The Secret Keeper

by Kate Morton

  Vivien had seated herself on an upturned crate and drawn a book from somewhere—her handbag, Jimmy supposed. She ran her fingers along the middle margins, creasing it flat, and then said, ‘Let’s start with Captain Hook and the Lost Boys—now where’s Wendy?’

  ‘Here I am,’ said a girl of about eleven, her arm in a sling.

  ‘Good,’ said Vivien. ‘Now make sure you’re ready for your entrance. It won’t be long.’

  A boy with a pirate’s patch over one eye and a hook made from some sort of shiny cardboard in his hand, began to walk towards Vivien in a rollicking way that made her laugh.

  They were rehearsing a play, Jimmy realised, Peter Pan. His mother had taken him to see it once when he was a boy. They’d made the trip to London and then had tea afterwards at Liberty’s, a fancy tea it had been, during which Jimmy had sat silent and out of place, stealing glances at his mother’s tight wistful expression as she peered over her shoulder at the clothing racks. There’d been a fight between his parents later over money (what else?) and Jimmy had listened from his bedroom as something smashed into pieces on the floor. He’d closed his eyes and thought back to the play, his favourite moment when Peter had flung out his arms and addressed all in the audience who might be dreaming of Neverland: ‘Do you believe in fairies, girls and boys?’ he’d shouted, ‘If you believe, clap your hands; don’t let Tink die.’ And Jimmy had been moved to stand up from his seat, thin legs trembling hopefully as he brought his hands together and shouted back, ‘Yes!’ with all the emphatic trust that in doing so he was bringing Tinkerbell back to life and saving everything that was more and magical in the world.

  ‘Nathan are you ready with the torch?’

  Jimmy blinked back to the present.

  ‘Nathan?’ Vivien said. ‘We’re ready for you.’

  ‘I’m shining it already,’ said a small boy with curly red hair and his foot in a brace. He was sitting on the floor, aiming his torch at the sail. ‘Oh yes,’ said Vivien. ‘So you are. Well, that’s—good.’

  ‘But we can hardly see it,’ said another boy, standing with his hands on his hips where the audience might sit. He was craning up at the sail, squinting through his glasses at the spread of feeble light.

  ‘It’s not much use if we can’t see Tinkerbell,’ said the boy playing Captain Hook. ‘It won’t work at all.’

  ‘Yes it will,’ Vivien said determinedly. ‘Of course it will. The power of suggestion is a tremendous thing. If we all say we can see the fairy, then the audience will, too.’

  ‘But we can’t see her.’

  ‘Well, no, but if we say we can—’

  ‘You mean lie?’

  Vivien glanced towards the ceiling, searching for the words to explain, and the children began to bicker amongst themselves.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Jimmy from where he stood in the door-way. Nobody seemed to hear him so he said it again, louder this time. ‘Excuse me?’

  They all turned then. Vivien drew breath when she saw him, and then she scowled. Jimmy admitted to taking a certain pleasure in upsetting her; in showing her things didn’t always go her way.

  ‘I was just wondering,’ he said. ‘What if you used a photographer’s light? It’s similar to a torch but far more powerful.’

  Children being what they were, not one reacted with suspicion or even surprise that a stranger had joined them in the attic nursery and weighed in on this most specific of conversations. Instead, there was silence as they all considered his suggestion, and then light whispery noise as they discussed it, and then ‘Yes!’ shouted one of the boys, jumping to his feet with excitement.

  ‘Perfect!’ said another.

  ‘But we don’t have one,’ said the gloomy boy in the glasses.

  ‘I could get you one,’ Jimmy said. ‘I work at a newspaper, we have a studio filled with lights.’

  More excited cheering and chatter came from the children.

  ‘But how would we make it look like a fairy, flying about and what not?’ said the same cheerless chap, piping up over the top of the others.

  Jimmy left his doorjamb and entered the room. All the children had swivelled now to face him; Vivien was glowering, her copy of Peter Pan closed on her lap. Jimmy ignored her. ‘I guess you’d have to shine it from somewhere high. Yes, that would work, and if you made sure it was always angling down towards the stage, it would focus a smaller light, rather than a wide, general brightness, and maybe if you fashioned a sort of funnel …’

  ‘But none of us is tall enough to operate it.’ The kid in the glasses again. ‘Not from up there.’ Orphan or not, Jimmy was starting to dislike him.

  Vivien had been watching the exchange with a firm expression on her face, willing Jimmy, he knew, to remember what she’d said—to let the suggestion go and just disappear—but he couldn’t do it. He could picture how tremendous it was going to look, and he could think of a hundred ways to make it work. If they put a ladder in the corner, or else attached it to a broom—reinforced somehow—and wielded it like a fishing rod, or else—‘I’ll do it,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’ll operate the light.’

  ‘No!’ Vivien said, standing.

  ‘Yes!’ cried the children.

  ‘You couldn’t.’ She gave him a flinty look—‘You won’t.’

  ‘He could!’ ‘He will!’ ‘He must!’ shouted the mass of children.

  Jimmy spotted Nella then, sitting on the floor; she waved at him and then glanced around at the others, a glimmer of unmistakable pride and ownership in her eyes. How could he say no? Jimmy raised his palms at Vivien in a gesture of not entirely genuine apology, and then he grinned at the kids. ‘That does it,’ he said. ‘I’m in. You’ve found yourselves a new Tinkerbell.’

  Hard to believe later, but when Jimmy offered to play Tinkerbell in the hospital play, he hadn’t been thinking—even remotely—of the meeting he was supposed to be setting up with Vivien Jenkins. He’d merely become swept up in his grand vision for the way they’d be able to represent the fairy with his photography light. Dolly didn’t mind either way: ‘Oh, Jimmy, you clever thing,’ she said, drawing excitedly on her cigarette. ‘I knew you’d think of something.’

  Jimmy took the praise and let her believe it was all part of his plan. She was so happy lately, and it was such a relief to have his old Doll back. ‘I’ve been thinking about the seaside,’ she’d say some evenings when she smuggled him through Mrs White’s larder window and they lay together in that narrow sink-in-the-middle bed of hers. ‘Can’t you just picture us, Jimmy? Growing old together, our children around us, grandchildren one day, visiting in their flying cars—we could get one of those swing seats for two—what do you say to that, lovely boy?’ Jimmy said, yes please. And then he kissed her again on her bare neck and made her laugh and thanked God for this new intimacy and warmth they were sharing. Yes, he wanted what she described; he wanted it so badly it hurt. If it pleased her to think Jimmy and Vivien were working together and growing closer, then it was a fiction he was glad enough to go along with.

  The reality, as he knew only too well, was rather different. Over the next couple of weeks, as Jimmy fronted up to every scheduled rehearsal he could manage, Vivien’s hostility astonished him. He couldn’t believe she was the same person he’d met in the canteen that night, who’d seen his photograph of Nella and told him about her work at the hospital; now, it was as if it were beneath her to exchange more than a few words with him. Jimmy was pretty sure she’d have ignored him entirely if she could have. He’d expected coldness to a degree—Doll had prepared him for how cruel Vivien Jenkins could be when she took against a person—what caught him by surprise was how personal her hatred was. They hardly knew each other, and furthermore she had no way of suspecting his connection to Dolly.

  One day they were both laughing at something funny one of the children had done, and Jimmy glanced over, as one adult might to another, wanting nothing more than to share the moment. She sensed his gaze and met it, but the minute she saw him smiling, she
let her own happy expression drop away. Vivien’s animus put Jimmy between a rock and a hard place. In some respects it suited him to be so loathed— the idea of blackmail didn’t sit well with Jimmy, but he felt easier and more justified about the plan when Vivien treated him like nothing; yet without gaining her trust, if not her affection, he wasn’t going to be able to make the plan work.

  So Jimmy kept trying. He forced aside the resentment he felt at Vivien’s hostility, her disloyalty towards Doll, the way she’d cast off his glittering girl and brought her so low; and he focused instead on how she was with the hospital orphans. The way she created a world into which they could disappear when they came through the door; their real problems left behind in the downstairs dormitories and wards of the hospital. The way they all watched her, staring spellbound when rehearsal was over and she wove stories for them about tunnels through the centre of the earth, and dark magical creeks without bottoms, and tiny lights beneath the water that called to children to come just a little closer …

  And eventually, as rehearsals continued, Jimmy began to suspect that Vivien Jenkins’s antipathy was fading; that she no longer hated him quite so much as she had at first. She continued not to make conversation or acknowledge him with more than the barest of nods, but sometimes Jimmy caught her looking at him when she thought he didn’t know, and it seemed to him that the expression on her face was not angry, so much as it was thoughtful, even curious. Perhaps that’s why he made his mistake. He’d started to perceive a growing—well, not a warmth, but at least an increasing thaw between them, and one day towards the end of April, when the children had run off to lunch and he and Vivien were left packing up the ship, he’d asked her whether she had any of her own.

  It was supposed to be the start of a light conversation, but Vivien’s whole body had seemed to freeze, and Jimmy had known right away that he’d made an error—if not exactly how—and that it was too late to take it back.

  ‘No.’ The word when it came was as sharp as a stone in his heel. She cleared her throat. ‘I can’t have children.’

  Jimmy had wished right about then for a deep tunnel through the centre of the earth into which he could fall and fall and fall. He muttered a ‘Sorry,’ which elicited a slight nod from Vivien, and then she finished wrapping up the sail and left the attic, letting the door shut reproachfully behind her.

  He’d felt like an insensitive buffoon. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten why he was really there—what she was, what she was doing hadn’t changed—it was only that, well, Jimmy didn’t like being the one to cause a person hurt the way he had. Remembering how she’d stiffened when he said it made him wince, so he brought it to mind over and over, punishing himself for being such a louse. That night when he was out photographing the latest bomb damage, pointing his camera at the newest souls to join the ranks of the homeless and bereaved, half of his brain kept turning over ways he could possibly make it up to her.

  He arrived at the hospital early the next day and waited for her across the street, smoking nervously. He’d have sat on the front steps only he had a feeling she’d turn and walk the other way if she saw him there.

  When she came hurrying down the street, he got rid of his cigarette and went to meet her. He handed her a photograph.

  ‘What’s this?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing, really,’ he said, watching as she turned it over in her hands. ‘I took it for you—last night. It reminded me of your story, you know, the creek with the lights at the very bottom, and the people—the family on the other side of the veil.’

  She looked at the picture.

  He’d taken it as dawn was breaking; sunlight had made shards of glass in the ruins glitter and sparkle, and beyond the rising smoke you could make out the shadowy forms of the family who’d just emerged from the Andersen shelter that had saved their lives; Jimmy hadn’t slept after he took it, he’d headed straight over to the newspaper to develop the print for Vivien.

  She didn’t say anything, and the look on her face made Jim-my think she might be going to cry.

  ‘I feel terrible,’ he said.

  Vivien glanced at him.

  ‘What I said yesterday. I upset you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You weren’t to know.’ She put the photograph carefully in her bag.

  ‘Still—’

  ‘You weren’t to know.’ And then she almost smiled, at least he thought she did, it was hard to tell because she turned quickly towards the door and hurried inside.

  The rehearsal that day was one of the last before the big performance. The children barrelled into the room and filled it with light and noise, and then the lunch bell rang and they disappeared as quickly as they’d come; a part of Jimmy had been tempted to go with them, to avoid the awkwardness of being alone with Vivien, but he’d have hated himself for his weakness if he had, so he stayed to help dismantle the ship.

  He felt her watching him while he was stacking chairs, but he didn’t look over; he didn’t know what he’d see in her face and he didn’t want to feel worse than he already did. Her voice, when she spoke, sounded different: ‘Why were you in the can-teen that night, Jimmy Metcalfe?’

  At that, Jimmy did glance sideways; she’d turned her attention to the backdrop she was painting with palm trees and sand for the play. There was a strange formality in her use of his full name, and for some reason it sent a not unpleasant shudder down his spine. He couldn’t tell her about Dolly, he knew that, but Jimmy wasn’t a liar. He said, ‘I was meeting someone.’

  She looked over at him and the faintest of smiles animated her lips. Jimmy never did know when to stop talking. ‘We were sup-posed to meet somewhere else,’ he said, ‘only I went to the canteen instead.’ ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why didn’t you stick to your original plan?’

  ‘I don’t know. It just felt like the right thing to do.’

  Vivien was still studying him, her face giving no hint as to her thoughts, and then she turned back to the frond she was working on. ‘I’m glad,’ she said, an edge to her otherwise clear voice. ‘I’m really glad you did.’

  Things changed that day. It wasn’t what she said, though that was nice enough, it was an inexplicable feeling that had come over Jimmy when she looked at him, a sense of connection be-tween them that came flooding back when he thought about the exchange afterwards. Neither had said more than ten words and none of the ten had been particularly meaningful, yet the whole thing had meant something. Jimmy knew that at the time, and he knew it later when Dolly asked for her usual report of the day’s progress and he recounted every detail but didn’t mention that part. It would have made Doll glad, he knew, she’d have seen it as evidence that he was getting closer to winning Vivien’s trust, but Jimmy said nothing. The conversation with Vivien was his; it felt like a breakthrough of some kind and not in the way Dolly would have wanted. He didn’t want to share it; he didn’t want it spoiled.

  Next day Jimmy turned up at the hospital with more of a spring in his step. But when he opened the door and delivered the gift of a glorious ripe orange to Myra (whose birthday it was), she told him Vivien wasn’t there. ‘She’s not well. She telephoned this morning and said she wasn’t able to get out of bed. She wondered if you’d take over the rehearsal.’

  ‘I can do that,’ said Jimmy, wondering, suddenly, whether Vivien’s absence had anything to do with what had happened between them; whether perhaps she’d regretted letting down her guard. He frowned at the floor and then looked up at Myra from beneath his hair. ‘Sick, did you say?’

  ‘She didn’t sound well at all, poor lamb. No need to look so glum, though—she’ll mend. She always does.’ Myra held up the orange. ‘I’ll save her half, shall I? Give it to her at the next rehearsal.’

  Only Vivien wasn’t there at the next rehearsal either.

  ‘Still in bed,’ Myra told Jimmy when he came through the door later in the week. ‘Best thing for it, too.’

  ‘Is it serious?’

 
‘I shouldn’t think so. She does seem to have bad luck, poor dear, but she’ll be back on her feet soon enough—she never can stand being away from the children too long.’

  ‘This has happened before?’

  Myra smiled, but the gesture was restrained by something else, an element of realisation, and almost of kindly concern. ‘Everybody’s poorly sometimes, Mr Metcalfe. Mrs Jenkins has her share of setbacks, but don’t we all?’ She hesitated, and when she spoke again her voice was soft but firm. ‘Listen, Jim-my dear, I can see you care for her, and that’s very kind of you. Heaven knows she’s an angel, all she does for the children here. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about though and that her husband will be taking good care of her.’ She smiled in a motherly way. ‘Put her out of your mind now, won’t you?’

  Jimmy said that he would and then started up the stairs, but Myra’s advice gave him pause. Vivien was unwell, surely to think of her would seem natural—why then was Myra so intent on Jimmy putting her out of his mind? The way Myra said ‘her husband’ had been pointed, too. It was the sort of thing she might have said to someone like Dr Tomalin, a fellow who had designs on another man’s wife …

  He didn’t have a copy of the play, but Jimmy gave the rehearsal his best shot. The kids went easy on him, running through their parts, arguing rarely, and all was going well. He was even be-ginning to feel a little pleased with himself, until they finished packing down the set, and gathered on the floor by his upturned crate to beg a story of him. Jimmy told them he didn’t know any, and when they refused to believe him, he made a failed attempt to retell one of Vivien’s, before remembering—just in time to avoid a revolt—the Nightingale Star. They listened, wide-eyed, and Jimmy realised, as he hadn’t before, how much he had in common with the patients of Dr Tomalin’s hospital.