The Secret Keeper (21 page)

‘Would that be so bad?’ Kitty said. ‘You could come and work with us. One smile and my supervisor would take you in a jiffy. Bit of a lech, but jolly good fun once you know how to handle him.’

‘Oh yes!’ said Betty and Susan, who had a curious knack for unison. They looked up from their magazine. ‘Come and work with us.’

‘And give up my daily flaying? I hardly think so.’

Kitty laughed. ‘You’re mad, Doll. Mad or brave, I’m not sure which.’ Dolly shrugged; she certainly wasn’t going to discuss her reasons for staying with a gossip like Kitty.

She took up her book instead. It was lying on the side table where she’d left it the night before. The book was new, the first she’d ever owned (except for the unread copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management her mother had thrust so hopefully into her hands). She’d gone to Charing Cross Road especially on one of her Sundays off and bought it from a bookseller there.

‘The Reluctant Muse.’ Kitty leaned forward to read the cover. ‘Haven’t you already read that one?’

‘Twice, actually.’

‘That good?’

‘’Tis, rather.’

Kitty wrinkled her pretty little nose. ‘Not much of a reader myself.’ ‘No?’ Dolly wasn’t either, not usually, but Kitty didn’t need to know that.

‘Henry Jenkins? That name’s familiar … oh now, isn’t he the fellow across the street?’

Dolly gave a vague wave of her cigarette. ‘I believe he lives around here somewhere.’ Of course, it was the very reason she’d chosen the book. Once Lady Gwendolyn had let slip that Henry Jenkins was well known in literary circles for including rather too much fact in his fiction (‘a fellow I could mention was furious to find his dirty laundry aired. Threatened to bring a lawsuit but died before he had the chance—accident prone, just like his father. Lucky for Jenkins …’), Dolly’s curiosity had worked at her like a file. After careful discussion with the bookseller, she’d divined that The Reluctant Muse was about the love affair between a handsome author and his much younger wife, and had eagerly handed over her precious savings. Dolly had spent a delicious week thereafter, eye pressed up close to the window of the Jenkins’s marriage, learning all sorts of details she’d never have dared to ask Vivien outright.

‘Terrifically handsome chap,’ Louisa said, lying prone now on the rug, arching her spine cobra-style to blink at Dolly. ‘Married to that woman with the dark hair, the one who walks around like she’s got a broomstick up her—’

‘Oh!’ Betty and Susan, wide-eyed. ‘Her.’

‘Lucky girl,’ Kitty said. ‘I’d kill for a husband like him. Have you seen the way he looks at her? Like she’s a piece of perfection and he can’t quite believe his luck.’

‘I wouldn’t mind if he glanced my way,’ said Louisa. ‘How do you think a girl meets a man like him?’

Dolly knew the answer to that—how Vivien met Henry—it was right there in the book, but she didn’t volunteer it. Vivien was her friend. To discuss her like this, to know that the others had noticed her too, that they’d speculated and wondered and drawn their own conclusions, made Dolly’s ears burn with indignation. It was as if something that belonged to her, something precious and private that she cared about deeply, was being riffled through like—well, like a hat box of salvaged clothes.

‘I heard she’s not entirely well,’ Louisa said, ‘that’s why he never takes his eyes off her.’

Kitty scoffed. ‘She doesn’t look one bit ill to me. Quite the contrary. I’ve seen her reporting to the WVS canteen round on Church Street when I’m coming home of an evening.’ She lowered her voice and the other girls leaned close to hear her. ‘I heard it was because she had a wandering eye.’

‘Ooh,’ Betty and Susan cooed together, ‘A lover!’

‘Haven’t you noticed how careful she is?’ Kitty continued, to the rapt attention of the others. ‘Always greeting him at the door when he gets home, dressed to the nines and placing a glass of whisky in his waiting hand. Please! That’s not love. It’s a guilty conscience. You mark my words—that woman’s hiding something, and I think we all know what that something is.’

Dolly had heard as much as she could stand; in fact, she found herself in rather violent agreement with Lady Gwendolyn that the sooner the girls left number 7 Campden Grove, the bet-ter. They really were an unsophisticated lot. ‘Is that the time?’ she said, clapping her book closed. ‘I’m going to go and have my bath.’

Dolly waited until the water had reached the five-inch line and turned the tap off with her foot. She poked her big toe inside the spout to stop it dripping. She knew she ought to call someone about fixing it, but who was there left nowadays? Plumbers were too busy putting out fires and turning off exploded water mains to care about a little drip and it always seemed to settle down eventually. She rested her bare neck on the tub’s cool rim and adjusted herself to keep her curlers and kirby grips from digging into her head. She’d tied the whole lot up with a scarf so the steam wouldn’t make her hair lank—wishful thinking, of course, Dolly couldn’t remember the last time her bath had been steaming.

She blinked at the ceiling as strains of dance music drifted up from the wireless downstairs. It really was a lovely room, black and white tiles and lots of silver rails and taps. Lady Gwendolyn’s ghastly nephew, Peregrine, would have a pink fit if he saw the lines strung across it with knickers and brassieres and stockings hung out to dry. The thought rather pleased Dolly.

She reached over the side of the tub and took up her cigarette in one hand, The Reluctant Muse in the other. Keeping both clear of the water (it wasn’t hard—five inches didn’t go far) she flicked through until she found the scene she was looking for. Humphrey, the clever but unhappy writer, has been invited by his old headmaster to return to his school and talk to the boys about literature, followed by dinner in his master’s private quarters. He’s just excused himself from the table and left the residence to stroll back through the darkling garden to the spot where he’s parked his car, and is thinking about the direction his life has taken, the regrets he’s acquired and the ‘cruel passing of time’, when he reaches the estate’s old lake and something catches his eye:

Humphrey dimmed his flashlight and stayed where he was, quiet and still in the shadows of the bathing house. In the nearby clearing on the bank of the lake, glass lanterns had been strung from the branches and candles flickered in the warm night air. A girl on the threshold of adulthood was standing amongst them, feet bare and only the simplest of summer dresses grazing her knees. Her dark hair fell loose in waves over her shoulders and moonlight dripped over the scene to cast silver along her profile. Humphrey could see that her lips were moving, as if she spoke the lines of a poem beneath her breath.

Her face was exquisite—cat-like eyes, arched brows, lips that were curled for singing—yet it was her hands that entranced him. While the rest of her body was perfectly still, her fingers were moving together in front of her body, the small but graceful motions of a person weaving together invisible threads. It wouldn’t have surprised Humphrey to learn that she was sending forth instructions to the sun and moon.

He had known women before, beautiful women who flattered and seduced, but this girl was different. There was beauty in her focus, a purity of purpose that reminded him of a child’s, though she was most certainly a woman. To find her in these natural surrounds, to observe the free flow of her body, the wild, romance of her face, enchanted him.

Humphrey stepped out of the shadows. The girl saw him but she didn’t start. She smiled as if she’d been expecting him and gestured towards the rippling lake, ‘There’s some-thing magical about swimming in the moonlight, don’t you think?’

It was the end of a chapter and the end of her cigarette, and Dolly disposed of both. The water was growing tepid and she wanted to wash herself before it turned any colder. She lathered her arms thoughtfully, wondering as she rinsed off the soap if that was the way Jimmy felt about her.

Dolly climbed out of the tub and slipped a towel from the rack. She caught sight of herself unexpectedly in the mirror and stopped very still trying to imagine what a stranger might see when he looked at her. Brown hair, brown eyes—not too close together thank goodness, a rather perky nose. She knew she was pretty, she’d known that since she was eleven years old and the postman began to behave strangely when he saw her in the street; but was her beauty of a different kind from Vivien’s? Would a man like Henry Jenkins have stopped, spell-bound, to watch her whisper in the moonlight?

Because, of course, Viola was Vivien. Aside from the bio-graphical similarities, there was the description of the girl standing in moonlight by the lake, her curled lips, feline eyes, the way she was staring so intently at something no one else could see. Why, it might have been written about Dolly’s view of Vivien from Lady Gwendolyn’s window.

She moved closer to the mirror. She could hear her own breathing in the still of the bathroom. What must it have been like, she wondered, for Vivien to know that she had made a man like Henry Jenkins, older, more experienced, and with an entree to literature and Society’s finest circles, so enchanted? How like a real princess must she have felt when he proposed marriage, when he swept her away from the humdrum of her normal existence and took her back to London, a life in which she blossomed from a wild young girl into a pearl-wearing, Chanel No 5-scented beauty, dashing about on her husband’s arm as the pair of them held court in the most glamorous clubs and restaurants. That was the Vivien Dolly knew; and, she suspected, the one she more resembled.

Knock, knock. ‘Anyone alive in there?’

Kitty’s voice on the other side of the bathroom door caught Dolly by surprise. ‘Just a minute,’ she called back.

‘Oh, good, you are there. I was beginning to think you might’ve drowned.’

‘No.’

‘Going to be much longer?’

‘No.’

‘Only it’s almost gone half nine, Doll, and I’m meeting a rather splendid airman at the Caribbean Club. Up from Biggin Hill for the night. I don’t suppose you fancy a dance? He said he’s going to bring some friends. One of them specially asked after you.’

‘Not tonight.’

‘Did you hear me say airmen, Doll? Brave and dashing he-roes?’

‘I already have one of those, remember? Besides, I’ve a shift at the WVS canteen.’

‘Surely the widows, virgins and spinsters can do without you for a night?’

Dolly didn’t answer and after a few moments, Kitty said, ‘Well, if you’re sure. Louisa’s keen as mustard to take your place.’

As if she ever could, thought Dolly. ‘Have fun,’ she called, and then she waited as Kitty’s footsteps retreated.

Only when she heard the other girl descending the stairs, did she untie the knot of her scarf and slip it from her head. She knew she’d have to re-do them later, but it didn’t matter. She began to unwind her curlers, dropping them into the empty sink. When they were all out, she combed her hair with her fingers, pulling it down in soft waves around her shoulders.

There now. She turned her head from side to side; she began to whisper beneath her breath (Dolly didn’t know any poems, but she figured the lyrics to ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ would do just as well); she lifted her hands and moved her fingers before her as if she were weaving invisible threads. Dolly smiled a little at what she saw. She looked just like Viola in the book.

Twelve

The following week, December 1940

SATURDAY NIGHT AT LAST, and Jimmy was combing his dark hair back, trying to convince the longer bit at the front to stay put. It was a losing battle without Brylcreem, but he hadn’t been able to stretch to a new tin this month. He’d been doing his best with water and a bit of sweet-talking but the results were not encouraging. The light bulb flickered above him and Jimmy glanced upwards, willing it not to die yet; he’d already robbed the sitting-room lamps, and the bathroom was next. He didn’t fancy bathing in the dark. The bulb dimmed and Jimmy stood in the half-light, strains of music drifting through the floor from the wireless in the flat downstairs. When it brightened again his spirits lifted with it and Jimmy started whistling along to Glenn Miller’s ‘In the Mood’.

The dinner suit had belonged to his dad, back in the days of W. H. Metcalfe & Sons, and it was a whole lot more formal than anything Jimmy owned. He felt a bit of a chump, to be honest—there was a war on and it was bad enough, he always thought, not to be in uniform, let alone all done up like a playboy. Dolly had said to dress well though— ‘Like a gentleman, Jimmy!’ she’d written in her letter, ‘a real gentle- man’—and there wasn’t much in his wardrobe that met that brief. The suit had come with them when they moved down from Coventry, just before the war started; it was one of the few vestiges of the past Jimmy had been unable to part with. Just as well, as things turned out—Jim- my knew better than to disappoint Dolly when she got an idea in her head, especially lately. There’d been a distance between them the past few weeks, ever since her family was hit; she’d been avoiding his sympathy, putting on a brave face, stiffening if he tried to embrace her. She wouldn’t even talk about their deaths, turning the conversation instead to her employer, speaking about the old woman in a far more glowing way than she’d used to. Jimmy was glad she’d found someone to help her with her grief—of course he was; he just wished it could have been him.