by Kate Morton
Laurel turned to the first page of neat penmanship, an entry dated May 18th, 1929 and headed ‘Week One—New Beginnings’. She smiled at the slightly pompous tone of Katy Ellis’s record, and then drew breath as the name ‘Vivien’ leapt out at her. In amongst a perfunctory description of the ship—the accommodations, the other passengers and (in most detail of all) the meals, Laurel read the following:
My travelling companion is a girl, aged eight, by the name of Vivien Longmeyer. She is a most unusual child, quite perplexing. Pleasant enough to look at—dark hair, parted in the middle and kept (by me) in plaits down her back, very large brown eyes, and full lips of a deep cherry colour that she holds together with a firmness giving the impression either of petulance or strength of mind—I have yet to decide which. She is of a proud and wilful nature, I can tell that by the way those dark eyes bore directly into mine (and certainly the aunt fashioned me with all manner of reports as to the sharpness of the girl’s tongue and the readiness of her fists); thus far, however, I have seen no evidence of her rumoured physicality, nor has she uttered more than five words, sharp or otherwise, in my hearing. Disobedient, she is certainly; ill mannered, there is no doubt; and yet somehow, in one of the inexplicable kinks of human personality, the child is oddly likable. She draws me to her; even when she is doing nothing more than sitting on the deck and watching the passing sea; it is not mere physical beauty, although there is undoubtedly much that is pleasing in her dark fea- tures—it is an aspect of herself that comes from deep within and communicates itself quite unwittingly so that one cannot help but watch.
I should add that there is an uncanny quiet about her. She chooses, when other children might be running and larking about the decks, to hide herself away and sit almost entirely still. It is an unnatural stillness, and one for which I had not been prepared.
Apparently Vivien Longmeyer continued to intrigue Katy Ellis, for along with further comments about the journey and notes for lesson plans she intended to use when she arrived in England, the journal entries over the next few weeks contained similar reports. Katy Ellis watched Vivien from a distance, interacting only insofar as it was necessary for the two of them in their shared travels, until finally, in an entry dated July 5th, 1929 and titled ‘Week Seven’, there appeared to come a breakthrough.
It was hot this morning, and a mild breeze blew from the north. We were sitting together on the front deck after break-fast when a most peculiar thing happened. I told Vivien to go back to the cabin and fetch her exercise book so that we might run through some lessons— I’d promised her aunt before we left, that Vivien’s lessons would not be neglected while we were on the seas (she fears, I think, that if the girl’s intellect is deemed unsatisfactory by the English uncle, she will be sent straight back to Australia). Our lessons are an interesting charade and always the same: I draw and point to the book, explaining various principles until my brain aches with the eternal quest for clarity of explanation; and Vivien stares with blank boredom at the fruits of my labours.
Still, I made a promise and so I persist. This morning, not for the first time, Vivien failed to do as I’d asked. She didn’t so much as deign to meet my eyes, and I was forced to repeat myself, not twice but thrice, and in increasingly stern tones. Still the child ignored me, until finally (the urge to tears pressing in my throat), I begged to know why she so often behaves as if she cannot hear me.
Perhaps my loss of control moved the child, for she sighed then, and told me the reason. She looked me in the eye and explained that seeing as I was merely a part of her dream, a figment of her own imagination, she didn’t see any point in listening unless the subject of my ‘chatter’ (her word) was of interest.
Another child might have been suspected of cheek and clipped about the ears for giving such response; but Vivien is not another child. For one thing, she does not lie—her aunt, for all her eager criticism of the child, conceded I would never hear an untruth from the girl’s mouth (‘Frank to the point of rudeness, that one’)—and so I was intrigued. I tried to keep my voice steady, asking as nonchalantly as if I were enquiring the time of day, what she meant by saying I was part of a dream. She blinked those wide brown eyes and said: ‘I fell asleep beside the creek back home and I haven’t woken up yet.’ Everything that had happened since, she told me—the news of her family’s motorcar accident, her removal like an unwanted package to England, this long sea voyage with only a teacher for company—was nothing more than a great big bad dream.
I asked her why she didn’t wake up, how it was possible that someone could sleep for such a very long time, and she responded it was bush magic. That she’d fallen asleep beneath some ferns on the edge of the enchanted creek (the one with the little lights, she said, and the tunnel that leads through a great engine room, right to the other side of the world)—that’s why she didn’t wake up as she otherwise might. I asked her then, how she would know when she had finally woken up, and she tilted her head as if I might be simple: ‘When I open my eyes and see that I’m home again.’ Of course, her firm little face added.
Laurel flicked through the journals until, two weeks later, Katy Ellis revisited the subject:
I have been probing—delicately, of course—about this dream world of Vivien’s, for it interests me greatly that a child might choose to comprehend a traumatic event in such a way. I gather, from the titbits she feeds me, that she has conjured a shadow land around her, a place of darkness through which she must quest in order to get back to her sleeping self in the ‘real world’ of the creek bank in Australia. She told me she believes that sometimes she comes close to waking; if she sits very, very still, she says she can glimpse the other side of the veil; she can see and hear her family going about their usual business, oblivious to her standing on the side, watching them. At least now I understand why the child exhibits such a profound quiet and stillness.
The girl’s theory of her waking dream is one thing. I can well understand the instinct a person might have to retreat in-to a safe imaginary world. What disturbs me more is Vivien’s seeming gladness in the face of punishment. Or—if not glad-ness, because that is not it precisely— her resignation, almost relief, when met with reprimand. I witnessed a brief incident the other day, in which she was wrongly accused of having taken an elderly woman’s hat from the top deck. She was innocent of the crime, a fact of which I was certain, having witnessed the ghastly cloche take up with the breeze and dance right overboard. As I watched, though—stunned for a moment into silence—Vivien presented herself for punishment, receiving a tremendous tongue-lashing; when threatened with a strapping, the girl seemed quite prepared to accept it. The expression in her eyes as she was scolded was one almost of relief. I found my brio then, and stepped in to stop the miscarriage of justice, informing them in the chilliest of tones as to the hat’s true fate, before directing Vivien to safety. But the look I’d seen in the girl’s eyes troubled me long after. Why, I wondered, would a child willingly accept punishment, particularly for a crime they hadn’t really committed?
A few pages further, Laurel found the following:
I believe I have answered one of my own most pressing questions. I have sometimes heard Vivien shouting out in her sleep—the episodes are usually short-lived, ending just as soon as the girl rolls over, but the other night the situation reached a peak and I rushed from my bed to soothe her. She was speaking very quickly as she clung to my arms— the most effusive conversation I have yet had from the child—and I was able to gather from what she said that she has come to believe the death of her family was her fault in some way. A ridiculous notion, when held up to the yardstick of adult perception, for as I understand it they were killed in a motorcar accident while she was many miles away; but childhood is not a place of logic and measuring sticks, and somehow (I cannot help but think the girl’s aunt might have helped it on its way) the idea has stuck.
Laurel looked up from Katy Ellis’s journal. Ben was making pack- ing-up noises and she glanced, alarme
d, at her watch. It was ten minutes to one—damn—she’d been warned the library shut for an hour over lunch. Laurel was clinging to any reference to Vivien, feeling she was getting somewhere, but there wasn’t time to read everything. She skimmed through the rest of the sea voyage, until finally she reached an entry written in shakier handwriting than those previous—written, Laurel gathered, as Katy Ellis took the train to York, where she was to be employed as a governess.
The conductor is coming now, so I will record quickly, before I forget, the strange behaviour of my young charge as we disembarked in London yesterday. No sooner had we cleared the gangplank, and I was looking this way and that in attempts to discern where we ought to go next, than she hopped down on all-fours—never mind the dress I’d specially hand-sponged and prepared for her to wear when meeting her uncle—and pressed her ear to the ground. I am not one to embarrass easily so it was no such paltry emotion that made me shriek when I saw her, rather concern that the child would find herself trampled by the crowds of foot traffic, or the hoofs of a rearing horse.
I couldn’t help myself, I shouted with alarm: ‘What are you doing? Get up!’
To which—one should hardly be surprised—there came no answer.
‘What are you doing, child?’ I demanded.
She shook her head and said quickly: ‘I can’t hear it.’
‘Hear what?’ I replied.
‘The sound of the wheels turning.’
I remembered then what she had told me about the engine room in the centre of the earth, the tunnel that would lead her home.
‘I can’t hear them any more.’
She was beginning to realise, of course, the finality of her situation, for like me she will not see her homeland again for many years, if at all, and certainly not the version of it to which she longs to return. Though my heart broke for the stubborn sapling, I did not offer her words of meaningless encouragement, for it is best, surely, that she comes in time to escape the grip of her fantasies. Indeed, it seemed there was nothing for me to say or do but to take her hand kindly and shepherd her along to where I’d spotted the meeting place her aunt had agreed upon with the English uncle. Vivien’s pronouncement troubled me though because I knew the turmoil it would be causing within the child, and I knew too that the moment fast approached when I must bid her farewell and send her on her way.
Perhaps I would be feeling less disquieted now if I’d sensed more warmth from the uncle. Alas, I did not. Her new guardian is headmaster of the Nordstrom School in Oxford-shire, and perhaps it was some aspect of professional (male?) pride that erected a barrier between us, for he seemed determined not to notice my presence, stopping only to inspect the child, before telling her to come along, they hadn’t a second to spare.
No, he did not strike me as the sort of fellow to open his home with the warmth and understanding a sensitive little girl whose recent history is filled with so much suffering will need.
I have written to the Australian aunt with my misgivings, but I do not hold out high hopes she will leap to the girl’s aid and demand her immediate return. In the meantime, I have promised to write regularly to Vivien in Oxfordshire, and I in-tend to do so. Would that my new position didn’t take me to the other side of the country—I would gladly tuck the girl un-der my wing and keep her safe from harm. Despite myself, and against the best theories of my chosen career, to observe but not absorb, I have developed strong personal feelings for her. I dearly hope that time and circumstance—perhaps the cultivation of a good friend nearby?—will conspire to mend the deep wound rent inside the child by her recent suffering. It may be that strong emotion causes me to overstate and overthink the future, to fall victim to my worst imaginings, but I fear otherwise. Vivien is at risk of disappearing deep inside the safety of the dream world she’s created, remaining a stranger to the real world of human beings, and thus, becoming easy prey, as she grows to adulthood, to those who would look to gain by her ill-treatment. One wonders (suspicious-mindedly perhaps?) as to the uncle’s motivation in accepting the child as his ward. Duty? It is possible. A fondness for children? Afearedly not. With the beauty she is sure to attain, and the vast wealth I have learned she will inherit at maturity, I worry there is much she will possess that others may seek to take.
Laurel leaned back and stared unseeing at the medieval wall on the other side of the window. She bit her thumbnail as the words went round and round inside her head: I worry there is much she will possess that others may seek to take. Vivien Jenkins had an inheritance. It changed everything. She was a wealthy woman with the sort of character, or so her confidante had worried, that made her the perfect victim for those who might wish to profit by her.
Laurel took off her glasses, closing her eyes as she rubbed the tender patches on the sides of her nose. Money. It was one of the oldest motivators, wasn’t it? She sighed. It was so base, so predictable, but that had to be it. Her mother didn’t seem at all the type to desire more than she had, let alone to make plans to take it from someone else; but that was now. The Doro-thy Nicolson Laurel knew was removed by decades from the hungry young girl she’d used to be; an eighteen-year-old girl who’d lost her family in the Coventry Blitz and had to fend for herself in wartime London.
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.