saw the narrator on the verge of breaking off his affair, but agonising over what the repercussions might be. Poor girl had become hopelessly obsessed with him, you see, and who could blame her? As Henry Jenkins wrote himself, that is, the protagonist, he was quite a catch.
Laurel looked again at the attic window of 25 Campden Grove. Henry Jenkins was known to have written largely from life; Ma had worked for a time as a maid (that’s how she came to Grandma Nicol- son’s boarding house); Ma and Vivien had been close, Ma and Henry Jenkins, in the end, decidedly not. Was it drawing too long a bow to think that Sally’s story might be her mother’s? That Dorothy had at one time lived inside that little room up there beneath the slate, that she’d fallen in love with her employer and that she’d been let down? Would it ex-plain what Laurel had witnessed at Greenacres, a scorned woman’s fury and all that?
Perhaps.
As Laurel wondered how she was going to find out whether a young woman named Dorothy had worked for Henry Jenkins, the front door of number 25 which was red; there was a lot to like about a person with a red front door—opened, and a noisy tangle of plump stockinged legs and knitted pom-pom beanies spilled out onto the pavement. Householders generally didn’t appreciate strangers scoping out their homes, so she ducked her head and riffled through her bag, trying to look like a perfectly normal woman on an errand and not one who’d been chasing ghosts all afternoon. Like any nosy parker worth her salt, she still managed to keep an eye on the action, watching as a woman emerged, with a baby in a pram, three small people at her legs, and—good grief—another childish voice singing at her from somewhere back inside the house.
The woman was crab-stepping the pram towards the top of the stairs and Laurel hesitated. She was about to offer help when the fifth child, a boy, who was taller than the others but still no more than five or six years old, emerged from the house and took up the front. Together he and his mother carried the pram downstairs. The family set off towards Kensington Church Street, little girls skipping ahead, but the boy lingered behind. Laurel watched him. She liked the way his lips moved slightly as if he might be singing to himself, and the way he was using his hands, flattening them out and then tilting his head to watch them undulate towards one another like floating leaves. He was utterly unaware of his surroundings and his focus made him bewitching. He reminded her of Gerry as a boy Darling Gerry. He’d never been ordinary, their brother. He hadn’t spoken a word for the first six years of his life and people who didn’t know him had often presumed he was backward. (People who did know the noisy Nicolson girls saw his silence as nothing other than inevitable.) Those strangers had been wrong, too. Gerry wasn’t backward, he was smart: fiercely smart. Science smart. He collected facts and proofs, truth and theorems, and answers to questions Laurel hadn’t even thought to ask about time and space and the matter in between. When he did finally decide to communicate in words, out loud, it was to ask whether any of them had an opinion as to how engineers planned to help keep the Leaning Tower of Pisa from toppling over (it had been on the news some nights before).
‘Julian!’
Laurel’s memory dissolved and she looked up to see the little boy’s mother calling to him, as if from another planet. ‘Ju-ju-bean.’
The boy guided his left hand into safe landing before looking up.
His eyes met Laurel’s and they widened. Surprise at first, but then something else. Recognition, she knew; it happened a lot, if not always accompanied by realisation. (‘Do I know you? Have we met? Do you work at the bank?’)
She nodded and started to leave, until, ‘You’re Daddy’s lady,’ the boy dead-panned.
‘Ju-li-an.’
Laurel turned back to face the odd little man. ‘What’s that?’
‘You’re Daddy’s lady.’
But before she could ask him what he meant, the lad was gone, tripping over his feet on his way to meet his mother, both hands sailing the invisible currents of Campden Grove.
Ten
LAUREL HAILED A TAXI on Kensington High Street. ‘Where to, love?’ said the driver as she scrambled into the back and out of the sudden rain.
‘Soho—Charlotte Street Hotel, thank you kindly.’
A pause