The Secret Keeper

by Kate Morton

  ‘I meant my own.’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘Because I like you.’ She took his hands, holding them firmly. They were warm, clever kind hands. ‘I think you’re a fine man, Jimmy, one of the best, and I want you to have a happy life.’

  ‘That sounds a lot like goodbye.’

  ‘Does it?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I suppose that’s because it is.’ She came closer then and, after the merest hesitation, she kissed him, right there in the middle of the street; she kissed him softly, barely, finally, and then she held onto his shirt, committing the splendid moment to her memory. ‘Goodbye, Jimmy Metcalfe,’ she said. ‘And this time … this time we really won’t meet again.’

  Jimmy sat for a long time afterwards staring at the cheque. He felt betrayed, angry with her, even as he knew he was being utterly unfair. Only—why would she have given him such a thing? And why now, when Doll’s plan was forgotten and they were becoming real friends? Was it to do with her mysterious illness? There’d been something final in the way she was speaking; it had worried him.

  All through the following week, as he fielded his dad’s questions as to when his lovely girl was coming back, Jimmy looked at the cheque and wondered what he was going to do. There was a part of him that wanted to rip the hateful thing into a hundred tiny pieces; but he didn’t. He wasn’t stupid; he knew it was the answer to all his prayers, even if it did make him burn with shame and frustration and a strange unnameable grief.

  The day he was due to meet Dolly again for tea at Lyons, he debated whether or not to take the cheque with him. He went back and forth on the subject: taking it from inside the copy of Peter Pan, putting it in his pocket, and then replacing it in the book and hiding the damn thing out of sight. He looked at his watch. And then he did the same thing over again. He was running late. He knew Dolly would be waiting for him. She’d said she had something important to show him. She’d be staring at the door, eyes wide and bright, and he’d never be able to explain to her that he’d lost something rare and precious.

  Feeling as if all the world’s shadows were closing in around him, Jimmy pocketed Peter Pan and went to meet his fiancee.

  Dolly was waiting in the same seat she’d sat in when she pro-posed the plan. He noticed her at once because she was wearing that horrible white coat of hers; it wasn’t cold enough any more to wear fur, but Dolly refused to take it off. The coat had become so entangled in Jimmy’s mind with the whole awful scheme, that even a glimpse of it was enough to send a sick feeling surging through his body.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, Doll, I—’

  ‘Jimmy.’ Her eyes were shining. ‘I’ve done it.’

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘Here—’. She was holding an envelope between the fingers of both hands and now she pulled a square piece of photo-graphic paper from inside. ‘I even had it developed myself.’ She slid the picture across the table.

  Jimmy picked it up and briefly, before he could stop himself, he felt a surge of tenderness. It had been taken at the hospital, the day of the play. Vivien could be made out clearly, and Jim-my, too, standing close, his hand reaching to touch her arm. They were looking at one another; he remembered the moment, it was when he’d noticed that bruise … And then he realised what he was looking at. ‘Doll—’

  ‘It’s perfect, isn’t it?’ She was smiling at him broadly, proudly, as if she’d done him a huge favour—almost as if she expected him to thank her.

  Louder than he’d intended, Jimmy said, ‘But we decided not to do it—you said it was a mistake, that you never should have asked.’

  ‘You, Jimmy. I never should have asked you.’

  Jimmy glanced again at the photograph and then back to Doll; his gaze was an unforgiving light that showed up all the cracks in his beautiful vase. She hadn’t lied; he’d simply misunderstood. She’d never been interested in the children or the play or making amends with Vivien. She’d just seen an opportunity.

  ‘Jimmy—’. Her face fell. ‘But why do you look that way? I thought you’d be happy. You haven’t changed your mind, have you? I wrote the letter so nicely, Jimmy, not at all unkindly, and she’s the only one who’ll ever see the pho—’

  ‘No.’ Jimmy found his voice then. ‘No, she won’t.’

  ‘Jimmy?’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’ He forced the photograph back inside the envelope and slid the whole thing towards her. ‘Get rid of it, Doll. There’s no need for any of that, not any more.’ ‘What do you mean?’ Her eyes narrowed suspiciously.

  Jimmy took Peter Pan from his pocket, retrieved the cheque and handed it across the table. Dolly turned it over cautiously and read the contents.

  Her cheeks flushed. ‘What’s this for?’

  ‘She gave it to me—to us. For help with the hospital play, and to thank you for returning her locket.’

  ‘She did?’ Tears came into Dolly’s eyes, not of sadness but relief. ‘But Jimmy—it’s for ten thousand pounds.’

  ‘Yes.’ He lit a cigarette while she stared dazedly at the cheque.

  ‘More than I ever would have thought to ask for.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Dolly leapt up to kiss him then, and Jimmy felt nothing.

  He walked around London for a long time that afternoon. Doll had his copy of Peter Pan—he’d been loathe to part with it, but she’d snatched it up and pleaded with him to let her take it home and what reason could he have given to explain his reticence to let it go? The cheque he had retained and it sat like a weight in his pocket as he roamed down street after battered street. Without his camera he didn’t see the small poetic vignettes of war, he saw the whole God-awful mess. One thing he knew for certain: he could never use a penny of that money, and he didn’t think he’d be able to look at Doll ever again if she did.

  He was crying when he got back to his room, hot angry tears that he swiped away with the heel of his hand, because every-thing was wrong and he didn’t know how to begin setting it right. His father noticed he was upset, and asked whether one of the other neighbourhood children had been giving him a hard time at school—did he need his dad to go and sort them out? Jimmy’s heart lurched then for the impossible yearning he felt at the idea of going back, of being a child again. He gave his father a kiss on the top of his head and told him he’d be all right, and when he did, he noticed the letter on the table, addressed in small precise handwriting to Mr J. Metcalfe.

  The sender was a woman called Miss Katy Ellis and she was writing to Jimmy, she said, about Mrs Vivien Jenkins. Jimmy read it, and as he did his heart began to pound with anger, love and finally determination. Katy Ellis had some rather compelling reasons for wanting Jimmy to stay away from Vivien, but all Jimmy saw was how desperately he needed to go to her. Finally, he understood everything that had previously confused him.

  As to the letter Dolly Smitham wrote to Vivien Jenkins, and the photograph tucked inside its envelope: they were forgotten. Dolly had no need now for either so she didn’t go looking for the envelope and therefore didn’t notice it was missing. But it was. Swept aside by the sleeve of her thick white coat when she clutched the cheque and leaned ecstatically to kiss Jimmy, it had skidded to a halt on the edge of the table, teetered a few seconds, before tipping, finally, and falling deep into the narrow crevice where the bench seat met the wall.

  The envelope was completely hidden from sight, and per-haps it might have stayed that way, gathering dust, being nib-bled at by cockroaches, disintegrating over the continuous ebb and flow of seasons until long after the names inside it were nothing more than the echoes of lives once lived. But fate has a funny way about it, and that’s not what happened.

  Late that night, while Dolly slept, curled up in her narrow bed at Rillington Place, dreaming of Mrs White’s face when Dolly announced that she was leaving the boarding house; a Luftwaffe Heinkel on its way back to Berlin, dropped a time-bomb that fell quietly through the warm night sky. The pilot woul
d’ve preferred to hit Marble Arch, but he was tired and his aim was off, and so the bomb landed where the iron railing used to stand, right out the front of the nearby Lyons Corner House. It went off at four o’clock the next morning, just as Dolly, who’d woken early, far too excited to keep sleeping, was sitting up in bed, looking over the copy of Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Never Grew Up she’d brought home from the restaurant, and copying her name— Dorothy—very carefully at the top of the annotation; so sweet of Vivien to give it to her—it made Dolly sad to think how she’d misjudged her. She was glad they were friends now. The bomb took the restaurant and half the house next door with it. There were casualties, but not as many as there might have been, and the ambulance team from Station 39 responded promptly, combing the ruins for survivors. A kindly officer named Sue, whose husband Don had come home shell-shocked from Dunkirk, and whose only boy had been evacuated to a place in Wales with a name she couldn’t pronounce, was nearing the end of her shift when she spied something in the debris.

  She rubbed her eyes and yawned, thought about leaving it, but then reached down to pick it up. It was a letter, she saw, addressed and stamped, but not yet sent. The envelope wasn’t sealed and a photograph slipped out into the palm of her hand. She could see quite clearly now, as dawn broke brilliantly over proud smouldering London: the photograph was of a man and a woman, lovers—she could tell that just by looking at them. The way the fellow had his eyes trained on the pretty young woman; he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He wasn’t smiling as she was, but everything in his face told Sue that the man in the picture loved that woman with all his heart.

  She smiled to herself, a little sadly, remembering the way she and Don had used to stare at one another, and then she sealed up the letter and tucked it in her pocket. She jumped into the trusty brown Daimler beside her shift partner, Vera, and they drove back to the station. Sue believed in staying positive, and in helping others—sending the lovers’ note on its way was to be her first good deed of the breaking day. She popped the envelope in the postbox as she walked home, and for the rest of her long, largely happy life, she thought about those lovers sometimes and hoped things had turned out well for them.

  Twenty-nine

  Greenacres, 2011

  ANOTHER DAY of Indian summer, and a golden heat haze hovered above the fields. After sitting all morning with her mother, Laurel had handed over to Rose and left the pair of them with the pedestal fan turning slowly on the dressing table while she ventured outside. She’d intended to take a walk down to the stream to stretch her legs, but the tree house had struck her eye, and she decided to climb up the ladder instead. It would be the first time she’d done so in fifty years.

  Lord, but the doorway was much lower than she remembered. Laurel clambered through, bottom cocked at an unfortunate angle, and then sat with her legs crossed, surveying the room itself. She smiled when she saw Daphne’s mirror still set on its side along the crossbeam. Sixty years had caused the mercury backing to rupture and flake so that when Laurel looked at her reflection, the image was mottled as if through water. It was strange indeed, to find herself within this place of childhood memories and see her grown-up wrinkled face staring back at her. Like Alice falling through the rabbit hole; or else falling through it again, fifty years on, only to find herself the only thing changed.

  Laurel put the mirror back and allowed herself to glance out of the window, just as she had that day; she could almost hear Barnaby barking, see the one-winged hen turning circles in the dust; feel the stretched summer glare sheering off the driveway stones. She was just about convinced that if she peeked back at the house she might see Iris’s hula hoop rocking against its leaning post when the hot breeze grazed it. And so she didn’t look. Sometimes the distance of years—all that was contained within its concertina folds—was a physical ache. Laurel turned away from the window instead.

  She’d brought the photograph of Dorothy and Vivien into the tree house with her, the one Rose had found inside Peter Pan, and now Laurel took it out of her pocket. Along with the play script itself, she’d been carrying it around with her ever since she’d got back from Oxford; they’d become a talisman of sorts, the starting point to this mystery she was trying to unravel, and—God, she hoped—with any luck, the key to its solution. The two women hadn’t been friends, Gerry said, and yet they must have been, for what else explained this picture?

  Laurel stared hard at them, their arms linked as they smiled at the photographer, determined to find a clue. Where had it been taken? she wondered. In a room somewhere, that much was clear; a room with a slanting roof—an attic perhaps? There was no one else in the photo, but a small dark smudge behind the women might have been another person moving very quickly—Laurel looked closer—a small person, unless there was something tricky going on with the perspective. A child? Perhaps. Though that didn’t help especially, there were children everywhere. (Or were there, in London during the war? A lot were evacuated, particularly during the first years when London was being blitzed.)

  Laurel sighed frustratedly. It was no use; no matter how she tried, it was still a guessing game—one option was as plausible as the next and nothing she’d discovered so far gave any real hint as to the circumstances that had led to this picture being taken. Except perhaps the book it had been nestled inside all these decades. Did that mean something—had the two objects always been a pair—had her mother and Vivien been in a play together? Or was it just another infuriating coincidence?

  She focused her attention on Dorothy, slipping on her glasses and angling the photograph towards the light of the open window, better to see each grain of detail. It struck Laurel that there was something not quite right about her mother’s face; it was strained, as if the extreme good humour she’d found for the photographer wasn’t entirely genuine. It wasn’t antipathy; certainly not; there was no sense that she didn’t like the person behind the camera—rather that the happiness was an exaggeration. That it was driven by some emotion other than pure simple joy—

  ‘Hey!’

  Laurel jumped and made an owl-like whoop. She glanced at the tree-house entrance. Gerry was standing at the top of the ladder, laughing. ‘Oh, Lol,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You should have seen your face.’

  ‘Yes. Very funny, I’m sure.’

  ‘It really was.’

  Laurel’s heart was still pounding. ‘To a child perhaps.’ She looked out onto the empty driveway. ‘How did you get here? I didn’t hear a car?’

  ‘We’ve been working on teleporting—you know, dissolving matter into nothing and then transmitting it. Going pretty well so far, though I think I might’ve left half my brain in Cambridge.’

  Laurel smiled with exaggerated patience. Delighted though she was to see her brother, she was in no mood for humour.

  ‘No? Oh, all right. I caught the bus and walked up from the village.’ He climbed in and sat down next to her. He looked like a lanky shaggy giant, craning his long neck to take in every angle of the tree house. ‘God, it’s been a while since I’ve been up here. I really like what you’ve done with the place.’

  ‘Gerry.’

  ‘I mean I like your flat in London, but this is less pretentious, isn’t it? More natural.’

  ‘Are you finished?’ Laurel blinked sternly at him.

  He pretended to consider, tapping his chin, and then pushed his unruly hair back from his forehead. ‘You know, I think I am.’

  ‘Good, then would you kindly tell me what you found in Lon-don? Don’t mean to be rude, but I’m trying to solve a rather significant family mystery here.’

  ‘Right, well. When you put it like that …’ He was wearing a green canvas satchel across his body and he lifted the strap over his head, long fingers feeling about inside to draw out a small notebook. Laurel felt a surge of dismay when she saw it, but she bit her tongue and didn’t remark on how tatty the book was—bits of paper coming out at all angles, some curling Post-it notes at top and bottom, a coffee ring on the fro
nt. The man had a doctorate and more besides, presumably he knew how to take good notes, hopefully he’d be a dab hand at finding them again.

  ‘While you’re riffling,’ she said with determined cheerfulness. ‘I’ve been wondering about what you said the other day, on the phone.’ ‘Mm?’ He continued searching through a clutch of papers.

  ‘You said Dorothy and Vivien weren’t friends, that they hardly knew each other.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I just—I’m sorry, but I just don’t understand how that can be. Do you think you might’ve got it wrong somehow? I mean—’ she held up the photograph, the two young women, arms linked, smiling at the camera—‘what do you say to that?’

  He took it from her. ‘I say they’re both very pretty young la-dies. Film quality’s come a long way since then. Black and white’s a far more moody finish than col—’

  ‘Gerry,’ Laurel warned.

  ‘And—’ he handed it back—‘I say all this photo tells me is that for a split second, sixty years ago, our mother linked arms with another woman and smiled at a camera.’

  Damned, dry science logic. Laurel grimaced. ‘What about this then?’ She took up the old copy of Peter Pan and opened it to the frontispiece. ‘It’s inscribed,’ she said, pointing her finger at the handwritten lines, ‘Look.’

  Gerry set his papers in his lap and took the book from her. He read the message. ‘For Dorothy, A true friend is a light in the dark, Vivien.’ It was small of her, she knew, but Laurel felt just a wee bit triumphant then. ‘That’s a bit harder to dispute, isn’t it?’

  He stuck the pad of his thumb in his chin dimple and frowned, still staring at the page. ‘That, I grant you, is a little trickier.’ He brought the book closer, lifted his brows as if he were trying to focus, and then he leaned it more towards the light. As Laurel watched, a smile brightened her brother’s face.

  ‘What?’ she demanded. ‘What is it?’