Six

LAUREL SPENT a large part of dinner observing her youngest sister’s face. Something had been done to it, and done well, and the result was fascinating. ‘A fabulous new moisturiser,’ Daphne would say if asked, which, because Laurel didn’t fancy being lied to, she refrained from doing. Instead, she nodded along as Daphne tossed her blonde curls and enthralled them all with tales from the LA Breakfast Show set, where she read the weather and flirted with a newsreader named Chip each morning. Breaks in the garrulous monologue were rare and when occasion finally presented, Rose and Laurel leapt at once.

‘You first,’ said Laurel, tilting her wine glass—empty again, she no- ticed—towards her sister.

‘I was just going to say, perhaps we ought to talk a little about Mummy’s party.’

‘I should say so,’ said Iris.

‘I’ve some thoughts,’ said Daphne.

‘Certainly—’

‘Obviously—’

‘We—’

‘I—’

‘What were you thinking, Rosie?’ said Laurel.

‘Well—’ Rose, who’d always struggled in the sibling press, started with a cough—‘it will have to be in hospital, more’s the pity, but I thought we could try to come up with ways to make it special for her. You know how she feels about birthdays.’

‘Just what I was going to say,’ said Daphne, catching a small hiccup behind baby-pink fingernails. ‘And after all this will be her last.’

Silence stretched between them, with the rude exception of the Swiss clock, until Iris broke it with a sniff: ‘You’re very … brash, now, aren’t you?’ she said, patting the blunt ends of her steel-grey bob. ‘Since you moved stateside.’

‘I was just saying—’

‘I think we all know what you were just saying.’

‘But it’s true.’

‘Precisely, some might argue, why you needn’t have said it at all.’ Laurel regarded her tablemates. Iris glowering, Daphne blinking with blue-eyed chagrin, Rose twisting her plait with an angst that threatened to sever it. Squint a little and they could have been their childhood selves. She sighed into her glass. ‘Perhaps we could take in some of Ma’s favourite things,’ she said, ‘play some of the records from Daddy’s collection. Is that the sort of thing you meant, Rosie?’

‘Yes,’ said Rose, with unnerving gratitude, ‘yes, that’s perfect. I thought we might even retell some of the stories she used to invent for us.’

‘Like the one about the gate at the bottom of the garden that led to fairyland—’

‘And the dragon eggs she found in the woods—’

‘And the time she ran away to join the circus.’

‘Do you remember,’ said Iris suddenly, ‘the circus we had here?’

‘My circus,’ said Daphne, beaming from behind her wine-glass. ‘Well, yes,’ Iris interjected, ‘but only because—’

‘Because I’d had the horrid measles and missed the real circus when it came to town.’ Daphne laughed with pleasure at the memory ‘She got Daddy to build a tent at the bottom of the meadow, remember, and organised all of you to be clowns. Laurel was a lion, and Mummy walked the tightrope.’

‘She was rather good at that,’ said Iris. ‘Barely fell off the rope. She must’ve practised for weeks.’

‘Or else her story was true and she really did spend time in the circus,’ said Rose. ‘I can almost believe it of Mummy.’

Daphne gave a contented sigh. ‘We were lucky to have a mother like ours, weren’t we? So playful, almost as if she hadn’t fully grown up; not at all like other people’s boring old mothers. I used to feel rather smug when I had friends home from school.’

‘You? Smug?’ Iris pretended surprise. ‘Now that just doesn’t seem— ‘With regards to Mummy’s party, ’ Rose flapped a hand, desperate to avoid a new dip into argument, ‘I thought I might bake a cake, Victoria sponge, her fav—’

‘Do you remember,’ said Daphne with sudden brightness, ‘that knife, the one with the ribbon—’

‘The red ribbon,’ said Iris.

‘—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.

A cigarette held between two fingers, Laurel slipped the articles from inside the book. She passed over the report from the local paper, picking up the obituary instead. She scanned the early years of Henry Ronald Jenkins’s life waiting for her eye to alight on what she knew was there.

A third of the way down, the name jumped out at her.

Vivien.

Laurel backtracked to read the whole sentence: ‘Jenkins was married in 1938 to Miss Vivien Longmeyer, born in Queensland, Australia, but raised by an uncle in Oxfordshire.’ She scrolled down further to find: ‘Vivien Jenkins was killed in 1941 during a heavy air raid in Not- ting Hill.’

She drew heavily on her cigarette and noticed that her fingers were trembling.

It was possible, of course, that there were two Viviens, both Australian.

It was possible that her mother’s wartime friend was unrelated to the Australian Vivien whose husband had died on their doorstep.

But it wasn’t likely, was it?

And if her mother knew Vivien Jenkins, then surely she knew Henry Jenkins, too. ‘It’s been a long time, Dorothy,’ he’d said, and then Laurel had seen fear on her mother’s face.

The door opened and Rose was there. ‘Feeling all right?’ she said, wrinkling her nose at the tobacco smoke.

‘Medicinal,’ said Laurel, gesturing shakily with the cigarette before holding it outside the window. ‘Don’t tell the parents; I’d hate to be grounded.’

‘Secret’s safe with me.’ Rose came closer and held out a small book. ‘It’s rather tattered, I’m afraid.’

Tattered was an understatement. The book’s front cover was hanging, literally, by threads, and the green cloth board beneath had been discoloured by dirt; perhaps, judging by the vaguely smoky smell, even soot. Laurel turned carefully through the first pages until she reached the title page. On the frontispiece, handwritten in black ink, was the following: For Dorothy, A true friend is a light in the dark, Vivien.

‘It must’ve been important to her,’ said Rose. ‘It wasn’t on the bookshelf with the others; it was inside her trunk. She’d kept it up there all these years.’

‘You saw inside her trunk?’ Their mother had rather fixed ideas about privacy and its observation.

Rose blushed. ‘No need to look at me like that, Lol, it’s not as though I broke the padlock open with a nail file. She asked me to fetch the book for her a couple of months ago, just before she went into hospital.’

‘She gave you the key?’

‘Reluctantly, and only after I caught her trying to get up the ladder herself.’

‘She wasn’t.’

‘She was.’

‘She’s incorrigible.’

‘She’s like you, Lol.’

Rose was being kind, but her words made Laurel flinch. A flash of memory came: the evening she’d told her parents she was going up to London to attend Central School. They’d been shocked and unhappy: hurt she’d gone behind their backs to audition, adamant she was too young to leave home, worried she wasn’t going to finish school and get her A levels. They’d sat with her around the kitchen table, taking it in turns to make reasonable arguments in exaggeratedly calm voices. Laurel tried to look bored, and when they’d finally finished she said, ‘I’m still going,’ with all the sulky vehemence one might expect from a confused and resentful teenager. ‘Nothing you say will change my mind. It’s what I want.’

‘You’re too young to know what you really want,’ her mother had said. ‘People change, they grow up, they make better decisions. I know you, Laurel—’

‘You don’t.’

‘I know you’re headstrong. I know you’re stubborn and determined to be different, that you’re full of dreams, just like I was—’

‘I’m not a bit like you,’ Laurel had said then, her pointed words cutting like a blade through her mother’s already shaky composure. ‘I’d never do the things you do.’

‘That’s enough!’ Stephen Nicolson put his arms around his wife. He signalled to Laurel that she should go upstairs to bed, but warned her that the conversation was far from over.

Laurel lay in bed fuming as the hours passed; she wasn’t sure where her sisters were, only that they’d been put some-where else so as not to break her quarantine. It was the first time she could remember fighting with her parents and she was in equal parts exhilarated and crushed. It didn’t feel as if life could ever go back to how it had been before.

She was still there, lying in the dark, when the door opened and someone walked carefully towards her. Laurel felt the edge of the bed depress when the person sat and then she heard Ma’s voice. She’d been crying, Laurel could tell, and the realisation, the knowledge that she was the cause, made her want to wrap her arms around her mother’s neck and never let go.

‘I’m sorry we fought,’ said Dorothy, a wash of moonlight falling through the window to illuminate her face; ‘It’s funny how things turn out. I never thought I’d argue with my daughter. I used to get in trouble when I was young—I always felt different from my parents. I loved them, of course, but I’m not sure they knew quite what to make of me. I thought I knew best and didn’t listen to a word they said.’

Laurel smiled faintly, unsure where the conversation was headed, but glad her insides were no longer roiling like hot lava.

‘We’re similar, you and I,’ her mother continued. ‘I expect that’s why I’m so anxious you shouldn’t make the same mistakes I did.’

‘I’m not making a mistake, though.’ Laurel had sat up tall against her pillows. ‘Can’t you see that? I want to be an actress—drama school is the perfect place for someone like me.’

‘Laurel—’

‘Imagine you were seventeen, Ma, and your whole life was ahead of you. Can you think of anywhere else you’d rather go than London?’ It was the wrong thing to say—Ma had never shown the least interest in going up to London.

There was a pause and a blackbird called to his friends out-side. ‘No,’ Dorothy had said eventually, softly and a little sadly as she reached to stroke the ends of Laurel’s hair. ‘No, I don’t suppose I can.’

It struck Laurel now, that even then she’d been too self-absorbed to wonder or ask what her mother was actually like at seventeen, what it was she’d longed for, and what mistakes she’d made that she was so anxious her daughter should not repeat.

 

Laurel held up the book Rose had given her and said, more shakily than she’d have liked, ‘It’s strange to see something of hers from before, isn’t it?’

‘Before what?’

‘Before us. Before this place. Before she was our mother. Just imag- ine—when she was given this book, when that photograph with Vivien was taken, she had no idea that we were out there somewhere waiting to exist.’

‘No wonder she’s beaming in the photo.’

Laurel didn’t laugh. ‘Do you ever think about her, Rose?’

‘About Mummy? Of course—’

‘Not about Ma, I mean that young woman. She was a different person back then, with a whole other life we know nothing about. Do you ever wonder about her, about what she wanted, how she felt about things—’ Laurel sneaked a glance at her sister—‘the sorts of secrets she kept?’

Rose smiled uncertainly and Laurel shook her head. ‘Don’t mind me. I’m a bit maudlin tonight. It’s being back here, I guess. The old room.’ She forced a cheeriness she didn’t feel. ‘Remember the way Iris used to snore?’

Rose laughed. ‘Worse than Daddy, wasn’t she? I wonder if she’s improved.’

‘I expect we’re about to find out. You heading to bed now?’

‘I thought I’d take a bath before the others finish up and I lose the mirror to Daphne.’ She lowered her voice and lifted the skin above one eye. ‘Has she … ?’

‘It would appear so.’

Rose pulled a face that said, ‘Aren’t people strange?’ and closed the door behind her.

Laurel’s smile fell as her sister’s footsteps retreated down the corridor. She turned to watch the night sky. The bathroom door clicked shut and the water pipes began to whistle in the wall behind her.

Fifty years ago, Laurel told a distant patch of stars, my mother killed a man. She called it self-defence, but I saw it. She raised the knife and brought it down and the man fell backwards onto the ground where the grass was worn and the violets were flowering. She knew him, she was frightened, and I’ve no idea why.

It suddenly seemed to Laurel that all the absence in her own life, every loss and sadness, every nightmare in the dark, every unexplained melancholy, took the shadowy form of the same unanswered question; something that had been there since she was sixteen years old—her mother’s unspoken secret.

‘Who are you, Dorothy?’ she said beneath her breath, ‘Who were you, before you became Ma?’

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