The Secret Keeper (50 page)

Certainly, the regrets her mother was expressing now, her talk of mistakes and second chances and forgiveness, fitted the theory. And what was it she’d used to say to Iris—no one likes a girl who wants more than the others every time? Might that have been a lesson she learned from her own experience? The more Laurel thought about it, the more right it seemed. It was money her mother had needed; money she’d tried to take from Vivien Jenkins; but it had all gone terribly wrong. She wondered again whether Jimmy had been involved; whether it was the plan’s failure that had seen their relationship flounder. And she wondered what part exactly the plan had played in Vivien’s death. Henry had held Dorothy responsible for his wife’s death: she might have fled to a life of atonement, but Vivien’s grieving husband had refused to give up his search, and he’d found her eventually. Laurel had seen what happened next with her own eyes.

Ben was behind her now, making small throat-clearing noises as the wall clock’s minute hand slipped past the hour. Laurel pretended not to hear him, wondering what had gone wrong with her mother’s plan. Had Vivien realised what was happening and put a stop to it, or was it something else, something worse that made it all blow up? She eyed the stack of journals, scanning the spines for that dated 1941.

‘I’d leave you here, really I would,’ Ben said, ‘only the head archivist is the sort to string me up by my toes.’ He gulped. ‘Or worse’.

Oh, bugger. Bloody hell. Laurel’s heart was heavy, there was a sick swirling in the pit of her stomach, and now she was going to have to cool her heels for fifty-seven minutes while the very book that might contain the answers she needed languished here in a shut-up room.

Twenty-five

London, April 1941

JIMMY STOOD with his foot pressed against the door of the hospital attic, staring through the crack after Vivien. He was puzzled. This was not the illicit scene of an extra-marital rendezvous he’d expected. There were children everywhere, playing with puzzles on the floor, jumping round in circles, one standing on her hands; he was in the attics, Jimmy realised, this room was the old nursery, these children, presumably, Dr Tomalin’s orphaned patients. Through some unspoken awareness their collective attention was caught and they looked up to see that Vivien was among them. As Jimmy watched, they all rushed towards her, arms out like airplanes. She was beaming, too, an enormous smile on her face as she dropped to her knees and held out her own arms to catch as many as she could when they leapt.

They all started talking then, rapidly and with some agitation, about flying and ships and ropes and fairies, and Jimmy knew that he was witnessing a conversation with its roots in an earlier time. Vivien seemed to know what they were on about though, she was nodding thoughtfully, and not in that pretend way adults have when they’re interacting with children—she was listening and considering and the slight frown she wore made it clear that she was trying to find solutions. She was different now from the way she’d been when she spoke to him in the street; more at ease, not so on guard. When they’d all said their piece and the noise fell away—as it sometimes seems to, all at once—she held up her hands and said, ‘Why don’t we just start and we’ll address each problem as we get to it?’

They agreed, at least Jimmy presumed that’s what had happened, for without a word of complaint they dispersed again, all industry as they dragged chairs and other inexplicable objects—blankets, broomsticks, teddy bears with eye patches—into the cleared section at the centre of the room and began assembling them into some sort of carefully worked-out structure. He realised then, and it made him laugh to himself with unexpected pleasure. A ship was forming before his very eyes—there was the prow, and the mast, a plank propped up at one end by a footstool, the other by a wooden bench. As Jimmy watched, a sail went up, a bed sheet folded into a triangle with fine ropes holding each corner firm and proud.

Vivien had seated herself on an upturned crate and drawn a book from somewhere—her handbag, Jimmy supposed. She ran her fingers along the middle margins, creasing it flat, and then said, ‘Let’s start with Captain Hook and the Lost Boys—now where’s Wendy?’

‘Here I am,’ said a girl of about eleven, her arm in a sling.

‘Good,’ said Vivien. ‘Now make sure you’re ready for your entrance. It won’t be long.’

A boy with a pirate’s patch over one eye and a hook made from some sort of shiny cardboard in his hand, began to walk towards Vivien in a rollicking way that made her laugh.

They were rehearsing a play, Jimmy realised, Peter Pan. His mother had taken him to see it once when he was a boy. They’d made the trip to London and then had tea afterwards at Liberty’s, a fancy tea it had been, during which Jimmy had sat silent and out of place, stealing glances at his mother’s tight wistful expression as she peered over her shoulder at the clothing racks. There’d been a fight between his parents later over money (what else?) and Jimmy had listened from his bedroom as something smashed into pieces on the floor. He’d closed his eyes and thought back to the play, his favourite moment when Peter had flung out his arms and addressed all in the audience who might be dreaming of Neverland: ‘Do you believe in fairies, girls and boys?’ he’d shouted, ‘If you believe, clap your hands; don’t let Tink die.’ And Jimmy had been moved to stand up from his seat, thin legs trembling hopefully as he brought his hands together and shouted back, ‘Yes!’ with all the emphatic trust that in doing so he was bringing Tinkerbell back to life and saving everything that was more and magical in the world.

‘Nathan are you ready with the torch?’

Jimmy blinked back to the present.

‘Nathan?’ Vivien said. ‘We’re ready for you.’

‘I’m shining it already,’ said a small boy with curly red hair and his foot in a brace. He was sitting on the floor, aiming his torch at the sail. ‘Oh yes,’ said Vivien. ‘So you are. Well, that’s—good.’

‘But we can hardly see it,’ said another boy, standing with his hands on his hips where the audience might sit. He was craning up at the sail, squinting through his glasses at the spread of feeble light.

‘It’s not much use if we can’t see Tinkerbell,’ said the boy playing Captain Hook. ‘It won’t work at all.’

‘Yes it will,’ Vivien said determinedly. ‘Of course it will. The power of suggestion is a tremendous thing. If we all say we can see the fairy, then the audience will, too.’

‘But we can’t see her.’

‘Well, no, but if we say we can—’

‘You mean lie?’

Vivien glanced towards the ceiling, searching for the words to explain, and the children began to bicker amongst themselves.

‘Excuse me,’ said Jimmy from where he stood in the door-way. Nobody seemed to hear him so he said it again, louder this time. ‘Excuse me?’

They all turned then. Vivien drew breath when she saw him, and then she scowled. Jimmy admitted to taking a certain pleasure in upsetting her; in showing her things didn’t always go her way.

‘I was just wondering,’ he said. ‘What if you used a photographer’s light? It’s similar to a torch but far more powerful.’

Children being what they were, not one reacted with suspicion or even surprise that a stranger had joined them in the attic nursery and weighed in on this most specific of conversations. Instead, there was silence as they all considered his suggestion, and then light whispery noise as they discussed it, and then ‘Yes!’ shouted one of the boys, jumping to his feet with excitement.

‘Perfect!’ said another.

‘But we don’t have one,’ said the gloomy boy in the glasses.

‘I could get you one,’ Jimmy said. ‘I work at a newspaper, we have a studio filled with lights.’

More excited cheering and chatter came from the children.

‘But how would we make it look like a fairy, flying about and what not?’ said the same cheerless chap, piping up over the top of the others.

Jimmy left his doorjamb and entered the room. All the children had swivelled now to face him; Vivien was glowering, her copy of Peter Pan closed on her lap. Jimmy ignored her. ‘I guess you’d have to shine it from somewhere high. Yes, that would work, and if you made sure it was always angling down towards the stage, it would focus a smaller light, rather than a wide, general brightness, and maybe if you fashioned a sort of funnel …’

‘But none of us is tall enough to operate it.’ The kid in the glasses again. ‘Not from up there.’ Orphan or not, Jimmy was starting to dislike him.

Vivien had been watching the exchange with a firm expression on her face, willing Jimmy, he knew, to remember what she’d said—to let the suggestion go and just disappear—but he couldn’t do it. He could picture how tremendous it was going to look, and he could think of a hundred ways to make it work. If they put a ladder in the corner, or else attached it to a broom—reinforced somehow—and wielded it like a fishing rod, or else—‘I’ll do it,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’ll operate the light.’

‘No!’ Vivien said, standing.

‘Yes!’ cried the children.

‘You couldn’t.’ She gave him a flinty look—‘You won’t.’

‘He could!’ ‘He will!’ ‘He must!’ shouted the mass of children.

Jimmy spotted Nella then, sitting on the floor; she waved at him and then glanced around at the others, a glimmer of unmistakable pride and ownership in her eyes. How could he say no? Jimmy raised his palms at Vivien in a gesture of not entirely genuine apology, and then he grinned at the kids. ‘That does it,’ he said. ‘I’m in. You’ve found yourselves a new Tinkerbell.’

Hard to believe later, but when Jimmy offered to play Tinkerbell in the hospital play, he hadn’t been thinking—even remotely—of the meeting he was supposed to be setting up with Vivien Jenkins. He’d merely become swept up in his grand vision for the way they’d be able to represent the fairy with his photography light. Dolly didn’t mind either way: ‘Oh, Jimmy, you clever thing,’ she said, drawing excitedly on her cigarette. ‘I knew you’d think of something.’

Jimmy took the praise and let her believe it was all part of his plan. She was so happy lately, and it was such a relief to have his old Doll back. ‘I’ve been thinking about the seaside,’ she’d say some evenings when she smuggled him through Mrs White’s larder window and they lay together in that narrow sink-in-the-middle bed of hers. ‘Can’t you just picture us, Jimmy? Growing old together, our children around us, grandchildren one day, visiting in their flying cars—we could get one of those swing seats for two—what do you say to that, lovely boy?’ Jimmy said, yes please. And then he kissed her again on her bare neck and made her laugh and thanked God for this new intimacy and warmth they were sharing. Yes, he wanted what she described; he wanted it so badly it hurt. If it pleased her to think Jimmy and Vivien were working together and growing closer, then it was a fiction he was glad enough to go along with.

The reality, as he knew only too well, was rather different. Over the next couple of weeks, as Jimmy fronted up to every scheduled rehearsal he could manage, Vivien’s hostility astonished him. He couldn’t believe she was the same person he’d met in the canteen that night, who’d seen his photograph of Nella and told him about her work at the hospital; now, it was as if it were beneath her to exchange more than a few words with him. Jimmy was pretty sure she’d have ignored him entirely if she could have. He’d expected coldness to a degree—Doll had prepared him for how cruel Vivien Jenkins could be when she took against a person—what caught him by surprise was how personal her hatred was. They hardly knew each other, and furthermore she had no way of suspecting his connection to Dolly.

One day they were both laughing at something funny one of the children had done, and Jimmy glanced over, as one adult might to another, wanting nothing more than to share the moment. She sensed his gaze and met it, but the minute she saw him smiling, she let her own happy expression drop away. Vivien’s animus put Jimmy between a rock and a hard place. In some respects it suited him to be so loathed— the idea of blackmail didn’t sit well with Jimmy, but he felt easier and more justified about the plan when Vivien treated him like nothing; yet without gaining her trust, if not her affection, he wasn’t going to be able to make the plan work.

So Jimmy kept trying. He forced aside the resentment he felt at Vivien’s hostility, her disloyalty towards Doll, the way she’d cast off his glittering girl and brought her so low; and he focused instead on how she was with the hospital orphans. The way she created a world into which they could disappear when they came through the door; their real problems left behind in the downstairs dormitories and wards of the hospital. The way they all watched her, staring spellbound when rehearsal was over and she wove stories for them about tunnels through the centre of the earth, and dark magical creeks without bottoms, and tiny lights beneath the water that called to children to come just a little closer …

And eventually, as rehearsals continued, Jimmy began to suspect that Vivien Jenkins’s antipathy was fading; that she no longer hated him quite so much as she had at first. She continued not to make conversation or acknowledge him with more than the barest of nods, but sometimes Jimmy caught her looking at him when she thought he didn’t know, and it seemed to him that the expression on her face was not angry, so much as it was thoughtful, even curious. Perhaps that’s why he made his mistake. He’d started to perceive a growing—well, not a warmth, but at least an increasing thaw between them, and one day towards the end of April, when the children had run off to lunch and he and Vivien were left packing up the ship, he’d asked her whether she had any of her own.