A third of the way down, the name jumped out at her.
Vivien.
Laurel backtracked to read the whole sentence: ‘Jenkins was married in 1938 to Miss Vivien Longmeyer, born in Queensland, Australia, but raised by an uncle in Oxfordshire.’ She scrolled down further to find: ‘Vivien Jenkins was killed in 1941 during a heavy air raid in Not- ting Hill.’
She drew heavily on her cigarette and noticed that her fingers were trembling.
It was possible, of course, that there were two Viviens, both Australian.
It was possible that her mother’s wartime friend was unrelated to the Australian Vivien whose husband had died on their doorstep.
But it wasn’t likely, was it?
And if her mother knew Vivien Jenkins, then surely she knew Henry Jenkins, too. ‘It’s been a long time, Dorothy,’ he’d said, and then Laurel had seen fear on her mother’s face.
The door opened and Rose was there. ‘Feeling all right?’ she said, wrinkling her nose at the tobacco smoke.
‘Medicinal,’ said Laurel, gesturing shakily with the cigarette before holding it outside the window. ‘Don’t tell the parents; I’d hate to be grounded.’
‘Secret’s safe with me.’ Rose came closer and held out a small book. ‘It’s rather tattered, I’m afraid.’
Tattered was an understatement. The book’s front cover was hanging, literally, by threads, and the green cloth board beneath had been discoloured by dirt; perhaps, judging by the vaguely smoky smell, even soot. Laurel turned carefully through the first pages until she reached the title page. On the frontispiece, handwritten in black ink, was the following: For Dorothy, A true friend is a light in the dark, Vivien.
‘It must’ve been important to her,’ said Rose. ‘It wasn’t on the bookshelf with the others; it was inside her trunk. She’d kept it up there all these years.’
‘You saw inside her trunk?’ Their mother had rather fixed ideas about privacy and its observation.
Rose blushed. ‘No need to look at me like that, Lol, it’s not as though I broke the padlock open with a nail file. She asked me to fetch the book for her a couple of months ago, just before she went into hospital.’
‘She gave you the key?’
‘Reluctantly, and only after I caught her trying to get up the ladder herself.’
‘She wasn’t.’
‘She was.’
‘She’s incorrigible.’
‘She’s like you, Lol.’
Rose was being kind, but her words made Laurel flinch. A flash of memory came: the evening she’d told her parents she was going up to London to attend Central School. They’d been shocked and unhappy: hurt she’d gone behind their backs to audition, adamant she was too young to leave home, worried she wasn’t going to finish school and get her A levels. They’d sat with her around the kitchen table, taking it in turns to make reasonable arguments in exaggeratedly calm voices. Laurel tried to look bored, and when they’d finally finished she said, ‘I’m still going,’ with all the sulky vehemence one might expect from a confused and resentful teenager. ‘Nothing you say will change my mind. It’s what I want.’
‘You’re too young to know what you really want,’ her mother had said. ‘People change, they grow up, they make better decisions. I know you, Laurel—’
‘You don’t.’
‘I know you’re headstrong. I know you’re stubborn and determined to be different, that you’re full of dreams, just like I was—’
‘I’m not a bit like you,’ Laurel had said then, her pointed words cutting like a blade through her mother’s already shaky composure. ‘I’d never do the things you do.’
‘That’s enough!’ Stephen Nicolson put his arms around his wife. He signalled to Laurel that she should go upstairs to bed, but warned her that the conversation was far from over.
Laurel lay in bed fuming as the hours passed; she wasn’t sure where her sisters were, only that they’d been put some-where else so as not to break her quarantine. It was the first time she could remember fighting with her parents and she was in equal parts exhilarated and crushed. It didn’t feel as if life could ever go back to how it had been before.
She was still there, lying in the dark, when the door opened and someone walked carefully towards her. Laurel felt the edge of the bed depress when the person sat and then she heard Ma’s voice. She’d been crying, Laurel could tell, and the realisation, the knowledge that she was the cause, made her want to wrap her arms around her mother’s neck and never let go.
‘I’m sorry we fought,’ said Dorothy, a wash of moonlight falling through the window to illuminate