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