for Laurel to explain it all away. She felt for him—one minute he was happily contemplating the wonders of the universe, the next his sister was telling him his mother had killed a man. ‘Who was this guy, Lol? Why did she do it?’
In the most straightforward fashion she could manage—it was best with Gerry, to appeal to his sense of logic—Laurel told him what she knew about Henry Jenkins, that he was an author, married to their mother’s friend, Vivien, during the war. She also told him what Kitty Barker had said, that there’d been a terrible falling out between Dorothy and Vivien in early 1941.
‘You think their argument is related to what happened at Greenacres in 1961,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t mention it other-wise.’
‘I do.’ Laurel remembered Kitty’s account of the night out with her mother, the way she’d behaved, the things she’d been saying. ‘I think Ma became upset by whatever happened between them and she did something to punish her friend. I think her plan—whatever it was— turned out badly, far worse than she’d expected; but by then it was too late to put things right. Ma fled London and Henry Jenkins was angered enough by whatever happened to come looking for her twenty years later.’ Laurel wondered at the way a person could outline such dreadful theories in such a frank, no-nonsense way. To an observer, Laurel knew, she would seem cool and calm and keen to get to the bottom of things; she gave away no hint of the deep distress that was gnawing away at her insides. She lowered her voice, though, to say: ‘I even wonder if she wasn’t responsible in some way for Vivien’s death.’ ‘God, Lol.’
‘Whether she’s had to live with her guilt all this time and the woman we know was formed as a result; whether she’s spent the rest of her life atoning.’
‘By being the perfect mother to us.’
‘Yes.’
‘Which was working out fine until Henry Jenkins came looking to even the score.’
‘Yes.’
Gerry had fallen silent; a faint frown creased the skin be-tween his eyes, he was thinking.
‘Well?’ Laurel pressed, leaning closer to him. ‘You’re the scientist— does the theory have legs?’
‘It’s plausible,’ said Gerry, nodding slowly. ‘Not difficult to believe remorse might act as a motivator for change. Nor that a husband might seek to avenge a slight against his wife. And if what she did to Vivien was bad enough, I can see she’d have thought her only choice was to silence Henry Jenkins once and for all.’
Laurel’s heart sank. There was a very small part of her, she realised, that had been clinging to the hope he might laugh, poke holes in her theory with the sharp point of his stupendous brain, and tell her she ought to take a good long lie down and leave off reading Shakespeare for a while.
He didn’t. The logician in him had taken the reins and he said, ‘I wonder what she could have done to Vivien that she came to regret so much.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Whatever it was, I think you’re right,’ he said slowly. ‘It must have turned out worse than she’d intended. Ma never would’ve harmed her friend on purpose.’
Laurel offered a noncommittal noise in response, remembering the way her mother had brought the knife down on Henry Jenkins’s chest without a moment’s hesitation.
‘She wouldn’t have, Lol.’
‘No, I wouldn’t have thought so either—not at first. Have you considered, though, that perhaps we’re just making excuses because she’s our mother and we know and love her?’
‘We probably are,’ Gerry agreed, ‘but that’s all right. We do know her.’
‘We think we do.’ Something Kitty Barker said had been playing on Laurel’s mind, about wartime and the way it heightened passions; the threat of invasion, the fear and the dark, night after night of broken sleep … ‘What if she was a different person back then? What if the pressure of wartime got to her? What if she changed after she married Daddy and had us?’ After she was given her second chance.
‘No one changes that much.’
From nowhere, the crocodile story leapt into Laurel’s mind. Is that why you changed to become a lady, Mummy? she’d asked, and Dorothy had answered that she’d given up her crocodile ways at the same time she’d become a mother. Was it drawing too long a bow to think the story might have been a metaphor, that even then her mother might have been confessing to some other sort of change? Or was Laurel reading