The Secret Keeper

Twenty-six

New College Library, Oxford, 2011


LAUREL SPENT the next fifty-seven minutes, each of them excruciating, pacing New College gardens. When the doors were finally unlocked, she all but set a library record, reminding herself of a shopper at the Boxing Day sales as she jostled past other people in her hurry to get back to her desk; certainly Ben seemed impressed when he arrived to find her already hard at work. ‘Cool,’ he said, eyes wide with wonder as he considered the possibility that she’d returned by the click of her fingers and the wiggle of her nose. Awed bafflement gave way to whispered concern, ‘I didn’t leave you in here by mistake, did I?’

Laurel assured him he hadn’t, and got busy skimming through Katy’s first journal for 1941 in search of anything that might tell her how her mother’s plan had turned pear-shaped. There wasn’t much mention of Vivien in the first few months of the year, other than occasional notations advising that Katy had written or received a letter, and discreet statements along the lines of ‘all seems to go the same for Mrs Jenkins’, but then, on April 5th, 1941, things started to liven up:

Today’s post brought word from my young friend, Vivien. It was a long letter by her standards, and I was alert immediately to the fact that something in her tone was changed. At first I was pleased, it seemed that a flush of her former spirit had returned, and I wondered that a new peace might have dawned on her concerns. But alas, no; for the letter did not describe a renewed commitment to home and hearth; rather, she wrote in lengthy and profuse details about the volunteer work she’s been doing at Dr Tomalin’s London hospital for orphaned children; entreating me, as always, to destroy her letter afterwards and refrain from making reference to her work in my response.

I will of course comply, but I intend to implore her again, in the strongest possible terms, to cease all involvement with the place, at least until I can work out a lasting solution to her problems. Is it not enough she insists on making donations to the hospital’s running costs? Does she care nothing for her own health? She won’t stop, I know that; twenty years old now, but Vivien is still that stubborn child I first knew on our ship, refusing to heed my advice if it doesn’t suit her. I will write anyway. I could never forgive myself if the worst were to happen and I hadn’t done my best to steer her right.

Laurel frowned. What worst? Clearly she was missing some-thing— why on earth would Katy Ellis, teacher and friend to small traumatised people everywhere, have felt so strongly that Vivien should cease volunteering at Dr Tomalin’s hospital for war orphans? Unless Dr Tomalin himself was a danger. Was that it? Or was the hospital perhaps located in an area that drew a lot of German bombers? Laurel pondered the question a minute before deciding it was impossible to know precisely what Katy feared without embarking on a tangential line of research that threatened to absorb what little time she had left. The question was intriguing, but irrelevant, she suspected, to the mission she was on to learn more about her mother’s plan. She continued reading:

The cause of Vivien’s improved spirits was revealed to me on the second page of her letter. It appears she has met some-one, a young man, and although she is at pains to mention him in only the most casual terms—‘I am joined in my project with the children by another volunteer; a man who seems to know as little about boundaries as I know about turning lights into fairies’—I know my young friend well, and I suspect that her breezy veneer is a performance for my sake, designed to conceal something deeper. What precisely that something might be, I do not know, only that it is unlike her to devote so many lines to the discussion of an individual—friend or foe—whose acquaintance she has just made. I am wary. My instincts have never let me down before, and I plan to write at once to urge appropriate caution.

Katy Ellis must have done just that, for her next journal entry contained a lengthy direct quote from a letter written by Vivien Jenkins, evidently in response to her concerns:

How I miss you, Katy dear—it’s been over a year since last we met; it feels like ten. Your letter made me wish that we were sitting together beneath that tree at Nordstrom, the one by the lake where we used to picnic when you came to visit. Do you remember the night we crept from the great house and hung paper lanterns from the trees in the grove? We told my uncle that it must have been gypsies and he spent the whole of the next day stalking the grounds with that shotgun on his shoulder and his poor arthritic dog at his heels—darling old Dewey. Such a faithful hound.

You lectured me later for causing mischief, but I seem to remember, Katy, that you were the one to describe in great detail at the breakfast table the ‘fearsome’ noises you’d heard in the night, when the ‘gypsies’ must’ve been ‘descending’ on the hallowed grounds of Nordstrom. Oh, but wasn’t it something, swimming by the light of the great silver moon? How I love to swim—it is to drop right over the edge of the world, isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve ever stopped believing I might just discover the hole on the stream floor that will lead me back.

Ah, Katy—I wonder what age I will need to attain before you release me from your worries. What a burden I must be. Do you think you will still be minding me to keep my skirts clean and my nose dry when I am an old woman, clacking my knitting needles and rocking in my chair? How well you’ve looked out for me over the years, how difficult I’ve made that task for you at times, and how fortunate I am that it was you who met me that horrible day at the Southport railway station.

You are wise as ever in your advice, and please, dearest, be reassured that I am equally wise in my actions. I am not a child any more, and know too well my responsibilities—you’re not reassured, are you? Even as you read this, you are shaking your head and thinking what a reckless person I am. To allay your fears, let me promise you that I have hardly spoken to the man in question (Jimmy is his name, by the way—let’s call him that, shall we—‘the man’ has rather a sinister feel to it); indeed, I have at all times done my best to discourage any contact, even veering, when necessary, into the realm of rudeness. Apologies for that, Katy dear, I know you would not like to see your young charge gaining a reputation for poor manners, and I for my part detest doing that which might bring your good name into disrepute!

Laurel smiled. She liked Vivien; the response was tongue in cheek without straying into unkindness towards mother hen Katy and her wearying instinct towards worry. Even Katy had written beneath the extract: ‘It is nice to see my cheeky young friend returned. I’ve missed her these past years.’ Laurel liked less Vivien’s naming of the young man volunteering at the hospital with her. Was he the same Jimmy her mother had been in love with? Surely. Could it be a coincidence he was working with Vivien at Dr Tomalin’s hospital? Surely not. Laurel felt the rumblings of foreboding as the lovers’ plan began to take shape.

Evidently Vivien had no idea of the connection between the nice young man at the hospital and her onetime friend, Doro-thy—which wasn’t surprising, Laurel supposed. Kitty Barker had mentioned how careful Ma was to keep her boyfriend away from Campden Grove. She’d also described the way emotions were intensified and moral certainties dissolved during the war, providing, it struck Laurel now, the perfect environment in which a pair of star-crossed lovers might become swept up in a folie a deux.

The next week of journal entries contained no mention either of Vivien Jenkins or ‘the matter of the young man’; Katy Ellis devoted herself instead to the immediate concerns of divisional warden politics, and talk on the radio of invasion. On April 15th she recorded her concern that Vivien hadn’t written in a time, but then noted the next day a telephone call from Dr Tomalin, letting her know that Vivien was unwell. Now, that was interesting, it appeared the two were known to one another, after all, and it wasn’t an objection to the doctor’s character that had set Katy so firmly against his hospital. Four days later, the following:

A letter today that vexes me greatly. I cannot possibly capture the tone in summary and I wouldn’t know where to begin or end in quoting that which troubles me. Thus, I am going against the wishes of my dear (infuriating!) young friend, just this once, and will not toss the letter on this evening’s fire.

Laurel had never turned a page faster. There it was, on fine white paper and in rather messy handwriting—written in great haste it would seem—the letter from Vivien Jenkins to Katy Ellis dated April 23rd, 1941. A month before she died, Laurel noted grimly.

I am writing to you from a railway restaurant, darling Katy, because I was gripped by a fear that if I didn’t record it all without delay, the whole thing would disappear and I would wake up tomorrow and discover it a figment of my imagination. None of what I write will please you, but you are the only person I can tell, and I must tell somebody. Forgive me, then, dear Katy, and accept my deepest apologies in advance for the nerves I know this confidence will cause you. Only if you must think badly of me, think it softly and remember that I am still your own Little Shipmate.

Something happened today—I was leaving Dr Tomalin’s hospital and had paused on the step to straighten my scarf. I swear to you, Katy, and you know me not to be a liar, that I did not hesitate on purpose— still, when I heard the door open behind me I knew, without turning, that it was the young man—I believe I’ve mentioned him once or twice in my letters—Jimmy?—who was standing there.

Katy Ellis had underlined this sentence and made an annotation in the margin, the note written in such tiny neat script, that Laurel could just picture the tight disapproving moue of its writer: Mentioned once or twice! The delusions of the love struck never cease to amaze one. Love struck. Laurel’s stomach balled with concern as she concentrated her attention back on Vivien’s letter. Had Vivien fallen in love with Jimmy? Is that what had turned the ‘harmless’ plan on its head?

Sure enough, it was he; Jimmy had joined me on the front step and we exchanged there a few words about a humorous incident that had occurred between the children. He made me laugh—he is funny, Katy—I do like funny people, don’t you?—my father was a very funny man, he always had us laughing—and then he asked, quite naturally, whether we might walk home together seeing as we were both headed in the same direction, to which, against every sensible dictate, I answered, ‘Yes.’

Now, while you are shaking your head, Katy, (I can picture you at that little desk you told me about beneath the window—do you have fresh primroses in a vase on the corner? You do, I know it) let me tell you why I answered that way. For a month now, I have done as you advised and gone out of my way to ignore him, but the other day he gave me something—a gift of apology, the reason for which I won’t go into, after we had a small misunderstanding. The gift was a photograph. I will not describe it here other than to say that in its depiction it was as if he had somehow seen inside my soul to the world I’ve kept contained there since I was small.

I took that photograph home with me, and I guarded it like a jealous child, taking it out at every opportunity, poring over each small detail, before locking it away in the concealed wall cabinet behind my grandmother’s portrait in the second bedroom—just as a child might hide a precious object, for no other reason than that by concealing it, by keeping it for my-self, the value was somehow magnified. He has heard me tell stories to the hospital children, of course, and I am not suggesting there was anything more ‘magical’ in his choosing such a gift, but still it moved me.

The word ‘magical’ was underlined and subject to another annotation from Katy Ellis:

It is precisely what she is suggesting: I know Vivien, and I know how deeply she believes. One of the things I have come to know most surely in my work is that the belief system acquired in childhood is never fully escaped; it may submerge itself for a while, but it always returns in times of need to lay claim to the soul it shaped.

Laurel thought of her own childhood, wondering whether it was true what Katy said. Above any other theistic system, her parents had preached the values of family; her mother, in particular, had held the line—she’d realised too late, she told them sadly, the value of family. And Laurel had to concede that if she looked beyond the good-natured bickering, the Nicolsons did come together in times of need, just as they’d been taught to do as children.

Perhaps, too, my recent indisposition has made me more reckless than usual—after a week in the dark of my bed-room, German planes thrumming overhead, Henry sitting by the bedside of an evening clutching my hand and willing me to mend, it is quite something to be out again, drinking in the fresh air of London in springtime. As a side note—don’t you find it remarkable, Katy, that the whole world can be involved in this madness we call war, and all the while the flowers and the bees and the seasons keep on doing what they must, wise but never weary in their wait for humanity to come to its senses and remember the beauty of life? It is queer, but my love and longing for the world are always magnified by my absence from it; it’s wondrous, don’t you think, that a person can swing from despair to gleeful hunger, and that even during these dark days there is happiness to be found in the smallest things?

Anyway, whatever the reason, he asked me to walk with him and I said yes, and so we walked, and I let myself laugh. I laughed because he told me funny stories and it was so easy and light. I realised how long it has been since I’ve en-joyed that most simple of pleasures: company and conversation on a sunny afternoon. I am impatient for such pleasures, Katy. I am no longer a girl—I am a woman, and I want things; things that I will not have, but it is human, is it not, to long for that from which we are barred?

What things? What was Vivien barred from? Not for the first time, Laurel had the feeling she was missing an important part of the puzzle. She skimmed through the next fortnight’s journal entries until Vivien was mentioned again, hoping all would be made clear.

She continues to see him—at the hospital, which is bad enough, but elsewhere, too, when she is supposed to be working at the WVS canteen or running household errands. She tells me that I must not worry, that ‘he is a friend, and nothing more.’ She submits as evidence reference to the young man’s fiancee: ‘He is engaged to be married, Katy, they are very much in love and have plans to move to the country when the war is over; they’re going to find a big old house and fill it with children; so you see, I am not in danger of breaking my own wedding vows, as you seem to fear.’

At this, Laurel felt the dizziness of recognition. It was Doro-thy, Vivien was writing about—Ma. The intersection of then and now, learned history and lived experience, was briefly overwhelming. She removed her glasses and rubbed her forehead, focusing on the stone wall outside the window for a moment.

And then she let Katy continue:

She knows that is not all I fear; the girl is wilfully misunderstanding my concerns. I am no innocent, either; I know that this young man’s engagement is no impediment to the human heart. I cannot know his feelings, but I know Vivien’s well enough.

More extravagant worry on Katy’s behalf, yet Laurel still wasn’t any closer to understanding why: Vivien intimated that Katy’s fears stemmed from her rigid views as to what constituted seemly marital behaviour. Did Vivien make a habit of disloyalty? There wasn’t a lot to go on, but Laurel could almost read into Vivien’s more florid romantic musings on life, a spirit of free love—but only because she wanted to.

Then Laurel found an entry, two days later, that made her wonder whether Katy had somehow intuited all along that Jim-my posed a threat to Vivien:

Dreadful war news—Westminster Hall was hit last night, and the Abbey and the Houses of Parliament; they thought at first Big Ben had been razed! Rather than pick up the newspaper or listen to the wireless this evening I determined to clear out the sitting-room cupboard to make room for my new teaching notes. I confess to being something of a bowerbird—a trait that shames me; I would prefer to be as efficient of home as I am of mind—and I found there the most amazing collection of trifles. Amongst them, a letter received three years ago from Vivien’s uncle. Along with the description of her ‘pleasing compliance’ (I was as riled when I read that line tonight as I was at the time—how little he ever saw of the real Vivien!) he had enclosed a photograph, still folded in with the letter. She was seventeen years old when it was taken, and such a beauty—I remembered thinking, when I saw it those years ago, that she looked like the character from a fairy tale, Red Riding Hood, perhaps; wide eyes and heart-shaped lips; and still the direct and innocent gaze of a child. I remembered hoping, too, that there was no Big Bad Wolf waiting for her in the woods.

That the letter and its photograph should have come to light today of all days gave me pause. I was not wrong the last time I had one of my ‘feelings’. I didn’t act then, much to my eternal regret, but I will not stand by and let my young friend make another mistake with dire ramifications. Given that I cannot express my concerns in writing as I would wish, I will make the trip to London and see her myself.

A trip she evidently took—and promptly—for the next journal entry was written two days later:

I have been to London and it was worse than I feared. It was obvious to me that my dear Vivien has fallen in love with the young man, Jimmy. She didn’t say as much, of course, she is too practised for that, but I have known her since she was a child and thus I could see it in every animation of her face; hear it in every unspoken phrase. Worse yet, it appears she has thrown all caution to the wind; she has been repeatedly to the young man’s home, where he lives with his poorly father. She insists that ‘all is innocent’, to which I replied that there was no such thing, and that such distinctions would do her no favours if she were called upon to answer to these visits. She told me she wouldn’t ‘give him up’—stubborn child—to which I summoned every bit of steel I possessed and said, ‘My dear, you are married.’ I reminded her further of the promise she’d made to her husband in the Nordstrom church, that she would love, honour and obey, till death did them part, etc., etc. Oh, but I won’t easily forget the way she looked at me then— the disappointment in her eyes as she told me that I didn’t understand.

I understand well enough what it is to love that which is forbidden, and I told her so, but she is young and the young are quick to presume themselves the exclusive possessors of all strong feelings. I am sorry to say that we parted on ill terms—I made one last attempt to convince her to give up her work at the hospital; she refused. I reminded her she had her health to consider; she waved my concerns aside. To disappoint a soul like hers—that face which reveals itself as if beneath a master painter’s brush—is to feel as guilty as if one had removed all goodness from the world. Still, I will not give up—I have one last card to play. It risks her eternal outrage, but I decided as my train left London, that I am going to write to this Jimmy Metcalfe and explain to him the damage he does her. Perhaps he will exercise proper caution where she will not.

The sun had started to set and the reading room was growing colder and darker by the minute; Laurel’s eyes were glazed from reading Katy Ellis’s neat but tiny script without pause for the last two hours. She leaned back and closed her eyes, Katy’s voice swirling in her head. Had she written the letter to Jimmy, Laurel wondered; was that what had upset her mother’s plan? Had whatever Katy included in the letter— something she obviously thought persuasive enough to make Jimmy give up the friendship when Vivien wouldn’t—been enough to cause ruptures between Ma and Jimmy, too? In a book, Laurel thought, that’s exactly what would happen. There was a narrative rightness to a pair of young lovers being torn apart by the very deed they’d contrived to commit in order to buy their shared happiness. Was that what her mother had been thinking about, that day in the hospital when she’d told Laurel she should marry for love, that she shouldn’t wait, that nothing else was as important? Had Dorothy waited too long, and wanted too much, and in the meantime lost her lover to the other woman?

Laurel had guessed that it was something particular to Vivien Jenkins made her the very worst person against whom Dorothy and Jimmy could make such a plan. Was it simply that Vivien was precisely the type of woman Jimmy might fall in love with? Or was it something else Laurel was intuiting? Katy Ellis—every bit the minister’s daughter— was obviously worried that Vivien wasn’t being careful of her marriage vows, but there was something else at work, too. Laurel wondered whether Vivien might have been ill. Katy was a worrywart, but her concern for Vivien’s health was of the type usually reserved for a friend with chronic illness, not a vital young woman of twenty. Vivien herself had referred to ‘absences’ from the outside world, when her husband Henry sat by her bedside and stroked her hand in convalescence. Had Vivien Jenkins suffered with a condition that made her more vulnerable to the world than she might otherwise have been? Had she experienced a breakdown of some kind, emotional or physical, that left her susceptible to a relapse?

Or—Laurel sat bolt upright at her desk—had she perhaps endured a series of miscarriages after her marriage to Henry? It certainly explained the doting care of her husband, even, to an extent, Vivien’s drive to get out of the house when she was re-covered, to leave the domestic site of her unhappiness and do more than she was really able. It might even explain Katy Ellis’s specific concern about Vivien working with children at the hospital. Was that it? Had Katy worried that her friend was increasing her sadness by surrounding herself with constant reminders of her barrenness? Vivien had written in her letter about it being human nature, and certainly her own, to crave the very things she knew she couldn’t have. Laurel was sure she was onto something— even Katy’s reliance on euphemisms was consistent with that subject at that time.

Laurel wished she knew more places to look for answers. It occurred to her that Gerry’s time machine would be most helpful about now. Alas, she was stuck with Katy’s journals. There were a few more entries in which Vivien’s friendship with Jimmy seemed to grow, despite Katy’s continued misgivings, and then, all of a sudden, on May 20th, an entry reporting that Vivien had written to advise she would not see Jimmy again, that it was time for him to begin a new life, and that she’d wished him well and told him goodbye.

Laurel drew breath, wondering whether Katy had sent her letter to Jimmy, after all, and if whatever she wrote to him was at the root of this abrupt change of heart. Against the odds, she felt sorry for Vivien Jenkins—even though Laurel knew that there was more to Jimmy’s friendship than met the eye, she couldn’t help but pity the young woman who’d been so pleased with so little. Laurel wondered whether her sympathy might be influenced by her awareness of what was waiting around the corner for Vivien; but even Katy, who’d been so keen that the relationship should end, seemed ambivalent now that it had:

I was worried about Vivien and wanted the affair with the young man to stop; now I suffer the burden of having been granted my wish. I have received a letter offering very little detail but with a tone that is not remotely difficult to decipher. She writes in resignation. She says only that I was right; that the friendship is over; and that I need not worry for everything has worked out for the best. Despair or anger I could accept. It is the submissive tone of her letter that makes me worry. I cannot help but fear it bodes ill. I will await her next letter and hope for an improvement, and I will hold fast to my certainty that what I did was done for the very best of reasons.

But there was to be no further letter. Vivien Jenkins died three days later, a fact recorded by Katy Ellis with just the sort of grief one might imagine.

Thirty minutes later Laurel was hurrying across the dusk-draped lawn of New College towards the bus stop, musing over everything she’d learned, when her phone started buzzing at her from her pocket. She didn’t recognise the caller number but answered anyway.

‘Lol?’ came the voice.

‘Gerry?’

‘Oh good, it is your number.’

Laurel had to strain to hear through the noise on the other end of the line. ‘Gerry? Where are you?’

‘London. A phone booth on Fleet Street.’

‘The city still has working phone booths?’

‘It would appear so. Unless this is the Tardis, in which case I’m in serious trouble.’

‘What are you doing in London?’

‘Chasing Dr Rufus.’

‘Oh?’ Laurel pressed a hand against her other ear so she could hear properly. ‘And? Have you caught him?’

‘I have. His journals, at any rate. The doctor himself died from an infection towards the end of the war.’

Laurel’s heart was thumping fast; she skipped over the doc-tor’s untimely end. In the pursuit of answers to this mystery, there was only room for so much empathy. ‘And? What have you found?’

‘I don’t know where to start.’

‘The important bit. And do please hurry.’

‘Hang on.’ She heard him drop another coin into the phone. ‘Still there?’

‘Yes, yes.’

Laurel stopped beneath a streetlight glowing orange, as Gerry said, ‘They were never friends, Lol. Ma and this Vivien Jenkins, according to Dr Rufus they were never friends.’

‘What?’ She figured she’d misheard.

‘They hardly even knew each other.’

‘Ma and Vivien Jenkins? What are you talking about? I’ve seen the book, the photograph—of course they were friends.’

‘Ma wanted them to be friends—from what I read, it was al-most as if she wanted to be Vivien Jenkins She became obsessed with the idea that they were inseparable—“two of a kind”, were his exact words, but it was all in her head.’

‘But … I don’t …’

‘And then something happened—it wasn’t clear what exactly—but Vivien Jenkins did something that made it evident to Mummy that they weren’t close friends at all.’

Laurel thought of the argument Kitty Barker had spoken of: something happening between the two of them that had put Dorothy in a terrible mood and spurred her desire for revenge. ‘What was it, Gerry?’ she said. ‘Do you know what Vivien did?’ Or took.

‘She—hang on. Bugger, I’m out of coins.’ There came the fierce sound of pockets being shaken, the phone receiver being fumbled. ‘It’s going to cut me off, Lol—’

‘Call me back. Find some more coins and ring me back.’

‘Too late, I’m out. I’ll talk to you soon, though; I’m coming to Green- ac—’

The tone sounded flatly and Gerry was gone.