The Secret Keeper (3 page)

Her mother moved then with startling haste. She wrested the baby away, depositing him roughly on the ground behind her. There was gravel beneath his bare legs and for a child who knew only pleasure and love the shock proved too much. Crestfallen, he began to cry.

Laurel’s heart tugged, but she was frozen, unable to move. Hairs prickled on the back of her neck. She was watching her mother’s face, an expression on it that she’d never seen before. Fear, she realised, Ma was frightened.

The effect on Laurel was instant. Certainties of a lifetime turned to smoke and blew away. Cold alarm moved in to take their place.

‘Hello, Dorothy,’ the man said. ‘It’s been a long time.’

He knew Ma’s name. The man was no stranger.

He spoke again, too low for Laurel to hear, and her mother nodded slightly. She continued to listen, tilting her head to the side. Her face lifted to the sun and her eyes closed just for one second.

The next thing happened quickly.

It was the liquid silver flash Laurel would always remember. The way sunlight caught the metal blade, and the moment was very briefly beautiful.

Then the knife came down, the special knife, plunging deep into the man’s chest. Time slowed; it raced. The man cried out and his face twisted with surprise and pain and horror; and Laurel stared as his hands went to the knife’s bone handle, to where the blood was staining his shirt; as he fell to the ground; as the warm breeze dragged his hat over and over through the dust.

The dog was barking hard, the baby wailing in the gravel, his face red and glistening, his little heart breaking, but for Laurel sounds were fading. She heard them through the watery gallop of her own blood pumping, the rasps of her own ragged breaths.

The knife’s bow had come undone, the ribbon’s end trailed into the rocks that bordered the garden bed. It was the last thing Laurel saw before her vision filled with tiny flickering stars and then everything went black.

Two

Suffolk, 2011

IT WAS RAINING IN SUFFOLK. In her memories of childhood it was never raining. The hospital was on the other side of town and the car went slowly along the puddle-pitted High Street before turning into the driveway and stopping at the top of the turning circle. Laurel pulled out her compact, opened it to look into the mirror, and pushed the skin of one cheek upwards, watching calmly as the wrinkles gathered and then fell when released. She repeated the action on the other side. People loved her lines. Her agent told her so, casting directors waxed lyrical, the make-up artists crooned as they brandished their brushes and their startling youth. One of those Internet newspapers had run a poll some months ago, inviting readers to vote for ‘The Nation’s Favourite Face’ and Laurel had won second place. Her lines, it was said, made people feel safe.

Which was all very well for them. They made Laurel feel old.

She was old, she thought, snapping the compact shut. And not in the Mrs Robinson sense. Twenty-five years now since she’d played in The Graduate at the National. How had that happened? Someone had speeded up the damn clock when she wasn’t watching, that’s how.

The driver opened the door and ushered her out beneath the cover of a large black umbrella.

‘Thank you, Neil,’ she said as they reached the awning. ‘Do you have the pick-up address for Friday?’

He set down her overnight bag and shook out the umbrella. ‘Farmhouse on the other side of town, narrow lane, driveway at the very end. Two o’clock still all right for you?’

She said that it was and he gave a nod, hurrying through the rain to the driver’s door. The car started and she watched it go, aching suddenly for the warmth and pleasant dullness of a long commute to nowhere special along the wet motorway. To be going anywhere, really, that wasn’t here.

Laurel sized up the entry doors but didn’t go through. She took out her cigarettes instead and lit one, drawing on it with rather more relish than was dignified. She’d passed a dreadful night. She’d dreamed in scraps of her mother, and this place, and her sisters when they were small, and Gerry as a boy. A small and earnest boy, holding up a tin space shuttle, some-thing he’d made, telling her that one day he was going to invent a time capsule and he was going to go back and fix things. What sort of things? she’d said in the dream. Why, all the things that ever went wrong, of course—she could come with him if she wanted.

She did want.

The hospital doors opened with a whoosh and a pair of nurses burst through. One glanced at Laurel and her eyes widened in recognition. Laurel nodded a vague sort of greeting, dropping what was left of her cigarette as the nurse leaned to whisper to her friend.

Rose was waiting on a bank of seats in the foyer and for a split second Laurel saw her as one might a stranger. She was wrapped in a purple crocheted shawl that gathered at the front in a pink bow, and her wild hair, silver now, was roped in a loose plait over one shoulder. Laurel suffered a pang of almost unbearable affection when she noticed the bread tie holding her sister’s plait together. ‘Rosie,’ she said, hiding her emotion behind jolly-hockey-sticks, hale and hearty—hating herself just a little as she did so. ‘God, it feels like ages. We’ve been ships in the night, you and I.’

They embraced and Laurel was struck by the lavender smell, familiar, but out of place. It belonged to summer-holiday afternoons in the good room at Grandma Nicolson’s Sea Blue boarding house, and not to her little sister.

‘I’m so glad you could come,’ Rose said, squeezing Laurel’s hands before leading her down the hallway.

‘I wouldn’t have missed it.’

‘Of course you wouldn’t.’

‘I’d have come earlier but for the interview.’

‘I know.’

‘And I’d be staying longer if not for rehearsals. The film starts shooting in a fortnight.’

‘I know.’ Rose clenched Laurel’s hand even tighter, as if for emphasis. ‘Mummy will be thrilled to have you here at all. She’s so proud of you, Lol. We all are.’

Praise within one’s family was worrisome and Laurel ignored it. ‘The others?’

‘Not yet. Iris is caught in traffic and Daphne arrives this after-noon. She’ll come straight to the house from the airport. She’s going to call en route.’

‘And Gerry? What time’s he due?’

It was a joke and even Rose, the nice Nicolson, the only one who didn’t as a rule go in for teasing, couldn’t help but giggle. Their brother could construct cosmic-distance calendars to calculate the whereabouts of faraway galaxies, but ask him to estimate his arrival time and he was flummoxed.

They turned the corner and found the door labelled ‘Dorothy Nicol- son’. Rose reached for the knob but hesitated before turning it. ‘I have to warn you, Lol,’ she said, ‘Mummy’s gone down-hill since you were here last. She’s up and down. One minute she’s quite her old self, the next …’ Rose’s lips quivered and she clutched at her long strand of beads. Her voice lowered as she continued. ‘She gets confused, Lol, upset sometimes, saying things about the past, things I don’t always understand—the nurses say it doesn’t mean anything, that it happens often when people—when they’re at Mummy’s stage. The nurses have tablets they give her then; they settle her down, but they make her terribly groggy. I wouldn’t expect too much today.’

Laurel nodded. The doctor had said as much when she rang last week to check. He’d used a litany of tedious euphemisms—a race well run, time to answer the final summons, the long sleep—his tone so supercilious that Laurel had been unable to resist: ‘Do you mean, Doctor, that my mother is dying?’ She’d said it in a queenly voice, just for the satisfaction of hearing him splutter. The reward had been sweet but short-lived, lasting only until his answer came.

Yes.

That most treasonous of words.

Rose pushed open the door—‘Look who I found, Mummy!’—and Laurel realised she was holding her breath.

There was a time in Laurel’s childhood when she’d been afraid. Of the dark, of zombies, of the strange men Grandma Nicolson warned were lurking behind corners to snatch up little girls and do unmentionable things to them. (What sort of things? Unmentionable things. Always like that, the threat more frightening for its lack of detail, its hazy suggestion of tobacco and sweat and hair in strange places.) So convincing had her grandmother been, that Laurel had known it was only a matter of time before her fate found her and had its wicked way.

Sometimes her greatest fears had balled themselves together so she woke in the night, screaming because the zombie in the dark cupboard was eyeing her through the keyhole, waiting to begin his dreaded deeds. ‘Hush now little wing,’ her mother had whispered, ‘It’s just a dream. You must learn to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s pretend. It isn’t always easy—it took me an awfully long time to work it out, too long.’ And then she’d climb in next to Laurel and say, ‘Shall I tell you a story, about a little girl who ran away to join the circus?’

It was hard to believe that the woman whose enormous presence vanquished every night-time terror, was this same pallid creature pinned beneath the hospital sheet. Laurel had thought herself prepared. She’d had friends die before, she knew what death looked like when it came, she’d received her BAFTA for playing a woman in the late stages of cancer. But this was different. This was Ma. She wanted to turn and run.

She didn’t though. Rose, who was standing by the bookshelf, nodded encouragement, and Laurel wrapped herself within the character of the dutiful visiting daughter. She moved swiftly to take her mother’s frail hand. ‘Hello there,’ she said. ‘Hello there, my love.’

Dorothy’s eyes flickered open briefly before closing again. Her breaths continued their soft pattern of rise and fall as Laurel brushed a light kiss on the paper of each cheek.

‘I’ve brought you something. I couldn’t wait for tomorrow.’ She set down her things, withdrawing the small parcel from in-side her handbag. Leaving a brief pause for convention’s sake, she started to unwrap the gift. ‘A hairbrush,’ she said, turning the silver object over in her fingers. ‘It has the softest bristles—boar, I think; I found it in an antiques shop in Knightsbridge. I’ve had it engraved, you see, right here—your initials. Would you like me to brush your hair?’

She hadn’t expected an answer, not really, and none came. Laurel ran the brush lightly over the fine white strands that formed a corona on the pillow round her mother’s face, hair that had once been thick, darkest brown, and was now dissolving into thin air. ‘There,’ she said, arranging the brush on the shelf so that light caught the cursive D. ‘There now.’

Rose must have been satisfied in some way, because she handed over the album she’d taken from the shelf and whispered that she was going down the hall to make their tea.

There were roles in families; that was Rose’s, this was hers. Laurel eased herself into a remedial-looking chair by her mother’s pillow and opened the old book carefully. The first photo-graph was black and white, faded now with a colony of brown spots creeping silently across its surface. Beneath the foxing, a young woman with a scarf tied over her hair was caught forever in a moment of disruption. Looking up from whatever she was doing, she’d lifted a hand as if to shoo the photographer away. She was smiling slightly, her annoyance mixed with amusement, her mouth open in the articulation of some forgotten words. A joke, Laurel had always liked to think, a witty aside for the person behind the camera. Probably one of Grandma’s many forgotten guests: a travelling salesman, a lone holidaymaker, some quiet bureaucrat with polished shoes, sitting out the war in a protected occupation. The line of a calm sea could be glimpsed behind her by anyone who knew that it was there.

Laurel held the book across her mother’s still body and began. ‘Here you are then, Ma, at Grandma Nicolson’s boarding house. It’s 1944 and the war’s nearing its end. Mrs Nicolson’s son hasn’t come home yet, but he will. In less than a month, she’ll send you into town with the ration cards for groceries and when you return there’ll be a soldier sitting at the kitchen table, a man you’ve never met but whom you recognise from the framed picture on the mantle. He’s older when you meet than he is in the picture, and sadder, but he’s dressed the same way, in his army khaki, and he smiles at you and you know, instantly, that he’s the one you’ve been waiting for.’

Laurel turned the page, using her thumb to flatten the plastic corner of the yellowing protective sheet. Time had made it crackly. ‘You were married in a dress you stitched yourself from a pair of lace curtains Grandma Nicolson was induced to sacrifice from the upstairs guest room. Well done, Ma dear—I can’t imagine that was an easy sell. We all know how Grandma felt about soft furnishings. There was a storm the day before and you were worried it would rain on your wedding day. It didn’t, though. The sun rose and the clouds were blown away and people said it was a good omen. Still, you hedged your bets; that’s Mr Hatch, the chimney sweep, standing at the bottom of the church stairs for luck. He was all too happy to oblige—the fee Daddy paid bought new shoes for his eldest boy.’