The Secret Keeper (48 page)

Only once, in the wee hours of Monday morning, was she visited by the terrors that had nipped at her heels in recent weeks. Rose and Iris had both gone back to their own homes for the night, so it was Laurel who woke in the dark with a start and stumbled along the corridor, feeling about the wall for light switches as she went. The thought came to her of the many nights her mother had done the same thing for her: been woken from her sleep by a cry in the dark, and rushed down the hall to chase her daughter’s monsters away, to stroke her hair and whisper in her ear, ‘Hush, little wing … there now, hush’. No matter Laurel’s conflicted feelings towards her mother these days, it seemed there was a privilege in being able to do the same in return, particularly for Laurel, who’d left the family home in such a fraught way, who hadn’t been there when her father died, who’d spent her whole life beholden to no one but herself and her art.

Laurel climbed into bed with her mother, holding the old woman firmly but gently. The cotton of Dorothy’s long, white nightdress was damp with the labours of her nightmare, and her thin frame trembled. ‘It was my fault, Laurel,’ she was saying. ‘It was my fault.’

‘Hush, hush,’ Laurel whispered. ‘There now, everything’s all right.’ ‘It was my fault she died.’

‘I know, I know it was.’ Henry Jenkins came again to Laurel’s mind; his insistence that Vivien had died because she’d been led to a place she’d otherwise never have gone, led there by someone she trusted. ‘There, there, Ma. It’s over now.’

Dorothy’s breathing settled to a slow steady rhythm, and Laurel thought about the nature of love. That she could continue to feel it so intensely, despite the things she was learning about her mother, was remarkable. It seemed that ugly deeds did not make love disappear; but oh, the disappointment if Laurel let it could have crushed her. It was an anodyne word, disappointment, but the shame and helplessness intrinsic to it were breathtaking. It wasn’t that Laurel expected perfection. She wasn’t a child. And she didn’t share Gerry’s blind faith that just because Dorothy Nicolson was their mother she would somehow be found miraculously innocent of all wrongdoing. Not at all. Laurel was a realist, she understood her mother was a human being and had naturally done things in her life that weren’t saintly; she’d hated and wanted and made mistakes that never went away—just as Laurel had herself. But the picture Laurel was beginning to form of precisely what had happened in Dorothy’s past, what she’d seen her mother do—

‘He came to find me.’

Laurel had been drifting off with her thoughts and her mother’s faded voice startled her. ‘What’s that Ma?’

‘I tried to hide, but he found me.’

She was speaking of Henry Jenkins, Laurel realised. It seemed they were drawing ever closer to what had happened that day in 1961. ‘He’s gone now, Ma, he’s not coming back.’

A whisper: ‘I killed him, Laurel.’

Laurel’s breath caught. She whispered back, ‘I know you did.’

‘Can you forgive me, Laurel?’

It was a question Laurel hadn’t asked herself, let alone answered. Faced with it in that instant, in the dark quiet of her mother’s room, all she could say was, ‘Hush now. Everything’s going to be all right, Ma. I love you.’

Some hours later, when the sun was just beginning to rise above the treetops, Laurel handed the baton to Rose and headed for the green Mini.

‘London again?’ said Rose, walking with her along the gar-den path.

‘Oxford today.’

‘Oh, Oxford.’ Rose twisted her beads. ‘More research, is it?’

‘It is.’

‘Getting close to what you’re looking for?’

‘You know, Rosie,’ said Laurel, sitting in the driver’s seat, reaching to pull the door shut behind her, ‘I think I am.’ She smiled and waved and put the car into reverse, glad to escape before Rose could ask anything that required heavy-duty obfuscation.

The fellow at the desk in the British Library Reading Room had seemed pleased on Friday by her request to locate ‘a rather obscure memoir’, even more so when she mused as to how one might go about finding what happened to Miss Katy Ellis’s correspondence after she died. He’d frowned determination at his computer screen, pausing every so often to jot things down on his notepad, and Laurel’s hopes had risen and fallen with his brows, until evidently her rapt attention became a hindrance and he suggested it might take some time and he’d be very happy to continue the search while she got on with something else. Laurel had taken the hint, ducking outside for a quick cigarette (all right, three) and a bit of neurotic pacing, before rushing back to the Reading Room to see how he’d got on.

He’d got on rather well, as it turned out. He slid the piece of paper across the desk with the marathon runner’s smile of satisfied exhaustion on his face and said, ‘Found her.’ The cache of her private papers, at any rate. It turned out they were located in the archives of New College Library, Oxford; Katy Ellis had studied there as a doctoral candidate and her papers had been donated after her death in September 1983. There was a copy of the memoir available, too, but Laurel figured she’d be far more likely to find what she was looking for within the primary documents.

Laurel left her green Mini at the Park and Ride site in Thorn-hill, and caught the bus into Oxford. The driver directed her to hop off on the High Street, which she did, right opposite Queen’s College; she followed directions a short walk past the Bodleian Library, and along Holywell Street, to arrive at the main entrance of New College. She never tired of the university’s extraordinary beauty; every stone, every turret and spindle pointing towards the heavens, grated and heaved with the weight of the past; but Laurel didn’t have time today for sightseeing; she put her hands in her trouser pockets, head down against the chill, and hurried across the grass quadrangle to-wards the library.

She was greeted inside by a young man with shaggy blue-black hair. Laurel explained who she was and why she’d come, mentioning that the librarian from the British Library had called ahead on Friday to make an appointment.

‘Yes, yes,’ said the young man (whose name, it transpired was Ben, and who was—enthusiastically, it had to be said—serving a one-year traineeship in the library before undertaking his MA in archives and records management), ‘I spoke to him myself. You’re here to look at one of our alumni collections.’

‘The papers belonging to Katy Ellis.’

‘That’s right. I’ve brought it all over from the muniments tower.’ ‘Tremendous. Thank you very much.’

‘Don’t mention it—any excuse to climb the tower.’ He smiled and leaned a little closer, exhibiting an air of conspiracy. ‘It’s up a spiral staircase, you know, accessed through a door hidden in the panelling of the Hall. Like something out of Hogwarts.’

Laurel had read Harry Potter, of course, and was no less immune to the charms of old buildings than anyone else; but opening hours were limited, and Katy Ellis’s letters were within shouting distance, and the combination of those two facts left her rather panicked at the thought of spending another minute discussing either architecture or fiction with Ben. She smiled with a dazed lack of comprehension (Hogwarts?), he met it with one of sympathetic realisation (Muggle), and they both moved on.

‘The collection’s waiting for you in the archive reading room,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you over there myself, shall I? It’s a bit of a maze if you haven’t been here before.’

Laurel followed him along a stone corridor, Ben talking happily all the while about the history of New College until finally they arrived, a great many twists and turns later, in a room with tables laid out and windows overlooking a magnificent medieval wall overgrown with ivy.

‘Here you are,’ he said, stopping at a table with twenty or so matching boxes stacked on top. ‘Are you happy to work here?’

‘I’m sure this will be fine.’

‘Excellent. There are gloves near the boxes. Please wear them while you’re touching the materials. I’ll be right over there if you need me—’ he indicated a pile of papers on a desk in the far corner—‘transcribing,’ he added, by way of explanation. Laurel didn’t ask what for fear he’d tell her and so, with a nod, Ben left.

Laurel waited for a moment and then exhaled into the stony library silence. Finally she was alone with Katy Ellis’s letters. She fronted up to the desk and cracked her knuckles—not metaphorically, but literally; it seemed the right thing to do—and then she donned her reading glasses and the pair of white gloves and started the hunt for answers.

The boxes were identical—brown cardboard, acid-free, each about the size of an encyclopedia. They were named and numbered with a code Laurel didn’t entirely comprehend but which seemed to indicate a complex catalogue of items. She considered asking Ben for an explanation, but feared a fervid lecture on the history of records management might result if she did. It appeared the boxes had been arranged in chronological order … Laurel decided to take a chance that it would all make sense once she got going.

She opened the lid of box number one and found several acid-free envelopes inside. The first contained twenty or so letters bound with white tape and supported with a stiff piece of board, cut slightly larger than the largest letter. Laurel eyed the large pile of boxes. It seemed Katy Ellis was a prolific correspondent, but with whom had she corresponded … ? By the looks, the letters were arranged in order of receipt, but there had to be a better method of finding what she needed than by simple trial and error.

Laurel drummed her fingers, thinking, and then looked over the top of her glasses at the table. She smiled as she spied what she’d been missing—the index card—taking it up quickly and glancing over the whole to check that it contained, as she’d hoped, a list of senders and recipients. It did. Holding her breath, Laurel ran her finger down the ‘sender’ column, hesitating first at ‘J’ for Jenkins, next at ‘1! for Long- meyer, and finally ‘V’ for Vivien.

None of the options was listed.

Laurel looked again, more carefully this time. Still she came up blank. There was no reference in the index list to any letters from Vivien Longmeyer or Vivien Jenkins. And yet Katy Ellis had referred to such letters in the snippet of Born to Teach quoted in Henry Jenkins’s biography. Laurel pulled out the photocopy she’d taken in the British Library. There—it said so in black and white: Over the course of our long sea voyage, I was able to gain Vivien’s trust sufficiently to establish a relationship that continued over many years. We corresponded by letter with warm regularity until her untimely death during the Second World War … Laurel gritted her teeth and checked the list one final time.

Nothing.

It made no sense, Katy Ellis said there were letters—a life-time of them, warmly regular. Where were they? Laurel glanced over at Ben’s hunched back and decided there was nothing for it.

‘That’s all the letters we received,’ he said when she’d explained. Laurel pointed out the lines from the memoir and Ben frowned and agreed that it was odd, but then he brightened: ‘Perhaps she destroyed the letters before she died?’ He wasn’t to know that he was crushing Laurel’s dreams like a dried leaf between his fingers. ‘That happens sometimes,’ he continued, ‘particularly in the case of people who intend to donate their correspondence. They make sure anything they don’t want seen is no longer part of the collection. Is there any reason she might have done that, do you know?’

Laurel thought about it. It was possible, she supposed. Vivien’s letters might have contained something Katy Ellis considered sensitive or incriminating—God, anything was possible at this point. Laurel’s brain hurt. She said, ‘Could they be stored somewhere else?’

Ben shook his head. ‘New College Library was the sole beneficiary of Katy Ellis’s records. Everything she left is here.’

Laurel could have thrown the neat file boxes around the room; given poor Ben a real show. To have come so close only to be thwarted at this point—the disappointment was gutting. Ben smiled sympathetically and Laurel was about to slump back to her desk when she thought of something. ‘Journals,’ she said quickly ‘What’s that?’

‘Journals. Katy Ellis kept journals—she mentions them in the memoir. Do you know if they’re part of the collection?’

‘I do, and they are,’ he said. ‘I brought them down for you.’

He indicated a stack of books on the floor by the table and Laurel could have kissed him. She refrained, taking her seat instead and seizing up the first leather-bound volume. It was dated 1929, the year, Laurel remembered, that Katy Ellis had accompanied Vivien Longmeyer on the long sea voyage from Australia to England. The first page held a black-and-white photograph, inserted neatly using gold document corners, spotted now with age. It was the portrait of a young woman in long skirts and a prim blouse, her hair—hard to tell, but Laurel had a feeling it was red—parted on one side and then pressed into neat crimped curls. Everything about her appearance was modest and bluestocking-conservative, but her eyes were lit with determination. She’d lifted her chin at the camera and she wasn’t smiling so much as looking pleased with herself. Laurel decided that she liked Miss Katy Ellis, even more so when she read the small annotation at the bottom of the page: ‘A small and impudent vanity, but the author encloses here this photograph, taken at Hunter & Lyon Studios, Brisbane, as a record of a young woman on the verge of her great adventure in the year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and twenty-nine.’