The Secret Keeper (27 page)

‘Oh—’ Dorothy blinked, and gave a small bewildered smile that broke Laurel’s heart. ‘Yes, yes please. I need to speak to Dr Rufus—’

‘Dr Rufus? You mean Dr Cotter, dear.’

A cloud of confusion cast its brief shadow on her pale face, and then, ‘Yes,’ she said with an even fainter smile. ‘Of course, Dr Cotter.’

The nurse said she’d send him in when she could, and then turned towards Laurel, tapping a finger to her temple and delivering a Significant Look. Laurel resisted the urge to garrotte her with the handbag strap as she squeaked around the room in her soft-soled shoes.

The wait for the nurse to leave them was interminable: she collected old cups, marked things on the medical chart, paused to comment idly on the driving rain. Laurel was almost burning with suspense when the door finally closed behind her.

‘Ma?’ she prompted, more sharply than she’d have liked.

Dorothy Nicolson looked at her daughter. Her face was pleasantly blank and Laurel realised with a jolt that whatever it was that had pressed so urgently before the interruption was no longer there. It had receded, back to the place where old secrets go. The frustration was breathtaking. She could ask again, say, ‘What did you do that brought that man after you? Was it something to do with Vivien? Tell me, please, so I can let the whole thing go,’ but the beloved face, that weary old-lady’s face, was staring at her now in a state of mild confusion, a slight, worried smile forming as she said, ‘Yes, Laurel?’

Mustering every bit of patience she could—there was always tomorrow, she would try again then—Laurel smiled back and said, ‘Would you like some help with your lunch, Ma?’

Dorothy didn’t eat much; she’d wilted in the past half hour, and Laurel was struck anew by just how frail she’d become. The green armchair was a rather humble affair, one they’d brought from home, and Laurel had seen her mother sitting in it count-less times over the decades. Somehow, though, the chair had changed proportions in the past few months and was now a great hulking thing that devoured Ma’s frame like a surly bear.

‘Why don’t I give your hair a brush?’ said Laurel, ‘Would you like that?’

The ghost of a smile passed Dorothy’s lips and she nodded slightly ‘My mother used to brush my hair.’

‘Did she?’

‘I pretended not to like it—I wanted to be independent—but it was lovely.’

Laurel smiled as she collected the antique hairbrush from the shelf behind the bed; she passed it gently over her mother’s dandelion fluff and tried to picture what she must have been like as a little girl. Full of adventure, no doubt, naughty at times, but with the sort of spirit that made people fond rather than cross. Laurel supposed she’d never know, not unless her mother told her.

Dorothy’s eyelids, paper-thin, had closed and the fine wiry nerves inside them twitched occasionally at whatever mysterious pictures were forming on the black beneath. Her breathing slowed as Laurel stroked her hair, and when it took on the rhythm of slumber, Laurel set down the brush as quietly as she could. She pulled the crocheted rug a little higher on her mother’s lap and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

‘Goodbye, Ma,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll come again tomorrow.’

She was creeping from the room, careful not to jiggle her bag or make too much noise with her shoes, when a drowsy voice said, ‘That boy.’

Laurel turned, surprised. Her mother’s eyes were still closed.

‘That boy, Laurel,’ she mumbled.

‘Which boy?’

‘The one you’ve been going around with—Billy.’ Her misty eyes opened and she turned her head towards Laurel. She lifted a feeble finger and her voice when she spoke was soft, sad. ‘You think I don’t notice? You think I wasn’t young once myself? That I don’t know how it feels to fancy a handsome boy?’

Laurel realised then that her mother was no longer in the hospital room; that she was back at Greenacres, talking to her teenage daughter. The fact was unnerving.

‘Are you listening to me, Laurel?’

She swallowed, found her voice. ‘I’m listening, Mummy.’ It had been a long time since she’d called her mother that.

‘If he asks you to marry him and you love him, then you must say yes … Do you understand me?’

Laurel nodded. She felt strange, dizzy and rather hot. The nurses had said her mother’s mind was drifting these days, in and out of the present like a radio tuner slipping its station, but what had brought her here? Why would her focus settle on a boy she’d barely known, a fleeting crush of Laurel’s from so very long ago?

Dorothy’s lips moved against one another softly, and then she said. ‘I made so many mistakes … so many mistakes.’ Her cheeks were moist with seeping tears. ‘Love, Laurel, that’s the only reason to get married. For love.’

Laurel made it as far as the toilets in the hospital corridor. She turned on the tap, cupped her hands and collected some water to toss on her face; she leaned her palms on the basin. There were hairline fractures near the plughole and they merged together as her vision glazed. Laurel closed her eyes. Her pulse was beating like a jackhammer in her ears. God, she was shaken.

It wasn’t merely the fact of being spoken to like a teenager, the instant erasure of fifty years, the conjuring of a long-ago boy, the faraway feeling of first love fluttering at her edges. It was the words themselves, the urgency in Ma’s voice as she spoke, the sincerity that suggested she was offering her teen-age daughter the wealth of her own experience. That she was pressing Laurel to make choices that she, Dorothy, had not—to avoid making the mistakes she had.

But it didn’t make sense. Her mother had loved her father; Laurel knew it just as certainly as she knew her own name. They’d been married for five and a half decades before Daddy’s death without so much as a sniff of marital disharmony. If Dorothy had married for some other reason, if she’d regretted that decision all this time, she’d done a terrific job of pretending otherwise. No one could keep up a performance like that, surely? Of course they couldn’t. Besides, Laurel had heard the story of how her parents met and fell in love a hundred times before; she’d seen her mother gazing at her father’s face as he recounted the way he’d known at once that they were meant to be together.

Laurel looked up. Grandma Nicolson had had her doubts though, hadn’t she? Laurel had always been aware of some-thing uncomfortable between her mother and grandmother—a formality in the way they spoke to one another, the stern set of the older woman’s mouth when she was looking at her daughter-in-law and thought no one else was watching. And then, when Laurel was fifteen or so and they were visiting Grandma Nicolson’s boarding house by the sea, she’d overheard some-thing she shouldn’t have. She’d spent too long in the sun one morning and come in early with a raging headache and a bad case of sunburned shoulders. She was lying in her darkened bedroom, nursing a wet flannel on her forehead and a feeling of great hardship in her breast, when Grandma Nicolson and her elderly boarder, Miss Perry, happened along the corridor.

‘He’s a real credit to you, Gertrude,’ Miss Perry was saying, ‘Of course, he always was a good lad.’

‘Yes, worth his weight in gold, my Stephen. More help around here than his father ever was.’ Grandma had paused, waiting for the knowing grunt of agreement that was forthcoming from her consort, and then continued, ‘Kind-hearted, too. Never could resist a stray.’

That’s when Laurel had grown interested. The words were weighted with the echoes of previous conversations and certainly Miss Perry seemed to know precisely what it was of which they spoke. ‘No,’ she’d said. ‘The lad didn’t stand a chance, did he? Not with one as beautiful as her.’

‘Beautiful? Well, I suppose if you like that sort of thing. A bit, too—’ Grandma paused for thought and Laurel craned to hear which word she’d pluck—‘a bit too ripe, for my tastes.’

‘Oh yes,’ Miss Perry backpedalled fast, ‘terribly ripe. Knew a good wicket when she saw it though, didn’t she?’

‘She did.’

‘Knew a soft touch when she met it.’

‘Indeed.’

‘And to think he might’ve married a nice local girl like that Pauline Simmonds down the street. I always thought she might have been sweet on him.’

‘Of course she was,’ Grandma snapped, ‘and who could blame her? Hadn’t counted on Dorothy, though, had we? Poor Pauline didn’t stand a chance, not against one like her, not against her when she had her mind set.’

‘Such a shame.’ Miss Perry knew her cue and her line. ‘Such a terrible shame.’

‘Bewitched him, she did. My dear boy didn’t know what had hit him. He thought she was an innocent, of course, and who could blame him—back from France just a few short months when they married. She had his head in a spin—she’s one of those people though, isn’t she, who gets whatever she sets her mind to.’

‘And she wanted him.’

‘She wanted an escape, and my son gave it to her. No sooner were they wed and she dragged him away from everything and everyone he knew to start again in that tumbledown farm-house. I blame myself, of course—’

‘But you mustn’t!’

‘I was the one who brought her into this house.’

‘There was a war on, it was near impossible to get good staff—you weren’t to know.’

‘But that’s just it. I should have known; I should have made it my business to know. I was far too trusting. At least I was at the start. I made enquiries about her but not until after, and by then it was too late.’ ‘What do you mean? Too late for what? What did you find out?’

But whatever it was Grandma Nicolson had found remained a mystery to Laurel, for the two of them moved out of earshot before her grandmother could expand. To be honest it hadn’t concerned Laurel too much at the time. Grandma Nicolson was a prude and an atten- tion-seeker who liked to make her eldest granddaughter’s life a misery by reporting to her parents if she so much as looked at a boy on the beach. Whatever it was Grandma thought she’d discovered about their mother, Laurel had decided as she lay there cursing her throbbing head, it was bound to be an exaggeration, if not an all out fiction.

Now though … Laurel dried her face and hands … now though, she wasn’t so sure. Grandma’s suspicions—that Dorothy had been seeking an escape, that she wasn’t as innocent as she appeared, that her hasty marriage had been one of convenience—seemed to tally, in some ways, with the things her mother had said just now.

Had Dorothy Smitham been running from a broken engagement when she turned up at Mrs Nicolson’s boarding house? Was that what Grandma had found out? It was possible, but there had to be more to it than that. A previous relationship might have been enough to sour her grandmother’s milk—Lord knows it hadn’t taken much—but surely it wasn’t the sort of thing her mother might still be crying over sixty years later (guiltily, it seemed to Laurel, all that talk of mistakes, of not thinking straight)—unless she’d run away from her fiance with-out telling him? But why, if she’d loved him so much, would Ma have done such a thing? Why hadn’t she just married him? And what did any of it have to do with Vivien and Henry Jenkins?

There was something Laurel wasn’t seeing, lots of things, probably. She let out a hot sigh of exasperation that echoed around the small tiled bathroom. She felt thoroughly thwarted. So many disparate clues that meant nothing on their own. Laurel tore off a piece of toilet tissue and dabbed the mascara that had smeared beneath her eyes. The whole mystery was like the beginning of a child’s dot-to-dot, or a constellation in the night sky. Their father had once taken them sky-watching when Laurel was small. They’d set up camp on the rise above Blind- man’s Wood and, as they waited for the dusk to darken and the stars to appear, he’d told them about the time he’d been lost as a boy and followed the stars home. ‘You just have to look for the pictures,’ he’d said, lining up his telescope on its stand. ‘If you ever find yourself alone in the dark, they’ll show you the way back.’

‘But I can’t see any pictures,’ Laurel had protested, rubbing her mittens together and squinting at the twinkling stars above.

Daddy had smiled at her then, fondly. ‘That’s because you’re looking at the stars themselves,’ he’d said, ‘instead of the spaces in between. You have to draw lines in your mind, that’s when you’ll begin to see the whole picture.’

Laurel stared at herself in the hospital mirror. She blinked and the memory of her lovely father dissolved. A sudden pressing ache of mortal grief took its place—she missed him, she was getting older, her mother was fading.

What a bloody mess she looked. Laurel took out her comb and did what she could with her hair. It was a start. She pushed air through her lips with a thoughtful steadiness. Finding pictures in the constellations had never been her strong suit. Gerry was the one who’d been able to wow them all by making sense of the night-time sky; even as a small boy, he’d pointed out patterns and pictures where Laurel saw only deep dark space.