The Secret Keeper

Two

Suffolk, 2011


IT WAS RAINING IN SUFFOLK. In her memories of childhood it was never raining. The hospital was on the other side of town and the car went slowly along the puddle-pitted High Street before turning into the driveway and stopping at the top of the turning circle. Laurel pulled out her compact, opened it to look into the mirror, and pushed the skin of one cheek upwards, watching calmly as the wrinkles gathered and then fell when released. She repeated the action on the other side. People loved her lines. Her agent told her so, casting directors waxed lyrical, the make-up artists crooned as they brandished their brushes and their startling youth. One of those Internet newspapers had run a poll some months ago, inviting readers to vote for ‘The Nation’s Favourite Face’ and Laurel had won second place. Her lines, it was said, made people feel safe.

Which was all very well for them. They made Laurel feel old.

She was old, she thought, snapping the compact shut. And not in the Mrs Robinson sense. Twenty-five years now since she’d played in The Graduate at the National. How had that happened? Someone had speeded up the damn clock when she wasn’t watching, that’s how.

The driver opened the door and ushered her out beneath the cover of a large black umbrella.

‘Thank you, Neil,’ she said as they reached the awning. ‘Do you have the pick-up address for Friday?’

He set down her overnight bag and shook out the umbrella. ‘Farmhouse on the other side of town, narrow lane, driveway at the very end. Two o’clock still all right for you?’

She said that it was and he gave a nod, hurrying through the rain to the driver’s door. The car started and she watched it go, aching suddenly for the warmth and pleasant dullness of a long commute to nowhere special along the wet motorway. To be going anywhere, really, that wasn’t here.

Laurel sized up the entry doors but didn’t go through. She took out her cigarettes instead and lit one, drawing on it with rather more relish than was dignified. She’d passed a dreadful night. She’d dreamed in scraps of her mother, and this place, and her sisters when they were small, and Gerry as a boy. A small and earnest boy, holding up a tin space shuttle, some-thing he’d made, telling her that one day he was going to invent a time capsule and he was going to go back and fix things. What sort of things? she’d said in the dream. Why, all the things that ever went wrong, of course—she could come with him if she wanted.

She did want.

The hospital doors opened with a whoosh and a pair of nurses burst through. One glanced at Laurel and her eyes widened in recognition. Laurel nodded a vague sort of greeting, dropping what was left of her cigarette as the nurse leaned to whisper to her friend.



Rose was waiting on a bank of seats in the foyer and for a split second Laurel saw her as one might a stranger. She was wrapped in a purple crocheted shawl that gathered at the front in a pink bow, and her wild hair, silver now, was roped in a loose plait over one shoulder. Laurel suffered a pang of almost unbearable affection when she noticed the bread tie holding her sister’s plait together. ‘Rosie,’ she said, hiding her emotion behind jolly-hockey-sticks, hale and hearty—hating herself just a little as she did so. ‘God, it feels like ages. We’ve been ships in the night, you and I.’

They embraced and Laurel was struck by the lavender smell, familiar, but out of place. It belonged to summer-holiday afternoons in the good room at Grandma Nicolson’s Sea Blue boarding house, and not to her little sister.

‘I’m so glad you could come,’ Rose said, squeezing Laurel’s hands before leading her down the hallway.

‘I wouldn’t have missed it.’

‘Of course you wouldn’t.’

‘I’d have come earlier but for the interview.’

‘I know.’

‘And I’d be staying longer if not for rehearsals. The film starts shooting in a fortnight.’

‘I know.’ Rose clenched Laurel’s hand even tighter, as if for emphasis. ‘Mummy will be thrilled to have you here at all. She’s so proud of you, Lol. We all are.’

Praise within one’s family was worrisome and Laurel ignored it. ‘The others?’

‘Not yet. Iris is caught in traffic and Daphne arrives this after-noon. She’ll come straight to the house from the airport. She’s going to call en route.’

‘And Gerry? What time’s he due?’

It was a joke and even Rose, the nice Nicolson, the only one who didn’t as a rule go in for teasing, couldn’t help but giggle. Their brother could construct cosmic-distance calendars to calculate the whereabouts of faraway galaxies, but ask him to estimate his arrival time and he was flummoxed.

They turned the corner and found the door labelled ‘Dorothy Nicol- son’. Rose reached for the knob but hesitated before turning it. ‘I have to warn you, Lol,’ she said, ‘Mummy’s gone down-hill since you were here last. She’s up and down. One minute she’s quite her old self, the next …’ Rose’s lips quivered and she clutched at her long strand of beads. Her voice lowered as she continued. ‘She gets confused, Lol, upset sometimes, saying things about the past, things I don’t always understand—the nurses say it doesn’t mean anything, that it happens often when people—when they’re at Mummy’s stage. The nurses have tablets they give her then; they settle her down, but they make her terribly groggy. I wouldn’t expect too much today.’

Laurel nodded. The doctor had said as much when she rang last week to check. He’d used a litany of tedious euphemisms—a race well run, time to answer the final summons, the long sleep—his tone so supercilious that Laurel had been unable to resist: ‘Do you mean, Doctor, that my mother is dying?’ She’d said it in a queenly voice, just for the satisfaction of hearing him splutter. The reward had been sweet but short-lived, lasting only until his answer came.

Yes.

That most treasonous of words.

Rose pushed open the door—‘Look who I found, Mummy!’—and Laurel realised she was holding her breath.



There was a time in Laurel’s childhood when she’d been afraid. Of the dark, of zombies, of the strange men Grandma Nicolson warned were lurking behind corners to snatch up little girls and do unmentionable things to them. (What sort of things? Unmentionable things. Always like that, the threat more frightening for its lack of detail, its hazy suggestion of tobacco and sweat and hair in strange places.) So convincing had her grandmother been, that Laurel had known it was only a matter of time before her fate found her and had its wicked way.

Sometimes her greatest fears had balled themselves together so she woke in the night, screaming because the zombie in the dark cupboard was eyeing her through the keyhole, waiting to begin his dreaded deeds. ‘Hush now little wing,’ her mother had whispered, ‘It’s just a dream. You must learn to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s pretend. It isn’t always easy—it took me an awfully long time to work it out, too long.’ And then she’d climb in next to Laurel and say, ‘Shall I tell you a story, about a little girl who ran away to join the circus?’

It was hard to believe that the woman whose enormous presence vanquished every night-time terror, was this same pallid creature pinned beneath the hospital sheet. Laurel had thought herself prepared. She’d had friends die before, she knew what death looked like when it came, she’d received her BAFTA for playing a woman in the late stages of cancer. But this was different. This was Ma. She wanted to turn and run.

She didn’t though. Rose, who was standing by the bookshelf, nodded encouragement, and Laurel wrapped herself within the character of the dutiful visiting daughter. She moved swiftly to take her mother’s frail hand. ‘Hello there,’ she said. ‘Hello there, my love.’

Dorothy’s eyes flickered open briefly before closing again. Her breaths continued their soft pattern of rise and fall as Laurel brushed a light kiss on the paper of each cheek.

‘I’ve brought you something. I couldn’t wait for tomorrow.’ She set down her things, withdrawing the small parcel from in-side her handbag. Leaving a brief pause for convention’s sake, she started to unwrap the gift. ‘A hairbrush,’ she said, turning the silver object over in her fingers. ‘It has the softest bristles—boar, I think; I found it in an antiques shop in Knightsbridge. I’ve had it engraved, you see, right here—your initials. Would you like me to brush your hair?’

She hadn’t expected an answer, not really, and none came. Laurel ran the brush lightly over the fine white strands that formed a corona on the pillow round her mother’s face, hair that had once been thick, darkest brown, and was now dissolving into thin air. ‘There,’ she said, arranging the brush on the shelf so that light caught the cursive D. ‘There now.’

Rose must have been satisfied in some way, because she handed over the album she’d taken from the shelf and whispered that she was going down the hall to make their tea.

There were roles in families; that was Rose’s, this was hers. Laurel eased herself into a remedial-looking chair by her mother’s pillow and opened the old book carefully. The first photo-graph was black and white, faded now with a colony of brown spots creeping silently across its surface. Beneath the foxing, a young woman with a scarf tied over her hair was caught forever in a moment of disruption. Looking up from whatever she was doing, she’d lifted a hand as if to shoo the photographer away. She was smiling slightly, her annoyance mixed with amusement, her mouth open in the articulation of some forgotten words. A joke, Laurel had always liked to think, a witty aside for the person behind the camera. Probably one of Grandma’s many forgotten guests: a travelling salesman, a lone holidaymaker, some quiet bureaucrat with polished shoes, sitting out the war in a protected occupation. The line of a calm sea could be glimpsed behind her by anyone who knew that it was there.

Laurel held the book across her mother’s still body and began. ‘Here you are then, Ma, at Grandma Nicolson’s boarding house. It’s 1944 and the war’s nearing its end. Mrs Nicolson’s son hasn’t come home yet, but he will. In less than a month, she’ll send you into town with the ration cards for groceries and when you return there’ll be a soldier sitting at the kitchen table, a man you’ve never met but whom you recognise from the framed picture on the mantle. He’s older when you meet than he is in the picture, and sadder, but he’s dressed the same way, in his army khaki, and he smiles at you and you know, instantly, that he’s the one you’ve been waiting for.’

Laurel turned the page, using her thumb to flatten the plastic corner of the yellowing protective sheet. Time had made it crackly. ‘You were married in a dress you stitched yourself from a pair of lace curtains Grandma Nicolson was induced to sacrifice from the upstairs guest room. Well done, Ma dear—I can’t imagine that was an easy sell. We all know how Grandma felt about soft furnishings. There was a storm the day before and you were worried it would rain on your wedding day. It didn’t, though. The sun rose and the clouds were blown away and people said it was a good omen. Still, you hedged your bets; that’s Mr Hatch, the chimney sweep, standing at the bottom of the church stairs for luck. He was all too happy to oblige—the fee Daddy paid bought new shoes for his eldest boy.’

She could never be sure these past few months, that her mother was listening, though the kinder nurse said there was no reason to think otherwise, and sometimes Laurel allowed herself the liberty of inven- tion—nothing too drastic, only that when her imagination led away from the main action and into the peripheries she let it. Iris didn’t approve, she said their mother’s story was important to her and Laurel had no right to embellish, but the doctor had only shrugged when told of the transgression, and said it was the talking that mattered, not so much the truth of what was said. He’d turned to Laurel with a wink: ‘You of all people shouldn’t be expected to abide by truth, Miss Nicolson.’

Despite his having sided with her, Laurel had resented the assumed collusion. She’d considered pointing out the distinction between performance on stage and deception in life; telling the impertinent doctor with his too-black hair and too-white teeth that in either case truth mattered; but she’d known better than to argue philosophy with a man who carried a golf-stick novelty pen in his shirt pocket.

She moved on to the next page and found, as she always did, the series of her infant self. She narrated swiftly across her early years— baby Laurel sleeping in a crib with stars and fairies painted on the wall above; blinking dourly in her mother’s arms; grown some and tottering plumply in the seaside shallows—before reaching the point where reciting ended and remembering began. She turned the page, unleashing the noise and laughter of the others. Was it a coincidence that her own memories were linked so strongly with their arrival, these stepping-stone sisters, tumbling in long grass; waving from the tree- house window; standing in line before Greenacres farmhouse—their home—brushed and pinned, polished and darned for some forgotten outing?

Laurel’s nightmares had stopped after her sisters were born. That is, they’d changed. There were no more visits from zombies or monsters or strange men who lived by day in the cup-board; she started dreaming instead that a tidal wave was coming, or the world was ending, or a war had started, and she alone had to keep the younger ones safe. It was one of the things she could most clearly remember her mother saying to her as a girl: ‘Take care of your sisters. You’re the eldest, don’t you let them go.’ It hadn’t occurred to Laurel back then that her mother might be speaking from experience; that implicit in the warning was her decades-old grief for a younger brother, lost to a bomb in the Second World War. Children could be self-centred like that, especially the happy ones. And the Nicolson children had been happier than most.

‘Here we are at Easter. That’s Daphne in the highchair, which must make it 1956. Yes, it is. See—Rose has her arm in plaster, her left arm this time. Iris is playing the goat, grinning at the back, but she won’t be for long. Do you remember? That’s the afternoon she raided the fridge and sucked clean all the crab claws Daddy had brought home from his fishing trip the day before.’ It was the only time Laurel had ever seen him really angry. He’d stumbled out after his nap, sun-touched and fancying a bit of sweet crabmeat, and all he’d found in the fridge were hollow shells. She could still picture Iris hiding behind the sofa—the one place their father couldn’t reach her with his threats of a tanning (an empty threat, but no less frightening for it)—refusing to come out. Begging whomever would listen to take pity and please, pretty please slide her the copy of Pippi Longstocking. The memory made Laurel fond. She’d forgotten how funny Iris could be when she wasn’t so damn busy being cross.

Something slipped from the back of the album and Laurel fetched it up from the floor. It was a photograph she’d never seen before, an old-fashioned black-and-white shot of two young women, their arms linked. They were laughing at her from within its white border, standing together in a room with bunting hanging above them and sunlight streaming in from an unseen window. She turned it over, looking for an annotation, but there was nothing written there except the date: May 1941. How peculiar. Laurel knew the family album inside out and this photograph, these people, did not belong. The door opened and Rose appeared, two mismatched teacups jiggling on their saucers.

Laurel held up the photo. ‘Have you seen this, Rosie?’

Rose set a cup down on the bedside table, squinted briefly at the picture, and then she smiled. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘It turned up a few months ago at Greenacres—I thought you’d be able to make a place for it in the album. Lovely, isn’t she? So special to discover something new of her, especially now.’

Laurel looked again at the photo. The young women with their hair in side-parted Victory rolls; skirts grazing their knees; one with a cigarette dangling from her hand. Of course it was their mother. Her makeup was different. She was different.

‘Funny,’ Rose said, ‘I never thought of her like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Young, I suppose. Having a laugh with a girlfriend.’

‘Didn’t you? I wonder why?’ Though of course the same was true of Laurel. In her mind—in all of their minds, apparently—their mother had come into being when she’d answered Grandma’s newspaper advertisement for a maid-of-all-work and started at the boarding house. They knew the basics of before: that she’d been born and raised in Coventry, that she’d gone to London just before the war began, that her family had been killed in the bombings. Laurel knew, too, that the death of her mother’s family had struck her deeply. Dorothy Nicolson had taken every opportunity to remind her own children that family was everything; it had been the mantra of their childhood. When Laurel was going through a particularly painful teenage phase, her mother had taken her by the hands and said, with unusual sternness, ‘Don’t be like I was, Laurel. Don’t wait too long to realise what’s important. Your family might drive you mad sometimes, but they’re worth more to you than you could ever imagine.’

As to the details of Dorothy’s life before she met Stephen Nicol- son, though, she’d never forced them on her children and they hadn’t thought to ask. Nothing odd in that, Laurel supposed with mild discomfort. Children are inherently self-centred; they don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, about parental claims to a prior existence. Now though, looking at this wartime stranger, Laurel felt the lack of knowledge keenly.

When she was starting out as an actress, a well-known director had leaned over his script, straightened his coke-bottle glasses and told Laurel she hadn’t the looks to play leading roles. The advice had stung and she’d wailed and railed, and then spent hours catching herself ac- cidentally-on-purpose in the mirror before hacking her long hair short in the grip of drunken bravura. But it had proved a ‘moment’ in her career. She was a character actress. The director cast her as the leading lady’s sister and she garnered her first rave reviews. People marvelled at her ability to build characters from the inside out, to submerge herself and disappear beneath the skin of another person, but there was no trick to it; she merely bothered to learn the character’s secrets. Laurel knew quite a bit about keeping secrets. She also knew that’s where the real people were found, hiding behind their black spots.

‘Do you realise it’s the youngest we’ve ever seen her?’ Rose perched on Laurel’s armrest, her lavender smell stronger than before, as she took the photograph.

‘Is it?’ Laurel reached for her cigarettes, remembered she was in a hospital and took up her tea instead. ‘I suppose it is.’ So much of her mother’s past was made up of black spots. Why had it never bothered her before? She glanced again at the picture, the two young women who seemed now to be laughing at her ignorance. She tried to sound casual. ‘Where did you say you found it, Rosie?’

‘Inside a book.’

‘A book?’

‘A play, actually—Peter Pan.’

‘Ma was in a play?’ Their mother had been a great one for games of ‘dressing up’ and ‘let’s pretend’, but Laurel couldn’t remember her ever performing in a real play.

‘I’m not sure about that. The book was a gift. There was an inscription in the front—you know, the way she liked us to do with presents when we were kids?’

‘What did it say?’

‘For Dorothy,’ Rose plaited her fingers together under the strain of recollection, ‘A true friend is a light in the dark, Vivien.’

Vivien. The name did something strange to Laurel. Her skin went hot and cold, and her heart speeded up so she could feel her pulse beating in her temples. A dizzying series of images flashed across her brain—a glistening blade, her mother’s frightened face, a red ribbon come loose. Old memories, ugly memories, that the unknown woman’s name had somehow un-leashed -‘Vivien,’ she repeated, her voice louder than she in-tended. ‘Who is Vivien?’

Rose looked up, surprised, but whatever she might have answered was lost when Iris came blasting through the door, parking ticket held aloft. Both sisters turned towards her mighty indignation and therefore neither noticed Dorothy’s sharp intake of breath, the look of anguish that crossed her face at the mention of Vivien’s name. By the time the three Nicolson sisters had gathered at their mother’s side, Dorothy appeared to be sleeping calmly, her features giving no hint that she’d left the hospital, her weary body, and her grown daughters behind; slipping through time to the dark night of 1941.