The Secret Keeper Read online

  But then she went one click too far. A seemingly innocuous link to a website titled: ‘The Imaginarium of Rupert Holdstock’. The photograph appeared onscreen like a face at the window: Henry Jenkins, unmistakable, though younger than when she’d watched him coming up the driveway. Laurel’s skin flushed hot and cold. Neither of the newspaper articles she’d found when it happened had included a photograph and this was the first time she’d seen his face since that afternoon from the tree house.

  She couldn’t help it; she ran an image search. Within 0.27 seconds Google had assembled a screen tiled with identical photographs of marginally different proportions. Seeing them en masse made him look macabre. (Or was it her own associations doing that? The creak of the gate hinge; Barnaby’s growl; the white sheet turned russet red). Row upon row of black-and-white portraits: formal attire, dark moustache, heavy brows framing an alarmingly direct gaze. ‘Hello, Dorothy,’ the multiple sets of thin lips seemed to move on the screen. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  Laurel slammed the laptop lid shut and cast the room into darkness.

  She’d refused to look at Henry Jenkins any longer, but she’d thought about him, and she’d thought about this house, just around the corner from her own, and when the first parcel arrived by overnight mail and she sat up reading it from cover to cover, she’d thought about her mother, too. The Sometime Maid was the eighth novel by Henry Jenkins, published in 1940 and detailing the love affair between a respected author and his wife’s maid-companion. The girl—Sally, she was called—was something of a minx, and the male protagonist a tortured fellow whose wife was beautiful but cold. It wasn’t a bad read, once one made allowance for the stuffy prose; the characters were richly drawn and the narrator’s dilemma was timeless, particularly as Sally and the wife became friends. The ending saw the narrator on the verge of breaking off his affair, but agonising over what the repercussions might be. Poor girl had become hopelessly obsessed with him, you see, and who could blame her? As Henry Jenkins wrote himself, that is, the protagonist, he was quite a catch.

  Laurel looked again at the attic window of 25 Campden Grove. Henry Jenkins was known to have written largely from life; Ma had worked for a time as a maid (that’s how she came to Grandma Nicol- son’s boarding house); Ma and Vivien had been close, Ma and Henry Jenkins, in the end, decidedly not. Was it drawing too long a bow to think that Sally’s story might be her mother’s? That Dorothy had at one time lived inside that little room up there beneath the slate, that she’d fallen in love with her employer and that she’d been let down? Would it ex-plain what Laurel had witnessed at Greenacres, a scorned woman’s fury and all that?

  Perhaps.

  As Laurel wondered how she was going to find out whether a young woman named Dorothy had worked for Henry Jenkins, the front door of number 25 which was red; there was a lot to like about a person with a red front door—opened, and a noisy tangle of plump stockinged legs and knitted pom-pom beanies spilled out onto the pavement. Householders generally didn’t appreciate strangers scoping out their homes, so she ducked her head and riffled through her bag, trying to look like a perfectly normal woman on an errand and not one who’d been chasing ghosts all afternoon. Like any nosy parker worth her salt, she still managed to keep an eye on the action, watching as a woman emerged, with a baby in a pram, three small people at her legs, and—good grief—another childish voice singing at her from somewhere back inside the house.

  The woman was crab-stepping the pram towards the top of the stairs and Laurel hesitated. She was about to offer help when the fifth child, a boy, who was taller than the others but still no more than five or six years old, emerged from the house and took up the front. Together he and his mother carried the pram downstairs. The family set off towards Kensington Church Street, little girls skipping ahead, but the boy lingered behind. Laurel watched him. She liked the way his lips moved slightly as if he might be singing to himself, and the way he was using his hands, flattening them out and then tilting his head to watch them undulate towards one another like floating leaves. He was utterly unaware of his surroundings and his focus made him bewitching. He reminded her of Gerry as a boy Darling Gerry. He’d never been ordinary, their brother. He hadn’t spoken a word for the first six years of his life and people who didn’t know him had often presumed he was backward. (People who did know the noisy Nicolson girls saw his silence as nothing other than inevitable.) Those strangers had been wrong, too. Gerry wasn’t backward, he was smart: fiercely smart. Science smart. He collected facts and proofs, truth and theorems, and answers to questions Laurel hadn’t even thought to ask about time and space and the matter in between. When he did finally decide to communicate in words, out loud, it was to ask whether any of them had an opinion as to how engineers planned to help keep the Leaning Tower of Pisa from toppling over (it had been on the news some nights before).

  ‘Julian!’

  Laurel’s memory dissolved and she looked up to see the little boy’s mother calling to him, as if from another planet. ‘Ju-ju-bean.’

  The boy guided his left hand into safe landing before looking up.

  His eyes met Laurel’s and they widened. Surprise at first, but then something else. Recognition, she knew; it happened a lot, if not always accompanied by realisation. (‘Do I know you? Have we met? Do you work at the bank?’)

  She nodded and started to leave, until, ‘You’re Daddy’s lady,’ the boy dead-panned.

  ‘Ju-li-an.’

  Laurel turned back to face the odd little man. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You’re Daddy’s lady.’

  But before she could ask him what he meant, the lad was gone, tripping over his feet on his way to meet his mother, both hands sailing the invisible currents of Campden Grove.

  Ten

  LAUREL HAILED A TAXI on Kensington High Street. ‘Where to, love?’ said the driver as she scrambled into the back and out of the sudden rain.

  ‘Soho—Charlotte Street Hotel, thank you kindly.’

  A pause ensued, accompanied by scrutiny in the rear-view mirror, and then, as the car lurched into traffic, ‘You look familiar. What do you do then?’

  You’re Daddy’s lady—now what on earth did that mean? ‘I work in a bank.’

  As the driver launched an invective against bankers and the global credit crunch, Laurel pretended great focus on the screen of her mobile phone. She scrolled randomly through the names in her address book, stopping when she reached Gerry’s.

  He’d arrived late to Ma’s party, scratching his head and trying to remember where he’d left her present. No one expected anything different from Gerry and they were all as thrilled as ever to see him. Fifty-two now, but somehow still an adorable scatty boy wearing ill- fitting trousers and the brown slub jumper Rose had knitted him thirty Christmases before. A great fuss was made, the other sisters falling over one another as they fetched him tea and cake. And even Ma had woken from her doze, her tired old face briefly transformed by the dazzling smile of pure joy she’d been saving for her only son.

  Of all her children, she missed him specially. Laurel knew this because the kinder nurse had told her so. She’d stopped Laurel in the hallway when they were setting up for the party and said, ‘I was hoping to catch you.’

  Laurel, always quick to raise her guard: ‘What is it?’

  ‘No need to panic, nothing awful. It’s just your mum’s been asking after someone. A fellow, I think. Jimmy? Would that be it? She wanted to know where he was, why he wasn’t visiting.’

  Laurel had frowned and shaken her head and told the nurse the truth. She couldn’t think that Ma knew any Jimmys. She hadn’t added that she was the wrong person to ask, that there were far more dutiful amongst the sisters. (Though not Daphne. Thank God for Daphne. In a family of daughters it was a happy thing not to be the worst.)

  ‘Not to worry.’ The nurse had smiled reassurance. ‘She’s been going in and out a bit lately. It’s not unusual for them to get confused, not at the end.’


  Laurel had flinched at the general ‘them’, the ghastly blunt-ness of ‘end’, but Iris had appeared then with a faulty kettle and a frown for England, and so she’d let the matter go. It was only later, when she was sneaking a cigarette in the hospital portico, that Laurel had realised the mix-up, that of course Gerry was the name Ma was saying, and not Jimmy at all.

  The driver swerved off the Brompton Road and Laurel clutched her seat. ‘Building site,’ he explained, skirting round the back of Harvey Nichols. ‘Luxury apartments. Twelve months it’s been, and still that bloody crane.’

  ‘Irritating.’

  ‘Sold most of ’em already, y’know. Four million quid a pop.’ He whistled through his teeth. ‘Four million quid—I’d buy m’self an island for that.’

  Laurel smiled with what she hoped was not encouragement—she loathed being drawn into conversation about other people’s money— and held her phone closer to her face.

  She knew why she had Gerry on her mind; why she was spotting his likeness in the faces of strange little boys. They’d been close once, the pair of them, but things had changed when he was seventeen. He’d come to stay with Laurel in Lon-don on his way up to Cambridge (a full scholarship, as Laurel told everyone she knew, sometimes those she didn’t) and they’d had fun—they always did. A daytime session of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and then dinner from the curry house down the road. Afterwards, riding a delectable tikka masala high, the two of them had climbed out through the bathroom window, dragged pillows and a blanket after them, and shared a joint on Laurel’s roof.

  The night was unusually clear—stars, more stars than usual, sure- ly?—and down on the street, the distant easy pleasantness of other people’s revelry. Smoking made Gerry unusually garrulous, which was fine with Laurel because it made her wondrous. He’d been trying to explain the origins of everything, pointing to star clusters and galaxies and making explosion gestures with his delicate febrile hands, and Laurel had been narrowing her eyes and making the stars blur and bend, letting his words merge together like running water. She’d been lost in a current of nebulas and penumbras and supernovas and hadn’t realised his monologue was ended until she heard him say, ‘Lol’ in that pointed way people have when they’ve already said the word more than once.

  ‘Ehh?’ Closing one eye and then the other so the stars jumped across the sky.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you something.’

  ‘Ehh?’

  ‘God—.’ He laughed. ‘I’ve said this in my head so many times and now I can’t get the bloody words out.’ He pushed his fingers through his hair, frustrated, and made an airy animal noise. ‘Humph. OK, here goes: I’ve been meaning to ask you if something happened, Lol, back when we were kids? Something …’ He dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘Something violent?’

  She’d known then. Some sixth sense had made her pulse start rippling beneath her skin and she’d been hot all over. He remembered. They’d always presumed he was far too young, but he remembered.

  ‘Violent?’ She sat up but didn’t turn to face him. She didn’t think that she could look into his eyes and lie. ‘You mean aside from Iris and Daphne in a bid for the bath-room?’

  He didn’t laugh. ‘I know it’s stupid, only sometimes I get this feeling.’

  ‘You get a feeling?’

  ‘Lol—’

  ‘Because if it’s spooky feelings you want to talk about, it really should be Rose—’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘I could put a call through to the ashram if you like—’

  He tossed a cushion at her. ‘I’m bloody serious, Lol. It’s doing my head in. I’m asking you because I know you’ll tell me the truth.’

  He smiled a little then because seriousness wasn’t some-thing they did often or well, and Laurel thought for the millionth time how deeply she loved him. She knew for a fact that she couldn’t have loved her own child more.

  ‘It’s like I’m remembering something, only I can’t remember what it is. As if the event has gone but the feelings, the ugliness and the fear, shadows of them anyway, are still there. Do you know what I mean?’ Laurel nodded. She knew exactly what he meant.

  ‘Well?’ He lifted one shoulder uncertainly and then dropped it again, almost in defeat, although she hadn’t disappointed him yet. ‘Is there anything? Anything at all?’

  What could she have said? The truth? Hardly. There were certain things one didn’t tell one’s baby brother no matter how tempting. Not on the eve of his going up to university, not on the roof of a four-storey building. Not even when it was suddenly the thing she wanted more than anything in the world to share with him. ‘Nothing I can think of, G.’

  He didn’t ask again and he made no sign that he didn’t believe her. After a time he went back to explaining stars and black holes and the beginning of everything, and Laurel’s chest ached with love and something like regret. She made sure not to look too closely because there was something about his eyes, right then, that made her see the bonny little baby who’d cried when Ma put him down on the gravel beneath the wisteria, and she didn’t think she could bear that.

  The next day, Gerry left for Cambridge and there he remained, an award-winning, game-changing, universe-expanding honours student. They’d seen each other some-times, and written when they could— hastily scribbled accounts of backstage antics (her) and increasingly cryptic notes sketched on the back of cafeteria napkins (him)—but in some ungraspable way it was never the same again. A door she hadn’t realised was open had closed. Laurel wasn’t sure if it was just her, or whether he, too, discerned that a fault line had fractured silently across the surface of their friendship that night on the roof. She’d regretted it, the decision not to tell him, but not until much later. She’d thought she was doing the right thing, protecting him, but now she wasn’t so sure. ‘Right then, love. Charlotte Street Hotel. That’ll be twelve quid.’ ‘Thank you.’ Laurel put her phone into her handbag and gave the driver a ten and a five-pound note. It occurred to her now that Gerry might be the one person aside from their mother whom she might talk to about it; he’d been there, too, that day; they were tied, the two of them, to each other and to what they’d witnessed.

  Laurel opened the door, almost hitting her agent, Claire, who was hovering on the pavement with an umbrella. ‘Lord, Claire, you scared me,’ she said as the taxi pulled away.

  ‘All part of the service. How are you? All right?’

  ‘Fine.’

  They kissed cheeks and hurried into the dry and the warm of the hotel. ‘The crew’s still setting up,’ said Claire, shaking out the umbrella. ‘Lights and all that jazz. Would you like something in the restaurant while we wait? Tea or coffee?’

  ‘A stiff gin?’

  Claire raised a thin brow. ‘You’re not going to need it. You’ve done this a hundred times before and I’m going to sit in. If the journalist even looks like deviating from the brief I’ll be all over him like a rash.’ ‘A pleasant thought indeed.’

  ‘I’d make a rather good rash.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  They’d just been served a pot of tea when a young girl with a ponytail and a shirt that said ‘Whatever’ approached the table and announced that the crew was ready when they were. Claire waved over a waitress who said she’d bring the tea things after them and they took the lift up to the room.

  ‘OK?’ said Claire as the doors closed on reception.

  ‘OK,’ Laurel agreed, and she tried very hard to believe it.

  The documentary team had booked the same room as be-fore: it wasn’t ideal to film a single conversation over the course of a week and there was the small matter of continuity to think of (in whose service, Laurel had brought with her, as instructed, the blouse she’d been wearing last time).

  The producer met them at the door and the wardrobe man-ager directed Laurel to the ensuite, where an iron had been set up. The knot in her stomach tightened and perhaps it showed on her face, for Claire whispered, ‘Come with yo
u, shall I?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ Laurel whispered back, forcing aside all thought of Ma and Gerry and the dark secrets of the past. ‘I should think I’m perfectly capable of dressing myself.’

  The interviewer—‘Call me, Mitch’—beamed when he saw her and gestured to the armchair by a vintage seamstress’s mannequin. ‘I’m so glad we could do this again,’ he said, enclosing her hand inside both of his and pumping it keenly. ‘We’re all really excited by how it’s coming together. I watched some of last week’s footage—it’s very good. Your episode’s going to be one of the highlights in the series.’

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it.’

  ‘We don’t need a lot today, there are just a few bits and pieces I’d like to cover, if that’s OK with you? Just so we don’t have any black holes when we cut the story together.’

  ‘Of course.’ There was nothing she’d rather do than explore her black spots, except perhaps root canal surgery.

  Minutes later, made up and miked up. Laurel arranged her-self in the armchair and waited. Finally, the lights came on and an assistant compared the set-up with polaroids from the previous week; silence was called and someone held a clapperboard in front of Laurel’s face. Snap went the crocodile.

  Mitch leaned forward in his seat.

  ‘And we’re rolling,’ said the cameraman.