The Secret Keeper (42 page)

Twenty-one

Thursday, London, 2011

IT WAS A SMOOTH RUN down the motorway and Laurel was driving along Euston Road by eleven, scanning for car parks. She found one by the mainline station, and eased the little green Mini into a slot. Perfect—the British Library was only a hop, skip and a jump away, and she’d spied the black and blue awning of a Caffe Nero round the corner. All morning with no caffeine and her brain was threatening to melt.

Twenty minutes later a far more focused Laurel was making her way across the grey and white library foyer towards the Reader Registration Office. The young woman with a nametag that read ‘Bonny’ didn’t appear to recognise her, and having caught a glimpse of herself coming through the glass entry door, Laurel took that as a compliment. After tossing and turning most of the night, her thoughts tying themselves in knots as she wondered what her mother could possibly have taken from Vivien Jenkins, she’d slept late again this morning and given herself only ten minutes at Greenacres to make it from bed to car. Her speed had been commendable, but she couldn’t claim to have made the transition in prize peach condition. She tousled a little life into her hair and when Bonny said, ‘Can I help you?’ Laurel answered, ‘My dear, I most certainly hope so.’ She took out the piece of paper on which Gerry had written her reader number. ‘I believe there might be a book waiting for me in the Humanities Reading Room?’

‘Let’s have a look, shall we?’ Bonny said, typing something on her keyboard. ‘I’m just going to need some ID and proof of address to complete your registration.’

Laurel handed over both and Bonny smiled. ‘Laurel Nicolson. Just like the actress.’

‘Yes,’ Laurel agreed. Quite.

Bonny sorted out the reader’s pass and pointed Laurel in the direction of the curved staircase. ‘You want the second floor. Go straight to the desk; you should find the book waiting for you.’

She did. That is, she found a most helpful gentleman—wearing a red knitted waistcoat and a tangled white beard—waiting for her. Laurel explained what she was looking for, passed him the print-out she’d been given downstairs, and within moments he’d gone to the shelves behind him and was sliding a slim, black leather-bound volume across the counter. Laurel read the title under her breath and experienced a frisson of anticipation: Henry Jenkins: An Author’s Life, Loves and Loss.

She found a seat in the corner and sat down, turning over the cover and breathing in the glorious dusty scent of papery possibility. It wasn’t a particularly long book, published by an imprint Laurel had never heard of and with a distinctly unprofessional look about it—something in the size and type of font, the lack of margins, and the few poorly reproduced photographs; it also seemed to rely rather heavily for augmentation on extracts from Henry Jenkins’s novels. But it was a starting point, and Laurel was eager to get started. She scanned the table of contents, her heart beginning to trip along swiftly when she found the chapter entitled ‘Married Life’ that had first sparked her interest when she saw it on the Internet listing.

But Laurel didn’t turn straight to page ninety-seven. Every time she closed her eyes lately, the dark shape of the strange man in a black hat was there, burned onto her retina as he walked up the sunlit driveway. She drummed her fingers lightly on the contents page. Here was her chance to find out more about him; to add colour and detail to the silhouette that made her skin shrink; maybe even to glimpse the reason for what her mother had done that day. Laurel had been frightened before, when she’d searched for Henry Jenkins on the Net, but this—this rather insignificant book—didn’t scare her in the same way. The information contained within it had been published for a long time (since 1963, she saw when she checked the copyright page), which meant—allowing for natural attrition—there were likely to be very few copies in existence, most of them lost in dim less-travelled places. This particular copy had been hidden for decades amongst miles and miles of other forgotten books; if Laurel found something inside she didn’t like, she could just close the cover again and send it back. Never speak of it again. She hesitated, but only briefly, before steeling herself. Fingers tingling, she opened quickly to the ‘Prologue’. With a deep breath of strange and sudden excitement, she began to read about the stranger on the driveway.

When Henry Ronald Jenkins was six years old, he saw a man beaten to within an inch of his life by policemen on the High Street of his Yorkshire village. The man, it was whispered amongst the gathering villagers, was a resident of nearby Denaby—a ‘hell upon earth’, situated in the valley of the Crags and considered by many to be the ‘worst village in England’. It was an incident the young Jenkins was never to forget, and in his debut novel, Mercy of the Black Diamonds, published in 1928, he gave life to one of interwar British fiction’s most remarkable characters, a man of alarming truth and dignity, whose plight generated enormous sympathy from readers and critics alike.

In the opening chapter of Black Diamonds, police in steel-capped boots set upon the ill-fated protagonist, Benny Baker, an illiterate but hard-working man whose personal heart-breaks have led him to agitate for social change and ultimately which result in his untimely death. Jenkins spoke of the real-life event and its profound influence on his work ‘and on my soul’, in a 1935 radio interview with the BBC: ‘I realised that day as I watched a man reduced to nothing by uniformed officers, that there are weak and there are powerful people in our society and that goodness is not a factor in determining into which camp one falls.’ It was a theme that was to find expression in many of Henry Jenkins’s future novels. Mercy of the Black Diamonds was declared ‘a masterpiece’ and on the strength of its early reviews became a publishing sensation. His earliest works, in particular, were lauded for their verisimilitude and the unflinching portraits they observed of working-class life, including uncompromising depictions of poverty and physical violence.

Jenkins himself was brought up in a working-class family. His father was a low-level overseer at the Fitzwilliams’ Collieries; a stern man who drank too much—‘but only on Saturdays’—and who ran his family ‘like we were subordinates in the pits.’ Jenkins was alone amongst his six brothers in leaving behind the village and the expectations of his birth. Of his parents, Jenkins said: ‘My mother was a beautiful woman, but she was vain, too, and disappointed by her lot; she had no real or focused idea as to how her situation might be improved and her frustrations made her bitter. She goaded my father, badgering him constantly about whatever it was that came first to mind; he was a man of great physical strength, but too weak in other ways to be married to a woman like her. Ours was not a happy household.’ When asked by the BBC interviewer whether his parents’ lives had provided him with material for his novels, Jenkins laughed slightly and then added: ‘More than that, they gave me a firm example of the life I wished more than anything to escape.’

And escape it he did. From such humble beginnings, Jenkins, by virtue of his precocious intelligence and tenacity, managed to pull himself out of the pits and take the literary world by storm. When asked by The Times about his tremendous rise, Jenkins credited a teacher at his village school, Herbert Taylor, for recognising his intellectual aptitude as a child and encouraging him to sit scholarship examinations for several of the best public schools. When he was ten years old, Jenkins won a place at the small but prestigious Nordstrom School in Oxfordshire. He left the family home in 1911, boarding the train alone for a journey to the unknown south. Henry Jenkins was never to return to the Yorkshire of his childhood.

While some former public schoolboys, particularly those with different social backgrounds to most, speak of a miserable schooling experience, Jenkins would never be drawn on the subject, saying only that: ‘Admittance to a school like Nordstrom changed my life in the very best of ways.’ His schoolmaster, Jonathan Carlyon, said of Jenkins: ‘He was an incredibly hard worker. He passed his final exams with tremendous scores and went up to Oxford University the following year to study at his first preference College.’ While con-ceding Jenkins’s intelligence, Oxford friend and fellow author, Allen Hennessy, made light-hearted reference to another pool of talents from which he had to draw, ‘I’ve never met a man with more charisma than Jenkins,’ he said. ‘If there were a girl you fancied, you learned pretty damn fast not to intro-duce her to Harry Jenkins. He only had to fix her with one of his famous stares, and your chances were out the window.’ Which is not to suggest that Jenkins abused his so-called ‘powers’: ‘He was handsome and charming, he enjoyed the attention of women, but he was never a playboy,’ said Roy Edwards, Jenkins’s publisher at Macmillan.

Whatever effect Jenkins might have had on the fairer sex, his personal life did not enjoy the same smooth path as his publishing career. In 1930, he suffered a broken engagement to Miss Eliza Holdstock, the details of which he declined to discuss publicly, before finally marrying Vivien Longmeyer, the niece of his Nordstrom schoolmaster in 1938. Despite an age difference of almost twenty years, Jenkins considered their marriage to be ‘the crowning glory of my life’, and the couple settled in London, where they enjoyed a happy domestic situation in the final year before the Second World War. In the lead-up to the declaration of war, Jenkins began working for the Ministry of Information; it was a position in which he excelled, a fact that came as no surprise to those who knew him well. As Allen Hennessy said: ‘Everything [Jenkins] did, he did to perfection. He was athletic, clever, charming … the world is made for men like him.’

Be that as it may, the world is not always kind to men like Jenkins. After the death of his young wife in an air raid during the final weeks of the London Blitz, Jenkins suffered from such tremendous grief that his life began to unravel. He was never to publish another book, indeed whether he continued to write at all remains a mystery, along with many other de-tails of the last decade of his life. When he died in 1961 Henry Ronald Jenkins’s star had set so low that the event barely registered a mention in the very newspapers that had once described him as ‘a genius’ and ‘one to watch’. Suggestion arose in the early 1960s that Jenkins was responsible for the acts of public indecency that had earned the perpetrator the nickname ‘Suffolk Picnic Stalker’, however the allegations have never been proven. Regardless of whether or not Jenkins was guilty of such obscenity, that this once great man had become the subject of such speculation indicates the depth of his fall from grace. The boy whose headmaster had once referred to him as ‘capable of achieving everything to which he set his mind’, died with nothing and no one to his name. The enduring question for admirers of Henry Jenkins is how such an ending could come to the man who had once had everything; an ending that bears tragic similarities to that of his character Benny Baker, whose fate was also to die a quiet lonely death after a life in which love and loss had be-come interwoven.

Laurel leaned back against her library chair and let out the breath she’d been holding. There was nothing much there she hadn’t already gleaned from Google, and the relief was extraordinary. She felt ten pounds lighter. Better yet, despite the reference to Jenkins’s ignominious end, there’d been no mention at all of Dorothy Nicolson nor a farmhouse called Greenacres. Thank God. Laurel hadn’t realised quite how nervous she’d been about what she might find. Turned out the most flustering thing about the Prologue was the portrait it painted of a self-made man whose success was the result of nothing more than hard work and considerable talent. Laurel had rather hoped to uncover something that justified the feelings of snarling hatred she’d developed towards the man on the driveway.

She wondered whether there was a chance the biographer had got it all wrong. It was possible; anything was possible. But even as her spirits briefly lifted, Laurel rolled her eyes. Really, her own arrogance knew no limits—a hunch was one thing, presuming to know more on the subject of Henry Jenkins than the fellow who’d researched and written his life story, quite an-other.

There was a photograph of Jenkins on the frontispiece of the book and she flicked back to it, determined to look beyond the layers of menace her prejudice applied and see the charming, charismatic, bright young writer described by the Prologue. He was younger in this photograph than in the one she’d seen online, and Laurel had to admit that he was handsome. In fact—it occurred to her as she studied his chiselled features—he reminded her in some way of a fellow actor she’d once been rather in love with. They’d been cast together in a Chekhov play back in the sixties and fallen into a mad tempestuous affair. It hadn’t worked out—theatre romances rarely did—but oh, it had been dazzling and intense while it lasted.

Laurel closed the book—her cheeks were warm and a lovely nostalgic feeling was stirring. Well now. That was unexpected. Rather uncomfortable-making, too, under the circumstances. Swallowing a small lump of disquiet, Laurel reminded herself of her purpose and made her way to page ninety-seven. With a focusing deep breath she started on the chapter called, ‘Married Life’.

If Henry Jenkins had been unlucky thus far in his personal relationships, things were about to change for the better. In the spring of 1938, his former headmaster, Mr Jonathan Carlyon, invited Jenkins to return to the Nordstrom School and speak to the final-year students about the travails of literary life. It was there, as he strolled across the estate by evening, that Jenkins met the headmaster’s niece and ward, Vivien Longmeyer, seventeen years old at the time and a beauty. Jenkins wrote about their meeting in The Reluctant Muse, one of his most successful novels, and a marked departure from the gritty subject matter of his earlier work.