Nine

London, 2011

IT WAS GREY OUT, and gloomy, and Laurel was glad she’d brought her heavier coat. The documentary producers had offered to send a car, but she’d said no, the hotel wasn’t far and she preferred to walk. She did, too. She enjoyed walking, always had, and it came these days with the added bonus that it kept the doctors happy. Today, though, she was particularly pleased to go by foot; with any luck the fresh air would help to clear her head. She felt unusually nervous about the afternoon’s interview. Just thinking about the glaring lights, the unblinking eye of the camera, the amiable young journalist’s questions, drove Laurel’s fingers into her bag for a cigarette. So much for keeping the doctors happy.

She stopped on the corner of Kensington Church Street to strike a match, glancing at her watch as she shook the flame away. They’d finished the film’s rehearsal ahead of schedule and the interview wasn’t until three. She drew thoughtfully on her cigarette; if she hurried, there was still time to make a little detour along the way. Laurel glanced towards Notting Hill. It wasn’t far, it wouldn’t take long; nonetheless she hesitated. She sensed herself at a crossroads of sorts, a raft of shadowy implications lurking behind the seemingly simple decision. But no, she was overthinking it—of course she should go and take a look. It would be silly not to, having found herself so near. Hugging her handbag close, she started briskly away from the High Street. (‘Clip along, loves,’ their mother used to say, ‘don’t dilly-dally.’ Just because the words amused her.)

Laurel had caught herself staring at her mother’s face during the birthday party, as if she might find answers to the riddle written there. (How did you know Henry Jenkins, Ma? I take it you weren’t good friends.) They’d held the party on Thursday morning in the hospital garden—the weather had been fine and, as Iris pointed out, after the sorry excuse for a summer they’d had it would’ve been a crime not to take advantage of the sunshine.

Such a wonderful face, their mother’s. As a younger woman she’d been beautiful, far more beautiful than Laurel, more so than any of her daughters with the possible exception of Daphne. She certainly wouldn’t have had directors pushing her to-wards character roles. But one thing you could bank on, beauty—the sort that came with youth— didn’t last, and their mother had grown old. Her skin had sagged, spots had appeared, along with mysterious puckers and discolorations; her bones had seemed to subside as the rest of her shrank and her hair frayed to nothing. But still that face remained, every aspect bright with mischief, even now. Her eyes, though tired, had the glint of one who never stopped expecting to be amused, and her mouth turned up at the corners as if she’d just remembered a joke. It was the sort of face that drew strangers; that enchanted them and made them want to know her better. The way she had of making you feel with a slight twitch of the jaw that she too had suffered as you did, that everything would be better now simply for having come within her orbit: that was her real beauty—her presence, her joy, her magnetism. That, and her splendid appetite for make-believe.

‘My nose is far too big for my face,’ she’d said once when Laurel was small and watching her dress for something or other. ‘My God-given talents were wasted. I’d have made a fine parfumier.’ She’d turned from the mirror then and given the sort of playful smile that always made Laurel’s heart beat a little faster in anticipation. ‘Can you keep a secret?’

Laurel, sitting on the end of her parents’ bed, had nodded and her mother had leaned forward so that the tip of her nose touched Laurel’s own little button and then she’d whispered, ‘That’s because I used to be a crocodile. A long time ago, be-fore I became a mummy.’

‘Did you really?’ Laurel said with a gasp.

‘Yes, but it became rather tiresome. All that snapping and swimming. And tails can be very heavy, you know, especially when they’re wet.’

‘Is that why you changed to become a lady?’

‘No, not at all. Heavy tails aren’t pleasant, but they’re no reason to shirk one’s duties. One day I was lying on the banks of a river—’

‘In Africa?’

‘Of course. You didn’t think we had crocodiles here in England, did you?’

Laurel shook her head.

‘There I was, sunning myself, when a little girl wandered by with her mummy. They were holding hands and I realised that I should very much like to do the same thing. So I did. I became a person. And then I had you. It all worked out rather well, I have to say, except for this nose.’

‘But how?’ Laurel blinked wondrously. ‘How did you turn into a person?’

‘Well, now.’ Dorothy returned to the mirror and straightened her shoulder straps. ‘I can’t tell you all my secrets, can I? Not all at once. Ask me again some day. When you’re older.’

Ma always did have an imagination. ‘Well, she had to, hadn’t she,’ said Iris with a snort as she drove them home from the birthday party, ‘all of us to put up with. A lesser woman would’ve gone stark raving mad.’ Which, Laurel had to concede, was true. She knew she would have. Five children squawking and squabbling at her heels, a farmhouse that dripped somewhere else each time it rained, birds nesting in the chimneys. It was like some kind of nightmare.

Except that it hadn’t been. It had been perfect. The sort of home life that was written about by sentimental novelists in the type of books branded nostalgic by critics. (Until that whole business with the knife. That’s more like it, the critics would’ve puffed.) Laurel could vaguely remember rolling her eyes from the depths of her teenage glooms, and wondering how anyone could be content with such a dull domestic lot. The word bucolic hadn’t been invented then, not for Laurel, who was far too busy in 1958 with Kingsley Amis to bother with The Darling Buds of May. But she hadn’t wanted her parents to change. Youth was an arrogant place, and to believe simply that they were less adventurous than she was had suited Laurel just fine. Not for a moment had she considered that there might be anything beyond Ma’s appearance as a happy wife and mother; that she might have been young once herself, and determined not to turn into her mother; that she might even be hiding from something in her past.

Now, though, the past was everywhere. It had seized Laurel in the hospital when she saw the photo of Vivien, and it hadn’t let go since. It waited for her around every corner; it whispered in her ear by dead of night. It was cumulative, gathering weight each day, bringing with it bad dreams and knives that glistened, and little boys with tin rockets and the promise of going back, of fixing things. She couldn’t concentrate properly on anything else, not the film that was due to start production next week, nor the documentary interview series she was recording. Nothing seemed to matter except learning the truth about her mother’s secret past.

And there was a secret past. If Laurel hadn’t been sure enough already, Ma had all but confirmed it. At her ninetieth birthday party, as her three great-granddaughters wove neck-laces from daisies, and her grandson tied a hanky round his own son’s bleeding knee, and her daughters made sure every-one had cake and tea enough, and someone shouted, ‘Speech! Speech!’, Dorothy Nicolson had smiled beatifically The late-flowering roses blushed on the bushes behind her and she clasped her hands together, idly rolling the rings that fell now loosely around her knuckles. And then she sighed. ‘I’m so fortunate,’ she said, in a slow rickety voice. ‘Look at all of you, look at my children. I’m so thankful, so lucky to have …’ Her old lips had trembled then, and her eyelids fluttered shut, and the others had rushed around her with kisses and cries of ‘Dearest, darling Mummy!’ so they’d missed it when she said, ‘a second chance.’

But Laurel had heard it. And she’d stared harder at Ma’s lovely, tired, familiar secretive face. Hunting it for answers. Answers she knew were there to be found. Because people who’d led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances.

Laurel turned into Campden Grove and met a large drift of leaves. The street-sweeper hadn’t been around yet and she was glad. She crunched through the thickest clump and time looped back upon itself so she was both here and now, and eight years old again playing in the woods behind Greenacres. ‘Fill the bag right to the top, girls. We want our flames to reach the moon.’ That was Ma and it was Bonfire Night. Laurel and Rose in Wellington boots and scarves, Iris a bundled baby blinking from the pushchair. Gerry, who would come to love the woods best of all was but a whisper, a distant firefly in the rosy sky. Daphne, also unborn, was making her presence felt, swimming and swirling and leaping in their mother’s belly: I’m here! I’m here! I’m here! (‘That happened when you were dead,’ they used to tell her when conversation turned to something from before she was born. The suggestion of death hadn’t bothered her, but the idea that the whole noisy show had been rolling along without her scorched.)

Halfway along the street, just past Gordon Place, Laurel stopped. There it was, number 25. Wedged between 24 and 26, just as it should be. The house itself was much like the others, white Victorian with black iron railings on the first-floor balcony and a dormer window in the shallow slate roof. A baby’s pram, the sort that looked as if it might well double as a lunar module, was sitting on the tessellated-tile front path, and a garland of Halloween pumpkin heads, drawn by a child, had been strung across the ground-floor window. There was no blue plaque on the front, only the street number. Evidently no one had seen fit to suggest to English Heritage that Henry Ronald Jenkins’s tenure at 25 Campden Grove should be marked for posterity. Laurel wondered if the current residents knew that their house had once belonged to a famous writer. Probably not, and why should they? Lots of people in London lived in a house that could lay claim to having once been lived in by a Somebody, and Henry Jenkins’s fame had been fleeting.

Laurel had found him on the Internet, though. Opposite problem there—one couldn’t disentangle oneself from that net for all the love and money in England. Henry Jenkins was one of millions of ghosts who lived inside it, milling wraithlike until the right combination of letters was entered and they were briefly resurrected. At Greenacres, Laurel had made a tentative attempt to surf the Web on her new phone, but just as she’d worked out where she was supposed to enter the search terms, the battery had died. Borrowing Iris’s laptop for such clandestine purpose was out of the question, so she’d spent her final hours in Suffolk in silent excruciation, helping Rose scrub mould from the bathroom grout.

When Neil came as arranged on Friday, they’d made pleas-ant small talk about the traffic, the coming theatre season, the likelihood of the road works being finished in time for the Olympics, all the way back down the M11. Safely arrived in London, Laurel had forced herself to stand in the dusk with her suitcase, waving goodbye until the car disappeared from sight, and then she’d gone calmly up the stairs, unlocked the flat without a hint of key fumbling, and let herself in. She’d closed the door quietly behind her and then, only then, in the safety of her very own sitting room, had she let the suitcase and the facade drop. Without even pausing to switch on the lights, she’d fired up her laptop and typed his name into Google. In the fraction of time it took for results to appear, Laurel became a nail-biter again.

The Henry Jenkins Wikipedia page wasn’t detailed, but it provided a bibliography and a brief biography (born London, 1901, married Oxford, 1938, lived at 25 Campden Grove, Lon-don, died Suffolk, 1961); his novels were listed on a few second-hand bookstore sites (Laurel ordered two); and he was mentioned on pages as varied as the ‘Nordstrom School Alumni List’ and ‘Stranger than Fiction: Mysterious Literary Deaths’. Laurel was able to glean some information about his writing—fiction that was semi-autobiographical, a focus on bleak settings and working-class anti-heroes until his breakthrough love story in 1939, work for the Ministry of Information during the war; but there was far more material about his unmasking as the Suffolk Summer Picnic Stalker. She pored over it, page by page, teetering on the rim of panic as she waited for a familiar name or address to leap out and bite her.

It didn’t happen. No mention anywhere of Dorothy Nicolson, mother of Oscar-winning actress and Nation’s (second) Favourite Face, Laurel Nicolson; no more specific geographical reference than ‘a meadow outside Lavenham, Suffolk’; no salacious gossip as to birthday knives or crying babies or family parties by the stream. Of course. Of course there wasn’t. The gentlemanly deceit of 1961 had been shored up nicely by the online history-makers: Henry Jenkins was an author who’d enjoyed success preceding the Second World War but found his star on the wane afterwards. He lost money, influence, friends, and eventually his sense of decency; what he managed to find, in turn, was infamy, and even that had now largely faded. Laurel read the same sorry story over and over again, and each time the pencil-drawn picture became more permanent. She exhaled. She gave her chewed thumbnail a rest. She almost started to believe the fiction herself.

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.

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