about the traffic, the coming theatre season, the likelihood of the road works being finished in time for the Olympics, all the way back down the M11. Safely arrived in London, Laurel had forced herself to stand in the dusk with her suitcase, waving goodbye until the car disappeared from sight, and then she’d gone calmly up the stairs, unlocked the flat without a hint of key fumbling, and let herself in. She’d closed the door quietly behind her and then, only then, in the safety of her very own sitting room, had she let the suitcase and the facade drop. Without even pausing to switch on the lights, she’d fired up her laptop and typed his name into Google. In the fraction of time it took for results to appear, Laurel became a nail-biter again.

The Henry Jenkins Wikipedia page wasn’t detailed, but it provided a bibliography and a brief biography (born London, 1901, married Oxford, 1938, lived at 25 Campden Grove, Lon-don, died Suffolk, 1961); his novels were listed on a few second-hand bookstore sites (Laurel ordered two); and he was mentioned on pages as varied as the ‘Nordstrom School Alumni List’ and ‘Stranger than Fiction: Mysterious Literary Deaths’. Laurel was able to glean some information about his writing—fiction that was semi-autobiographical, a focus on bleak settings and working-class anti-heroes until his breakthrough love story in 1939, work for the Ministry of Information during the war; but there was far more material about his unmasking as the Suffolk Summer Picnic Stalker. She pored over it, page by page, teetering on the rim of panic as she waited for a familiar name or address to leap out and bite her.

It didn’t happen. No mention anywhere of Dorothy Nicolson, mother of Oscar-winning actress and Nation’s (second) Favourite Face, Laurel Nicolson; no more specific geographical reference than ‘a meadow outside Lavenham, Suffolk’; no salacious gossip as to birthday knives or crying babies or family parties by the stream. Of course. Of course there wasn’t. The gentlemanly deceit of 1961 had been shored up nicely by the online history-makers: Henry Jenkins was an author who’d enjoyed success preceding the Second World War but found his star on the wane afterwards. He lost money, influence, friends, and eventually his sense of decency; what he managed to find, in turn, was infamy, and even that had now largely faded. Laurel read the same sorry story over and over again, and each time the pencil-drawn picture became more permanent. She exhaled. She gave her chewed thumbnail a rest. She almost started to believe the fiction herself.

But then she went one click too far. A seemingly innocuous link to a website titled: ‘The Imaginarium of Rupert Holdstock’. The photograph appeared onscreen like a face at the window: Henry Jenkins, unmistakable, though younger than when she’d watched him coming up the driveway. Laurel’s skin flushed hot and cold. Neither of the newspaper articles she’d found when it happened had included a photograph and this was the first time she’d seen his face since that afternoon from the tree house.

She couldn’t help it; she ran an image search. Within 0.27 seconds Google had assembled a screen tiled with identical photographs of marginally different proportions. Seeing them en masse made him look macabre. (Or was it her own associations doing that? The creak of the gate hinge; Barnaby’s growl; the white sheet turned russet red). Row upon row of black-and-white portraits: formal attire, dark moustache, heavy brows framing an alarmingly direct gaze. ‘Hello, Dorothy,’ the multiple sets of thin lips seemed to move on the screen. ‘It’s been a long time.’

Laurel slammed the laptop lid shut and cast the room into darkness.

She’d refused to look at Henry Jenkins any longer, but she’d thought about him, and she’d thought about this house, just around the corner from her own, and when the first parcel arrived by overnight mail and she sat up reading it from cover to cover, she’d thought about her mother, too. The Sometime Maid was the eighth novel by Henry Jenkins, published in 1940 and detailing the love affair between a respected author and his wife’s maid-companion. The girl—Sally, she was called—was something of a minx, and the male protagonist a tortured fellow whose wife was beautiful but cold. It wasn’t a bad read, once one made allowance for the stuffy prose; the characters were richly drawn and the narrator’s dilemma was timeless, particularly as Sally and the wife became friends. The ending saw the narrator on the verge of breaking off his affair, but agonising over what the repercussions might be. Poor girl had become hopelessly obsessed with him, you see, and who could blame her? As Henry Jenkins wrote himself, that is, the protagonist, he was quite a catch.

Laurel looked again at the attic window of 25 Campden Grove. Henry Jenkins was known to have written largely from life; Ma had worked for a time as a maid (that’s how she came to Grandma Nicol- son’s boarding house); Ma and Vivien had been close, Ma and Henry Jenkins, in the end, decidedly not. Was it drawing too long a bow to think that Sally’s story might be her mother’s? That Dorothy had at one time lived inside that little room up there beneath the slate, that she’d fallen in love with her employer and that she’d been let down? Would it ex-plain what Laurel had witnessed at Greenacres, a scorned woman’s fury and all that?

Perhaps.

As Laurel wondered how she was going to find out whether a young woman named Dorothy had worked for Henry Jenkins, the front door of number 25 which was red; there was a lot to like about a person with a red front door—opened, and a noisy tangle of plump stockinged legs and knitted pom-pom beanies spilled out onto the pavement. Householders generally didn’t appreciate strangers scoping out their homes, so she ducked her head and riffled through her bag, trying to look like a perfectly normal woman on an errand and not one who’d been chasing ghosts all afternoon. Like any nosy parker worth her salt, she still managed to keep an eye on the action, watching as a woman emerged, with a baby in a pram, three small people at her legs, and—good grief—another childish voice singing at her from somewhere back inside the house.

The woman was crab-stepping the pram towards the top of the stairs and Laurel hesitated. She was about to offer help when the fifth child, a boy, who was taller than the others but still no more than five or six years old, emerged from the house and took up the front. Together he and his mother carried the pram downstairs. The family set off towards Kensington Church Street, little girls skipping ahead, but the boy lingered behind. Laurel watched him. She liked the way his lips moved slightly as if he might be singing to himself, and the way he was using his hands, flattening them out and then tilting his head to watch them undulate towards one another like floating leaves. He was utterly unaware of his surroundings and his focus made him bewitching. He reminded her of Gerry as a boy Darling Gerry. He’d never been ordinary, their brother. He hadn’t spoken a word for the first six years of his life and people who didn’t know him had often presumed he was backward. (People who did know the noisy Nicolson girls saw his silence as nothing other than inevitable.) Those strangers had been wrong, too. Gerry wasn’t backward, he was smart: fiercely smart. Science smart. He collected facts and proofs, truth and theorems, and answers to questions Laurel hadn’t even thought to ask about time and space and the matter in between. When he did finally decide to communicate in words, out loud, it was to ask whether any of them had an opinion as to how engineers planned to help keep the Leaning Tower of Pisa from toppling over (it had been on the news some nights before).

‘Julian!’

Laurel’s memory dissolved and she looked up to see the little boy’s mother calling to him, as if from another planet. ‘Ju-ju-bean.’

The boy guided his left hand into safe landing before looking up.

His eyes met Laurel’s and they widened. Surprise at first, but then something else. Recognition, she knew; it happened a lot, if not always accompanied by realisation. (‘Do I know you? Have we met? Do you work at the bank?’)

She nodded and started to leave, until, ‘You’re Daddy’s lady,’ the boy dead-panned.

‘Ju-li-an.’

Laurel turned back to face the odd little man. ‘What’s that?’

‘You’re Daddy’s lady.’

But before she could ask him what he meant, the lad was gone, tripping over his feet on his way to meet his mother, both hands sailing the invisible currents of Campden Grove.

Ten

LAUREL HAILED A TAXI on Kensington High Street. ‘Where to, love?’ said the driver as she scrambled into the back and out of the sudden rain.

‘Soho—Charlotte Street Hotel, thank you kindly.’

A pause ensued, accompanied by scrutiny in the rear-view mirror, and then, as the car lurched into traffic, ‘You look familiar. What do you do then?’

You’re Daddy’s lady—now what on earth did that mean? ‘I work in a bank.’

As the driver launched an invective against bankers and the global credit crunch, Laurel pretended great focus on the screen of her mobile phone. She scrolled randomly through the names in her address book, stopping when she reached Gerry’s.

He’d arrived late to Ma’s party, scratching his head and trying to remember where he’d left her present. No one expected anything different from Gerry and they were all as thrilled as ever to see him. Fifty-two now, but somehow still an adorable scatty boy wearing ill- fitting trousers and the brown slub jumper Rose had knitted him thirty Christmases before. A great fuss was made, the other sisters falling over one another as they fetched him tea and cake. And even Ma had woken from her doze, her tired old face briefly transformed by the dazzling smile of pure joy she’d been saving for her only son.

Of all her children, she missed him specially. Laurel knew this because the kinder nurse had told her so. She’d stopped Laurel in the hallway when they were setting up for the party and said, ‘I was hoping to catch you.’

Laurel, always quick to raise her guard: ‘What is it?’

‘No need to panic, nothing awful. It’s just your mum’s been asking after someone. A fellow, I think. Jimmy? Would that be it? She wanted to know where he was, why he wasn’t visiting.’

Laurel had frowned and shaken her head and told the nurse the truth. She couldn’t think that Ma knew any Jimmys. She hadn’t added that she was the wrong person to ask, that there were far more dutiful amongst the sisters. (Though not Daphne. Thank God for Daphne. In a family of daughters it was a happy thing not to be the worst.)

‘Not to worry.’ The nurse had smiled reassurance. ‘She’s been going in and out a bit lately. It’s not unusual for them to get confused, not at the end.’

Laurel had flinched at the general ‘them’, the ghastly blunt-ness of ‘end’, but Iris had appeared then with a faulty kettle and a frown for England, and so she’d let the matter go. It was only later, when she was sneaking a cigarette in the hospital portico, that Laurel had realised the mix-up, that of course Gerry was the name Ma was saying, and not Jimmy at all.