The Secret Keeper (47 page)

‘Hurry up.’ Vivien Jenkins had stopped walking and was waiting for him on the doorstep of a brick building, indistinguishable from those either side except for a brass plate on the door: ‘Dr M. Tomalin, MD’. She was checking the fine rose-gold wristwatch she wore like a bracelet and her dark hair caught the sunlight as she tilted her head to glance down the street beyond him. ‘I have to move quickly, Mr—’ she drew a sharp breath, remembering their arrangement—‘well, you anyway. I’m late enough as it is.’

Jimmy followed her inside, arriving in what once must have been the entrance hall of a grand home but was now being used as a reception area. A woman whose silver hair was styled patriotically in a determined-looking Victory roll glanced up from where she sat behind a turned-leg desk.

‘This gentleman is here to see Nella Brown,’ Vivien said.

The other woman’s attention shifted to Jimmy and she regarded him for an unblinking instant over the top of her half-spectacles. He smiled; she didn’t; he realised that further explanation was necessary, furthermore it was expected. Jimmy took a step closer to the desk. He felt like a character from Dickens all of a sudden, the boy from the forge tugging his forelock in the face of greatness. ‘I know Nella,’ he said, ‘sort of. That is, we met the night her family was killed. I’m a photographer. For the newspapers. I’ve come to say hello—to see how she’s doing.’ He made himself stop talking then. He looked at Vivien, hopeful she might step in and vouch for him, but she didn’t.

A clock ticked somewhere, a plane flew overhead, and at length, the nurse released a slow considering sigh. ‘I see,’ she said, as if it were against her better judgement to admit him. ‘A photographer. For the newspapers. And what did you say your name was?’

‘Jimmy,’ he said, glancing again at Vivien. She looked away ‘Jimmy Metcalfe.’ He could have lied—he probably should have—but he didn’t think of it in time. He hadn’t had much practice with duplicity. ‘I just wanted to see how Nella’s getting on.’

The woman regarded him, lips fixed neatly together, and then she nodded briefly. ‘All right then, Mr Metcalfe, follow me. But I warn you, I won’t have my hospital or my charges upset. Any sign of trouble and you’re out.’

Jimmy smiled gratefully. A little fearfully, too.

She tucked her chair in neatly beneath the desk, straightened the gold cross that hung on a fine chain round her neck, and then, without a backward glance, started up the sweeping stairs with a clarity of purpose that demanded he follow. Jimmy did. He was halfway up when he realised Vivien hadn’t come with them. He turned back and saw her standing by a doorway on the far wall, straightening her appearance in an oval mirror.

‘You’re not coming?’ he said. It was meant to be a whisper, but the shape of the room, the dome in the ceiling, made it echo terribly.

She shook her head. I have something else to do—somebody to see—’. She flushed. ‘Go—go! I can’t keep talking, I’m already late.’

Jimmy stayed for about an hour, watching the little girl tap-dance, and then a bell sounded and Nella said, ‘That’s lunch,’ and he figured it was time to say goodbye. She held his hand as they walked together down the corridor, and when they reached the stairs she looked up at him: ‘When are you coming to visit me again?’ she said. Jimmy hesitated— he hadn’t thought that far ahead—but when he looked at her open earnest face, he had a sudden pressing memory of his mother leaving, followed by a lightning-bright flash of awareness that came too fast to pin down but which had something to do with the innocence of children, the willingness with which they trusted, and how little it took for them to put their small soft hand in yours and presume you wouldn’t disappoint them. He said, ‘How about in a couple of days’ time?’ and then she smiled and waved and tapped her way along the corridor to the dining room.

‘That was the very perfect thing to do,’ said Doll later that evening, when he was telling her all about it. She’d listened avidly to his entire account, eyes widening when he mentioned the mirror outside the doctor’s rooms, the way Vivien had blushed—guiltily, they agreed— when she realised Jimmy had seen her fixing herself up (‘I told you, Jimmy, didn’t I? She’s seeing that doctor behind her husband’s back’). Now Doll smiled. ‘Oh, Jimmy, we’re getting so close!’

Jimmy didn’t feel so certain. He lit a cigarette. ‘I don’t know, Doll. It’s complicated—I promised Vivien I wouldn’t go back to the hospital—’ ‘Yes, and you promised Nella that you would.’

‘Then you see my problem.’

‘What problem? You’re hardly going to break your promise to a child, are you? An orphan at that.’

He wasn’t, of course he wasn’t, but he obviously hadn’t made Doll understand just how caustic Vivien had been. Before he went upstairs with the silver-haired woman, he’d started to suggest that the two of them might meet up afterwards for the walk back to Kensington, and Vivien had looked at him as if the idea repulsed her.

‘Jimmy?’ Dolly said again. ‘You’re not going to disappoint Nella, are you?’

‘No, no,’ he waved the hand that was holding his cigarette, ‘I’ll go back. Vivien won’t be happy though. She was quite clear about it.’ ‘You’ll bring her round.’ Dolly took his face gently between his hands. ‘I don’t think you realise, Jimmy, how people warm to you.’ She brought her face close to his so that her lips were touching his ear. She whispered playfully, ‘Just look how I’m warming to you.’

Jimmy smiled, but distractedly, as she kissed him lightly. He was busy envisaging Vivien Jenkins’s disapproving face when she saw him again at the hospital, defying her direct orders. He was still trying to work out how he would explain his reappearance—was it enough just to say that Nella had asked him to come?—when Dolly sat back and said,

‘It really is the simplest way.’

Jimmy nodded. She was right; he knew she was.

‘Visit Nella, bump into Vivien, set a time and a place and leave the rest to me.’ She tilted her head and smiled at him; she looked younger when she did. ‘Simple?’

Jimmy managed a faint smile in return. ‘Simple.’

And so it had seemed, except that Jimmy didn’t bump into Vivien. He went to the hospital every chance he had over the next fortnight, squeezing in visits to Nella between his responsibilities at work, and to his dad, and to Doll. But although he saw Vivien twice from a distance, neither occasion gave him the opportunity to reverse her ill opinion of him and somehow convince her to meet him again. The first time, she’d been leaving the hospital at the same time Jimmy turned the corner into Highbury Street. She had stopped on the doorstep, glancing in either direction as she lifted a scarf up to hide her face from anyone who might recognise her. He’d picked up pace, but by the time he got near the hospital it was too late and she’d stalked off in the opposite direction, head down against prying eyes.

The second time she hadn’t been so careful. Jimmy had just arrived in the hospital reception and was waiting to let Myra (the silver-haired receptionist—they’d become quite friendly over the weeks) know that he was heading up to see Nella, when he’d noticed that the door behind the desk stood ajar. He’d been able to see into Dr Tomalin’s office, and there he’d glimpsed Vivien, laughing softly at someone hidden behind the door. As he watched, a man’s hand came to rest on her bare arm and Jimmy felt his stomach start to churn.

He wished he’d brought his camera; he couldn’t make out much of the doctor, but he could see Vivien clearly enough: the man’s hand on her arm, the happy expression on her face …

Of all the days not to have his equipment with him—it would’ve been all they needed. Jimmy was still fuming at him-self when Myra appeared from nowhere, closed the door, and asked him how his day was treating him.

Then, finally, on Jimmy’s third Monday, as he rounded the top of the stairs and started down the corridor towards Nella’s dormitory, he saw a familiar figure walking ahead of him. It was Vivien. Jimmy lingered where he was, paying fierce and undue attention to the Dig for Victory poster on the wall, taking in the pigeon-toed child with his hoe and spade, while keeping both ears trained on her retreating footsteps. When she’d turned the corner he scurried after her, heart beginning to thump as he watched her progress from a distance. She reached a door in the wall, a small door Jimmy had never noticed before, and pulled it open. He followed, surprised when he found a flight of narrow stairs behind, leading upwards. He climbed, quickly but quietly, until a sliver of light ahead revealed the doorway she’d left by. He did the same, finding himself on a level of the old house with lower ceilings than those below, and less of a hospital feel. He could hear her distant footsteps but wasn’t sure which way she’d gone, until he glanced left and saw her shadow slide across the faded blue and gold wallpaper. He smiled to himself—the boy in him was rather enjoying the chase—and went after her.

Jimmy had a feeling he knew where she was going; she was sneaking off to a secret meeting with Dr Tomalin, high in the quiet private attics of the old house, hidden away where no one would ever think to look for them. Except Jimmy. He poked his head around the corner and watched as Vivien stopped. This time, he did have his camera with him. Far better to take a genuinely incriminating photograph than go through the rigmarole of setting up a false meeting that might, on photographic paper, seem compromising. This way, too, Vivien would be guilty of an actual indiscretion, and somehow that made Jimmy feel a whole lot easier. There remained the issue of sending the letter (blackmail, wasn’t it? Call a spade a spade)—Jimmy still found the idea pretty unpalatable, but he hardened his heart.

He watched as she opened the door, and when she made her way inside he crept forwards, removing his camera’s lens cap. He stuck his foot in the doorway, just in time to keep it from closing. And then Jimmy lifted his camera to take the shot.

What he saw through the viewfinder, though, made him put it right back down.

Twenty-four

Greenacres, 2011

The Nicolson sisters (minus Daphne, who’d stayed in LA to shoot a new network promo but promised to catch the red-eye back to London ‘just as soon as they can spare me’) brought Dorothy home to Greenacres on Saturday morning. Rose was concerned because she hadn’t been able to contact Gerry, but Iris—who always liked to be an authority—declared that she’d already telephoned his college and been told he was away on ‘very important’ business; the office had promised to get a message to him. Laurel had reached unconsciously for her phone while Iris was making her proclamation, turning it over in her palm, wondering why she still hadn’t heard a word about Dr Rufus, but she resisted calling. Gerry worked in his own way, at his own pace, and she knew from experience there was no joy to be had by ringing his office number.

By lunchtime Dorothy was settled in her bedroom, fast asleep with her white hair resting like a halo on the burgundy pillowcase. The sisters looked at one another and reached a silent agreement to leave her to it. The weather had cleared up and turned unseasonably warm, and they headed outside to sit on the swing seat beneath the tree and eat the bread rolls Iris had insisted on making solo, swatting away flies and enjoying what must surely be the last hot burst of the year.

The weekend passed smoothly. They installed themselves around Dorothy’s bed, reading silently or chatting together in low voices, even attempting Scrabble at one stage (though not for long—Iris never could play a full round without blowing up in the face of Rose’s remarkable knowledge of tricky two-letter words), but most of the time, they took turns just sitting in quiet company with their sleeping mother. It was right, Laurel thought, that they’d brought Ma home. Greenacres was where Dorothy belonged, this funny old big-hearted house she’d discovered by chance and recognised immediately as one she must inhabit and possess. ‘I always dreamed of a house like this one,’ she used to tell them, a broad smile spreading across her face as they walked in from the garden. ‘For a time I thought I’d lost my chance, but it all came right in the end. As soon as I saw her, I knew she was the one …’

Laurel wondered if her mother had been thinking of that long-ago day as they drove her up the driveway on Friday; whether she’d seen in her mind’s eye the old farmer who’d made tea for her and Daddy when they knocked on his door in 1947, the birds that had watched them from behind the boarded-up fireplace, and the young woman she’d been back then, holding firm to her second chance as she looked to the future and tried to escape whatever it was she’d done before. Or had Dorothy been thinking rather, as they wound up the drive, of events that had unfolded that summer’s day in 1961 and about the impossibility of ever truly escaping one’s past? Or was Laurel being sentimental, and had the tears her mother shed in the passenger seat of Rose’s car, the soft silent tears, been simply the effect of great age and faulty plumbing?

Whatever the case, the move from the hospital had evidently tired her and she slept most of the weekend, eating little and saying even less. Laurel, when it was her turn at the bedside, willed her mother to stir, to open her tired eyes and recognise her eldest daughter, to resume their conversation of the other day. She needed to know what her mother had taken from Vivien Jenkins—it was the crux of the mystery. Henry had been right all along, insisting there was more to his wife’s death than met the eye, that she’d been the target of shady con-artists. (Con-artists plural, Laurel noted—was it merely a turn of phrase, or had her mother acted with someone else? Could it have been Jimmy, the man she’d loved and lost? Was that perhaps why they’d been driven apart?) She would have to wait until Monday, though, because Dorothy wasn’t talking. In fact, it seemed to Laurel, watching as the old woman slept so peacefully, and the curtains fluttered in the light breeze, that her mother had passed through some invisible doorway into that place where ghosts from the past could no longer touch her.