by Kate Morton
She was in the corner of the room right now—Laurel could see her there, wrapping a birthday present for Iris. It was a book about ancient history, a children’s encyclopedia, and Laurel could remember being struck at the time by the beautiful illustrations inside, black and white and somehow mysterious in their depictions of long-ago places. The book, as an object, had seemed distinctly important to Laurel and she’d felt jealous when Iris unwrapped it on their parents’ bed next morning, when she started turning the pages with proprietorial care and readjusting the ribbon bookmark. There was something about a book that inspired dedication and a swelling desire to possess it, especially in Laurel, who hadn’t many of her own.
They hadn’t been a particularly bookish family—it always surprised people to hear that—but they’d never gone without stories. Daddy had been full of dinner table anecdotes, and Dorothy Nicolson was the sort of mother to invent her own fairy tales rather than read them out of books. ‘Did I ever tell you,’ she’d said once when Laurel was small, and resistant to sleep, ‘about the Nightingale Star?’
Laurel had shaken her head eagerly. She liked Mummy’s stories. ‘Have I not? Well, that explains it then. I did wonder why I never saw you there.’
‘Where, Mummy? What’s the nightingale star?’
‘Why, it’s the way home of course, little wing. And it’s the way there, too.’
Laurel was confused. ‘The way where?’
‘Everywhere—anywhere—’ She smiled then, in that way she had that always made Laurel feel glad to be near her, and leaned closer, as if to tell a secret, her dark hair falling forwards over one shoulder. Laurel loved to hear secrets; she was very good at keeping them too, so she listened closely when Mummy said, ‘the Nightingale Star is a great ship that leaves each night from the rim of sleep. Have you ever seen a picture of a pirate ship, one with billowing white sails and rope ladders that swing and sway in the wind?’
Laurel nodded hopefully.
‘Then you’ll know her when you see her, for she looks just like that. The straightest mast you can imagine, and a flag at the very top, silver cloth with a white star and a pair of wings at its centre.’
‘How do I get aboard, Mummy? Will I have to swim?’ Laurel wasn’t a very good swimmer.
Dorothy laughed. ‘That’s the best part of all. The only thing you have to do is wish, and when you fall asleep tonight, you’ll find yourself on her warm decks, about to set sail on a grand adventure.’
‘Will you be there, too, Mummy?’
Dorothy had a faraway look on her face; a mysterious expression she wore sometimes, as if remembering something that made her feel a little bit sad. But then she smiled, and ruffled Laurel’s hair. ‘Of course, I will, poppet. You didn’t think I’d let you go alone, did you?’
In the distance, a late train whistled into the station and Laurel let out a sigh. It seemed to echo from one wall to another and she considered switching on the television, just to have some noise. Ma had steadfastly refused to upgrade to a set with a remote control though, so she tuned the old wireless to BBC Radio 3 and picked up her book instead.
It was her second Henry Jenkins novel, The Reluctant Muse, and truth be told Laurel was finding it rather hard going. In fact, she was beginning to suspect the man was something of a male chauvinist. Certainly his main character Humphrey (just as irresistible as the male lead in his other book) had some questionable ideas about women. Adoration was one thing, but he seemed to look upon his wife, Viola, as a precious possession; not so much a flesh and blood woman as a blithe spirit whom he had captured and thereby saved. Viola was an ‘element of the wild’ brought to London in order to be civilised—by Humphrey, of course—but whom the city must never be permitted to ‘corrupt’. Laurel rolled her eyes in impatience. She found herself wishing Viola would just pick up her pretty skirts and run in the opposite direction as fast and as far as she could.
She didn’t, of course, she agreed to marry her hero—this was Humphrey’s story, after all. Laurel had liked the girl at first, she’d seemed a spirited and worthy heroine, unpredictable and fresh, but the more she read, the less of that girl she saw. Laurel realised that she was being unfair—poor Viola was barely an adult and could therefore hardly be blamed for having questionable judgement. And really, what would Laurel know? She’d never managed to sustain a relationship for longer than two years. Nonetheless, Viola’s marriage to Humphrey was not Laurel’s idea of a fine romance. She persisted through two further chapters that took the pair to London and established the creation of Viola’s gilded cage, before it all became too much and she slapped the book down in frustration.
It had only just gone nine, but Laurel decided that was late enough. She was tired after the day’s travel and she wanted to be up early next morning so she could get to the hospital in good time and hopefully find her mother at her best. Rose’s husband, Phil, had dropped over a spare car from his garage—a 1960s Mini, green as a grasshopper—and she was going to drive herself into town as soon as she was ready. Tucking The Reluctant Muse beneath her arm, she washed her plate and took herself up to bed, leaving the dark ground floor of Greenacres to the ghosts.
‘You’re in luck,’ the sour nurse told Laurel when she arrived the next morning, managing to make it sound a regrettable state of affairs. ‘She’s up and in fine fettle. Last week’s party tired her, you know, but visits from family seem to do them the world of good. Just try not to excite her too much.’ And then she smiled with a remarkable deficit of warmth and returned her attention to the plastic clipboard she was cradling.
Laurel abandoned plans for a rousing session of Irish dancing and started down the beige hallway. She arrived at her mother’s door and knocked lightly. When there was no answer, she gently opened it. Dorothy was reclined in the armchair, her body curved away from the door, and Laurel’s first thought was that she was sleeping. It wasn’t until she crept closer that she realised her mother was awake and paying close attention to something in her hands.
‘Hello there, Ma,’ said Laurel.
The old woman startled and turned her head. There was a glazed look about her eyes, but she smiled when she registered her daughter. ‘Laurel,’ she said softly. ‘I thought you were in London.’
‘I was. I’ve come back for a bit.’
Her mother didn’t ask why, and Laurel wondered whether perhaps a person reached an age when so much was kept from them, so many details of life discussed and decided elsewhere, misheard or misunderstood, that to be surprised was no longer disconcerting. She wondered whether she, too, would find one day that absolute clarity was neither possible nor desirable. What a ghastly thought. She wheeled the tray table aside and sat down on the spare vinyl-covered chair. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ She nodded at the object in her mother’s lap. ‘Is it a photograph?’
Dorothy’s old hand trembled as she held out the small silver frame she’d been cradling. It was old and dented, but freshly polished. Laurel couldn’t think that she’d ever seen it before. ‘From Gerry,’ she said, ‘A gift for my birthday.’
It was the perfect gift for Dorothy Nicolson, patron saint of all discarded things, and that was typical of Gerry. Just when he seemed completely disconnected from the world and all who dwelt in her, he managed a stroke of breathtaking insight. Laurel felt a pang when she thought of her brother: she’d left a message for him on his university voicemail—three messages, in fact, since she’d decided to leave London. The last she’d recorded late at night after a half bottle of red, and she feared it had been rather more plain spoken than those previous. She’d told him she was home at Greenacres, determined to find out what happened ‘back when we were kids’, that the other sisters didn’t yet know the details and she needed him to help. It had seemed a good idea at the time, but she hadn’t heard back.
Laurel put on her reading glasses to look closely at the sepia photograph. ‘A wedding party,’ she said, taking in the arrangement of formally attired strangers pressed behind th
e spotted glass. ‘No one we know, though, is it?’
Her mother didn’t answer, not exactly. ‘Such a precious thing,’ she said, shaking her head with slow sadness. ‘A charity shop—that’s where he found it. Those people … they should be hanging on someone’s wall, not lying in a box of unwanted things … It’s terrible, isn’t it, Laurel, the way we throw people away?’
Laurel agreed that it was. ‘The photo’s lovely, isn’t it?’ she said, running a thumb over the glass. ‘Wartime by the look of the clothing, though he’s not in uniform.’
‘Not everyone wore one.’
‘Shirkers, you mean.’
‘There were other reasons.’ Dorothy took back the picture. She studied it again and then reached, shakily, to set it down beside the framed picture of her own austerity wedding.
At mention of the war, Laurel had felt opportunity spread be-fore her, the vertigo of anticipation. Surely there could be no better moment to raise the matter of her mother’s past. ‘What did you do in the war, Ma?’ she said with careful nonchalance.
‘I was with the Women’s Voluntary Service.’
Just like that. No hesitation, no reluctance, nothing to suggest this was the first time mother and daughter had ever broached the topic. Laurel grasped keenly at the thread of conversation. ‘You mean knitting socks and feeding soldiers?’
Her mother nodded. ‘We had a canteen in a local crypt. We served soup … Sometimes we ran a mobile canteen.’
‘What—out in the streets, dodging the bombs?’
Another slight nod.
‘Ma—’ Laurel was lost for words. The answer itself, the fact of having received one at all—‘You were brave.’
‘No,’ she said, with surprising sharpness. Her lips quivered. ‘There were far braver people than I.’
‘You’ve never mentioned it before.’
‘No.’
Why not, Laurel wanted to plead, tell me. Why was it all such a big secret? Henry Jenkins and Vivien, her mother’s childhood in Coventry, the war years before she met Daddy … What had happened to make Ma seize her second chance so firmly, to turn her into the kind of person who could kill the man who threatened to bring her past back home to haunt her? Instead, Laurel said, ‘I wish I’d known you back then.’ Dorothy smiled faintly. ‘That would have been difficult.’
‘You know what I mean.’
She shifted in her chair, an ill expression pulling at the lines of her papery brow. ‘I don’t think you’d have liked me very much.’
‘What do you mean? Why ever not?’
Dorothy’s mouth twitched, as if the thing she wanted to say would not come out.
‘Why not, Ma?’
Dorothy forced a smile, but a shadow in her voice and in her eyes belied it. ‘People change as they get older … grow wiser, make better decisions … I am very old, Laurel. Anyone who lives as long as I have can’t help but collect regrets along the way … things they did in the past … things they wish they’d done differently.’
The past, regrets, people changing—Laurel felt the thrill of having arrived at last. She tried to sound light, a loving daughter asking her elderly mother about her life. ‘What sort of things, Ma? What would you have done differently?’
But Dorothy wasn’t listening. Her gaze had a distant look about it; her fingers were busy working the edges of the blanket on her lap. ‘My father used to tell me I’d get myself into trouble if I wasn’t careful …’ ‘All parents say that sort of thing,’ Laurel said with gentle caution. ‘I’m sure you never did anything worse than the rest of us.’
‘He tried to warn me, but I never listened. I thought I knew best. I was punished for my bad decisions, Laurel—I lost every-thing … everything I loved.’
‘How? What happened?’
But the previous speech, whatever memories it brought with it, had tired Dorothy—the wind literally lost from her sails—and she was slumped now against her cushions. Her lips moved a little but no sound came out and after a moment she gave up, turning her head back towards the misted window.
Laurel studied her mother’s profile, wishing she had been a different sort of daughter, wishing there was more time, that she could go back and do it all again, not leave everything to the last and find herself sitting at her mother’s hospital bed with so many blanks to fill. ‘Oh, now,’ she said brightly, trying a different tack, ‘Rose showed me something rather special.’ She fetched the family album from its shelf and slipped the picture of her mother and Vivien from inside. For all her attempts at ease, she noticed that her fingers were trembling. ‘It was inside a trunk, I believe, somewhere at Greenacres.’
Dorothy took the proffered photograph and looked at it.
Doors opened and closed in the hallway, a buzzer sounded in the distance, cars stopped and started on the turning circle outside.
‘You were friends,’ Laurel prompted.
Her mother nodded, haltingly.
‘In the war.’
Another nod.
‘Her name was Vivien.’
This time Dorothy looked up. Surprise fleeted across her lined face, followed by something else. Laurel was on the verge of explaining about the book and its inscription when her mother said, ‘She died,’ so quietly that Laurel almost didn’t hear. ‘Vivien died in the war.’
Laurel remembered reading about it in Henry Jenkins’s obituary. ‘A bombing raid,’ she said.
Her mother gave no sign of having heard. She was staring again at the photo. Her eyes had glazed, and her cheeks were suddenly moist. ‘I hardly recognise myself,’ she said in a thin and ancient voice.
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Another lifetime.’ Dorothy drew a soft crumpled handkerchief from somewhere and pressed it to her cheeks.
Her mother was still speaking softly behind her hanky, but Laurel couldn’t make out all the words: something about bombs, and noise, and being frightened to start again. She leaned closer, skin tingling with a strong sense that answers were close at hand. ‘What’s that, Ma?’
Dorothy turned to Laurel and the look on her face was as fearful as if she’d just seen a ghost. She reached out and gripped Laurel’s sleeve; when she spoke, her voice was frayed. ‘I did something, Laurel,’ she whispered, ‘during the war … I wasn’t thinking straight, everything had gone horribly wrong … I didn’t know what else to do and it seemed like the perfect plan, a way to put things right, but he found out—he was angry.’
Laurel’s heart lurched. He. ‘Is that why the man came, Ma? Is that why he came that day, on Gerry’s birthday?’ Her breaths were short. She was sixteen again.
Her mother was still clenching Laurel’s sleeve, her face ash-en and her voice as thin as a reed. ‘He found me, Laurel … he never stopped looking.’
‘Because of what you did in the war?’
‘Yes.’ Barely audible.
‘What was it, Ma? What did you do?’
The door opened and Nurse Ratched appeared carrying a tray. ‘Lunchtime,’ she said briskly, wheeling the table into position. She half-filled a plastic cup with lukewarm tea, and checked there was still water in the jug.
‘Just ring the bell when you’re finished, dear,’ she sang in a too-loud voice. ‘I’ll come back and help you to the toot.’ She glanced about the table to check everything was as it should be. ‘Anything else you need before I go?’
Dorothy was dazed, spent, her eyes searching the other woman’s face.
The nurse smiled brightly, bending from the waist so she was nice and close. ‘Anything else you need, dear?’ she enunciated.
‘Oh—’ Dorothy blinked, and gave a small bewildered smile that broke Laurel’s heart. ‘Yes, yes please. I need to speak to Dr Rufus—’
‘Dr Rufus? You mean Dr Cotter, dear.’
A cloud of confusion cast its brief shadow on her pale face, and then, ‘Yes,’ she said with an even fainter smile. ‘Of course, Dr Cotter.’
The nurse said she’d send him in when she could, and then
turned towards Laurel, tapping a finger to her temple and delivering a Significant Look. Laurel resisted the urge to garrotte her with the handbag strap as she squeaked around the room in her soft-soled shoes.
The wait for the nurse to leave them was interminable: she collected old cups, marked things on the medical chart, paused to comment idly on the driving rain. Laurel was almost burning with suspense when the door finally closed behind her.
‘Ma?’ she prompted, more sharply than she’d have liked.
Dorothy Nicolson looked at her daughter. Her face was pleasantly blank and Laurel realised with a jolt that whatever it was that had pressed so urgently before the interruption was no longer there. It had receded, back to the place where old secrets go. The frustration was breathtaking. She could ask again, say, ‘What did you do that brought that man after you? Was it something to do with Vivien? Tell me, please, so I can let the whole thing go,’ but the beloved face, that weary old-lady’s face, was staring at her now in a state of mild confusion, a slight, worried smile forming as she said, ‘Yes, Laurel?’
Mustering every bit of patience she could—there was always tomorrow, she would try again then—Laurel smiled back and said, ‘Would you like some help with your lunch, Ma?’
Dorothy didn’t eat much; she’d wilted in the past half hour, and Laurel was struck anew by just how frail she’d become. The green armchair was a rather humble affair, one they’d brought from home, and Laurel had seen her mother sitting in it count-less times over the decades. Somehow, though, the chair had changed proportions in the past few months and was now a great hulking thing that devoured Ma’s frame like a surly bear.
‘Why don’t I give your hair a brush?’ said Laurel, ‘Would you like that?’
The ghost of a smile passed Dorothy’s lips and she nodded slightly ‘My mother used to brush my hair.’