gathering weight each day, bringing with it bad dreams and knives that glistened, and little boys with tin rockets and the promise of going back, of fixing things. She couldn’t concentrate properly on anything else, not the film that was due to start production next week, nor the documentary interview series she was recording. Nothing seemed to matter except learning the truth about her mother’s secret past.
And there was a secret past. If Laurel hadn’t been sure enough already, Ma had all but confirmed it. At her ninetieth birthday party, as her three great-granddaughters wove neck-laces from daisies, and her grandson tied a hanky round his own son’s bleeding knee, and her daughters made sure every-one had cake and tea enough, and someone shouted, ‘Speech! Speech!’, Dorothy Nicolson had smiled beatifically The late-flowering roses blushed on the bushes behind her and she clasped her hands together, idly rolling the rings that fell now loosely around her knuckles. And then she sighed. ‘I’m so fortunate,’ she said, in a slow rickety voice. ‘Look at all of you, look at my children. I’m so thankful, so lucky to have …’ Her old lips had trembled then, and her eyelids fluttered shut, and the others had rushed around her with kisses and cries of ‘Dearest, darling Mummy!’ so they’d missed it when she said, ‘a second chance.’
But Laurel had heard it. And she’d stared harder at Ma’s lovely, tired, familiar secretive face. Hunting it for answers. Answers she knew were there to be found. Because people who’d led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances.
Laurel turned into Campden Grove and met a large drift of leaves. The street-sweeper hadn’t been around yet and she was glad. She crunched through the thickest clump and time looped back upon itself so she was both here and now, and eight years old again playing in the woods behind Greenacres. ‘Fill the bag right to the top, girls. We want our flames to reach the moon.’ That was Ma and it was Bonfire Night. Laurel and Rose in Wellington boots and scarves, Iris a bundled baby blinking from the pushchair. Gerry, who would come to love the woods best of all was but a whisper, a distant firefly in the rosy sky. Daphne, also unborn, was making her presence felt, swimming and swirling and leaping in their mother’s belly: I’m here! I’m here! I’m here! (‘That happened when you were dead,’ they used to tell her when conversation turned to something from before she was born. The suggestion of death hadn’t bothered her, but the idea that the whole noisy show had been rolling along without her scorched.)
Halfway along the street, just past Gordon Place, Laurel stopped. There it was, number 25. Wedged between 24 and 26, just as it should be. The house itself was much like the others, white Victorian with black iron railings on the first-floor balcony and a dormer window in the shallow slate roof. A baby’s pram, the sort that looked as if it might well double as a lunar module, was sitting on the tessellated-tile front path, and a garland of Halloween pumpkin heads, drawn by a child, had been strung across the ground-floor window. There was no blue plaque on the front, only the street number. Evidently no one had seen fit to suggest to English Heritage that Henry Ronald Jenkins’s tenure at 25 Campden Grove should be marked for posterity. Laurel wondered if the current residents knew that their house had once belonged to a famous writer. Probably not, and why should they? Lots of people in London lived in a house that could lay claim to having once been lived in by a Somebody, and Henry Jenkins’s fame had been fleeting.
Laurel had found him on the Internet, though. Opposite problem there—one couldn’t disentangle oneself from that net for all the love and money in England. Henry Jenkins was one of millions of ghosts who lived inside it, milling wraithlike until the right combination of letters was entered and they were briefly resurrected. At Greenacres, Laurel had made a tentative attempt to surf the Web on her new phone, but just as she’d worked out where she was supposed to enter the search terms, the battery had died. Borrowing Iris’s laptop for such clandestine purpose was out of the question, so she’d spent her final hours in Suffolk in silent excruciation, helping Rose scrub mould from the bathroom grout.