The Secret Keeper

by Kate Morton

  When Henry Ronald Jenkins was six years old, he saw a man beaten to within an inch of his life by policemen on the High Street of his Yorkshire village. The man, it was whispered amongst the gathering villagers, was a resident of nearby Denaby—a ‘hell upon earth’, situated in the valley of the Crags and considered by many to be the ‘worst village in England’. It was an incident the young Jenkins was never to forget, and in his debut novel, Mercy of the Black Diamonds, published in 1928, he gave life to one of interwar British fiction’s most remarkable characters, a man of alarming truth and dignity, whose plight generated enormous sympathy from readers and critics alike.

  In the opening chapter of Black Diamonds, police in steel-capped boots set upon the ill-fated protagonist, Benny Baker, an illiterate but hard-working man whose personal heart-breaks have led him to agitate for social change and ultimately which result in his untimely death. Jenkins spoke of the real-life event and its profound influence on his work ‘and on my soul’, in a 1935 radio interview with the BBC: ‘I realised that day as I watched a man reduced to nothing by uniformed officers, that there are weak and there are powerful people in our society and that goodness is not a factor in determining into which camp one falls.’ It was a theme that was to find expression in many of Henry Jenkins’s future novels. Mercy of the Black Diamonds was declared ‘a masterpiece’ and on the strength of its early reviews became a publishing sensation. His earliest works, in particular, were lauded for their verisimilitude and the unflinching portraits they observed of working-class life, including uncompromising depictions of poverty and physical violence.

  Jenkins himself was brought up in a working-class family. His father was a low-level overseer at the Fitzwilliams’ Collieries; a stern man who drank too much—‘but only on Saturdays’—and who ran his family ‘like we were subordinates in the pits.’ Jenkins was alone amongst his six brothers in leaving behind the village and the expectations of his birth. Of his parents, Jenkins said: ‘My mother was a beautiful woman, but she was vain, too, and disappointed by her lot; she had no real or focused idea as to how her situation might be improved and her frustrations made her bitter. She goaded my father, badgering him constantly about whatever it was that came first to mind; he was a man of great physical strength, but too weak in other ways to be married to a woman like her. Ours was not a happy household.’ When asked by the BBC interviewer whether his parents’ lives had provided him with material for his novels, Jenkins laughed slightly and then added: ‘More than that, they gave me a firm example of the life I wished more than anything to escape.’

  And escape it he did. From such humble beginnings, Jenkins, by virtue of his precocious intelligence and tenacity, managed to pull himself out of the pits and take the literary world by storm. When asked by The Times about his tremendous rise, Jenkins credited a teacher at his village school, Herbert Taylor, for recognising his intellectual aptitude as a child and encouraging him to sit scholarship examinations for several of the best public schools. When he was ten years old, Jenkins won a place at the small but prestigious Nordstrom School in Oxfordshire. He left the family home in 1911, boarding the train alone for a journey to the unknown south. Henry Jenkins was never to return to the Yorkshire of his childhood.

  While some former public schoolboys, particularly those with different social backgrounds to most, speak of a miserable schooling experience, Jenkins would never be drawn on the subject, saying only that: ‘Admittance to a school like Nordstrom changed my life in the very best of ways.’ His schoolmaster, Jonathan Carlyon, said of Jenkins: ‘He was an incredibly hard worker. He passed his final exams with tremendous scores and went up to Oxford University the following year to study at his first preference College.’ While con-ceding Jenkins’s intelligence, Oxford friend and fellow author, Allen Hennessy, made light-hearted reference to another pool of talents from which he had to draw, ‘I’ve never met a man with more charisma than Jenkins,’ he said. ‘If there were a girl you fancied, you learned pretty damn fast not to intro-duce her to Harry Jenkins. He only had to fix her with one of his famous stares, and your chances were out the window.’ Which is not to suggest that Jenkins abused his so-called ‘powers’: ‘He was handsome and charming, he enjoyed the attention of women, but he was never a playboy,’ said Roy Edwards, Jenkins’s publisher at Macmillan.

  Whatever effect Jenkins might have had on the fairer sex, his personal life did not enjoy the same smooth path as his publishing career. In 1930, he suffered a broken engagement to Miss Eliza Holdstock, the details of which he declined to discuss publicly, before finally marrying Vivien Longmeyer, the niece of his Nordstrom schoolmaster in 1938. Despite an age difference of almost twenty years, Jenkins considered their marriage to be ‘the crowning glory of my life’, and the couple settled in London, where they enjoyed a happy domestic situation in the final year before the Second World War. In the lead-up to the declaration of war, Jenkins began working for the Ministry of Information; it was a position in which he excelled, a fact that came as no surprise to those who knew him well. As Allen Hennessy said: ‘Everything [Jenkins] did, he did to perfection. He was athletic, clever, charming … the world is made for men like him.’

  Be that as it may, the world is not always kind to men like Jenkins. After the death of his young wife in an air raid during the final weeks of the London Blitz, Jenkins suffered from such tremendous grief that his life began to unravel. He was never to publish another book, indeed whether he continued to write at all remains a mystery, along with many other de-tails of the last decade of his life. When he died in 1961 Henry Ronald Jenkins’s star had set so low that the event barely registered a mention in the very newspapers that had once described him as ‘a genius’ and ‘one to watch’. Suggestion arose in the early 1960s that Jenkins was responsible for the acts of public indecency that had earned the perpetrator the nickname ‘Suffolk Picnic Stalker’, however the allegations have never been proven. Regardless of whether or not Jenkins was guilty of such obscenity, that this once great man had become the subject of such speculation indicates the depth of his fall from grace. The boy whose headmaster had once referred to him as ‘capable of achieving everything to which he set his mind’, died with nothing and no one to his name. The enduring question for admirers of Henry Jenkins is how such an ending could come to the man who had once had everything; an ending that bears tragic similarities to that of his character Benny Baker, whose fate was also to die a quiet lonely death after a life in which love and loss had be-come interwoven.

  Laurel leaned back against her library chair and let out the breath she’d been holding. There was nothing much there she hadn’t already gleaned from Google, and the relief was extraordinary. She felt ten pounds lighter. Better yet, despite the reference to Jenkins’s ignominious end, there’d been no mention at all of Dorothy Nicolson nor a farmhouse called Greenacres. Thank God. Laurel hadn’t realised quite how nervous she’d been about what she might find. Turned out the most flustering thing about the Prologue was the portrait it painted of a self-made man whose success was the result of nothing more than hard work and considerable talent. Laurel had rather hoped to uncover something that justified the feelings of snarling hatred she’d developed towards the man on the driveway.

  She wondered whether there was a chance the biographer had got it all wrong. It was possible; anything was possible. But even as her spirits briefly lifted, Laurel rolled her eyes. Really, her own arrogance knew no limits—a hunch was one thing, presuming to know more on the subject of Henry Jenkins than the fellow who’d researched and written his life story, quite an-other.

  There was a photograph of Jenkins on the frontispiece of the book and she flicked back to it, determined to look beyond the layers of menace her prejudice applied and see the charming, charismatic, bright young writer described by the Prologue. He was younger in this photograph than in the one she’d seen online, and Laurel had to admit that he was handsome. In fact—it occurred to her as she studied his chiselled features
—he reminded her in some way of a fellow actor she’d once been rather in love with. They’d been cast together in a Chekhov play back in the sixties and fallen into a mad tempestuous affair. It hadn’t worked out—theatre romances rarely did—but oh, it had been dazzling and intense while it lasted.

  Laurel closed the book—her cheeks were warm and a lovely nostalgic feeling was stirring. Well now. That was unexpected. Rather uncomfortable-making, too, under the circumstances. Swallowing a small lump of disquiet, Laurel reminded herself of her purpose and made her way to page ninety-seven. With a focusing deep breath she started on the chapter called, ‘Married Life’.

  If Henry Jenkins had been unlucky thus far in his personal relationships, things were about to change for the better. In the spring of 1938, his former headmaster, Mr Jonathan Carlyon, invited Jenkins to return to the Nordstrom School and speak to the final-year students about the travails of literary life. It was there, as he strolled across the estate by evening, that Jenkins met the headmaster’s niece and ward, Vivien Longmeyer, seventeen years old at the time and a beauty. Jenkins wrote about their meeting in The Reluctant Muse, one of his most successful novels, and a marked departure from the gritty subject matter of his earlier work.

  How Vivien Jenkins felt about having the details of their courtship and early marriage written about in such a public way remains a mystery, as does the woman herself. The young Mrs Jenkins had barely begun to leave her mark on the world when her life was cut tragically short during the London Blitz. What is known, thanks to her husband’s clear adoration of his ‘reluctant muse’, is that she was a woman of remarkable loveliness and allure, about whom Jenkins’s feelings were clear from the first.

  There came then a lengthy extract, taken from The Reluctant Muse, in which Henry Jenkins wrote rapturously about meeting and courting his young bride. Having recently suffered through the entire book, Laurel skipped over it, picking up the thread when the biographer returned his focus to the facts of Vivien’s life:

  Vivien Longmeyer was the daughter of Jonathan Carlyon’s only sister, Isabel, who had eloped from England with an Australian soldier after the First World War. Neil and Isabel Longmeyer settled in the small cedar-getting community of Tamborine Mountain in south-east Queensland, and Vivien was the youngest of their four children. For the first eight years of her life Vivien Longmeyer lived a modest colonial existence, until she was sent back to England to be raised by her maternal uncle at the school he’d built on her family’s grand ancestral estate.

  The earliest account of Vivien Longmeyer comes from Miss Katy Ellis, a renowned educator, who was charged with the duty of chaperoning the child on the long sea voyage from Australia to England in 1929. Katy Ellis mentioned the girl in her memoir, Born to Teach, suggesting it was this en-counter with the child that first sparked her lifelong interest in educating the young survivors of trauma.

  The girl’s Australian aunt had issued a warning, when she asked me to act as chaperone, that the child was simple and I wasn’t to be surprised if she chose not to communicate with me on the voyage. I was young at the time, and therefore not yet equipped to castigate the woman for a lack of compassion that bordered on callous, but I was confident enough in my own impressions not to accept her assessment. Vivien Longmeyer was not simple, I could tell that much by looking at her; however, I could also see what it was that made her aunt describe her thus. Vivien had an ability, that bordered at times on unsettling, to sit still for very long periods of time, her face—not blank, certainly not that—rather alight with electric thought, but privately and in a manner that made anybody watching her feel excluded.

  I was an imaginative child myself, often upbraided by my strict Protestant father for daydreaming and writing in my journals—a habit I continue to this day—and it seemed quite clear to me that Vivien had a vibrant inner life into which she disappeared. Further, it seemed natural and understandable that a child suffering the simultaneous loss of her family, her home, and the country of her birth, might necessarily seek to preserve what small certainties of identity she had left to her by internalising them.

  Over the course of our long sea voyage, I was able to gain Vivien’s trust sufficiently to establish a relationship that continued over many years. We corresponded by letter with warm regularity until her tragic and untimely death during the Second World War, and although I never taught or counselled her in an official capacity I’m pleased to say that we became friends. She didn’t have many friends: she was the sort of person others longed to be loved by, yet she did not make connections easily or lightly. In retrospect, I consider it a highlight of my career that she opened up to me in detail about the private world she had constructed for herself. It was a ‘safe’ place into which she retreated if ever she was scared or alone, and I was honoured to be permitted a glimpse behind the veil.

  Katy Ellis’s description of Vivien’s retreat into a ‘private world’ tallies with accounts of the adult Vivien: ‘She was attractive, the sort of person you wanted to look at, but whom afterwards you couldn’t really say you knew’; ‘She gave you the feeling there was more going on beneath the surface than there seemed’; ‘In some way, it was her very selfsufficiency that made her magnetic—she didn’t appear to need other people.’ Perhaps it was Vivien’s ‘strange, almost otherworldly air’ that caught the eye of Henry Jenkins that evening at the Nordstrom School. Or perhaps it was the fact that she, like he, had survived a childhood marked by tragic violence and been removed soon after to a world peopled by those with vastly different backgrounds from her own. ‘We were both outsiders in our way,’ Henry Jenkins told the BBC. ‘We belonged together, the two of us. I knew it the first time I laid eyes on her.

  Watching her walk up the aisle towards me, perfect in her white lace, was the completion, in some ways, of a journey that started when I first arrived at Nordstrom School.’

  There was a spottily reproduced photograph of the two of them then, taken on their wedding day as they emerged from the school chapel. Vivien was gazing up at Henry, her lace veil rippling in the breeze, as he held her arm and smiled directly at the camera. The people gathered around them tossing rice from the chapel steps were happy; yet the photograph made Laurel sad. Old photographs often did; she was her mother’s daughter; there was something terribly sobering about the smiling faces of people who didn’t yet know what fate awaited them. Even more so in a case like this one, where Laurel knew precisely the horrors that lurked around the corner. She had witnessed first-hand the violent death Henry Jenkins would suffer; and she knew, too, that young Vivien Jenkins, so perfect in her wedding photo, would be dead a mere three years after it was taken…

  There is no doubt that Henry Jenkins adored his wife to the point of adulation. He made no secret of what she meant to him, calling her variously his ‘grace’, and his ‘salvation’, ex-pressing the sentiment, on more than one occasion, that without her his life would not be worth living. His claims would prove sadly prescient, for after Vivien’s death in an air raid on May 21st, 1941, Henry Jenkins’s world began to crumble. Despite being employed by the Ministry of Information and having first-hand knowledge of the Blitz’s heavy civilian toll, Jenkins found it impossible to accept that his wife’s death could have come by such a mundane cause. In retrospect, Jenkins’s rather wild claims—that there was foul play involved in Vivien’s death, that she’d been targeted by shady con-artists, that she would never have visited the site of the air raid otherwise—were the first indications of a madness that would ultimately claim him. He refused to accept his wife’s death as a simple wartime accident, vowing to ‘catch the people responsible and bring them to justice’. Jenkins was hospitalised after a breakdown in the mid 1940s, but sadly his mania was to last the rest of his life, leading him back to the fringes of polite society and eventually to his lonely death in 1961, a destitute and broken man.

  Laurel slammed the book shut as if to trap its subject between the covers. She didn’t want to read any further about Henry Jen
kins’s certainty that there’d been more to his wife’s death than met the eye, nor his vow to find the person responsible. She had a rather pressing and unwelcome feeling that he’d done just that, and that she, Laurel, had witnessed its result. Because Ma, with her ‘perfect plan’, was the person Henry Jenkins blamed for his wife’s death, wasn’t she? The ‘shady con-artist’ who’d sought to ‘take’ something from Vivien; who’d been responsible for drawing Vivien to the site of her death; a place she never would have visited otherwise.

  With an involuntary shudder, Laurel glanced behind her. She felt conspicuous all of a sudden, as if unseen eyes were watching her. Her stomach, too, felt as though it had turned to liquid. It was guilt, she realised, guilt by association. She thought about her mother in the hospital, the regret she’d expressed, her talk of ‘taking’ something, of being grateful for a ‘second chance’—they were stars, all of them, appearing in the dark night sky; Laurel might not like the patterns she was beginning to see, but she couldn’t deny that they were there.