The Secret Keeper

Seventeen

University of Cambridge, 2011


THE RAIN HAD CLEARED and a ripe moon broke silver through streaky clouds. Having already paid a visit to the Cambridge University Library, Laurel was now sitting outside Clare College Chapel, waiting to be knocked over by someone on a bicycle. Not just any someone, she had a particular cyclist in mind. Evensong was almost over; she’d been listening from the bench beneath the cherry tree for the past half an hour, letting the great organ and the voices of the choir transport her. Any minute, though, it would all stop and a cluster of people would burst from the doors, claim their bikes from the thirty-odd jumble stacked in metal racks by the door, and whizz past her in different directions. One of them, Laurel hoped, would be Gerry; it was something they’d always shared, the two of them, their love of music—the sort of music that made one glimpse answers to questions they hadn’t known they were asking—and as soon as she’d arrived in Cambridge and seen signs outside the college advertising evensong, she’d known it was her best chance of finding her brother.

Sure enough, a few minutes after Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb came to its breathtaking conclusion, as people started to emerge in pairs and small groups through the chapel doors, one of them walked out alone. A tall lanky figure whose arrival at the top of the stairs made Laurel smile because it was surely one of life’s most simple blessings to know someone so well you could pick them immediately from the other side of a dark courtyard. The figure climbed onto a bicycle and pushed off with one foot, wobbling a bit until he picked up pace.

Laurel stepped out onto the road as he came close, waving and calling his name. He almost knocked her over, before stop-ping and blinking at her through the moonlit dark. The most wonderful smile broke across his face and Laurel wondered why she didn’t come to visit more often.

‘Lol,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I wanted to see you. I tried to call; I left messages.’

Gerry was shaking his head. ‘The machine kept beeping, that little red light on the front wouldn’t stop bloody blinking at me. It was defective, I think—I had to pull it out of the wall.’

The explanation made such perfect Gerry sense that no matter how infuriating it had been, not being able to contact him, no matter the way she’d worried he was bitter with her, Laurel couldn’t help but smile. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it gave me an excuse to come and visit anyway Have you eaten?’

‘Eaten?’

‘Food. Annoying habit, I know, but I try to do it a few times a day.’ He messed his tangle of dark hair as if trying to remember.

‘Come on,’ said Laurel, ‘my shout.’

Gerry walked his bicycle beside her and they talked about music as they made their way to a small pizza restaurant built into a hole in the wall overlooking the Arts Theatre. The very place, Laurel noted, where she’d taken herself off as a teenager to see Pinter’s Birthday Party.

It was dark inside, with red and white check cloths and tea lights flickering inside glass jars on the tables. The place was crowded with diners, but they were pointed to a free table at the back, right near the pizza oven. Laurel took off her coat, and a young man with long blond hair falling in an elaborate sweep across his eyes wiped down the surface and took their order for pizzas and wine. He was back in a matter of minutes with a carafe of Chianti and two tumblers.

‘So,’ said Laurel, pouring for each of them, ‘dare I ask what you’ve been working on?’

‘Just today I finished an article on the feeding habits of teen-age galaxies.’

‘Hungry are they?’

‘Very, it seems.’

‘And older than thirteen years, I’m guessing.’

‘Little. Around three to five billion years after the Big Bang.’

Laurel watched as her brother went on, talking eagerly about the ESO Very Large Telescope in Chile—‘It does what a microscope does for a biologist’—and the way faint blobs in the sky were actually distant galaxies, and that some—‘It’s incredible, Lol’—appeared to have no rotation of their gas, ‘none of the current theories predicts them’; and she nodded and reacted, though somewhat guiltily because she wasn’t really listening to him at all; she was thinking about the way, when Gerry was excited, his words tumbled into one another, as if his mouth was having trouble keeping up with his beautiful mind; the way he took breaths only when he absolutely had to; the way his hands opened expressively and his long fingers strained, but with precision, as if they balanced stars on their very tips. They were Daddy’s hands, Laurel realised as she watched him; Daddy’s cheekbones and gentle eyes behind his glasses. In fact, there was a lot of Stephen Nicolson in his only son. Gerry had inherited his laugh from their mother though.

He’d stopped talking and was gulping now from his wine glass. For all the nervousness Laurel felt about this quest she was on, in particular the conversation she knew was still ahead of her, there was an uncomplicatedness about being with Gerry that made her yearn for something she couldn’t quite articulate. The echo of a memory of how things used to be between them, and she wanted to draw out the feeling a little longer before she spoiled it with her confession. She said, ‘And what’s next? What can possibly compete with the eating habits of teenage galaxies?’

‘I’m creating the Latest Map of Everything.’

‘Still setting yourself small achievable goals, I see?’

He grinned. ‘Should be a breeze—it’s not like I’m including all of space, just the sky. Only 560 million stars, galaxies and other objects, and I’m done.’

Laurel was contemplating that number when their pizzas arrived, and the whiff of garlic and basil reminded her she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. She ate with the tenacity of a teenage galaxy, quite sure no food anywhere had ever tasted so good as that pizza right then. Gerry asked after her work and, be-tween mouthfuls, Laurel told him about the documentary and the new version of Macbeth she was filming. ‘At least, I will be. I’ve taken a little time off.’

Gerry held up a large hand. ‘Wait—time off?’

‘Yes.’

He tilted his head. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Why does everyone keep asking me that?’

‘Because you don’t take time off.’

‘Nonsense.’

Gerry lifted his eyebrows. ‘Are you making a joke? I’ve been told I miss them sometimes.’

‘No, I’m not making a joke.’

‘Then I have to inform you that all empirical evidence goes against your assertion.’

‘Empirical evidence?’ Laurel scoffed. ‘Please. You can hardly talk. When’s the last time you took time off?’

‘June 1985, Max Seerjay’s wedding in Bath.’

‘Well then.’

‘I didn’t say I was any different. You and I are two of a kind, both wedded to our work: that’s how I know something’s wrong.’ He swiped his paper napkin across his lips and leaned back against the charcoal- coloured brick wall. ‘Anomalous time off, anomalous visit to see me—I can only deduce the two are related.’

Laurel sighed.

‘Stalling exhalation. All the proof I need. Want to tell me what’s going on, Lol?’

She folded her napkin into half and half again. It was now or never; all this time she’d been wishing Gerry were along with her for the ride—now was the time to buckle him in. She said, ‘Do you remember that time you came to stay with me in London? Right before you started here?’

Gerry answered in the affirmative by quoting from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. ‘Please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion.’

Laurel smiled. ‘Let’s not bicker and argue over who killed who. Love that film.’ She shifted a piece of olive from one side of her plate to the other, hedging, trying to decide which words were the right words. Impossible, because there were none, not really, best just to leap—‘You asked me something, that night on the roof; you asked me whether anything happened back when we were kids. Something violent.’

‘I remember.’

‘Do you?’

Gerry gave a single, efficient nod.

‘Do you remember what I said?’

‘You told me there was nothing you could think of.’

‘Yes. I did. I did say that,’ she agreed softly. ‘But I lied to you, Gerry.’ She didn’t add that it had been for his own good or that she’d thought she was doing the right thing. Both were true, but what did it matter now? She didn’t want to excuse herself, certainly not, she’d lied and she deserved whatever recriminations came her way—not only for withholding the truth from Gerry, but for what she’d told those policemen. ‘I lied.’

‘I know you did,’ he said, finishing off his crust.

Laurel blinked. ‘You do? How?’

‘You wouldn’t look at me when I asked, and you called me “G” when you answered. You never do that unless you’re obfuscating.’ He gave a nonchalant shrug. ‘Nation’s greatest ac-tress, maybe; still no match for my powers of deduction.’

‘And people say you don’t pay attention.’

‘They do? I had no idea. I’m crushed.’ They smiled at one another, but carefully, and then Gerry said, ‘Do you want to tell me now, Lol?’

‘I do. Very much. Do you still want to know?’

‘I do. Very much.’

She nodded. ‘All right, then. All right.’ And so she started at the beginning: a girl in a tree house on a summer’s day in 1961, a stranger on the driveway, a tiny boy in his mother’s arms. She took special care to describe how well the mother loved that boy, the way she paused on the doorstep just to smile at him and breathe in his milky smell and tickle his fat, waxy feet; but then the man in the hat stepped onstage and the spotlight swung towards him. His furtive tread as he passed through the gate at the side of the house, the way the dog knew before anyone else that darkness this way came; the way his bark alerted their mother, who turned and saw the man and, as the girl in the tree house watched, became suddenly frightened.

As she reached the part of the story involving knives and blood and a little boy crying in the gravel, Laurel thought, as she listened to her own voice as if it were coming from outside her body and watched her grown-man brother’s face across the table, how odd it was to be having this very private conversation in public; and yet, how necessary the noise and hum of this place was to her ability to tell it. Here, in a pizza restaurant in Cambridge, with students laughing and joking all around them, young and clever scholars with their whole lives still ahead of them, Laurel felt enclosed and safe, more comfortable somehow, and able to utter words she didn’t think she’d have managed in the silence of his college lodging, words like: ‘She killed him, Gerry. The man— Henry Jenkins was his name—he died there that day on our front path.’

Gerry had been listening closely, staring at a patch of table-cloth, his face revealing nothing. Now a muscle twitched in his shadowed jaw and he gave a small nod, more to acknowledge the end of her story than to respond to its content. Laurel waited, finished her glass of wine and poured some more for each of them. ‘So,’ she said. ‘That’s it. That’s what I saw.’

At length, Gerry looked up at her. He said, ‘I guess that ex-plains it then.’

‘Explains what?’

His fingers trembled with nervous energy as he spoke. ‘I used to see this thing sometimes as a kid, out of the corner of my eye, this dark shadow that made me frightened for no reason. Hard to describe. I’d turn and there’d be nothing there, just this awful feeling that I’d glanced around too late. My heart used to race and I’d have no idea why. I told Ma once; she took me to have my eyes tested.’

‘That’s why you got glasses?’

‘No, turns out I was short-sighted. The glasses didn’t help with the shadow, but they sure made people’s faces look bet-ter.’

Laurel smiled.

Gerry didn’t. The scientist in him had been relieved, Laurel knew, to have gained an explanation for something previously inexplicable, but the part of him that was son to a much-loved parent was not so easily assuaged. ‘Good people do bad things,’ he said, and then he clawed at his shock of hair. ‘Christ. What a bloody cliche’d thing to say.’

‘It’s true though,’ said Laurel, wanting to comfort him. ‘They do. Sometimes with good reason.’

‘What reason?’ He looked at her and he was a child again, desperate for Laurel to explain it all away. She felt for him—one minute he was happily contemplating the wonders of the universe, the next his sister was telling him his mother had killed a man. ‘Who was this guy, Lol? Why did she do it?’

In the most straightforward fashion she could manage—it was best with Gerry, to appeal to his sense of logic—Laurel told him what she knew about Henry Jenkins, that he was an author, married to their mother’s friend, Vivien, during the war. She also told him what Kitty Barker had said, that there’d been a terrible falling out between Dorothy and Vivien in early 1941.

‘You think their argument is related to what happened at Greenacres in 1961,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t mention it other-wise.’

‘I do.’ Laurel remembered Kitty’s account of the night out with her mother, the way she’d behaved, the things she’d been saying. ‘I think Ma became upset by whatever happened between them and she did something to punish her friend. I think her plan—whatever it was— turned out badly, far worse than she’d expected; but by then it was too late to put things right. Ma fled London and Henry Jenkins was angered enough by whatever happened to come looking for her twenty years later.’ Laurel wondered at the way a person could outline such dreadful theories in such a frank, no-nonsense way. To an observer, Laurel knew, she would seem cool and calm and keen to get to the bottom of things; she gave away no hint of the deep distress that was gnawing away at her insides. She lowered her voice, though, to say: ‘I even wonder if she wasn’t responsible in some way for Vivien’s death.’ ‘God, Lol.’

‘Whether she’s had to live with her guilt all this time and the woman we know was formed as a result; whether she’s spent the rest of her life atoning.’

‘By being the perfect mother to us.’

‘Yes.’

‘Which was working out fine until Henry Jenkins came looking to even the score.’

‘Yes.’

Gerry had fallen silent; a faint frown creased the skin be-tween his eyes, he was thinking.

‘Well?’ Laurel pressed, leaning closer to him. ‘You’re the scientist— does the theory have legs?’

‘It’s plausible,’ said Gerry, nodding slowly. ‘Not difficult to believe remorse might act as a motivator for change. Nor that a husband might seek to avenge a slight against his wife. And if what she did to Vivien was bad enough, I can see she’d have thought her only choice was to silence Henry Jenkins once and for all.’

Laurel’s heart sank. There was a very small part of her, she realised, that had been clinging to the hope he might laugh, poke holes in her theory with the sharp point of his stupendous brain, and tell her she ought to take a good long lie down and leave off reading Shakespeare for a while.

He didn’t. The logician in him had taken the reins and he said, ‘I wonder what she could have done to Vivien that she came to regret so much.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Whatever it was, I think you’re right,’ he said slowly. ‘It must have turned out worse than she’d intended. Ma never would’ve harmed her friend on purpose.’

Laurel offered a noncommittal noise in response, remembering the way her mother had brought the knife down on Henry Jenkins’s chest without a moment’s hesitation.

‘She wouldn’t have, Lol.’

‘No, I wouldn’t have thought so either—not at first. Have you considered, though, that perhaps we’re just making excuses because she’s our mother and we know and love her?’

‘We probably are,’ Gerry agreed, ‘but that’s all right. We do know her.’

‘We think we do.’ Something Kitty Barker said had been playing on Laurel’s mind, about wartime and the way it heightened passions; the threat of invasion, the fear and the dark, night after night of broken sleep … ‘What if she was a different person back then? What if the pressure of wartime got to her? What if she changed after she married Daddy and had us?’ After she was given her second chance.

‘No one changes that much.’

From nowhere, the crocodile story leapt into Laurel’s mind. Is that why you changed to become a lady, Mummy? she’d asked, and Dorothy had answered that she’d given up her crocodile ways at the same time she’d become a mother. Was it drawing too long a bow to think the story might have been a metaphor, that even then her mother might have been confessing to some other sort of change? Or was Laurel reading far too much into a tale that was meant merely to please a child? She pictured Dorothy that afternoon, turning back towards her mirror, straightening the shoulder straps of her lovely dress, as eight- year-old Laurel asked, wide-eyed, how such a wondrous transformation had taken place. ‘Well now,’ her mother had said, ‘I can’t tell you all my secrets, can I? Not all at once. Ask me again some day. When you’re older.’

And Laurel intended to do just that. She was hot, all of a sudden, the other diners were laughing and crowding the room, and the pizza oven let out great tidal waves of warm toasty air. Laurel opened her wallet and pulled out two twenties and a five, tucking the notes beneath the bill and waving away Gerry’s attempts to contribute. ‘I told you, my shout,’ she said. She didn’t add that it was the very least she could do, having brought her dark obsession into his starlit world. ‘Come on,’ she said, drawing on her coat. ‘Let’s walk.’

Chatter from the restaurants faded behind them as they crossed King’s College quad on their way to meet the Cam. It was quiet by the river and Laurel could hear the punts rocking gently on the moon-silvered surface. A bell sounded in the distance, stark and stoic, and in a college room somewhere someone was practising the violin. The beautiful sad music plucked at Laurel’s heart and she knew, suddenly, that she’d made a mistake in coming here.

Gerry hadn’t said much since they’d left the restaurant and was walking silently beside her now, pushing his bike with one hand. His head was bowed, his gaze trained on the ground before him. She’d let the burden of the past trick her into sharing it; she’d convinced herself that Gerry ought to know, that he too was bound to the monstrous thing she’d witnessed. But he’d been little more than a baby back then, a tiny person, and now he was a sweet man, his mother’s favourite, incapable of considering that she might have once done something dreadful. Laurel was about to say as much, to apologise and somehow make light of her own obsessive interest, when Gerry said:

‘What’s next then? Have we got any leads?’

Laurel glanced at him.

He’d stopped beneath the yellow glow of a streetlamp and was prodding his glasses further up the bridge of his nose. ‘What? You weren’t going to let it go, were you? Obviously we need to find out what happened. It’s part of our story, Lol.’

Laurel couldn’t think that she’d ever loved him quite so much as that moment. ‘There is something,’ she said, her breath catching, ‘Now you mention it. I went to visit Ma this morning and she came over all hazy and asked the nurse to send in Dr Rufus when she saw him.’

‘Not so strange in a hospital, is it?’

‘Not in itself, except her doctor’s name is Cotter not Rufus.’

‘A slip of the tongue?’

‘I don’t think so. There was a certainty in the way she said it. Besides …’. The shadowy image of a young man named Jimmy, loved once by her mother, lamented now, came to Laurel’s mind. ‘It’s not the first time she’d spoken of someone she used to know. I think the past is going round and round in her head; I think she almost wants us to know the answers.’

‘Did you ask her about it?’

‘Not about Dr Rufus, but I did about a few other things. She answered openly enough, but the conversation upset her. I’ll talk to her again, of course, but if there’s another way, I’m eager to try that too.’

‘Agreed.’

‘I went to the library earlier to see if there was any way of finding out details of a doctor who was operating in Coventry and maybe London, too, in the nineteen thirties and forties. I only had his surname and had no idea what sort of doctor he was, so the librarian suggested we start by checking the data-base for the Lancet.’

‘And?’

‘I found a Dr Lionel Rufus, Gerry—I’m almost certain it’s him, he lived in Coventry at the right time and published papers in the field of personality psychology.’

‘You think she was his patient? That Ma might’ve suffered from some sort of condition back then?’

‘I’ve no idea, but I intend to find out.’

‘I’ll do it,’ said Gerry suddenly. ‘There are people I could ask.’

‘Really?’

He was nodding, and his words tumbled together excitedly as he said, ‘You go back to Suffolk. I’ll let you know as soon as I find anything.’

It was more than Laurel had dared hope for—no it wasn’t, it was exactly what she’d dared hope for. Gerry was going to help her; together they were going to find out what really happened. ‘You realise—’ she didn’t want to scare him off, but she had to warn him—‘you might find something terrible. Something that makes a lie of everything we thought we knew about her.’

Gerry smiled. ‘Aren’t you the actress? Isn’t this the bit where you’re supposed to tell me that people aren’t a science—that characters are multi-faceted, and one new variable doesn’t dis-prove the whole theorem?’

‘I’m just saying. Be prepared, little brother.’

‘I’m always prepared,’ he said, with a grin, ‘And I’m still backing our mum.’

Laurel raised her eyebrows, wishing she had his faith. But she had seen what happened that day at Greenacres, she knew what their mother was capable of. ‘Not very scientific of you,’ she said sternly, ‘Not when everything points towards the one conclusion.’

Gerry took her hand. ‘Did the hungry teenage galaxies teach you nothing, Lol?’ he said softly, and Laurel felt a surge of worry and protective love because she saw in his eyes how much he needed to believe things would all work out, and she knew in her own heart how unlikely it was. ‘Never discount the possibility of turning up an answer none of the current theories predict.’