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 you, 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.

‘Ms Nicolson,’ he began, ‘we’ve spoken a lot about the highs and lows of your theatrical career, but what our viewers want to know is how their heroes were made. Can you tell me about your childhood?’ The script was straightforward enough; Laurel had written it herself. Once upon a time, in a farmhouse in the country, there lived a girl with a perfect family, lots of sisters, a baby brother, and a mother and father who loved each other almost as much as they loved their children. The girl’s childhood was smooth and even, filled with long sunlit spaces, and makeshift play, and when the nineteen-fifties yawned to an end and the sixties began to swing, she took herself towards the bright lights of London and arrived on the wave of a cultural revolution. She’d been smiled upon by luck (gratitude played well in interviews), she’d refused to give up (only the glib ascribe all good fortune to chance), she hadn’t been out of work since finishing drama school.

‘Your childhood sounds idyllic.’

‘I suppose it was.’

‘Perfect even.’

‘No one’s family is perfect.’ Laurel’s mouth felt dry.

‘Do you think your childhood formed you as an actress?’

‘I expect so. We are all shaped by that which came before. Isn’t that what they say? They, who seem to know everything.’

Mitch smiled and scribbled something in the notebook on his knee. His pen scratched across the surface of the paper and as it did, Laurel experienced a jolt of memory. She was sixteen, and sitting in the Greenacres sitting room while a policeman wrote down every word she said—

‘You were one of five siblings; was there a battle for attention? Did it force you to develop ways of being noticed?’

Laurel needed some water. She looked about for Claire, who seemed to have disappeared. ‘Not at all. Having so many sisters and a baby brother taught me how to disappear into the background.’ So adeptly, she could slip away from a family picnic in the middle of a game of hide and seek.

‘As an actor you could hardly be accused of disappearing into the background.’

‘But acting isn’t about being noticed or showing off, it’s about observation.’ A man had said that to her once at the stage door. She’d been leaving after a theatre session, buzzing still with the high of performance, and he’d stopped her to say how much he’d enjoyed it. ‘You’ve a great talent for observation,’ he’d said, ‘Ears, eyes and heart, all at once.’ The words had been familiar, a quote from some play or other, but Laurel couldn’t remember which one.

Mitch cocked his head. ‘Are you a good observer?’

Such a strange thing to remember now, that man at the stage door. The quote she couldn’t place, so familiar, so elusive. It had driven her mad for a time. It was doing a good job now. Her thoughts were jumbled. She was thirsty. There was Claire, watching from the shadows by the door.

‘Ms Nicolson?’

‘Yes?’

‘Are you a good observer?’

‘Oh yes. Yes, indeed.’ Hidden in a tree house, quiet as can be. Laurel’s heart was racing. The warmth of the room all those people staring at her, the lights—

‘You’ve said before, Ms Nicolson, that your mother was a strong woman. She lived through the war, she lost her family in the Blitz, she started again. Did you inherit her strength, do you think? Is that what’s enabled you to survive, indeed to thrive, in a notoriously tough business?’

The next line was easy to deliver, Laurel had done so many times before. Now, though, the words wouldn’t come. She sat like a stunned mullet as they dried to sawdust in her mouth. Her thoughts were swim- ming—the house on Campden Grove, the smiling photograph of Dorothy and Vivien, her tired old mother in a hospital bed—time thickened so that seconds passed like years. The cameraman straightened, the assistants began to whisper to one another, but Laurel sat trapped beneath the furious bright lights, unable to see past the glare, seeing instead her mother, the young woman in the photo who’d left London in 1941, running from something, looking for a second chance.

A touch on her knee. The young man, Mitch, with a concerned expression: did she need a break, would she like a drink, fresh air, was there anything at all he could do?

Laurel managed to nod. ‘Water,’ she said. ‘A glass of water please.’ And then Claire was by her side. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing, just a little warm in here.’

‘Laurel Nicolson, I’m your agent and, more to the point, one of your oldest friends. Let’s try that again, shall we?’

‘My mother,’ said Laurel, tightening her lip as it threatened to quiver, ‘she isn’t well.’

‘Oh, darling.’ The other woman took up Laurel’s hand.

‘She’s dying, Claire.’

‘Tell me what you need.’

Laurel let her eyes close. She needed answers, the truth, to know for certain that her happy family, her entire childhood wasn’t a lie. ‘Time,’ she said eventually. ‘I need time. There isn’t much left.’

Claire squeezed her hand. ‘Then you shall have some.’

‘But the film—’

‘Don’t give it another thought, I’ll take care of that.’

Mitch arrived with a fresh glass of water. He hovered nervously while Laurel drank it.

Claire said, ‘All right?’ to Laurel and, when she nodded, turned to Mitch. ‘Just one more question and then, regrettably, we’ll have to call it a day. Ms Nicolson has another engagement to get to.’

‘Of course.’ Mitch swallowed. ‘I hope I didn’t … I certainly didn’t mean any offence—’

‘Don’t be silly, none taken.’ Claire smiled with all the warmth of an Arctic winter. ‘Let’s get on, shall we?’

Laurel set down the glass and readied herself. A great weight had lifted from her shoulders, replaced by the clarity of firm resolve: during the Second World War, as bombs rained down on London, and plucky residents mended and made do and spent their nights huddled together in leaky shelters; as they craved oranges and cursed Hitler and longed for an end to the devastation; as some found courage they’d never used and others experienced fear they hadn’t imagined, Laurel’s mother had been one of them. She’d had neighbours, and probably friends, she’d traded coupons for eggs and been thrilled when she came by an occasional pair of stockings, and in the midst of it all her path had crossed those of Vivien and Henry Jenkins. A friend she would lose and a man she would one day kill.

Something terrible had happened between the three of them. It was the only explanation for the seemingly inexplicable, something horrific enough to justify what Ma had done. In what little time remained, Laurel intended to find out what that something was. It was possible she wouldn’t like what she found, but that was a chance she was willing to take. It was one she had to take.

‘Last question, Ms Nicolson,’ said Mitch. ‘We were speaking last week about your mother, Dorothy. You’ve said that she was a strong woman. She lived through the war, she lost her family in the Coventry Blitz, she married your father and started again. Did you inherit her strength, do you think? Is that what’s enabled you to survive, indeed to thrive, in a notoriously tough business?’

This time Laurel was ready. She delivered the line perfectly, no need at all for the prompt. ‘My mother was a survivor; she’s a survivor still. If I’ve inherited half her courage, I can count myself a very lucky woman.’

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