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