The Secret Keeper (65 page)

The list of Stephen’s attributes, had she ever been called upon to write it, would have been long. He was brave and protective, he was funny; he was patient with his mother, even though she was the sort of woman whose most amiable chatter contained acid enough to strip paint from the walls. He had strong hands and he did clever things with them; he could fix just about anything, and he could draw (though not as well as he’d have liked). He was handsome, and had a way of looking at her that made Dorothy’s skin heat with desire; he was a dreamer, but not so that he lost himself inside his fancies. He loved music and played the clarinet, jazz songs that Dorothy adored, but which drove his mother wild. Sometimes, while Dorothy sat cross-legged in the window seat in his room watching him play, Mrs Nicolson would take up her broom downstairs and hammer the end of it against the floor, which made Stephen play louder and jazzier, and made Dorothy laugh so hard she had to clap both hands across her mouth. He made her feel safe.

At the top of her list though, the thing she valued high above the rest, was his strength of character. Stephen Nicolson had the courage of his convictions; he would never let his lover bend his will and Dorothy liked that; there was a danger, she thought, in the sort of loving that made people act against type.

He also had a great respect for secrets. ‘You don’t talk much about your past,’ he’d said to her one night as they sat together on the sand.

‘No.’

A silence stretched between them in the shape of a question mark, but she didn’t say more.

‘Why not?’

She sighed but it caught the night sea breeze and drifted away silently. She knew his mother had been whispering in his ear; terrible lies about her past, aimed to convince him that he ought to wait a while, see other women, think about settling down with a nice local girl instead, who didn’t have ‘London ways’ about her. She knew, too, that Stephen had told his mother that he liked mysteries; that life was rather dull if you knew all there was to know about a person before you’d crossed the street to say hello. Dorothy said, ‘For the same reason, I suspect, that you don’t talk much about the war.’

He took her hand and kissed it. ‘Makes sense to me.’

She knew she’d tell him all about it one day, but she had to be careful. Stephen was the sort of man who’d want to march right up to London and take care of Henry himself. And Dorothy wasn’t about to lose anyone else she loved to Henry Jenkins. ‘You’re a good man, Stephen Nicolson.’

He was shaking his head; she could feel his forehead shifting against hers. ‘No,’ he insisted. ‘Just a man.’

Dorothy didn’t argue, but she took his hand in hers and she leaned her cheek gently on his shoulder in the dark. She’d known men before, good men and bad, and Stephen Nicolson was a good man. The best of men. He reminded her of some-one else she used to know.

Dorothy thought about Jimmy, of course, in the same way she continued to think of her brothers and sister, her mother and father. He’d taken up residence with them in that weatherboard house in the subtropics, welcomed by the Longmeyers of her mind. It wasn’t difficult to imagine him there, beyond the veil, he’d always reminded her of the men in her family; his friend-ship had been a light in the dark, it had given her hope, and maybe if they’d had the chance to know one another longer and better, it would have deepened into the sort of love that was written about in books, the sort of love she’d found with Stephen. But Jimmy belonged to Vivien and Vivien was dead.

Just once she thought she saw him. It was a few days after her wedding and she and Stephen were walking hand in hand along the water’s edge when he leaned to kiss her neck. She laughed and wriggled free, skipping ahead before glancing over her shoulder to call something teasing back to him. And that’s when she noticed a figure on the strand, way in the distance, watching them. Her breath caught in recognition as Stephen reached her and swept her off her feet. But it was just her mind playing tricks on her, for when she turned around to look again he was gone.

Thirty-three

Greenacres, 2011

THEIR MOTHER had requested the song and she wanted to listen to it in the sitting room. Laurel offered to bring a CD player into the bedroom so she didn’t have to move, but the suggestion was quickly dismissed and Laurel knew better than to argue. Not with Ma, not this morning when she had that otherworldly look in her eyes. She’d been like it for two days now, ever since Laurel got back from Campden Grove and told her mother what she’d found.

The long slow drive from London, even with Daphne talking about Daphne the whole way, had done nothing to diminish Laurel’s exhilaration, and she’d gone in to sit with her mother as soon as they could be alone. They’d spoken, finally, of everything that had happened, of Jimmy, and Dolly, and Vivien, and the Longmeyer family in Australia too; her mother told Laurel of the guilt she’d always harboured about having gone to see Dolly on the night of the bombing and urged her back inside the house. ‘She wouldn’t have died there if not for me. She was on her way out when I arrived.’ Laurel reminded her mother that she’d been trying to save Dolly’s life, that she’d been delivering a warning and she couldn’t possibly blame herself for the random landing places of German bombs.

Ma had asked Laurel to bring in Jimmy’s photograph—not a print at all, but an original—one of the few vestiges of the past she hadn’t locked away. Sitting there beside her mother, Laurel had looked at it afresh: the dawn light after a raid, the broken glass in the foreground shining like little lights, the group of people emerging from their shelter in the background, through the smoke. ‘It was a gift,’ Ma said softly, ‘it meant such a lot when he gave it to me. I couldn’t have borne to part with it.’

They’d both wept as they talked, and Laurel had wondered at times, as her mother found a reserve of energy and managed to speak—halt- ingly but with urgency—about the things she’d seen and felt, if the strain of old memories, some of them desperately painful, would prove too much; but, whether it was gladness at hearing Laurel’s news of Jimmy and his family, or relief at finally having let go of her secrets, she seemed to have rallied. The nurse warned them that it wouldn’t last, that they weren’t to be misled, and that the dip when it came would be swift; but she smiled, too, and told them to enjoy their mother while they could. And they did; they surrounded her with love and noise and all the happy, fractious crush of family life that Dorothy Nicolson had always loved best.

Now, while Gerry carried Ma to the sofa, Laurel thumbed through the vinyls in the rack, looking for the right album. She went quickly, but paused a moment when she reached the Chris Barber Jazz Band, a smile settling on her face. The record had belonged to her father; Laurel could still remember the day he’d brought it home. He’d got out his own clarinet and played along with Monty Sunshine’s solo for hours, standing right there in the middle of the rug, pausing every so often to shake his head in wonder at the sheer virtuosity of Monty’s skill. All through dinner that night he’d kept to himself, the noise of his daughters washing over him as he sat at the head of the table with a glaze of perfect satisfaction lighting his face.

Infused by the memory’s lovely emotion, Laurel pushed Monty Sunshine aside and continued turning through the records until she found what she was after, Ray Noble and Snooky Lanson’s ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’. She looked back to where Gerry was settling their mother, pulling the light rug so gently to cover her frail body, and she waited, thinking as she did what a boon it was to have had him back at Greenacres these past days. He was the only one in whom she’d confided the truth of the past. They’d sat up together the night before, drinking red wine in the tree house and listening to a London rockabilly station Gerry found on the Internet and talking nonsense about first love and old age and everything in between.

When they spoke of their mother’s secret, Gerry said he didn’t see there was any reason to tell the others. ‘We were there that day, Lol; it’s a part of our history. Rose, Daphne and Iris—’ he’d shrugged then, uncertain, and had a sip of wine—‘well, it might just upset them, and for what?’ Laurel wasn’t so sure. Certainly, there were easier stories to tell; it was a lot to cope with, especially for someone like Rose. But at the same time, Laurel had been thinking a lot lately about secrets, about how difficult they were to keep, and the habit they had of lurking quietly beneath the surface before sneaking all of a sudden through a crack in their keeper’s resolve. She supposed she’d just have to wait a while and see how things turned out.

Gerry glanced up at her now and smiled, nodding from where he’d perched near Ma’s head that she should start the song. Laurel slid the record out of its paper sheath and put it on the player, setting the needle on the outer rim. The swell of the piano opening filled the room’s silent pockets and Laurel sat back on the other end of the sofa, laying her hand on her mother’s feet and closing her eyes.

Suddenly, she was nine years old again. It was 1954 and a summer’s night. Laurel was wearing a nightie with short sleeves and the window above her bed was open in the hopes of luring in the night’s cool breeze. Her head was on the pillow, long straight hair splayed out behind her like a fan, and her feet were resting on the sill. Mummy and Daddy had friends over for dinner and Laurel had been lying in the dark like that for hours, listening to the gentle tides of conversation and laughter that rose sometimes over the mumbled sighs of her sleeping sisters. Periodically the scent of tobacco smoke drifted up the stairs and through the open door; glasses chinked together in the dining room, and Laurel basked in the knowledge that the adult world was warm and light and spinning still beyond her bedroom walls.

After a time there came the sound of chairs scraping back beneath the table and footsteps in the hall and Laurel could imagine the men shaking hands, and the women kissing one another’s cheeks as they said, ‘Goodbye,’ and, ‘Oh! What a lovely night,’ and made promises to do it all again. Car doors clunked, engines purred down the moonlit driveway; and finally, silence and stillness returned to Greenacres.

Laurel waited for her parents’ footsteps on the stairs as they went to bed, but they didn’t come and she teetered on the rim of sleep, unable quite to release herself and fall. And then, through the floorboards, a woman’s laugh, cool and quenching, like a drink of water when you’re thirsty, and Laurel was wide-awake. She sat up and listened as there came more laughter, Daddy’s this time, followed quickly by the sound of something heavy being moved. Laurel wasn’t supposed to get up this late at night, not unless she was ill or desperate to use the toilet or woken by a bad dream, but she couldn’t just close her eyes and go to sleep, not now. Something was happening downstairs and she needed to know what it was. Curiosity might have killed the cat, but little girls usually fared much better.

She slid out of bed and tiptoed along the carpeted corridor, nightie fluttering against her bare knees. Quiet as a mouse, she sneaked down the stairs, pausing on the landing when she heard music, faint strains coming from behind the sitting-room door. Laurel hurried the rest of the way down and knelt as carefully as she could, pressing first one hand and then her eye hard against the door. She blinked against the keyhole and then drew breath. Daddy’s armchair had been moved back into the corner, leaving a large clear space in the centre of the room and he and Mummy were standing together on the rug, their bodies clasped together in an embrace. Daddy’s hand was large and firm against Mummy’s back, and his cheek rested against hers as they swayed in time to the music. His eyes were closed and the look on his face made Laurel swallow and her cheeks heat. It was almost as if he were in pain, and yet somehow the opposite of that, too. He was Daddy, and yet he wasn’t, and to see him that way made Laurel feel uncertain and even a little envious, which she couldn’t understand at all.

The music kicked into a faster rhythm and her parents’ bodies drew apart as Laurel watched. They were dancing, really dancing, like something from a film, with clasped hands and shuffling shoes and Mummy spinning round and round beneath Daddy’s arm. Mummy’s cheeks were pink and her curls fell looser than usual, the strap of her oyster- coloured dress had slipped a little from one shoulder and nine-year-old Laurel knew that if she lived to be a hundred she’d never see anyone more beautiful.

‘Lol.’

Laurel opened her eyes. The song had ended and the record was turning by itself on the table. Gerry was standing over their mother, who’d drifted off to sleep, stroking her hair lightly.

‘Lol,’ he said again, and there was something in his voice, an urgency that brought her attention to him.

‘What is it?’

He was looking intently at Mummy’s face, and Laurel followed his gaze. When she did, she knew. Dorothy wasn’t sleeping; she’d gone.

Laurel was sitting on the swing seat beneath the tree, rocking it slowly with her foot. The Nicolsons had spent most of the morning discussing funeral arrangements with the local minister, and Laurel was now polishing the locket her mother had always worn. They’d decided— unanimously—to bury it with Ma; she’d never been one for material possessions, but had valued the locket specially, refusing ever to take it off. ‘It holds my dearest treasures,’ she used to say, whenever it was mentioned, opening it to show the photographs of her children inside. As a girl Laurel had loved the way the tiny hinges worked, and the pleasing click of the clasp when it caught.