The Secret Keeper (4 page)

She could never be sure these past few months, that her mother was listening, though the kinder nurse said there was no reason to think otherwise, and sometimes Laurel allowed herself the liberty of inven- tion—nothing too drastic, only that when her imagination led away from the main action and into the peripheries she let it. Iris didn’t approve, she said their mother’s story was important to her and Laurel had no right to embellish, but the doctor had only shrugged when told of the transgression, and said it was the talking that mattered, not so much the truth of what was said. He’d turned to Laurel with a wink: ‘You of all people shouldn’t be expected to abide by truth, Miss Nicolson.’

Despite his having sided with her, Laurel had resented the assumed collusion. She’d considered pointing out the distinction between performance on stage and deception in life; telling the impertinent doctor with his too-black hair and too-white teeth that in either case truth mattered; but she’d known better than to argue philosophy with a man who carried a golf-stick novelty pen in his shirt pocket.

She moved on to the next page and found, as she always did, the series of her infant self. She narrated swiftly across her early years— baby Laurel sleeping in a crib with stars and fairies painted on the wall above; blinking dourly in her mother’s arms; grown some and tottering plumply in the seaside shallows—before reaching the point where reciting ended and remembering began. She turned the page, unleashing the noise and laughter of the others. Was it a coincidence that her own memories were linked so strongly with their arrival, these stepping-stone sisters, tumbling in long grass; waving from the tree- house window; standing in line before Greenacres farmhouse—their home—brushed and pinned, polished and darned for some forgotten outing?

Laurel’s nightmares had stopped after her sisters were born. That is, they’d changed. There were no more visits from zombies or monsters or strange men who lived by day in the cup-board; she started dreaming instead that a tidal wave was coming, or the world was ending, or a war had started, and she alone had to keep the younger ones safe. It was one of the things she could most clearly remember her mother saying to her as a girl: ‘Take care of your sisters. You’re the eldest, don’t you let them go.’ It hadn’t occurred to Laurel back then that her mother might be speaking from experience; that implicit in the warning was her decades-old grief for a younger brother, lost to a bomb in the Second World War. Children could be self-centred like that, especially the happy ones. And the Nicolson children had been happier than most.

‘Here we are at Easter. That’s Daphne in the highchair, which must make it 1956. Yes, it is. See—Rose has her arm in plaster, her left arm this time. Iris is playing the goat, grinning at the back, but she won’t be for long. Do you remember? That’s the afternoon she raided the fridge and sucked clean all the crab claws Daddy had brought home from his fishing trip the day before.’ It was the only time Laurel had ever seen him really angry. He’d stumbled out after his nap, sun-touched and fancying a bit of sweet crabmeat, and all he’d found in the fridge were hollow shells. She could still picture Iris hiding behind the sofa—the one place their father couldn’t reach her with his threats of a tanning (an empty threat, but no less frightening for it)—refusing to come out. Begging whomever would listen to take pity and please, pretty please slide her the copy of Pippi Longstocking. The memory made Laurel fond. She’d forgotten how funny Iris could be when she wasn’t so damn busy being cross.

Something slipped from the back of the album and Laurel fetched it up from the floor. It was a photograph she’d never seen before, an old-fashioned black-and-white shot of two young women, their arms linked. They were laughing at her from within its white border, standing together in a room with bunting hanging above them and sunlight streaming in from an unseen window. She turned it over, looking for an annotation, but there was nothing written there except the date: May 1941. How peculiar. Laurel knew the family album inside out and this photograph, these people, did not belong. The door opened and Rose appeared, two mismatched teacups jiggling on their saucers.

Laurel held up the photo. ‘Have you seen this, Rosie?’

Rose set a cup down on the bedside table, squinted briefly at the picture, and then she smiled. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘It turned up a few months ago at Greenacres—I thought you’d be able to make a place for it in the album. Lovely, isn’t she? So special to discover something new of her, especially now.’

Laurel looked again at the photo. The young women with their hair in side-parted Victory rolls; skirts grazing their knees; one with a cigarette dangling from her hand. Of course it was their mother. Her makeup was different. She was different.

‘Funny,’ Rose said, ‘I never thought of her like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Young, I suppose. Having a laugh with a girlfriend.’

‘Didn’t you? I wonder why?’ Though of course the same was true of Laurel. In her mind—in all of their minds, apparently—their mother had come into being when she’d answered Grandma’s newspaper advertisement for a maid-of-all-work and started at the boarding house. They knew the basics of before: that she’d been born and raised in Coventry, that she’d gone to London just before the war began, that her family had been killed in the bombings. Laurel knew, too, that the death of her mother’s family had struck her deeply. Dorothy Nicolson had taken every opportunity to remind her own children that family was everything; it had been the mantra of their childhood. When Laurel was going through a particularly painful teenage phase, her mother had taken her by the hands and said, with unusual sternness, ‘Don’t be like I was, Laurel. Don’t wait too long to realise what’s important. Your family might drive you mad sometimes, but they’re worth more to you than you could ever imagine.’

As to the details of Dorothy’s life before she met Stephen Nicol- son, though, she’d never forced them on her children and they hadn’t thought to ask. Nothing odd in that, Laurel supposed with mild discomfort. Children are inherently self-centred; they don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, about parental claims to a prior existence. Now though, looking at this wartime stranger, Laurel felt the lack of knowledge keenly.

When she was starting out as an actress, a well-known director had leaned over his script, straightened his coke-bottle glasses and told Laurel she hadn’t the looks to play leading roles. The advice had stung and she’d wailed and railed, and then spent hours catching herself ac- cidentally-on-purpose in the mirror before hacking her long hair short in the grip of drunken bravura. But it had proved a ‘moment’ in her career. She was a character actress. The director cast her as the leading lady’s sister and she garnered her first rave reviews. People marvelled at her ability to build characters from the inside out, to submerge herself and disappear beneath the skin of another person, but there was no trick to it; she merely bothered to learn the character’s secrets. Laurel knew quite a bit about keeping secrets. She also knew that’s where the real people were found, hiding behind their black spots.

‘Do you realise it’s the youngest we’ve ever seen her?’ Rose perched on Laurel’s armrest, her lavender smell stronger than before, as she took the photograph.

‘Is it?’ Laurel reached for her cigarettes, remembered she was in a hospital and took up her tea instead. ‘I suppose it is.’ So much of her mother’s past was made up of black spots. Why had it never bothered her before? She glanced again at the picture, the two young women who seemed now to be laughing at her ignorance. She tried to sound casual. ‘Where did you say you found it, Rosie?’

‘Inside a book.’

‘A book?’

‘A play, actually—Peter Pan.’

‘Ma was in a play?’ Their mother had been a great one for games of ‘dressing up’ and ‘let’s pretend’, but Laurel couldn’t remember her ever performing in a real play.

‘I’m not sure about that. The book was a gift. There was an inscription in the front—you know, the way she liked us to do with presents when we were kids?’

‘What did it say?’

‘For Dorothy,’ Rose plaited her fingers together under the strain of recollection, ‘A true friend is a light in the dark, Vivien.’

Vivien. The name did something strange to Laurel. Her skin went hot and cold, and her heart speeded up so she could feel her pulse beating in her temples. A dizzying series of images flashed across her brain—a glistening blade, her mother’s frightened face, a red ribbon come loose. Old memories, ugly memories, that the unknown woman’s name had somehow un-leashed -‘Vivien,’ she repeated, her voice louder than she in-tended. ‘Who is Vivien?’

Rose looked up, surprised, but whatever she might have answered was lost when Iris came blasting through the door, parking ticket held aloft. Both sisters turned towards her mighty indignation and therefore neither noticed Dorothy’s sharp intake of breath, the look of anguish that crossed her face at the mention of Vivien’s name. By the time the three Nicolson sisters had gathered at their mother’s side, Dorothy appeared to be sleeping calmly, her features giving no hint that she’d left the hospital, her weary body, and her grown daughters behind; slipping through time to the dark night of 1941.

Three

London, May 1941

DOROTHY SMITHAM ran downstairs, calling goodnight to Mrs White as she shimmied into the sleeves of her coat. The landlady blinked through thick spectacles when she passed, anxious to continue her never-ending treatise on the neighbour’s foibles, but Dolly didn’t stop. She slowed sufficiently only to check herself in the hall mirror and pinch some colour into her cheeks. Happy enough with what she saw, she opened the door and darted out into the blackout. She was in a hurry, no time tonight for trouble with the warden; Jimmy would be at the restaurant already and she didn’t want to keep him waiting. They had so much to discuss—what they should take, what they’d do when they got there, when they should finally go …

Dolly smiled eagerly, reaching into her deep coat pocket and rolling the carved figurine beneath her fingertips. She’d noticed it in the pawnbrokers window the other day; it was only a trifle, she knew, but it had made her think of him, and now more than ever, as London came down around them, it was important to let people know how much they meant. Dolly was longing to give it to him—she could just imagine his face when he saw it, the way he’d smile and reach for her and tell her, as he always did, how much he loved her. The little wooden Mr Punch might not be much, but it was perfect; Jimmy had always adored the seaside. They both had.

‘Excuse me?’

It was a woman’s voice and it was unexpected. ‘Yes?’ Dolly called back, her own voice catching with surprise. The woman must’ve noticed her when light spilled briefly through the opened door.

‘Please—can you help me? I’m looking for number 24.’

Despite the blackout and the impossibility of being seen, Dolly gestured from habit towards the door behind her. ‘You’re in luck,’ she said. ‘It’s right here. No rooms free at the moment, I’m afraid, but there will be soon.’ Her very own room, in fact (if room it could be called). She slid a cigarette onto her lip and struck the match.

‘Dolly?’

At that, Dolly squinted into the darkness. The owner of the voice was rushing towards her; she sensed a flurry of movement, and then the woman, close now, said, ‘It is you, thank God. It’s me, Dolly. It’s—’ ‘Vivien?’ She recognised the voice suddenly; she knew it so well, and yet there was something different about it.

‘I thought I might’ve missed you, that I was too late.’

‘Too late for what?’ Dolly faltered; they’d had no plans to meet, not tonight. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing—’. Vivien started to laugh then and the sound, me-tallic and unnerving, sent jangles up Dolly’s spine. ‘That is, everything.’ ‘Have you been drinking?’ Dolly had never known Vivien to behave like this; gone was the usual veneer of elegance, the perfect self-control.

The other woman didn’t answer, not exactly. The neighbour’s cat bounded off a nearby wall, landing with a thud on their rabbit hutch. Vivien jumped, and then whispered: ‘We have to talk—quickly.’

Dolly stalled by drawing hard on her cigarette. Ordinarily she’d have loved for the pair of them to sit down and have a heart to heart, but not now, not tonight. She was impatient to be getting on. ‘I can’t,’ she said, ‘I was just—’

‘Dolly, please.’

She reached into her pocket and turned over the little wood-en gift. Jimmy would be there already; he’d be wondering where she was, glancing at the door each time it opened, expecting to see her. She hated to keep him waiting, especially now … But here was Vivien, turned up on the doorstep, so serious, so nervy, glancing over her shoulder all the time, pleading and saying how important it was that they talk.

Dolly sighed in reluctant capitulation. She couldn’t very well leave Vivien like this, not when she was so upset.

She told herself Jimmy would understand, that in a funny way, he’d become fond of Vivien, too. And then she made the decision that would prove fateful for them all. ‘Come on,’ she said, extinguishing her cigarette and taking Vivien gently by a thin arm, ‘let’s go back inside.’