The Secret Keeper (6 page)

But there was no choice; she had to go. The future stretched ahead: a second chance, a new life. All she had to do was take it, and never look back. Go to the seaside, like they’d planned, and start again.

She barely heard the planes outside now, the falling bombs, the ack- acks firing their response. The earth trembled with each blast and plaster dust sifted down from the ceiling. The chain on the door rattled, but Dolly noticed none of it. Her case was packed—she was ready to go.

She stood, looking to Vivien, and despite her firm resolve she faltered. ‘What about you?’ Dolly said, and for a split second it occurred to her that perhaps they could go together, that maybe Vivien would come with her after all. In some odd way, it seemed the perfect answer, the only thing to do—they’d each played their part, and none of it would have happened if Dolly and Vivien hadn’t met.

It was a foolish thought, of course—Vivien didn’t need a second chance. She had everything she could want right here. A lovely house, her own wealth, beauty to spare … Sure enough, Vivien handed Dolly Mrs Nicolson’s job offer and smiled a tearful farewell. Each woman knew in her heart it was the last time she’d see the other. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Vivien, as a bomber thundered overhead. ‘I’m going to be fine. I’m going home.’

Dolly held the letter tightly, and with a final nod of resolution, started towards her new life, no idea what the future might bring, but determined, suddenly, to meet it.

Four

Suffolk, 2011

THE NICOLSON SISTERS left the hospital in Iris’s car. Although she was eldest and traditionally favoured with front-seat privileges, Laurel sat in the back with the dog hairs. Her seniority was complicated by her celebrity and it didn’t do to let the others think she was getting above herself. She preferred the back anyway. Absolved from conversational duties she was free to keep company with her own thoughts.

The rain had cleared and the sun was shining now. Laurel was itching to ask Rose about Vivien—she’d heard the name before, she was sure of it. More than that, she knew it was connected in some way to that awful day in 1961—but she kept quiet. Iris’s interest, once piqued, could be suffocating and Laurel wasn’t ready yet to face the inquisition. While her sisters made small talk in the front, she watched the fields skim by. The windows were up but she could almost smell the fresh- cut grass and hear the jackdaw’s call. The landscape of one’s childhood was more vibrant than any other. It didn’t matter where it was or what it looked like, the sights and sounds imprinted differently. They became part of a person, inescapable.

The past fifty years evaporated and Laurel saw a ghosted version of herself flying alongside the hedgerows on her green Malvern Star, one of her sisters straddling the handlebars. Sun-browned skin, blonde leg hairs, scabbed knees. It was a long time ago. It was yesterday ‘Is it for television?’

Laurel looked up to find Iris blinking at her in the rearview mirror. ‘I’m sorry?’ she said.

‘The interview, the one that’s been keeping you so busy.’

‘Oh, that. It’s a series of interviews really. I’ve still one more to shoot on Monday.’

‘Yes, Rose said you were going back to London early. Is it for television?’

Laurel made a small noise of assent. ‘One of those biopic things, an hour or so long. It’ll include interviews with other people, too—direc- tors, actors I’ve worked with—cut together with old footage, childhood stuff—’

‘You hear that, Rose?’ said Iris tartly. ‘Childhood stuff.’ She lifted herself off the car seat to scowl more fully at Laurel in the mirror. ‘I’d thank you to hold back any of the family snaps in which I’m in a state of near or total undress.’

‘What a shame,’ said Laurel, picking a white hair off her black trousers. ‘There goes all my best material. Whatever will I talk about now?’ ‘Point a camera at you and I’m sure you’ll think of some-thing.’ Laurel masked a smile. People paid her so much earnest respect these days; it was comforting to bicker with an expert.

Rose, however, who’d always preferred peace, was beginning to fret. ‘Look, look,’ she said, flapping both hands at a razed block on the edge of the town. ‘The site for the new supermarket. Can you imagine? As if the other three weren’t enough.’

‘Well, of all the ridiculous … !’

With Iris’s irritation gracefully redirected, Laurel was free to sit back and look out of the window again. They passed through the town, stuck to the High Street as it tapered into a country lane, and then followed its gentle bends. The sequence was so familiar that Laurel could have closed her eyes and known precisely where she was. Conversation in the front fell away as the lane narrowed and the trees overhead thickened, until finally Iris flicked the indicator and turned into the driveway signed Greenacres Farm.

The farmhouse sat where it always had at the top of the rise, looking out across the meadow. Naturally enough, houses had a habit of staying where they were put. Iris parked on the flat spot where Daddy’s old Morris Minor had lived until their mother finally consented to sell it. ‘Those eaves are looking rather the worse for wear,’ she said.

Rose agreed. ‘They make the house look sad, don’t you think? Come and I’ll show you the latest leaks.’

Laurel closed the car door but didn’t follow her sisters through the gate. She planted her hands in her pockets and stood firm, taking in the entire picture—garden to cracked chimney pots and everything in between. The ledge over which they used to lower Daphne in the basket, the balcony where they’d hung the old bedroom curtains to form a proscenium arch, the attic room where Laurel taught herself to smoke.

The thought came suddenly: the house remembered her.

Laurel did not consider herself a romantic, but the sense was so strong that for a split second she had no trouble believing that the combination before her of wooden boards and red chimney bricks, of dappled roof tiles and gabled windows at odd angles, was capable of remembrance. It was watching her now, she could feel it, through each pane of glass; casting back over the years to marry this older woman in a designer suit to the young girl who’d mooned over pictures of James Dean. What did it think, she wondered, of the person she’d become?

Idiotic, of course—the house thought nothing. Houses did not remember people, they didn’t remember much of anything. It was she who remembered the house and not the other way around. And why shouldn’t she? It had been her home since she was two years old; she’d lived there until she was seven-teen. True, it had been some time since she’d come to visit—even with her semi-regular trips to the hospital, she never seemed to make it back to Greenacres—but life was busy. Laurel glanced towards the tree house. She’d made sure to keep herself busy.

‘It can’t have been so long you’ve forgotten where the door is,’ Iris called from the front hall. She’d disappeared inside the house, but her voice floated back behind her: ‘Don’t tell me—you’re waiting for the butler to come and carry your bags!’

Laurel rolled her eyes like a teenager, collected her suitcase, and made her way up to the house. She followed the same stone path her mother had discovered on a bright summer’s day, sixty-odd years before …

Dorothy Nicolson recognised Greenacres as the place to raise her family the first instant she saw it. She wasn’t supposed to be looking for a house. The war had only been over a few years, they’d no capital to speak of, and her mother-in-law had graciously consented to rent them a room in her own establishment (in exchange for ongoing duties, of course—she wasn’t a charity!). Dorothy and Stephen were only supposed to be out for a picnic.

It was a rare free day in the middle of July. They woke at the crack of dawn, tossed a basket and rug on the backseat, and then pointed the Morris Minor west; no further plans than to follow whichever country lane took their fancy. This they did for some time—her hand on his leg, his arm slung round her shoulders, warm air flowing through the open windows—and so they might have continued had the tyre not sprung a leak.

But it did, and so instead they slowed the car, pulling onto the side of the road to inspect the damage. There it was, plain as day: a rogue nail protruding from the rubber, a comprehensive puncture.

They were young though, and in love, and they didn’t often have free time together, so the day wasn’t spoiled as it other-wise might have been. While her husband fixed the tyre, Doro-thy wandered up the grassy hill, looking for a flat spot to spread the picnic rug. And that’s when she crested the rise and saw Greenacres farmhouse.

None of this was supposition on Laurel’s part. The Nicolson children all knew the story of Greenacres’ acquisition by heart. The sceptical old farmer scratching his head when Dorothy knocked on his door, the birds nesting in the parlour fireplace as the farmer poured tea, the holes in the floor with planks laid across them like narrow bridges. Most importantly, no one was in any doubt as to their mother’s immediate certainty that she must live in this place.

The house, she’d explained to them many times, had spoken to her; she’d listened and it turned out they’d understood one another very well indeed. Greenacres was a cantankerous old lady, a little worn, to be sure, cranky in her own way—but who wouldn’t be? The deterioration, Dorothy could tell, concealed a great former dignity. The house was proud and she was lonely, the sort of place that fed on children’s laughter, and a family’s love, and the smell of rosemary lamb roasting in the oven. She had good, honest bones and a willingness to look forwards rather than backwards, to welcome a new family and grow with them, to embrace their brand new traditions. It struck Laurel now, as it hadn’t before, that her mother’s description of the house might have been a self-portrait.

Laurel wiped her feet on the mat and stepped inside. The floor-boards creaked familiarly, the furniture was all where it should be, and yet the place felt different. The air was thick and there was a smell that wasn’t usually there. It was stale, she realised, and that was understandable— the house had been closed up since Dorothy went into hospital. Rose came to take care of things whenever her grandchild-minding schedule allowed it, and her husband Phil did what he could, but nothing compared with the constancy of habitation. It was unsettling, Laurel thought, suppressing a shiver, how quickly a person’s presence could be erased, how easily civilisation gave way to wilderness.

She counselled herself not to be so bloody cheerless and added her bags, from habit, to the pile beneath the hall table. She went then unthinkingly to the kitchen. It was the place where homework had been done and sticking plasters applied and tears cried over broken hearts; the first place anyone ever went when they came home. Rose and Iris were already there.

Rose flicked the light switch by the fridge and the wiring hummed. She rubbed her hands together brightly. ‘Shall I make us all some tea?’

‘Can’t think of anything better,’ said Iris, lining up her court shoes and stretching her black stockinged toes back and forth like an impatient ballet dancer.

‘I brought wine,’ said Laurel.

‘Except that. Forget the tea.’

While Laurel fetched a bottle from her suitcase, Iris took down glasses from the dresser. ‘Rose?’ She held one aloft, blinking sharply over the top of her cat’s eye frames. Her eyes were the same dark grey as her bobbed hair.

‘Oh,’ Rose worried her watch face back and forth, ‘Oh, I don’t know, it’s only just gone five.’

‘Come now, Rosie, dear,’ said Laurel, digging through a drawer of vaguely sticky cutlery for a bottle opener. ‘It’s full of antioxidants, you know.’ She retrieved the opener and pressed her tacky fingertips together. ‘Practically a health food.’

‘Well … all right.’

Laurel drew out the cork and started pouring. Habit had her lining up the glasses to make sure the amount was even across all three. She smiled when she caught herself—talk about a reversion to childhood. Iris would be pleased, at any rate. Fairness might be the great sticking point for all siblings, but it was an obsession for those in the middle: ‘Stop counting, little flower,’ their mother used to say. ‘Nobody likes a girl who always expects more than the others.’

‘Just a tipple, Lol,’ said Rose cautiously. ‘I don’t want to be on my ear before Daphne gets here.’

‘You’ve heard from her then?’ Laurel handed the fullest glass to Iris. ‘Just before we left the hospital—didn’t I say? Honestly, my memory! She’ll be here by six, traffic permitting.’

‘I suppose I should think about putting something together for dinner then,’ said Iris, opening the pantry and kneeling on a stool to inspect the use-by dates. ‘It’ll be toast and tea if I leave it up to you two.’ ‘I’ll help,’ said Rose.

‘No, no,’ Iris waved her away without turning around, ‘There’s no need.’

Rose glanced at Laurel who handed over a glass of wine and gestured towards the door. There was no point in arguing. It was enshrined in family law: Iris always cooked, she always felt put upon, the others let her savour the martyrdom because that was the sort of small kindness accorded between sisters.