The Secret Keeper (9 page)

‘—and the bone handle. She used to insist on it, every birth-day.’ ‘She said it was magical, that it could grant wishes.’

‘You know, I believed that for such a long time.’ Daphne rested her chin on the back of her hand with a pretty sigh. ‘I wonder whatever happened to that funny old knife.’

‘It disappeared,’ said Iris; ‘I remember that now. One year it just wasn’t there, and when I asked her she said it had been lost.’

‘No doubt it took up with the thousand pens and kirby grips that went AWOL from this house,’ said Laurel quickly. She cleared her throat. ‘I’m parched. More wine anyone?’

‘Wouldn’t it be something if we could find it …’ she heard as she crossed the hall.

‘What a splendid idea! We could take it in for her cake …’

Laurel reached the kitchen and was therefore spared excited preparations for the search party. (‘How far could it have gone?’ Daphne was enthusing.)

She flicked the switch and the room shuffled to life like a trusty old retainer who’d stuck around long past his use-by date. Empty of other people and with the fluorescent tube settling at a weak half-light, the kitchen looked sadder than Laurel remembered; the tile grouting was grey and the canister lids were dull with a film of greasy dust. She had the uncomfortable feeling that what she was seeing was the evidence of her mother’s failing eyesight. She should have organised a cleaner. Why hadn’t she thought to do that? And while she was self-castigating—why stop there?—she ought to have come to visit more often, cleaned the place herself.

The fridge, at least, was a new one; Laurel had seen to that. When the old Kelvinator finally gave up the ghost, she’d ordered a replacement over the phone from London: energy-efficient and with a fancy ice-maker that her mother never used.

Laurel found the bottle of wine and swung the door closed. A little too hard, perhaps, for a magnet fell and a piece of paper swept to the floor. It disappeared beneath the fridge and she cursed. She got down on all-fours to pat about amongst the dust bunnies. The newspaper clipping was from the Sudbury Chronicle and featured a photograph of Iris looking very head-mistressy in brown tweed and black tights at the front of her school. It was none the worse for its adventure and Laurel sought a gap to reposition it in. The task was easier said than done. The Nicolson fridge had always been a busy place, even before someone, somewhere, got the idea of selling magnets for the express purpose of clutter creation: anything deemed worthy of attention had been Sellotaped to the big white door for family notice. Photographs, accolades, cards, and certainly any mention in the media.

From nowhere the memory came, a summer’s morning in June 1961—a month before Gerry’s birthday party: the seven of them sitting around the breakfast table spooning strawberry jam onto buttery toast as Daddy cut the article from the local newspaper; the photograph of Dorothy, smiling as she held aloft her prize-winning runner bean; Daddy taping it to the fridge afterwards as the rest of them cleaned up.

‘Are you all right?’

Laurel spun around to see Rose standing in the door frame.

‘Fine. Why?’

‘You’ve been gone a while.’ She wrinkled her nose, regarding Laurel carefully. ‘And, I must say, you’re looking a little peaky.’

‘That’s just the light in here,’ said Laurel. ‘It gives one the most charming consumptive glow.’ She busied herself with the corkscrew, turning her back so Rose couldn’t read her expression. ‘I trust plans for the Great Knife Hunt are coming along?’

‘Oh, yes. Really when the two of them get together …’

‘If we could only harness the power and use it for good.’

‘Quite.’

There was a gust of steam as Rose opened the oven to check on the raspberry cobbler, their mother’s trademark pudding. The sugary smell of warming fruit filled the air and Laurel closed her eyes.

It had taken her months to summon the courage to ask about the incident. Such was her parents’ fierce determination to look onwards and upwards, to deny the whole event, that she might never have done so had she not begun dreaming of the man. But she had, each night the same. The man at the side of the house, calling her mother’s name— ‘Looks good,’ said Rose, sliding out the oven rack. ‘Not as good as hers perhaps, but we mustn’t expect miracles.’

Laurel had found her mother in the kitchen, on this very spot, a few days before she left for London. She’d asked her straight. ‘How did that man know your name, Ma?’ Her stomach had churned as the words left her lips, her head had lightened, and a part of her, she realised as she waited, prayed that her mother would say she was mistaken. That she’d misheard and the man had said no such thing.

Dorothy hadn’t answered right away. She’d gone to the fridge instead, opened the door and started riffling about inside. Laurel had watched her back for what seemed like forever, and she’d almost given up hope when her mother finally began to speak. ‘The newspaper,’ she said. ‘The police say he must’ve read the article in the paper. There was a copy in his briefcase. That’s how he knew where to come.’

It had made perfect sense.

That is, Laurel had wanted it to make sense and therefore it had. The man had read the newspaper, seen her mother’s picture and then set out to find her. And if a small voice in the back of Laurel’s mind whispered, why?, she waved that nagging drone aside. He was a madman, who could say why for certain? And what did it matter anyway? It was over. So long as Laurel didn’t pick too closely at its delicate threads, the tapestry hung together. The picture remained intact.

At least it had done until now. Incredible, really, that after fifty years all it took was the return of an old photograph and the utterance of a woman’s name for the fabric of Laurel’s fiction to begin unravelling.

The oven rack slid back with a clang and, ‘Five more minutes,’ said Rose.

Laurel glugged wine into her glass and strove for nonchalance: ‘Rosie?’

‘Mm?’

‘That photograph today, the one at the hospital. The woman who gave the book to Ma—’

‘Vivien.’

‘Yes.’ Laurel shuddered lightly as she set down the bottle. The name did something strange to her. ‘Did Ma ever mention her to you?’

‘A little,’ said Rose, ‘After I found the photo. They were friends.’ Laurel remembered the date on the photograph, 1941. ‘During the war.’

Rose nodded, folding the tea towel into a neat rectangle. ‘She didn’t say much, though she did say Vivien was Australian.’

‘Australian?’

‘She came here as a child, I’m not sure why exactly.’

‘How did they meet?’

‘She didn’t say.’

‘Why haven’t we met her?’

‘No idea.’

‘Funny, isn’t it, that she was never mentioned?’ Laurel took a sip of wine. ‘I wonder why not.’

The oven timer rang. ‘Perhaps they had a bust up. Drifted apart. I don’t know.’ Rose drew on the mitts. ‘Why are you so interested anyway?’

‘I’m not. Not really.’

‘Let’s eat then,’ said Rose, cupping the cobbler dish. ‘This looks quite perf—’

‘She died,’ said Laurel with sudden conviction. ‘Vivien died.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I mean—’ Laurel swallowed and backtracked swiftly—‘perhaps she died. There was a war on. It’s possible, don’t you think?’

‘Anything’s possible.’ Rose probed the crust with a fork. ‘Take, for example, this really rather respectable glaze. Ready to brave the others?’ ‘Actually—’ the need to get upstairs, to check her flash of memory, was immediate and searing—‘you were right before. I am feeling poorly.’

‘You don’t want pudding?’

Laurel shook her head, halfway to the door. ‘Early night for me, I’m afraid. Terrible to be ill tomorrow.’

‘Can I get you something else—paracetamol, a cup of tea?’

‘No,’ said Laurel, ‘no thanks. Except, Rose—’

‘Yes?’

‘The play.’

‘Which play?’

‘Peter Pan—the book the photo came from. Is it handy?’

‘You are a funny thing,’ said Rose with a lopsided smile. ‘I’ll have to dig it out for you.’ She bobbed her head at the cobbler. ‘Later all right?’ ‘Of course, no hurry, I’ll just be resting. Enjoy your pudding. And Rosie?’

‘Yes?’

‘Sorry to send you back into the fray alone.’

It was the mention of Australia that had done it. As Rose re-counted what she’d learned from their mother, a light bulb had fired in Laurel’s mind and she’d known why Vivien was important. She remembered, too, where she’d first come across the name, all those years before.

While her sisters ate dessert and hunted for a knife they’d never find, Laurel braved the attic in search of her trunk. There was one for each of them; Dorothy had been strict in that regard. It was because of the war, Daddy had once confided in them—everything she loved had been lost when that bomb fell on her family home in Coventry and turned her past to rubble. She’d been determined her children would never suffer the same fate. She might not be able to spare them every heart-ache, but she could damn well make sure they knew where to find their class photo when they wanted it. Their mother’s passion for things, for possessions—objects that could be held in one’s hands and invested with deeper meaning—had verged on obsessive, her enthusiasm for collecting so great that it was hard not to fall into line. Everything was kept; nothing thrown away; traditions adhered to religiously. Case in point, the knife.

Laurel’s trunk was tucked beside the broken radiator Daddy had never got around to fixing. She knew it was hers before she read her name stencilled on the top. The tan leather straps and broken buckle were a dead giveaway. Her heart fluttered when she saw it, anticipating the thing she knew she’d find inside. Funny the way an object she hadn’t thought of in decades could arrive so precisely in her mind. She knew exactly what she was looking for, what it would feel like in her hand, the emotions its uncovering would cause to surface. A faint imprint of herself the last time she’d done so knelt beside her as she undid the straps.

The trunk smelled like dust and damp and an old cologne with a name she’d forgotten but a fragrance that turned her six-teen inside. It was full of paper: diaries, photographs, letters, school reports, a couple of sewing patterns for capri pants, but Laurel didn’t pause to look them over. She pulled out one pile after another, scanning quickly.

Midway down on the far left-hand side, she found what she’d come for. A thin book, totally unprepossessing, and yet, for Laurel, reverberating with memories.

She’d been offered the role of Meg in The Birthday Party some years back; it had been a chance to perform at the Lyttelton Theatre, but Laurel had said no. It was the only time she could think of that she’d put her personal life ahead of her career. She’d blamed it on her film schedule, which wasn’t entirely improbable but wasn’t the truth either. Obfuscation had been necessary. She couldn’t have done it. The play was inextricably linked with the summer of 1961; she’d read it over and over that year, ever since the boy—she couldn’t remember his name; how ridiculous, she’d been mad about him—had given it to her. She’d memorised its lines, imbuing the scenes with all her pent-up anger and frustration. And then the man had walked up their driveway and the whole thing had become so muddled in her mind and heart that to contemplate the play in any detail made her physically ill.

Her skin was clammy even now, her pulse quickening. She was glad it wasn’t the play she needed, but what she’d tucked inside. They were still there, she could tell by the rough edges of paper jutting from between the pages. Two newspaper articles: the first a rather vague report from the local rag about a man’s death during a Suffolk summer; the second an obituary from The Times, torn surreptitiously from the paper her friend’s father brought home with him from London each day. ‘Look at this,’ he’d said one evening when Laurel was visiting Shirley ‘A piece about that fellow, the one who died out near your place, Laurel.’ It was a lengthy article, for it turned out the man wasn’t quite the usual suspect; there’d been moments, long before he’d turned up on the Greenacres doorstep, in which he’d distinguished himself and even been lauded. There were no surviving children, but there’d once been a wife.

The single light bulb swaying gently overhead wasn’t bright enough to read by, so Laurel closed the trunk and took the book downstairs.

She’d been assigned their girlhood room to sleep in—another given in the complex scale of sibling seniority—and the bed was made up with fresh sheets. Someone, Rose, she guessed, had brought her suitcase up already, but Laurel didn’t unpack. She opened the windows wide and sat on the ledge.